NZ congratulates itself on animal welfare. But it shouldn't.

Newsroom

01-05-2025

As a nation whose economy depends on animals, our farming is often a source of national pride. When tourists exclaim how yellow our butter is, we smugly give ourselves a pat on the back.
Why wouldn't we? Since the turn of this century, New Zealand has led the world in animal welfare standards. The legislation setting those standards made headlines in the New York Times when we presumptively banned research on great apes in 1999 and in the United Kingdom when we recognised animal sentience in 2015.
Many jurisdictions have cited our animal welfare legislation as a model to follow. While it has many problems and improvements to be made, New Zealanders can still be broadly proud of legislation that recognises the intrinsic worth of animals.
Higher animal welfare standards, after all, is something almost all of us want and expect. When people tuck into Sunday morning eggs benedict, Christmas Day ham or our national dish of fish and chips we expect that because this is Aotearoa – the land of the long white cloud and endless green pastures – the animals we're eating had a relatively humane life and death.
The problem is that there's a high chance that the bacon in that eggs benedict, the ham at Christmas lunch and the crabstick in the fish and chips order didn't come from New Zealand. In its groundbreaking report earlier this year, Animal Policy International found that we import a tremendous amount of animal products. Sixty percent of all the pork we eat in New Zealand isn't produced here, and we imported 11,000 tonnes of it from Spain alone in 2022.
That may be shocking to most of us, but there's a reason for our ignorance. If (and it's a big if) we're looking at a food label (and we can read it without a magnifying glass) it's likely we'll see a vague mention of 'made from local and imported ingredients' that does nothing to indicate exactly where our food comes from.
It's also highly likely that the 83 tonnes of liquid eggs we imported from China or the 4600 tonnes of dairy we import from the United States each year come from animals that likely did not have a good life. The animal welfare standards in these countries are woefully deficient and while New Zealand is far from perfect, those standards would be far below what we require of our own farmers.
It is illogical to ban Kiwi farmers from using certain practices while, at the same time, throwing the doors open to the import of the same products, the production of which has involved cruelty to animals. For example, while New Zealand finally banned sow stalls in 2016 and is due this year to phase out farrowing crates (which prevent a mother pig even from turning around), they are still somewhat commonplace throughout the world. That means that while New Zealand farmers are having to comply with fair and reasonable standards, it's likely that the Spanish producer of the bacon eaten at that Ponsonby café didn't.
That's pretty weird. We don't think twice about safety when we jump in a car or take medicine that has been manufactured overseas, because those products are required to meet our safety standards. As they should. While other countries can take advantage of their economies of scale and produce all sorts of things more efficiently and cheaply than we can, when it comes to our safety, we draw a line.
We're also extremely strict when it comes to biosecurity. Just as we carefully regulate imports for safety or biosecurity reasons, I'd argue that we should apply that same diligence to ensuring imported animal products meet our high animal welfare standards.
New Zealanders agree that we should expect the same standards from overseas farmers as we do as ours. The same Animal Policy International report showed that 83 percent of Kiwis agree that imported products from outside the country should have been produced by applying the same animal welfare standards that apply here. It's hard for 83 percent of New Zealanders to agree on anything, but we evidently agree on wanting to know that if we eat animals, that they lived a reasonable life before a humane death.
A petition is being presented to Parliament next week that demands legislation to require imports of animal products to meet or exceed New Zealand's animal welfare standards, and hopefully it's one that all parties in Parliament will take notice of. Another part of our national ethos is to take a courageous stand and to lead the way. Over 130 years ago we did that by giving women the right to vote. Forty years ago we took a stand against nuclear testing. By requiring our trading partners to meet our animal welfare standards, we would be standing up for our rural sector, and for animals worldwide.