Revisiting Frankford: the story of a rabbit farm and an accidental investigator.
This is not a happy story. So many of them rarely are. Too many.
I chose to live as a vegan in May of 2012. This decision was the culmination of of two years of exposure to online vegan arguing points, to the ongoing live export crisis, and due to establishing relationships with vegans through the foster care of displaced puppies and dogs. Shortly after, I began facilitating the rescue and rehabilitation of rabbits from my own home. Rabbits are one of the most neglected and abused of those animals used as “companions” by humans. Millions are sold, given away, dumped, or ignored in tiny hutches to freeze to death, or die of heat. Most new owners have little to no understanding of the individual needs of rabbits; many of these animals die painful deaths as a result. Whilst the focus is on puppy mills, with growing interest in kitten farming, little to no attention is paid to rabbits despite the proliferation of breeders who pump out litter after litter. An endless supply of babies, most of whom are simply born to die.
By 2013 I was locally recognised as being someone to consult in regards to rabbit matters, be it health, behaviour, nutrition, and housing (though I would not flatter myself and claim to be an expert then or now by any measure). This is how Gary Busey Bunny (GBB) came into my life.
He was a red-eyed white blockhead of a rabbit. There was nothing delicate about him. He was scruffy, stained, and looked kind of dented. Hence the name, Gary Busey, as to his rescuer (a friend of mine) and me there was a resemblance (which may have been more informed by our friendly meme war which consisted of me sending random photographs of Gary Busey and her screaming and running away). What had GBB been rescued from? A rundown backyard rabbit meat and fur farm operating in a rural area just outside of Launceston. It was small, but with a not insignificant output of “product.” It was also a complete shithole.
GBB had been kept for five years as a breeding male before the owner decided he was no longer profitably fertile. As the sizes of litters he sired decreased, so too did his value, which is how he found himself listed on Gumtree for a mere $30. Three tenners for a life spent in pursuit of human profit and gain. My friend saw his listing and decided to buy him, which is how the farm came to our attention. GBB came to live with me shortly after, for a brief few wonderful years.
“We have to do something.”
After the rescue of GBB, my friend had found herself in a situation. She had seen the conditions, and they were vile. She had personally taken on a number of other rabbits from the farm, including litters who were beset by unknown genetic disorders leading to hair loss, stunted development, and sudden death. GBB himself seemed healthy enough, though with a persistent wheeze from constant ammonia exposure and (as we later discovered) a heart defect. Clearly, this breeder was doing something horrifically wrong, even by the standards of most rabbit breeders. Merely reporting to the RSPCA, that utterly powerless giant, would achieve nothing. We ourselves would have to take action.
But what did I know about investigating farms? Investigators were these nameless, faceless heroes you sometimes heard about on social media. All mysterious and covert, with balaclavas and backbones of steel, existing in a world beyond reality. There was no way an ordinary vegan of a year who had accumulated a few rabbits and fostered a few puppies could ever aspire to undertake the actions of these shadowy figures. Surely not?
But we didn’t know anyone who was in that world who we could ask to investigate. And so, that’s how I found myself armed with a cheap camera on a keyring driving in broad daylight into the farm from hell.
We posed as buyers who wanted to establish our own breeding set ups. That meant hiding tattoos, wearing specific clothes, and adopting a certain language regarding animals that I had been working to unlearn as a vegan. Suddenly I was using “it” again, I was laughing at the suffering of animals, cracking jokes and nodding along as the farm owner explained the ins and outs of torturing and slaughtering rabbits. In retrospect, it is quite frightening just how easily it all came back to me. I guess decades of ADHD masking has its uses after all.
I don’t have a lot of photos left, most are screen captures from the low quality footage I captured. What I do have left barely even begins to show the horror of that place.
There were four main sheds; one for the breeding does and their litters, one for the “growers” (weaned young being fattened for slaughter at twelve weeks of age), one for the two breeding males, and finally the shed that was used for the slaughtering and butchering of rabbits, including curing their skins.
The stench was indescribable. The grower and breeding doe sheds were open fronted, yet still exuded an overpowering smell of accumulated feces, ammonia from urine, and rotting straw mixed with the natural smells rabbits emit. The scent of a juvenile male rabbit coming into maturity is musty and pungent, and the strength of that smell grows as they get older and produce more testosterone. We never entered the fourth shed, but could smell the sickly stink of blood emanating from the partially ajar door. All of which combined and increased tenfold with the temperatures outside peaking at over thirty degrees celsius.
The shed to which the breeding males were confined was tiny in comparison to the first two sheds. It was dark and without ventilation. The door was a heavy fabric drape that stifled any potential airflow but trapped numerous blow flies inside. The two cages were, as the others, suspended mid air to allow urine and fecal matter to fall to the dirt floor below where it accumulated over weeks and months. They were a mere 1m x 1m squared, and entirely lacking in enrichment. “They don’t need a lot of space to root!” the owner exclaimed, and we dutifully laughed along with her.
We also laughed as she scruffed a doe rabbit out of her cage and away from her litter of four week old babies. “This is my favourite girl, Reba. She’s a great breeder. Don’t worry about the bubs, she’ll be glad to get away from the little buggers!” One swift grab of the hand, and Reba would never see her babies again. Instead, she was unceremoniously dumped into one of the male’s cages. I had to laugh, to keep my cover, to keep from crying. Reba pressed herself to the floor of the cage as the huge male loomed over her. “Damn, look at him go!” I joked, feeling sick into my core. Reba wore an expression of terror and resignation all at once. She had endured this many times before and she remembered; she was still afraid.
She was left there overnight, to make sure the job was done. Meanwhile, her babies were relocated to the grower pens to be fattened for slaughter a mere eight weeks later.
The average age of slaughter for farmed rabbits is twelve weeks old. At this age their flesh is still tender, and the rabbit is big enough to yield profitable quantities whilst not being too big to handle or spoil the meat. The breeds favoured for meat production are larger, carry more fat, and grow at a more rapid rate than other breeds or their wild counterparts. For some, this rapid weight gain on such unsuitable flooring can result in debilitating splayed legs, where the joints and musculature cannot support the animal. These rabbits are sometimes culled, and if not often die as the ability to move for food and water is limited. This farm did not cull; rather they waited to see if they could at least get some flesh and fur from the hapless individuals. “It’s just nature, you see?”
We had returned to the grower pens to chat, whilst her grandchild who was no older than eight sat atop one of the cage banks and casually played with a blunt, blood stained knife. As though it were the most normal thing in the world for a child to do. The blood reminded us. There was one question that needed asking, one my friend and I were dreading.
“So, what’s the best way to kill them?”
A piece of dowel was produced, that resembled a small baseball bat.
“You gotta get ’em right on the back of the head, break the spinal cord. Takes a bit of getting used to but it’s gotta be done. Then you get ’em upside down, and bleed ‘em out.”
“Can you show us?”
And they did, using a beautiful silver rabbit whose eyes rolled as he was held aloft.
Maintain the face. Keep masking. Don’t flinch. You can’t afford to blow this.
We eventually left, with numerous rabbits in the car including two of GBB’s own sons, who we purchased to maintain the pretext of our cover. “What dyu reckon you’ll call that one?” I was asked. “Dinner!” I replied, and we all laughed together. In a dank garbage bag were also the salted skins of half a dozen rabbits, thrown in as a “bonus” by our affable mentor. There was much laughter, back slapping, and invitations to return at a later date if we ever need more rabbits or advice. A more generous host we could not have hoped for. The mask had taken over; I almost felt like hugging her goodbye. It was only as we drove out onto the road that what we had just seen and done became reality.
“Fuck. Pull over.”
Parked under the shade of a gumtree some distance from the property we stood in shocked silence and chain smoked, hands shaking as we tried to light the cigarettes.* The occasional exclamation of “fuck.” Quiet tears rolling down flushed cheeks.
We had achieved what we set out to do, but there was no sense of pride. No elation. Only the beginnings of an ongoing trauma that I personally carry with me to this day.
All the footage and images were provided to RSPCA Tasmania. The inspector was very helpful, and was utterly shocked at what we described to them. An official visit to the property was undertaken. But beyond that, there was nothing that could legally be done.
Under the advisory provisions laid down by the DPI, the cages these rabbits were confined to exceeded the standard requirements (0.7m for a grower, 0.56m for a breeder). The code also allows for the deprivation of food and water for up to twenty-four hours during transport (to slaughter or another facility); for an animal with a continually moving gut this is both dangerous and distressing. Methods of stunning and slaughter are not specified; anything goes. Cervical dislocation is permitted, despite this proving an ineffective method of slaughter in rabbits over a certain weight. Simply put, rabbits can be kept in any conditions the owner cares to, and may be killed by whatever methods the owner prefers. All the RSPCA inspector could do was recommend a bit of a tidy up and advise the owner to perhaps not give away raw uncured skins to random people.
That was it. It was over. Yes, social media afforded me a platform to share my words and images with people the world over. But really, the entire operation achieved little (except for the liberation of those lucky rabbits from the property). I lost all faith in official avenues of action. The government allowed animal welfare codes that entrenched the torture of these animals; the RSPCA had no capacity to effectively intervene. The police were entirely out of the question, as technically we had broken surveillance laws in undertaking the investigation. There was no hope to be found in men and suits. Since then I have seen little to alter my opinion.
Some years later GBB died of a congenital heart defect that the property owner had bred into him. A year after, his sons died of the same. Theirs was the story I told a crowd of thousands at a rally in Melbourne held to mark the release of Dominion Documentary: “Because the sad reality is, the industry will kill these animals in the end. Whether it is in the cages, or in the slaughterhouses, or in the loving arms of their rescuers.”
So many animals bred by the industries that exploit them will never achieve their full lifespan even after their liberation has been facilitated. “Layer” hens are eventually killed by their hyper-reproductivity of eggs, “broiler” chickens are literally crushed to death by their own weight. And farmed rabbits are no different, facing health issues that all too often kill them at a fraction of the lifespan they deserve. They are doomed from the moment they are born.
Frankford rabbit farm eventually closed down. Not because of any action my friend and I undertook, but because the owner became too ill to continue operations. It was a weird moment when I heard this; pieces of the mask I had worn that day returned and I felt myself genuinely concerned for her wellbeing. She was so friendly after all. But my head and heart also remembered the soul-tearing grief of burying GBB and his sons. I remembered the horror of that place, the stench of blood, shit, and fear. I thought of how many hundreds maybe thousands of rabbits were mercilessly slaughtered over the years.
I saw Reba in my mind, flat and terrified, bereft of yet another litter. I remembered that for breeding does like her, once their fertility was no longer profitable they too would become nothing more than lifeless hunks of meat and salted fur in a bag. I saw Reba’s babies, left in a cage wondering where their mother had gone. I saw the dowel. I saw the child with a knife.
It is hard to remain compassionate with such memories seared into one’s mind.
The numbers of large scale rabbit farms continues to dwindle. The market for product is rarely profitable; Akubra is one of the largest user of rabbit skins in Australia yet imports most of their raw product from overseas for cost efficiency. But smaller operations exist right across the country, often combining breeding for fur and flesh with pet mill operations, selling direct to pet stores or via Gumtree. I have found places such as this even in the heart of suburbia; rabbit cage banks are relatively cheap to make and can be kept in the average garage or backyard shed. Some places promote themselves as a boutique “ethical” meat source, such as one such business in the Huon Valley who at one point even used their own child holding their “favourite” breeding doe as an advertising point. A favourite breeding doe, just like Reba. This business sells at farmer’s markets as well as through Huon Valley Meat Co. which itself was exposed for egregious animal cruelty in 2016.
How fitting.
A final point to consider. Like all facilities where animals are exploited, some rabbit farms will be bigger, others smaller. Some will be cleaner, others a complete mess. Cage sizes may vary, slaughter methods may be different. To those who are focused on the notion of animal welfare, those farms that are cleaner or have bigger cages will appear to be the “better” option. But no matter the size or conditions, ALL of these businesses are reliant upon the exploitation of reproductivity and the deprivation of life and liberty. ALL of these businesses employ practices that necessitate violence, injustice, and slaughter. ALL of these business operate in an environment whereby they are rarely if ever able to be held legally accountable as welfare codes are so insipid as to be non-existent, and animal welfare organisations are too powerless to act.
There is no such thing as ethical exploitation.
*Please note: it may seem incongruous to rescue rabbits, investigate a facility that exploits rabbits, then spark up a smoke. Please understand it was an unexpectedly traumatic experience, and at the time I was not thinking coherently, though there are some few brands that do not contain animal products nor engage in animal testing.
