What mercy (if any) do they show to those poor animals they slaughter for meat in the USA?
I know my mother told me when she was younger, she took part in a letter-writing campaign. And according her, for that reason, they now have to stun animals before they butcher them for meat.
But is that still true? We used to get newsletters from PETA when my mother was still alive. (She belonged to PETA, yet still served us meat every day. Humans can clearly be multifaceted people sometimes, and not easy to define on just one subject.) Anyways, according to PETA, there is little or no attention given to the animals’ suffering.
But that is PETA’s view. What is the the real truth, the “straight dope” on the matter?
(P.S. I also submit this to Cecil Adams, if he’s interested.)
There are some regulations requiring some modicum of attention given to the animals, but they are rarely monitored and even less rarely enforced. It’s just a pretty ugly situation overall. The book Diet for a Dead Planet covers this, and other things about our food system, in excruciating, dry detail.
I once went looking for slaughter equipment. what I found was at a variance to my father’s description of a large man with an axe standing astraddle the chute and splitting the cattle’s skull as they passed (he was positioned over the point where the walkway became a conveyor).
Cattle are now walked along - at one point, a shackle is attached to a rear “ankle” - as they keep walking, they come to what appears to be 3/4 of a pen - the third side pops up and a captive bolt is shot into the skull - the wall then drops, and the ankle chain becomes taut and the carcass is hoisted along to be processed.
The machine for kosher slaughter is different - a bar raises the cow’s head, and the (don’t know term for the person) slices the throat - then the chain draws taut, etc.
The captive bolt guns don’t always work because they’re operated by people who are poorly trained and don’t care that much and have to manage assembly lines that are often too fast to be completely safe. Here’s a PDF from washington post, but there are other sources that should corroborate the same thing. It’s just one of many, many, many problems with the American meat industry.
In theory, humane treatment is supposed to be in everyone’s interest because having large, panicked animals is dangerous, and calm animals are easy to handle. Quick killing is efficient. And so on.
In reality, the machinery of slaughter is run as fast as possible, which can mean too fast to really do the job properly. As noted, the killing is done/overseen by poorly paid humans. Also, it’s not mentally healthy for a person to kill things for 8 hours a day, day in and day out yet the people doing the killing probably do just that - unlike old time butchers who yeah, killed the animal but then took it apart, processed some of it into things like sausage, interacted with customers, and so forth.
The person is called a “shochet” (Hebrew for “slaughterer”, the “ch” is that gutteral sound that doesn’t really exist in English). And (addressing the OP) it is the opinion of Jewish authorities that the method of slaughter required for an animal to be Kosher is as painless as it is possible for slaughter to be.
I raise pigs as part of our hobby farm operation and I’m always in the room when they’re killed because I need the “hanging weight” in order to know what to charge my customers. It’s quick, and they’re usually pretty calm walking in.
I know not everyone has the luxury of having a local butcher that actually kills the animals themselves, but if you do, please go spend your money there. If they’re anything like mine, they are humane, responsible, and actually pay their employees a decent wage. You will pay more, but you should probably be eating less meat anyway.
This is the ideal situation and conforms exactly with my experience of working in a local butchers that had its own abattoir.
The animals were the field down the road the previous evening, in the market that morning and in the cold store that evening. No fuss no fear. The slaughtermen were incredibly skilled and took pride in the speed and cleanliness of the kill and the dressing.
Sadly it doesn’t happen as often nowadays as regulations and economies of scale mean centralised meat-processing factories are the way to go.
So yes, if you can buy locally reared and slaughtered meat you are standing up for decent animal welfare.
Yes, animals are stunned before being slaughtered.
PETA does not impress me as a credible source for information of this type.
The real truth is that nearly all the time, the animals’ death is quick and reasonably painless. So many billions of animals are slaughtered every year that there are always going to be instances where the process is not instantaneous, but the wild exaggerations of people like PETA do not correspond very well with the reality AFAICT.
Humane slaughter is regulated by the US government. No industry is perfect or ever will be. But pretty much all the incidents cited by animal rights folks are isolated rather than systemic.
There may not be a clearcut answer to your question.
My first job out of college was HR at a meat packing plant.
They processed 1,200 cattle and 2,000 sheep a day.
Animals were stunned, except when they were doing a kosher kill. The kosher kill was done as described up thread.
All workers were members of a strong union and well paid.
This was a long time ago.
I’m really more concerned about how humanely the animals live their lives than whether they have a perfectly painless death (a privilege few living beings are afforded). We live in cow country, and the beef cows around here seem to have it pretty good, at least until they go to be “finished” on corn. I’m more concerned about pigs in industrial farms; that seems like a pretty crappy life for an intelligent animal. Also, egg-laying chickens are kept in deplorable conditions. Meat birds grow so fast that their lives are over in a few weeks, and aren’t horribly crowded until the last week or so, as I understand it.
