THOUSANDS of Australian cows are to be sent to Pakistan where 21,000 mainly West Australian sheep were brutally slaughtered - and there's no guarantee they won't face a similar fate.
The revelation came in ABC's Four Corners program on Monday, which probed the circumstances surrounding the inhumane culls in September and October.
Officials from the Sindh provincial government claimed the slaughter - which saw some sheep buried alive - was necessary due to health concerns, but these claims were vehemently rejected by Australia's live export industry and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF).
The department and Fremantle-based exporter Wellard desperately tried to stop the cull, taking the matter to court but had to concede they had lost control of the supply chain when those efforts were ignored.
They had been given assurances that sheep remaining after the initial cull would be killed humanely, in exchange for dropping the legal action but that pledge was broken within hours.
A voluntary suspension of live sheep exports to Pakistan is in place but cows are about to be sent there from Victoria, the program claimed.
Exporter Elders was preparing to send a shipment of nearly 3000 breeder cows, 2000 of which were destined for Pakistan, where they would be under the supervision of the same government department that carried out the cull.
"It's unfathomable," Animals Australia campaign director Lyn White - who last year helped expose cruelty in Australia's live cattle trade to Indonesia - told the program.
"Why would you send further animals into a country before you have completed your investigation into what happened to a shipment that has been horrendously treated?"
DAFF deputy secretary Philip Glyde said the department couldn't guarantee it would not happen again.
"I don't think we can," he told Four Corners.
"We could have a similar incident in any of our markets."
Ms White said the federal government's measures to reassure the public about live exports - the Australian Exporter Supply Chain Assurance Scheme brought in after the Indonesian abattoir scandal last year - had failed.
The scheme hands full responsibility for the animals, right up to slaughter, to the exporter.
But Wellard says it had no choice, with its staff forced to leave the dusty Karachi feedlot where the cull occurred by heavily armed police.
The program cited several witnesses to the culls, who said the sheep were in great pain.
"God forgive me this is so cruel," one witness was heard saying on video.
The secretary to the government of Sindh, Sayed Abid Ali Shah, denied the sheep were killed inhumanely, saying they were culled according to Islamic ways.
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