A Nation’s Protected Pestilence

The Australian sheep industry. It’s one of a kind. Nowhere else in the world does it exist in this form — a relic grown and manufactured since invasion, operating with no brakes and no parameters.

For any article like this to be genuinely received, readers must first confront their bias. What level of patriotic protection do you automatically assign to the sheep industry that prevents you from understanding the points raised here? What involvement do you have in it — through family, habit, or cultural conditioning?

Most Australians carry a certain level of sheep industry bias. The average citizen often preface their criticism with, “Not all sheep farmers are bad.” But this industry thrives on such soft spots. It feeds on them.

Journalists, too, often approach stories with built-in bias — not to challenge the industry, but to promote it. Sympathy marketing disguised as journalism. So before you keep reading, ask yourself: what is your bias?

There is no corner of Australia untouched by sheep exploitation. From the driest deserts to dense bushland, humans have declared it their right to breed and profit from sheep. Like the settlers who tore through the continent’s ecosystems, the modern sheep exploiter continues this colonial arrogance — taking, taking, taking.

The industry claims sheep are “climatised” to all environments, but that’s a lie. Every patch of Australia has been rewritten to serve this industry, and every species that stands in its way is branded a pest — from Dingoes to Kangaroos, from Cockatoos to Emus.

The propaganda pieces make the rounds almost daily: sheep exploiters claiming massive “losses” to predators or grass competition. One in western New South Wales, Neville Mattick, told the media he’d lost $50,000 worth of lambs to feral pigs. Another in South Australia demanded kangaroos be shot because they were “eating all the grass.”

It’s always the same cycle of victimhood marketing — portraying the exploiters as the victims and the actual victims, the animals, as expendable.

In regions where the Dingo has finally received limited protection, the sheep exploiter’s entitlement has begun to crack. For the first time, a native animal is recognised as having more right to exist in its own environment than a colonial industry.

Big Desert Wilderness Park in Victoria is a prime example. Farmers along its perimeter have operated unchecked for generations, grazing sheep in harsh, dry environments where no animal should be bred. One of the loudest opponents of the dingo protection program lives right on the park’s sandy entry point — still demanding the right to farm sheep there, still claiming victimhood when predators attack.

But let’s be clear: knowingly placing sheep in predator zones without protection is deliberate cruelty. It’s negligence dressed as tradition.

Not a single farm around Big Desert uses guardian animals. Most have no one even living on site. Their “solution” is to kill the predator, not to protect the vulnerable animals they claim to care for. This is the heart of sheep farmer entitlement — a cycle of neglect, followed by blame, followed by government sympathy.

The Australian media perpetuates this madness. Morning shows adore sheep farmers. Newspapers run their sob stories without a single question. The amazing "Sheep farmer" deserves a slave wife, yep, you've eaten this media garbage. The bias is institutionalised, baked into the nation’s psyche: the sheep farmer as noble battler; the kangaroo, pig, or dingo as terrorist; and the lamb as collateral damage.

When these articles appear, do you ever stop to question the sheep exploiter’s behaviors? Or do you automatically pity them — the “poor farmer” narrative we’ve been spoon-fed for over a century?

Take the pig “problem.” Sheep exploiters cry victim after losing lambs — but no one accuses them of being reckless breeders who have fed and expanded those pig populations through negligence. Pigs are not to blame for existing; humans put them there.

The truth is, this is a self-made, circular crisis — and yet every article elevates the exploiter’s status, not their accountability.

Many of these stories are politically weaponised, attacking Labor governments while remaining silent under Liberal rule, aligning perfectly with conservative rural loyalties.

Meanwhile, our native and introduced animals are brutalised.

The sheep industry is a disease of entitlement. A pestilence in the national psyche. It was built on colonisation, slavery, and ecological destruction — and yet we still revere it as a cultural icon.

Australia clings to wool as if it defines our identity, forgetting that this “backbone” industry was born from exploitation and war. The wool boom was a war economy boom — profits built on death and destruction. Any industry that flourishes from suffering has no integrity.

But the myth persists. Politicians romanticise it. Schools glorify it. Media protects it. And the public continues to sympathise with the destroyer — the first destroyer of this land.

Botany Bay. Elizabeth Farm. The first sheep farms. The first forests cleared. The first Indigenous people enslaved as shepherds. The first ecosystems obliterated.

It all began with the sheep industry.

So how’s your bias going? Do you feel defensive of your “beloved” industry? Or are you beginning to see it for what it is — the original environmental vandal?

Education starts with recognising bias. Every sympathy story you read about the poor, struggling farmer is designed to exploit that bias — to keep you looking away from the suffering of sheep and the annihilation of wildlife.

Next time you read a story about a sheep farmer “doing it tough,” stop and ask:

• What’s missing from this story?

• Who’s really suffering?

• And who benefits from your sympathy?

Because until Australians stop worshipping the myth of the sheep farmer, this cycle of cruelty, bias, and destruction will never end.

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Sheep Advocate Australia is dedicated to exposing, regulating and through a long term vision of environmental stewardship and a kinder world, phasing out the Australian sheep industry.