Australia bans live sheep exports: A precedent from Agricultural History Review
In May, the federal Australian government announced its intention to ban live sheep exports by 2028. As Alan Renwick reported for The Conversation, Australia’s ban followed UK and New Zealand bans in 2023. A 2020 YouGov poll put support for ending UK exports at 55% and opposition at 10%.
Today’s arguments follow a long history of debate, bans, and reversals. In Agricultural History Review 48.1 in 2000, Alun Howkins and Lida Merricks examined a campaign against live animal exports in the UK in 1994-95.
Post-1960s animal rights concerns themselves followed an established set of nineteenth-century anti-cruelty groups, including the SPCA (founded 1824, later RSPCA) and the Humanitarian League (founded 1891). The UK enacted temporary bans on exporting live sheep, cattle, and pigs in 1972, but reversed the ban in 1975. By 1989, annual UK exports had risen to 491,892 sheep and 302,223 cattle.
By the mid-1990s, mainstream concerns about farming also included ‘mad cow’ disease, EU subsidies, and herbicide and pesticide use—addressed by texts such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964), Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1984).
In 1990, French farmers blockaded roads and ports in protest at sheep imports from the UK. News coverage in Britain foregrounded anti-European sentiment. The NFU argued that stopping British exports would push buyers toward European producers with lower animal welfare standards, while animal rights campaigners continued to oppose the practice as a whole, citing conditions in continental European abattoirs. Howkins and Merricks describe urban dwellers’ views of the countryside by the mid-1990s as “a mixture of private game reserve and factory farm”.
Animal welfare activists targeted ferry companies and airlines, including British Airways, P&O, Stena, and Brittany Ferries, which all announced bans on live animal transport in 1994. The smaller alternative routes that grew to replace them also became targets: thousands of protesters and police confronted each other at Shoreham Port in Sussex and at Brightlingsea in Essex in early 1995.
Howkins and Merricks conclude that “a lot of the defence of the British trade mounted by the farming press, the NFU and MAFF was unsuccessful in winning the public’s mind.” In a survey the authors conducted for their article in Agricultural History Review, a woman from Essex wrote, “I can see the faces of the animals peeping out of the trucks, and I do not fancy meat anymore”.
