Coomalie Holding Depot, Bachelor NT, Australia, 19 August 2022 Veterinarian Hamish Brett inspects buffalos at his Coomalie Holding Depot. The animals are inoculated against a variety of bovine diseases, scanned for a memory ID chip in one ear, and then changes the numbered plastic pesticide tag on the other ear. Some cows were also checked for pregnancy. The animals are sorted by weight, as only cows weighing over 260kg are ready for export.
The livestock is destined for export from Australia to Indonesia and Malaysia. The buffalo are brought here from livestock stations in the outback of Australia’s Northern Territory and kept here to be prepared for shipment. These young buffalos have been bred in near-wild conditions, and most have never been fed anything besides wild vegetation, and now have to adjust to living in pens with other animals and eating hay, pelletized food, and drinking from a trough.
Asiatic buffalo were originally imported from Indonesia to Northern Australia in the 1850s as draft animals, and allowed to go near-wild on the seasonally flooded coastal plains. There are currently some 200,000 of them running wild on the northernmost tropical plains of Australia, and they sell for about half the price of cattle, but are very hardy and require little attention until they are rounded up and shipped for slaughter.
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