The Unseen Horror of America's Slaughterhouses

"Crimes Unseen"
by Dena Jones
Orion

Can consumers rewrite the dark and brutal story of America's big slaughterhouses?

TO SATISFY THE PUBLIC'S ever-growing appetite for meat, slaughterhouses in the United States killed ten billion animals last year. That's 27,397,260 animals every day, 1,141,553 every hour, 19,026 every minute. Most Americans, largely disconnected from their food supply, assume these animals met a painless end, if they think about it at all. Even readers of books and articles about conditions in factory farms may not be aware of what happens to animals at slaughter. But every now and then that reality flashes briefly across the public consciousness, as it did during last year's news stories about mad cow disease, when television viewers glimpsed a sick cow being dragged along the ground to a slaughterhouse. The media attention was on food safety, not the welfare of the animals, but for a brief moment the veil had been lifted on the brutality of the process that turns living creatures into meat.

And why should anyone want to inquire further? Can't we just assume that the same industry that maximizes profits by confinement so extreme that chickens can't flap their wings and pigs are prevented from turning around will also routinely mistreat animals at slaughter? What sense is there in focusing on the final hours of animals whose entire short lives are often a study in misery?

Mohandas Gandhi said that a nation's moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals. Animal behavior scientists have proven unequivocally that animals are not machines but sentient beings that experience feelings of pain, fear, anxiety, and despair. These feelings matter to the animal and they should matter to us. If Gandhi is right, we have an obligation to know what happens to animals when they are killed to feed us, and to let that knowledge inform our actions. Yet from early childhood, Americans are taught to dissociate picture-book scenes of cows and sheep grazing in a pasture from rows of plastic-wrapped cuts of meat lining grocer's shelves. We eat "pork" not pigs, "veal" not baby cows. Animals aren't killed in slaughterhouses but "processed" in "packing plants."

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Response to a comment to this posting:

Susanne,

I had the same reaction and have, as you know, been pondering my own politics of meat... may I suggest two novels by Ruth Ozeki that have caused me to think more about this:

My Year of Meats
All Over Creation

You might (or might not want to) check out these two sites for more info/arguments about meat:

Modern Meat

Meet Your Meat (thanks to Daniell Goodman for sending this to me)