Voiceless (animal rights group)

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Voiceless, the animal protection institute

Founded	2004
Founder	Brian Sherman AM, Ondine Sherman
Focus	Animal Welfare, Animal Rights
Location	Sydney
Area served	Australia
Method	Education, Animal Law, Research, Publications
Website	www.voiceless.org.au

Voiceless is an independent, non-profit animal protection charity based in Sydney, Australia. According to its mission statement, Voiceless's vision is for a world in which animals are treated with respect and compassion.^[1]

Voiceless was founded by father-daughter team Brian Sherman AM and Ondine Sherman in 2004 with the goal of making animal protection the next great social justice movement.^[2]

Voiceless keeps a mainstream focus by taking a measured and factual approach to animal protection,^[3] focussing on animal protection and animal law education.^[4]

History[]

Voiceless was founded by father-daughter team Brian Sherman AM and Ondine Sherman in 2004.

Ondine Sherman first became interested in animal welfare when served a dish of tongue cooked by her grandmother at age 8, an experience which resulted in her adopting a vegetarian lifestyle.^[5] After retiring in 2003, Brian Sherman attended an animal rights conference with Ondine in the United States. They were both shocked by the extent of animal suffering caused by institutionalised farming and felt compelled to challenge the cruel treatment of animals raised for food.^[6]

After being exposed to a number of animal welfare and animal rights issues, Ondine and Brian decided to focus their time on raising awareness of animal suffering in Australia. Brian admits that attending the conference was difficult: "I have always felt a kinship with animals, but my experience there can only be described as traumatic. We established Voiceless less than 12 months after, and have not looked back since."^[7] Brian has published a history of Voiceless in his autobiography The Lives of Brian.

Animal protection[]

Voiceless identifies itself as an animal protection institute. For Voiceless, animal protection is a term which encompasses animal welfare, and animal rights, in an attempt to unify those two movements.

Animal welfare is a philosophy which is concerned with regulating the use of animals to reduce unnecessary pain and suffering. Animal welfare holds that it is morally acceptable for humans to use non-human animals, provided that adverse effects on animal welfare are minimised as far as possible, short of not using the animals at all.^[8]

Animal rights is the idea that non-human animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives. In this way, animal rights law seeks to question animals’ well-entrenched status as property, with a view to securing fundamental rights for (at least some) animals.

While welfare and rights often fall on the same side of an issue, they are fundamentally different concepts. By unifying them, Voiceless seeks to shift focus away from the theoretical discourse and towards practical approaches to achieving greater animal protection in Australia.

Work areas[]

Voiceless focusses on youth education, encouraging critical-thinking on animal protection issues and growing the field of animal law.

Voiceless's Animal Law Education (ALE) program provides animal law teachers with the resources they need to encourage law students to think critically about the relationship between animals and the law.

Voiceless's Animal Protection Education (APE) program provides high school teachers with the resources they need to encourage students to think critically about animal protection.

Advocacy work (2004–2017)[]

From 2004-2017, Voiceless focussed its advocacy work on two areas – factory farming and the commercial kangaroo industry. Founder Ondine Sherman has explained that the reason for this focus is that these issues cause the most suffering to the largest number of Australian animals, yet often receive little attention.^[9] These objectives were realised through writing law reform submissions, running campaigns, creating research publications and hosting the Voiceless Animal Law Lecture Series, the Voiceless Grants Program and the Voiceless Media Prizes.

Factory farming[]

Factory farming is the process of raising livestock in industrial systems in which animals are confined at high stocking density to produce the highest output at the lowest cost.^[10] Factory farms remove domesticated farmed animals from open pastures, forcing them to live in confined and crowded environments.^[10] These close conditions require the use of antibiotics to stop the spread of disease and housing systems often prevent animals from exhibiting many of their natural behaviours.^[10] Farmed animals are often subjected to artificial feeding and lighting regimes, selective breeding, and intensive confinement, often in cages and at extreme stocking densities, to produce the greatest possible output of meat, milk and eggs in the shortest amount of time at the lowest cost.

According to Voiceless, the intensification of farming processes has resulted in large multinational companies dominating the global meat and dairy trade.^[11] Globally, more than 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for human consumption, with the vast majority coming from factory farms.^[12] Australians now eat more than ten times the amount of chicken meat than in 1960,^[13] but the number of chicken farms in Australia has plummeted and over 70% of the market is now supplied by just two corporations.^[13] Similarly, since the early 1970s pig meat production has increased by around 50%, while the number of pig producers has dropped from 40,000 to just over 1,500 in 2014.^[13] This concentration means that individual corporations can be responsible for more than a million animals at any one time.

Voiceless states that this intensification of agricultural practices has led to the widespread use of cruel and inhumane meat production practices, such as the debeaking of chickens, tail docking and teeth clipping of pigs, and mulesing of sheep, often undertaken without pain relief.^[14]

Voiceless’s advocacy work on factory farming focused on raising awareness of the practice in order to change the laws which allow it. Voiceless claims that factory farming corporations engage in legalised cruelty in the name of higher profit and cheaper animal products. Voiceless founder Brian Sherman has stated that "Australians need to see what goes on inside factory farms, to see how cruelly animals are treated for the sake of cheap chicken breast and bacon."^[14][15]

The commercial kangaroo industry[]

The commercial kangaroo industry is a multimillion-dollar meat and skin industry,^[16] responsible for the killing of almost 90 million kangaroos and wallabies in the last 20 years.^[17]

Voiceless claims that kangaroos are hunted in the largest commercial slaughter of land-based wildlife on the planet, primarily because they are perceived to be overpopulated in Australia and considered a pest.^[18] According to a 2011 report by THINKK, the think tank for kangaroos, the notion of kangaroos as costly pests to Australian farmers has been significantly overstated.^[19]

While shooters are required by the relevant Codes of Practice to aim to shoot a kangaroo in the brain and therefore cause instantaneous death,^[20] it is Voiceless's view that non-fatal body shots are unavoidable and cause horrific and painful injuries. Voiceless also claims that the death of joeys is ‘collateral damage’ to the killing of female kangaroos, with young joeys killed or left to die when the mother is shot. The kangaroo industry code allows joeys to be killed by a single blow to the head (usually with a steel pipe or against the tow bar of the shooter's truck) or through decapitation.^[20] On average, approximately 855,000 dependent joeys are killed as collateral damage of the kangaroo industry.^[21]

Law reform submissions[]

Voiceless has made submissions in regards to a range of law and policy reform issues over the past fifteen years.

Campaigns and publications[]

From 2004-2017, Voiceless ran numerous advocacy campaigns addressing a range of animal protection issues, including the use of battery cage systems for egg production and the use of sow-stalls in pig meat production.

These campaigns involved the release of a number of key publications, including:

• Unscrambled: The Hidden Truth of Hen Welfare (2017)
• The Life of the Dairy Cow (2015)
• Science and Sense: The Case for Abolishing Sow Stalls (2013)
• From Nest to Nugget: An Exposé of Australia's Chicken Factories (2008)
• From Label to Liable: Labelling Report (2007)
• From Paddocks to Prisons (2005)

Voiceless Animal Law Lecture Series[]

From 2007–2017, the Voiceless Animal Law Lecture Series was held across eight Australian cities, featuring nine international keynote speakers and animal law academics from across Australia. The Lecture Series addressed a range of topics, including factory farming, ag-gag legislation, hunting and animals in politics.

The Series featured a number of high profile lawyers and public figures including The Honourable Michael Kirby AC CMG, Her Excellency Professor Marie R Bashir AD CVO and Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Voiceless Grants Program[]

From 2004-2017, the Voiceless Grants Program awarded over $1.5 million to organisations working at the forefront of animal protection. The Grants provided financial support to non-profit organisations, councils and universities for independently conceived and operated projects.

Voiceless Grants funded research projects, public awareness campaigns, television and print advertisements and the publication of books and magazines.  The Grants enabled over 150 projects, each contributing towards the alleviation of animal suffering in Australian factory farms and the commercial kangaroo industry.

Voiceless Media Prizes[]

The Voiceless Media Prizes recognised the most accurate and influential reports on factory farming, kangaroo hunting, animal law, live export and other important issues that affect animals in Australia. In 2016, the Prizes were sponsored by Hunter Hall International Limited, and included $5,000 first prizes and $2,500 runner up prizes in each of the 3 categories: Journalism in written form (published in print media); Journalism in written form (published online) and Journalism in video form (broadcast on TV or digital platforms).

The successful nominees were stories which:

• Addressed factory farming, food labelling and certification, live export, animal law including enforcement and governance, hunting, animal experimentation, animals in entertainment, animals killed for fashion; or
• Built public understanding of animal sentience; or
• Examined the ethical relationship between human and non-human animals.

The winners were selected by a returning panel of judges, which included Professor J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature and Voiceless Patron.

Eureka Prizes[]

From 2005 to 2012, Voiceless supported the Australian Museum's Eureka Prizes for outstanding achievements by the scientific community. The Voiceless Eureka Prize awarded $10,000 annually to an individual or research team whose work had contributed or had the potential to contribute, to animal protection.

Education work (2017-present)[]

Animal Protection Education (APE)[]

Voiceless's Animal Protection Education (APE) program encourages students to think critically about animal protection by providing teachers with the information and tools they need to deliver complete lessons in the classroom.

APEs are aligned with the year 7-10 Australian Curriculum and developed in collaboration with experienced high-school teachers. Each APE contains free and professionally developed educational resources, including videos, infographics, podcasts, quizzes and fact sheets. Accompanying classroom activities and lesson plans cover a broad range of subject areas, including English, Geography, History, Civics & Citizenship, Arts and Science.

APEs ask questions without providing answers, encouraging students to think critically by questioning, considering and discussing the issues for themselves.

To date, Voiceless has produced seven APEs:

• Broiler Chicken Welfare (2017);
• Dolphins in Captivity (2018);
• Legal Personhood (2018);
• Lives of Animals (2018);
• Animal Allies Series (2019);
• Facts and Fishes (2019);
• Navigating Naplan (2020).

Voiceless states on its site that it is ‘Australia’s only comprehensive animal protection education program’. Voiceless partners with the global Humane Education Coalition.

Animal Cruelty Index[]

The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index (VACI)^[22] tracks the animal welfare performance of fifty countries selected among the largest producers of farmed animal products. Voiceless, together with a team of international animal welfare advocates joined together to produce the first ever Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index focusing on farmed animals.

The VACI aims to provide an interactive index that evaluates and ranks countries based on the nature, extent and intensity of cruelty associated with farmed animal production and consumption in a sample of fifty countries that together account for almost 80 per cent of the world’s farmed animal population.

The new index complements and makes use of the (API). While the API focuses on the quality of animal welfare legislation across countries, the VACI seeks to measure actual farmed animal cruelty. The VACI focuses on the same 50 countries included in the API. The VACI seeks to assess the suffering caused by producers and consumers of farmed animal products, as well as the countervailing effects of the animal protection legislative and regulatory environment, as follows:

• Producing Cruelty assesses country performance based on the number of farmed animals slaughtered for food every year (on a per capita basis), whilst taking explicit account of the fact that animals are treated and protected differently in each country.
• Consuming Cruelty assesses country performance based on the consumption of farmed animals, by looking at the ratio of plant-based protein to farm-animal protein consumed and the number of animals consumed in each country (on a per capita basis).
• Sanctioning Cruelty assesses country performance based on the societal and cultural attitudes to farmed animals, as reflected in the quality of the regulatory frameworks that protect, or fail to protect, farmed animals.

Podcast series[]

Voiceless produces two educational podcast series – Voiceless Animal Law Talk for animal law students, and Talking APEs for high school students.

See also[]

• Animal welfare and rights in Australia

References[]

External links[]

• Official website