MIKE CATT | Sheep and Goats | Contact
Even the very mention of her name can send one local sheep farmer on an hour long tirade about how US songbird Pink almost doomed the entire wool industry.
Just over a decade ago, the 37-year-old American called for a boycott of Australian sheep products over concerns she had about animal cruelty stemming from mulesing – the practice of removing folds of wool-bearing skin from around the breech of a sheep to prevent flystrike.
Michael Rust runs nearly ten thousand head of sheep on his spread about an hour south of town and even though P!nk later retracted her comments, he’s still got it in for her.
“Don’t get me started on that lunatic,” he said.
“Fucking coming over here and telling me and every other poor bastard running sheep in this country that we’re a pack of cunts and deserve to have our livelihoods taken away from us,”
“Nah, I’m not finished. Pink and her fucking PETA mates should stay in America where they actually put up with shit like that,”
Rust continued his rant for some time, the contents of which are not fit for publication.
However, his youngest daughter Amy fondly remembers the time when the controversy was fresh in the news and her father was just starting to feel the Pink’s wrath.
Amy said her old man even went as far as banning her music in the house and the family Falcon.
“He caught my sister Sam listening to a Pink song on her old Barbie-themed CD player and he just went ape,” said Amy.
“The CD player looked like a pink soccer ball. I remember Dad coming in from the cattle yards, back when we had cattle. He’d been smoked a few times by some rank cleanskins, so he was already in a bad mood that day,”
“He recognised the music and he just picked that Barbie CD player up off the kitchen bench, went out on the deck and punted it with his steel-capped Volleys halfway across the front yard. Sam just sat there and accepted that it was her fault and we as a family moved on from it.”
More to come.
