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