IF A young Pakistani trainee navigator can risk his job, his income and his very life to make us aware of the unimaginable suffering our sheep endure on live export vessels, it's disgraceful that the only response we are hearing from our government is: "A knee jerk ban would punish farmers who have done nothing wrong".

What about the tortured sheep who have "done nothing wrong"?

For years, we have reluctantly accepted the fact that a certain number of exported animals routinely die of heat stress but, until now, we haven't realised what that actually meant in terms of suffering.

Now we know. We have seen their torment. We know that they are not simply "feeling hot".

They are literally being roasted to death. This was confirmed by the fact that the fresh corpses fell apart as crew members attempted to pick them up.

Former ships vet, turned whistleblower, Lynn Simpson revealed that when she did autopsies on heat-stressed sheep, the fat around their heart was a translucent jelly instead of solid white. The sheep, she said, had melted.

Deliberately subjecting animals to this torture is immoral and indefensible.

JENNY MOXHAM

Victoria