The thick swarm of black flies hanging above the backyard of the rural property was the first tip-off. The metallic stench of weeks-old animal blood was another.
“There were dead animals, offal and blood everywhere, spread out on an exposed concrete slab with people walking through it and birds flying through,” says Gary Orr.
“None of the carcasses were hung, they were just lying on the open slab after being skinned and gutted, completely in contact with everything. And there was no hand-washing, no cleaning of knives or equipment. It was horrific, like a charnel house.”
The butchery was processing illegal meat and its customer list ran into the hundreds.
For Orr, whose title is the rather benign-sounding “compliance manager” for the ministry for primary industries (MPI), the discovery was an all too familiar one.
Across New Zealand an age old-crime is flourishing as farms that were once family-run sell up to corporations, meaning there are fewer people living in rural communities and keeping an eye on the land.
But in these backyard butchers it is not just the method of killing animals and handling meat that is illegal, but the way the stock is sourced as well.
Last year thousands of valuable farm animals were poached from isolated farms around the country, some to be sold illegally to other farms but most to be butchered in blackmarket meat operations, which kill and sell everything from chickens to goats to horses.
“It is a growing problem for us,” says Orr, who investigated 60 complaints regarding the Animal Products Act in 2016. Backyard butcheries were a significant problem that was becoming more prevalent every year , he said.
“Times are tough for some parts of our population and we are an increasingly multicultural society, who may have no issue eating horse meat for example. When the price of blackmarket meat is half of what you’d normally pay, that can be very tempting.”
Although small-scale, opportunistic grabs of half a dozen sheep or cows are relatively common, police and MPI say sophisticated gangs with links to organised crime are increasingly mounting well-planned raids on farms around New Zealand, in which hundreds and sometimes thousands of stock are stolen in a single hit.
Only a tiny proportion of stolen stock processed by illegal butchers is done in a hygienic way , says Orr, and very few are killed humanely (stunning them with electricity), instead slitting their throats without sedation or shooting them in the head with firearms.
The treatment of the stolen animals while they await slaughter is also abhorrent, says Orr.
The thieves – by the very nature of targeting big, live and unpredictable animals – are not quiet or discreet and their heists often involve a number of people with full-size cattle trucks in the middle of the night.
Yet despite their trucks teeming with snorting, stamping, terrified animals, none have been caught in the act, and no one has been charged for the mysterious, major hauls of 2016.
Federated Farmers rural security spokesman Rick Powdrell calls these guys “the professionals”, and believes organised crime groups are responsible for the 500 dairy cows stolen from a Canterbury dairy farm in August, and the 1,400 lambs taken from a Whanganui property in November.
Both hauls are believed to be the largest sheep and cattle thefts in New Zealand’s history. The estimated cost of the stolen cattle was nearly NZ$1m, while the stolen lambs were valued around NZ$120,000.
“When you have a lot of animals in a big dairying operation, the owners can be quite removed from the day-to-day management of the property, they are basically office workers,” says Powdrell. “And with rural communities so decimated now there are no longer the eyes and ears on the ground to watch out for suspicious behaviour.”
The Federated Farmers security survey of 2016 (which had 1,200 respondents) found 26% of Kiwi farmers had stock stolen in the last five years and of those 75% were not covered by an insurance claim. The survey also showed that 60% did not report the crime to the police, saying they felt the police were not interested in rural crime, didn’t have the resources to investigate it and convictions were rare.
Senior sergeant Alasdair Macmillan of the New Zealand police agrees that stock thefts are “greatly underreported” and says shame can be a factor in farmers not wanting to highlight their losses combined with the fact they don’t believe police will take their thefts seriously.
“We think the majority of stock thefts – when it’s large scale, in the hundreds – is going towards blackmarket meat operations, and we definitely take that seriously because organised crime groups sell meat like any other commodity; the same as drugs, the same as other stolen goods. When pinching 12 cows can net you a quick NZ$12,000, that’s an easy way to make cash fast.”
The situation is so bad in some communities that farmers have started armed night patrols to protect their property from poachers.
“We do hear of farmers running around in their vehicles with a shotgun, hoping like hell they can find these guys to blow their windows out. When your property is repeatedly hit it can be very frustrating, particularly if you feel like it isn’t a priority for the police. But that approach is extremely dangerous, and it is putting people’s lives at risk.”
In Whanganui all anyone talked of this holiday season was the 1,400 stolen lambs, a huge haul that would have taken two full-size stock trucks and a number of hours to complete. “The more we think about it the bigger the mystery gets,” said Harry Matthews, the Whanganui president for Federated Farmers. “How did they make 1,400 lambs just disappear? It is something that will play on that farmer’s mind for the rest of his days.”
The farmer – who did not want to be named – told the local paper he had become paranoid since the theft and had hired a private investigator to look into it. “It totally mentally debilitates you. Constantly making sure that everything’s all right,” the man said. “I’m a mentally tough person, most farmers are. But I’m human also. I’m still struggling with it.”
