Speaker 1: Yeah, every part on the bag is this is different.
Speaker 1: This one is called a millionaire. Yeah, it's called a
Speaker 1: millionaire for a reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This story starts in the sunshine of Paris Fashion Week
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: And this was when this pudgy yellow handbag was worn
Speaker 4: by the musician for El Williams and he designed this
Speaker 4: handbag for Louie Viton.
Speaker 5: It was called the Millionaire Speedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it comes with millionaires. Oh and every bit
Speaker 1: of the every bit of the bag is like the zipper,
Speaker 1: the zipper, the teeth on.
Speaker 6: The zippers going, all the hardware.
Speaker 1: Every rivit. This is gold.
Speaker 4: This is gold.
Speaker 1: Obviously, this chain is real. Peel.
Speaker 3: The bag for all designed was made from the soft
Speaker 3: skins of three or four young crocodiles.
Speaker 4: And it made a real splash among the fashion elite.
Speaker 4: It was championed in Vogue and it served to upstage
Speaker 4: the Ameres Burken crocodile skin bag, which had this elite
Speaker 4: waiting list. It was available only by invitation and it
Speaker 4: carried a million dollar price tag. Celebrities across the globe
Speaker 4: were clambering for them.
Speaker 5: The real housewives of everywhere.
Speaker 4: Were wearing them, and so were figures like Kim Kardashian,
Speaker 4: Martha Stewart and Beyonce and on TikTok Rihanna gushed about
Speaker 4: the millionaire Speedy and she said, I would sell all
Speaker 4: my purses to get this one.
Speaker 1: You know what I really want in my closet, Like,
Speaker 1: I would sell all my purses just for this one.
Speaker 1: It's the lot speedy, crap alvy monoground bag.
Speaker 5: Ah amazing.
Speaker 7: Somebody need to get the crocodile skins that supply Louis
Speaker 7: Veton and Amez and most of the luxury fashion houses
Speaker 7: come mostly from Australia.
Speaker 4: Australia supplies most of the world's croc skins for luxury
Speaker 4: goods and most crop factory.
Speaker 5: Farms are in Darwin.
Speaker 3: Catherine Wilson is an award winning journalist. As she started
Speaker 3: to look into the crocodile skin industry, she knew that
Speaker 3: she had to visit Darwin and what she found when
Speaker 3: she went was a booming, one hundred million dollar industry
Speaker 3: with a troubling underbelly. I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening
Speaker 3: to seven AM today Katherine Wilson on crop farming, conservation claims,
Speaker 3: and the true cost of Luxury Fashion. It's Friday, January nine,
Speaker 3: and this is part one of a two part series
Speaker 3: which was originally published in August.
Speaker 5: So, cath you.
Speaker 3: Recently went to Darwin to learn more about these crocodile farms.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me what you discovered about the way
Speaker 3: they operate and the types of conditions that the crocodile's.
Speaker 8: Are living in.
Speaker 4: Yet, I was lucky to have my trip sponsored by
Speaker 4: an outfit called World Animal Protection through another Melbourne based
Speaker 4: organization called Collective Fashion Justice, which advocates for ethical practices
Speaker 4: in the fashion industry. Both these outfits have for years
Speaker 4: been really keen to have media come and view the
Speaker 4: untold conditions on these farms. So these facilities are called farms,
Speaker 4: but it's probably a misnomer.
Speaker 5: When we think of.
Speaker 4: Farms, we might think of pastoral scenes or rural idols,
Speaker 4: but these facilities are more akin to manufacturing plants and
Speaker 4: production lines of crocs.
Speaker 5: They wear house.
Speaker 4: About one hundred and thirty thousand crocs in the territory alone,
Speaker 4: and they're huge castoral places with maximum security, so they're
Speaker 4: really quite like prisons. And one of the first things
Speaker 4: you notice outside these facilities.
Speaker 5: Is this weird dank smell.
Speaker 4: But it's probably best to describe what you can see
Speaker 4: in whistle blow of footage, and this is footage taken
Speaker 4: partly by workers within these farms and also by animal
Speaker 4: activist investigators.
Speaker 5: And what the footage shows are crocs that are each
Speaker 5: housed in cages that are.
Speaker 4: Submerged in these fast concrete channels or sumps where.
Speaker 5: They're kept alive for two years.
Speaker 3: Okay, so tell me a bit about how this one
Speaker 3: hundred million dollar industry developed. How we got to this
Speaker 3: point that Darwin is supplying these crocodile skins in such
Speaker 3: a large scale.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, of course crocodiles have coexisted with indigenous people
Speaker 4: in the territory for millennia, but they were feared by
Speaker 4: settlers and by the nineteen seventies saltwater crops were hunted
Speaker 4: almost to extinction.
Speaker 9: The club is quite an ingenious affair. A rope for
Speaker 9: the heavy log attached to it runs through a polyblog
Speaker 9: to the running ned. The lower part of this is
Speaker 9: have me buried in the mud so the crocodile will
Speaker 9: not disturb it, but put his head and shoulders through
Speaker 9: the loop to reach the beak.
Speaker 4: But then in seventy one, hunting was banned in the
Speaker 4: territory and slightly later in Queensland, and kroc populations started
Speaker 4: rapidly rebounding.
Speaker 5: And then you have.
Speaker 4: Farming introduced from the nineteen eighties. Now farming relies on
Speaker 4: collecting eggs from the wild and bringing them back to farms.
Speaker 9: Contendering the great size of a crocodile. The eggs are
Speaker 9: not so large as one might expect, being not such
Speaker 9: a greatly larger than an ordinary hen's egg. Both ends
Speaker 9: of the egg are similar, there is no point at
Speaker 9: end many of the eggs.
Speaker 4: And farmers really needed social license to extract these eggs
Speaker 4: from wild populations. So from the nineteen eighties croc farmers
Speaker 4: identified as conservationists. They promoted their trade as a profitable
Speaker 4: way to reduce pressure on wild populations.
Speaker 10: And I think it just makes a lot of economic sense,
Speaker 10: and it makes a lot of sense also for the
Speaker 10: conservation of the animal.
Speaker 4: This was a little bit of tricky messaging because the
Speaker 4: eggs they extracted were on this one way ticket to
Speaker 4: factory farms. The hatchlings were raised in the factories for
Speaker 4: profit and never made it back into the wild. But
Speaker 4: the industry's been kind of told another story.
Speaker 10: This is a potentially dangerous, unloved animal, but if you
Speaker 10: can make him worth money, people will tolerate him around.
Speaker 4: Farmers and industry figures insisted that monetized incentives to collect
Speaker 4: these eggs would help people accept crocs, and that the
Speaker 4: conservation success story was achieved not by protecting crocs, but
Speaker 4: by making crocs a financial.
Speaker 5: Asset to local people.
Speaker 4: So this belief persists that croc skin commerce is responsible
Speaker 4: for protecting and increasing crocodile numbers.
Speaker 5: But it recently came to.
Speaker 4: Light that almost all of the positive messaging and research
Speaker 4: cited to support crop farming arises either from the industry
Speaker 4: itself or from government officials and advocates associated with this industry.
Speaker 3: Coming up inside a crocodile cage path. You spoke to whistleblowers,
Speaker 3: people who'd worked in these farms. Can you tell me
Speaker 3: a bit about what they said to you about the
Speaker 3: conditions and the way that things operate. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The whistleblowers have so far documented four crop factories in
Speaker 4: the Darwin regions, and the conditions they've documented are pretty shocking.
Speaker 5: But these conditions.
Speaker 4: Can't be legal challenged because they're within standards set by
Speaker 4: the federal government's Code of Practice.
Speaker 5: So this code allows a quarter to half.
Speaker 4: A square meter of cage space per crocodile, in which
Speaker 4: they typically can't fully extend their bodies once they market ready.
Speaker 6: My name is Donnie in Belong. My family's jiro So
Speaker 6: from about three and a half hours south of here.
Speaker 4: One of the former indigenous workers in these farms, Donnie
Speaker 4: in Belong, described how his work involved this production line
Speaker 4: scenario where his coworker was electrocuting each croc to stun them,
Speaker 4: and Donny had to drag them out and ductate their
Speaker 4: snouts shute.
Speaker 6: So I had to job was to flip around. If
Speaker 6: the croc was been difficult, had to try and get
Speaker 6: him out to the end with the opening, and once
Speaker 6: I got him there the off side, I would zap
Speaker 6: him for about ten seconds stun it, and then I'd
Speaker 6: have to open the cage door and tape the mouth
Speaker 6: and I show and then flip it up belly up
Speaker 6: on the top of the cage, and then the boss
Speaker 6: would come around and inspect the belly between the front
Speaker 6: and hind legs. That was the most valuable part of
Speaker 6: the body.
Speaker 4: And they're waiting these cages for slaughter, which was a
Speaker 4: terribly drawn out process that involves a practice called pissing
Speaker 4: in which a worker has to force a steel rod
Speaker 4: into the croc's brain to scramble it. So you can
Speaker 4: imagine the impact not just on the croc, but on
Speaker 4: the workers having to perform this work.
Speaker 5: And Donny describes.
Speaker 4: How he felt the croc's spirit had been crushed.
Speaker 6: Would get a bit of a lump in a throat
Speaker 6: doing it and sort of seeing the state of them,
Speaker 6: and felt like the spirit was crushed or defeated in
Speaker 6: a way like you've seeing these animals reduced to yeah,
Speaker 6: just yeah.
Speaker 4: And we have to remember that the crocodile is a
Speaker 4: sacred totem species for many Aboriginal people in Northern Australia.
Speaker 6: And it does feel very colonial still. It's like, you know,
Speaker 6: the colony providing the resources for the mother country. It
Speaker 6: is a very colonial industry.
Speaker 4: I also spoke with elders and traditional owners and an
Speaker 4: ex croc farmer who said farmers were ripping off ranches
Speaker 4: and ranches are the people on the ground collecting eggs,
Speaker 4: often indigenous communities. Each of these eggs is sold to
Speaker 4: farms for around twenty five bucks.
Speaker 5: So you can see there's this million.
Speaker 8: Dollar handbag at the high end, and on the ground,
Speaker 8: on the other hand, ranchers risking their lives mucking around
Speaker 8: in these sludgy swampness to find.
Speaker 5: Eggs that might get them twenty five bucks each. And
Speaker 5: that's only if the croc farmer deems them viable.
Speaker 3: And so as more information about these farms and the
Speaker 3: way the industry works comes to light, is the fashion
Speaker 3: industry responding of people's understandings changing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Look, animal advocates are becoming a huge force, and they
Speaker 4: have among them some luminaries like Chris Darwin, who is
Speaker 4: Charles Darwin's great great grandson. And by last year, groups
Speaker 4: like Collective Fashion Justice and Defend the Wild and Peter
Speaker 4: had successfully lobbied Fashion Weeks in London, in Berlin, Copenhagen,
Speaker 4: Amsterdam and Melbourne to ban wild skins of armies.
Speaker 2: Suppliers in the US and Africa found there for every
Speaker 2: army's watchband or broken bag, crocodiles and alligators suffered miserable lives.
Speaker 4: And this was following very graphic catwalk disruptions around the
Speaker 4: world in which placards showed the conditions on these farms,
Speaker 4: and many luxury brands, including Chanelle and v and Westwood
Speaker 4: have now resolved to divest from animal skins.
Speaker 2: Victoriaew Bibian, Westwood, all of these brands have already brows
Speaker 2: exotic skins.
Speaker 3: And a Clemans doesn't do it soon, they will be
Speaker 3: left behind.
Speaker 4: In Australia, David Jones has also committed to phasing out
Speaker 4: skins by twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: And at the heart of the story PATHA the crocodiles themselves.
Speaker 3: So tell me about the research into what these animals
Speaker 3: are like and what you learned about them as a species.
Speaker 4: Yeah, crocodiles get really bad press, but they're really astonishing creatures.
Speaker 4: They've been billed as evolution's greatest survivors as they're pretty
Speaker 4: much the same as their Triassic ancestors, which existed, as
Speaker 4: you'd know, well before dinosaur extinction. And in recent years
Speaker 4: scientists have found them to be emotive and creative and
Speaker 4: playful and curious. They have language, they use tools. For example,
Speaker 4: they've been observed coordinating a complex.
Speaker 5: Of sticks as lures to.
Speaker 4: Entrap nesting birds, and by many measures, they're more sentient
Speaker 4: or at least more sensitive than us because they have
Speaker 4: these unique perceptive systems.
Speaker 5: These little organs embedded in.
Speaker 4: Nodules across their bodies of very same anatomies as their
Speaker 4: deep time ancestors, and so, for example, when crocodiles are submerged,
Speaker 4: their little nerve fibers can detect these signative vibrations.
Speaker 5: Of other animals. And the reason we know about all this.
Speaker 4: Is partly because of the work of two Darwin based scientists,
Speaker 4: one Graham Web and the other named Adam Britschen, whose
Speaker 4: research is now under a huge cloud.
Speaker 3: This was part one of a two part series. In
Speaker 3: the next episode, cath Wilson finds out how the scientific
Speaker 3: work of a criminal animal abuser underpins the claims of
Speaker 3: conservation at the heart of the crocodile skin industry. It's
Speaker 3: called Part two, Crocodiles and Criminals, and it's in your
Speaker 3: feed right now.