OPINION: I'm a '61 babe.

I'm 54 and-a-half. Other '61 babes include that guy who runs the country, John Key, and that other guy who runs things, Barack Obama. Both arrived on earth in 1961, too.

Key and I grew up in a different time. We had one TV channel and the internet was something you fished with.

The cars on Kiwi roads were old English Morris Minors and Hillmans and the occasional Ford Zephyr.

Times were different. My primary school teacher smoked in class, everyone burned their unprotected skin in the hot summer sun and TV was black and

white.

Today, everything has changed. Teachers don't smoke in class anymore, everyone is cautious about skin cancer and we can watch TV on mobile

phones and tablets. Cars can park or drive themselves while finding their way using satellites.

While times have changed and we have grown as a nation, there is one area that has remained unchanged throughout the decades: our appalling

nationwide cruelty to animals. The Sunday TV programme that revealed cruelty to farm animals this week had me wondering if we are stuck in the 1950/60s. Nothing has changed.

Rather than seeing the Sunday farm animal abuse programme in isolation, it points to a far wider malaise in New Zealand culture.

Today animals are still the bottom of the pile in New Zealand. They have been kept there decades longer than it took for New Zealanders to accept the sun causes cancer, cigarettes will kill you and drinking and driving is manslaughter at the wheel. While Key, Obama and I have changed, some things have remained the same.

In the late 1990s, I worked briefly as a volunteer for the Hamilton Cats Protection League. It was harrowing. What happens beneath the surface in Hamilton is animal abuse that disgusts.

At the time, we adopted a cat called Bobbitt. She had her tail cut off, caught in the middle of a violent divorce. She had been named by the Cats Protection League volunteers who had recovered her bleeding and dismembered after the husband had maimed the cat in front of the distraught wife.

Animal abuse is everywhere. Last month, protests were again heard about cruelty at rodeos. Meanwhile the public release of details behind the Saudi sheep deal where only 25 per cent of the sheep survived is withheld from the public. Animal welfare in New Zealand is clearly a low priority.

Add to the list the increasing level of illegal animal poaching by hunters, which has led to a government inquiry, and you have a wide profile of ongoing animal abuse from farm gates to DOC land to unwanted Christmas pets.

Read any of the hunting forums and you will soon see the hidden underbelly of animal abuse and poaching they describe as sport.

Sunday should do a programme about the cruelty of pig hunters. By accident, I saw footage of pig dogs dismembering a pig on a SAFE Facebook page. I wish I had never seen it. The brutal violence was beyond sport or humane hunting.

Adding spiritual morality into the discussion provides no solution. I recently read about Destiny Church Bishop Brian Tamaki gleefully shooting animals for fun. Does Genesis's description of man's dominion over animals (Genesis 1:26) provide a divine right to inflict suffering?

Is this where the widespread incidence of animal cruelty across New Zealand comes from; because God says it's OK?

Fonterra, Federated Farmers and the Ministry for Primary Industries must stand up and show moral leadership on animal welfare. That the Ministry has known about this hidden camera footage since September and done little suggests animal abuse is acceptable collateral damage.

If we are to mature as a country, we need to take our actions towards animals seriously. A dedicated police team needs to be established to deal with farm abuse, dog-fighting rings, companion animal abuse and poaching and hunting.

Animal cruelty has to end with stronger enforcement and dedicated policing to change the culture away from the abuse that is the norm in daily life in New Zealand.

In my 54-and-a-half years, I have come to believe that if children can develop empathy towards animals when young, they may display empathy towards society when old. Respect starts with protecting the animals and is paid forward through a lifetime.

I hold to this hope that we will mature together as we have in so many other areas in my lifetime and rid ourselves of our abusive culture towards animals.

This quote is often used and attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Today it demands to be revisited, adopted and become ingrained as part of New Zealand culture as we mature into a more sophisticated society in the years ahead.

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." - Mahatma Gandhi.

New Zealand has a long way to go.