WHISTLEBLOWER

1. I worked for Tye Cummings (Tye) from mid-April 2020 and mid July 2020. And again from January 2021 – end March 2021.

2. I am aware that Tye’s previous job was as an auctioneer for horses. I believe he has been doing his current job for around six years. I believe this because he has lived at his place for 6 years.

3. During my time working for Tye, I saw that he would start drinking at around 8 am ever morning and he would continue to drink during the day and would appear inebriated.

4. If Tye wanted to go somewhere I had to drive him around because he couldn’t drive anymore.

6. Tye kept the horses in three little yards, two stables in Gympie and three paddocks full of weed.

7. He would then ride the horses to see if they were saleable. If they cannot be sold within about two weeks, then they are sent to slaughter. Because he can’t afford to buy so much Horse feed. He feeds them normally when he has enough money left two times a day.

8. The horses cannot be sighted from the road. You need to drive up to the back of the property to see them. They would be within sight of the neighbours.

9. In June 2020, I was still on my first year of my working holiday visa and I needed to extend it, so l had to finish my farm days.

10. The working holiday visa allows you to stay up to three years in Australia, but you have to do something for the horticulture of Australia. You can work in specific sectors all over Australia, most being inland as opposed to being in cities. The farms must be registered with the Immigration Department to sign off the days you work on the farm and help farmers. In the first year you have to do 88 days and in your second year you have to accomplish 176 days. When you complete these days you can then apply for your last visa to stay another year in Australia. At the end of the three years, you have to go home or obtain another visa.

11. I could not continue working for Tye as I was paid cash in hand and it would not assist me to finish my farm days.

14. In the first few months of working for Tye I was paid $15 an hour as agreed.

15. Tye was a large spender and soon couldn’t afford to pay me anymore and he reduced my pay to $500 per week.

16. I always had to ask for my pay and there were weeks when Tye could not pay me and he owned me up to $1500.

17. I am aware that Tye works for Peter Klan (Peter), who operates from Springsure.

18. Peter sources horses from all over Queensland as far up as Cape York. He also sources horses from the Northern Territory and sometimes from Western Australia.

19. Peter has many contacts and he mainly sources horses from cattle stations.

20. Peter sometimes has around 500 horses in Springsure.

21. Peter has workers at Springsure that test and ride the horses in an extreme way.

22. Peter’s workers throw saddles onto the horses and jump on them and kick them into every pace.

23.  If a horse puts a foot wrong, they wil be killed.

24. Meramist Abattoir is located in Caboolture (Meramist) and this is the abattoir that Peter and Tye send horses to.

25.  The horses are sorted into different yards and are put on the next truck that goes to Meramist.

26.  There is a truck that goes to Meramist every fortnight.

27.  Tuesday is kill day at Meramist.

28.  Tye’s job is to also source horses from people who want or need to get rid of their horses.

29.  As selling Horses can be risky, for example you can have a horse that is well behaved for three months and then you sell it to someone who changes just the feed and the horse can change its behaviour, someone could get hurt and go back to Tye so he wants to be a 100% sure the horses are well behaved and sold to the right person.

31. Laidley has a ridden section and a pen section for unridden horses. Generally the horses in the ridden section attract higher sale prices.

32. At Laidley, Peter shows around 15 horses every month.

33. Of the around 15 horses Peter takes to Laidley, around five of them are good and healthy ones that go through the ridden section.

34.  The horses that Peter sells from the pens usually have not information about them except that they are from a station up north.

35.  Peter also takes a lot of weanlings and yearlings to Laidley. These youngsters are normally in pairs in the pens.

36. Peter’s horses usually wear plaid horse rugs with neck covers so his horses are easily identifiable at the sales and mostly come from stations. That’s just the rugs that he has, its good recognizing at the sales so you know theses Horses coming from stations.

37. Bernie Coonan is the Auctioneer at Laidley (Bernie).

38. Bernie knows Peter and knows that Peter hates it when anyone wants any information about a horse.

39.The horses that Peter sells attract GST, and most of the horses are private sales and do no have GST.

40. So the chances are if you purchase a horse from Laidley and you pay GST, then it will probably be one of Peter’s horses.

41. On or around June 2020, Tye obtained a beautiful Arab mare that was called Trixie. She had had a bad accident with her old owner and was full of drugs to medicate her due to her injury. The owner had spent about $5,000 on veterinary treatment for her, but she could not full recover and would never be able to be ridden again. The vet had recommended that she be euthanized or sent to a dogger, and the owner had contacted Ty.

42. Trixie was a beautiful horse who always responded to her name and called out to me when she saw me.

44. As the knackeries are in New South Wales, the transport costs are not cheap if you do not have enough horses to send.

45.  Trixie was in a yard together with a brumby and an old sick horse. Tye told me that they would be slaughtered for pet food.

46. Once during my time working for Tye I drove down to Meramist with Tye and Tony.

47. At Meramist we unloaded 39 horses.

49.  On this day it was really wet and the horses pushed each other to rush down the ramp.

51. There is a yard guard at Meramist, and he hadn’t opened up the next yard which caused the horses to rush and panic.

57. I could see there would be an accident and I could not watch this and went back into the truck.

58.  When I thought it had settled down, I came out of the truck after I had seen them all chased up to another yard.

60.  At Meramist I saw that there where so many horses from all over Australia.

61.  There was a yard full of Thoroughbreds. They were in terrible condition and covered in cuts with orange tags around their necks.

62. I asked one of the Meramist workers about the tags and he told me that they had come from Victoria.

63. Meramist also receives horses from private people who drop their horses of there. These horses are in separated yards. People get paid for their horses.

64. While I was there, I saw someone dropped off two stallions, a paint horse and a Shetland. The owner did not receive money for the Shetland because it was not big enough, but they took it to kill it anyway.

66. Tye also told everyone who worked for him to fill out the papers from the book from Meramist where you complete information about the horses.

70. During my time working for Tye I many saw injured horses. Tye would never provide any veterinary care or medication for the horses regardless of how badly they were injured.

71.  On one occasion there was a horse that was badly injured. She was tied up and she spooked and jumped up and punctured her front leg with a piece of wire that was standing up from the cattle fences.

72.  This horse had already been advertised on Gumtree and had been purchased by a guy who had come and bought her and another horse.

73. The horse’s leg swelled up really really fast. I hosed It down every day for 30 minutes to try to reduce the swelling.

74. Three days later Tye told me to ride the injured horse. She was still injured and lame and I refused. Tye said it would be good for her to move.

75.  I rode her as I felt I had no choice but I did not push her.

76. Sometimes a woman named Nikky (Nicole O’Neill) would come to Tye’s Place. Nikky is a Nurse and she had bought a horse of Tye some weeks ago.

77. Nikky turned up and saw the injured horse. I told Nikky that she needed medication and that we didn’t have anything to give her.

78. Nikky said she wanted me to call Tye. I knew that Tye was at a cattle sale out town but I rang him and said the horses needed treatment. Tye freaked out and said that there was no money for that shit and hang up.

79. I told Nikky that I knew Tye would say this. Nikky got some bandages and iced the horse’s injured leg.

80.  A few weeks after the horse left Tye’s, as I knew the buyer and his wife, I spoke to them and they said they had given her some penicillin and after a week her leg was complete healed up.

81. I had previously told Tye many times (possibly even up to 50 times) that we had to cut the wire off, but he said it will be alright.

82. One time while I was working for Tye, Tye and I drove to Chinchilla as he had someone who wanted to sell him and Peter 12 Quarter horse broodmares.

83. They were beautiful horses but the guy wanted to have them killed and he said he wouldn’t leave until we had them all tagged with killing tags with numbers plus their genders and color of each horse on Meramist papers. He wanted proof that they would not be resold.

84. I tagged them. It was easy to tag them as we just walked up to them. These horses were absolutely not dangerous. We then took them to Springsure where they remained for two days.

85. These 12 horses were then transported from Springsure with around another 28 horses to Meramist under Peter’s name.

87. When Peter sends horses to slaughter, a tag is put on around their necks that contains Peter’s surname and a number.

88. On or around June 2020, Peter sent around 18 good horses to Tye. They had all come from a station up in North Queensland. Al except for three sold very fast.

89. The remaining three horses was a beautiful registered Stock Horse mare, an old grey mare that Tye wanted to keep for his brother’s kids and a strawberry grey mare who bucked liked crazy.

90. The strawberry grey mare was sent to Meramist.

91. When I came back in January 2021, the old grey mare was still there and I asked Tye why he didn’t sell it because the kids did not come out that often and he had another pony for them anyway, and he told me that the grey mare had become really aggressive around the kids and that she would be catching the next bus (truck) down to Meramist.

92. I asked Tye why she had such bad behaviour since she was a dinosaur of around 30 years old. It was hard to determine her true age due to her colour. However, when kill day arrived I had to tag the horses and I prepared a list for Tye so he just had to copy and paste it into the declaration from Meramist and I entered her on the list as K5061 grey mare. However, Tye changed her to a blue mare on the declaration for Meramist to avoid drawing attention for the vet to check her age. No issues were raised with her at Meramist.

93. Peter’s truck transport between 27 to 36 horses per truck. Peter got a new trailer around May or June 2021, and this can transport up to 40 Horses at a time to Meramist.

94. The increase in purchases from the sales allowed Peter to send many horses to slaughter which increased the amount of meat money in the horse industry compared to rehomes or resells.

95. Meat prices are currently low and attracting less than $550 for a 14 to 15hh chunky horse. The bigger and chunkier the horse is, the more money it attracts for meat.

96. During my time working for Tye, I saw him send around 40 horses a fortnight to Meramist. This equates to 80 horses a month and 960 horses a year.

97.  In previous years, horses were sent every week and therefore it would be 1,920 horses a year.

99. The number has reduced as Meramist is currently not killing horses every week, and it’s now fortnightly.

100. The Laidley sale conveniently falls on the weekend before the Meramist Tuesday kill day.

101. It is due to the reduced numbers that Peter is doing business at Laidley sale.

102. Peter would send horses to Tye that are good enough to get resell for more money than Meramist would pay.

103. Peter had a driver called Tony that worked for him. Tony had a bad horse accident years ago and can’t walk very well. As Tony struggles to walk, Tye had to go with him to Meramist Abattoir to unload the horses.

104. Tye has a friend, Doug Pratt (Doug) who has a livestock transport company.

105. On Tuesdays, Doug picks up the horses from Tye’s place and takes them to the saleyards in Gympie. These horses wil include horses that Tye has bought from private people who want their horses killed.

106. Doug meets Peter at the Gympie saleyard and unloads the horses he has collected from Tye and loads them onto Peter’s Big Truck.

107. Peter’s truck is a Big BW white one with to big horns on each side and it has red linings around the front a massive Bullbar. On the top it says “Klan” and a bit over the radiator grill says “Pony Express”. Peter’s trailers are cow stock trailers that are blue and white with a sliding door in the middle.

108. Peter’s truck will already have horses on it that Peters has brought from Springsure.

114. In January 2021, I went to Tye’s to visit. I was concerned about the horses that Tye had. I helped him tagging some horses before kill day.

115. One of the horses to be tagged was an Arab stallion. He was a beautiful horse. I think he had come from one of the endurance stables around Gympie and that they wanted to have him killed because one of his testicles had not descended and the surgery to get him totally gelded was quoted around $2,000 and the owners didn’t want to spend this money, so they sold him to Tye for a cheap price.

116. As this horse acted like a stallion, Tye didn’t want to put him in a yard with other horses so he tied him up so short to a fence so that his head was on the first rail. I told Tye that he would pull back in the night and hang his head down and strangle himself. He was left there all night and for part of the day until he was loaded onto a truck, so for more than 14 or 15 hours.

117. On the truck he was again tied up as there were going to be more stallions on the truck from Peter.

119. To date he has not paid me for those two weeks work, but at least I was able to save some horses during that time by advertising them on Facebook.

120. On or around the 19 or 20 of February 2021, there was a blind mare that was around 25-28 years old. She had Cushing’s disease and had a really curly heavy coat and she was sweating. Her legs were really swollen and her hooves looked horrible. She was also completely blind and I had to lead her everywhere as she could not see anything.

121. This mare had come from a lady out of Bundaberg with another horse, a Standardbred.

122. I told Tye that he could not send the blind mare to Meramist as she would get killed in the truck as the other horses would kick her to death. I also said the vet at Meramist would not pass her because she could not even walk up to the kill race.

123. The Kill Race is the end part walking up the kill floor. This is where the animals get bolted in their heads and then they cut their throats and hang them up by their legs. It is a bit of a distance from the yards to the end killing point.

124. Tye said that he would shoot her in the paddock.

125. The blind mare was sent to Meramist and killed the following Tuesday after her arrival, being 23 February 2021.

126. I rang Tye a few days later, which was after the kill day, and asked him where the mare was and if he had shot her. Tye told me words to the effect of “/ sent her to Meramist, but the vet didn’t pass her but they still killed still her. The vet was really concerned and told Tye that he mustn’t send a blind horse, so he told them that she wasn’t blind in one eye. The vet wanted the contact details from the previous owner to find out if she was blind or not. So, Tye rang the old owner and warned her that Meramist would call her and she should say to them that she was just blind in one eye”.