Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, every part on the bag is this is different.
This one is called a millionaire.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yeah, it's called a millionaire for a reason.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Yeah. This story starts in the sunshine of Paris Fashion
Week in twenty twenty three, and.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
This was when this pudgy yellow handbag was worn by
the musician for El Williams and he designed this handbag
for Louie Viton. It was called the Millionaire Speedy.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Yeah, well it comes with millionaires.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
Oh and every bit of the every bit of the
bag is like the zipper, the zipper, the teeth on.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
The zipper is going.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
All the hardware, every rivit.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
This is gold.
Speaker 5 (00:46):
This is gold. Obviously, this chain is real.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
The bag for all designed was made from the soft
skins of three or four young crocodiles, and.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
It made a real splash among the fashion elite. It
was championed in Vogue and it served to upstage the
Ames Burken crocodile skin bag, which had this elite waiting list.
Speaker 5 (01:11):
It was available only.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
By invitation and it carried a million dollar price tag.
Celebrities across the globe were clambering for them.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
The real housewives of everywhere.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Were wearing them, and so were figures like Kim Kardashian,
Martha Stewart and Beyonce and on TikTok Rihanna gushed about
the millionaire Speedy and she said, I would sell all
my purses to get this one.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
You know what I really want in my closet, Like
I would sell all my purses just for this one.
Speaker 6 (01:45):
It's the little Speedy crop Alvy monoground bag.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Ah amazing.
Speaker 6 (01:51):
Somebody need get the crocodile skins that supply Louis Veton
and Amez and most of the luxury fashion houses come
mostly from Australia.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Australia supplies most of the world's croc skins for luxury
goods and most crop factory farms are in Darwin.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Catherine Wilson is an award winning journalist. As she started
to look into the crocodile skin industry, she knew that
she had to visit Darwin and what she found when
she went was a booming one hundred million dollar industry
with a troubling underbelly.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
AM today Catherine Wilson on crop farming, conservation claims, and
the true cost of luxury fashion. It's Tuesday, August nineteenth,
and this is part one of a.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
Two part series.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
So, cath you recently went to Darwin to learn more
about these crocodile farms. Can you tell me what you
discovered about the way they operate and the types of
conditions that the crocodile's are living in.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, it's lucky to have my trips sponsored by an
outfit called World Animal Protection through another Melbourne based organization
called Collective Fashion Justice, which advocates for ethical practices in
the fashion industry. Both these outfits have for years been
really keen to have media come and view the untold
(03:19):
conditions on these farms. So these facilities are called farms,
but it's probably a misnomer.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
When we think of farms.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
We might think of pastoral scenes or rural idols, but
these facilities are more akin to manufacturing plants and production
lines of crocs.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
They wear house.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
About one hundred and thirty thousand crops in the territory alone,
and they're huge castlele places with maximum security, so they're
really quite like prisons. And one of the first things
you notice outside these facilities is this weird, dank smell.
But it's probably best to discribe what you can see
in whistle blow of footage.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
And this is footage taken partly.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
By workers within these farms and also by animal activist investigators.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
And what the footage shows are crocs that.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Are each housed in cages that are submerged in these
fast concrete channels or sumps where.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
They're kept alive for two years.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Okay, so tell me a bit about how this one
hundred million dollar industry developed. How we got to this
point that Darwin is supplying these crocodile skins in such
a large scale.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, well, of course crocodiles have coexisted with indigenous people
in the territory for millennia, but they were feared by
settlers and by the nineteen seventies saltwater crops were hunted
almost to extinction.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
The club is quite an ingenious a beat a rope
for the heavy log attached to it runs through a
polyblog to the running nood oh father. This is carefully
buried in the mud so the crocodile will not disturb it,
but put his head and shoulders through the loop to
reach the beak.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
But then in seventy one, hunting was banned in the Territory,
and slightly later in Queensland and kroc populations started rapidly rebounding,
and then you had farming introduced from the nineteen eighties.
Now farming relies on collecting eggs from the wild and
(05:29):
bringing them back to farms.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Considering the great size of a crocodile, the eggs are
not so large as one might expect, being not such
a greatly larger than an ordinary hedn's egg. Both ends
of the egg are similar, there is no point at
end many.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Of the eggs have and farmers really needed social license
to extract these eggs from wild populations. So from the
nineteen eighties croc farmers identified as conservationists. They promoted their
trade as a profitable way to reduce pressure on wild populations.
Speaker 7 (06:05):
And I think it just makes a lot of economic sense,
and it makes a lot of sense also for the
conservation of the animal.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
This was a little bit of tricky messaging because the
eggs they extracted were on this one way ticket to
factory farms. The hatchlings were raised in the factories for
profit and never made it back into the wild. But
the industry's been kind of told another story.
Speaker 7 (06:33):
This is a potentially dangerous, unloved animal, but if you
can make him worth money, people will tolerate him around.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Farmers and industry figures insisted that monetized incentives to collect
these eggs would help people accept crocs, and that the
conservation success story was achieved not by protecting crocs, but
by making crocs a financial.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Asset to local people.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
This leief persists that croc skin commerce is responsible for
protecting and increasing crocodile numbers, but it recently came to
light that almost all of the positive messaging and research
cited to support crop farming arises either from the industry
(07:20):
itself or from government officials and advocates associated with this industry.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Coming up inside a crocodile cage path, you spoke to whistleblowers,
people who'd worked in these farms. Can you tell me
a bit about what they said to you about the
conditions and the way that things operate.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
The whistleblowers have so far documented four crop factories in
the Darwin regions, and the conditions they've documented are pretty shocking.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
But these conditions.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Can't be legally challenged because they're within standards set by
the federal government's Code of practice, So this code allows
a quarter to half a square meter of cage space
per crocodile, in which they typically can't fully extend their
bodies once they market ready.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
My name is Donnie in Belong. My family's jiro So
from about three and a half hours south of here.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
One of the former indigenous workers in these farms, Donnie
in Belong, described how his work involved this production line
scenario where his coworker was electrocuting each croc to stun them,
and Donny had to drag them out and ductate their
snouts shutge.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So I had to job was to flip around if
the croc has been difficult, had to try and get
him out to the end with the opening, and once
I got him there the off side, I would zap
him for about ten seconds stun it, and then I'd
have to open the cage door and tape the mouth
and eyes shut and then flip it up belly up
on the top of the cage, and then the boss
would come around and inspect the belly between the front
(09:09):
and hind legs. That was the most valuable part of
the body.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
And they're waiting these cages for slaughter, which was a
terribly drawn out process that involves a practice called pissing,
in which a worker has to force a steel rod
into the croc's brain to scramble it. So you can
imagine the impact not just on the croc, but on
the workers having to perform this work.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
And Donny describes.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
How he felt the croc's spirit had been crushed.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Would get a bit of a lump in my throat
doing it and sort of seeing the state of them,
and felt like the spirit was crushed or defeated in
a way like you've seeing these animals reduced to yeah,
just yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
And we have to remember that the crocodile is a
sacred totem species for many Aboriginal people in North and.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Australia, and it does feel very colonial still. It's like,
you know, the colony providing the resources for the mother country.
It is a very colonial industry.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I also spoke with elders and traditional owners and an
ex croc farmer who said farmers were ripping off ranchers
and ranches are the people on the ground collecting eggs,
often indigenous communities. Each of these eggs is sold to
farms for around twenty five bucks.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
So you can see there's this million.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Dollar handbag at the high end, and on the ground,
on the other hand, ranchers risking their lives mucking around
in these sludgy swampness to find eggs that might get
them twenty five bucks each. And that's only if the
croc farmer deemed some viable.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
And so As more information about these farms and the
way the industry works comes to light, is the fashion
industry responding of people's understandings changing.
Speaker 5 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Look, animal advocates are becoming a huge force, and they
have among them some luminaries like Chris Darwin, who is
Charles Darwin's great great grandson. And by last year groups
like Collective Fashion Justice and Defend the Wild and Peter
had successfully lobbied fashion weeks in London, in Berlin, Copenhagen,
(11:32):
Amsterdam and Melbourne to ban wild skins of armies.
Speaker 8 (11:38):
Suppliers in the US and Africa found there for every
army's watchband or broken bags, crocodiles and alligators suffered miserable lives.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
And this was following very graphic catwalk disruptions around the
world in which placards showed the conditions on these farms
and many luxury brands, including Chanelle and Vivian Westwood, have
now resolved to divest from animal skins.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Victoria, Chanell, Vivian Westwood, all of these brands have already
brown exotic skins, and the Clemans doesn't do it soon,
they will be left behind.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
In Australia, David Jones has also committed to phasing out
skins by twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And at the heart of the story PATHA the crocodiles themselves.
So tell me about the research into what these animals
are like and what you learned about them as a species.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, crocodiles get really bad press, but they're really astonishing creatures.
They've been billed as evolution's greatest survivors as they're pretty
much the same as their Triassic ancestors, which existed, as
you'd know, well before dinosaur extinction. And in recent years
(12:55):
scientists have found them to be emotive and creative and
playful and curios. They have language, they use tools. For example,
they've been observed coordinating a complex.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
Of sticks as lures to.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Entrap nesting birds, and by many measures, they're more sentient,
or at least more sensitive than us because they have
these unique perceptive systems.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
These little organs embedded.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
In nodules across their bodies of very same anatomies as
their deep time ancestors, and so, for example, when crocodiles
are submerged, their little nerve fibers can detect these signature vibrations.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Of other animals.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
And the reason we know about all this is partly
because of the work of two Darwin based scientists, one
Graham Web and the other named Adam Britten, whose research
is now under a huge cloud.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
This was part one of a two part series. In
the next episode, kath Wilson finds out how the scientific
work of a criminal animal abuser underpins the claims of
conservation at the heart of the crocodile skin industry. It's
called Part two, Crocodiles, Crimes and Conservation Claims, and it's
in your feed right now.