Farm animals for 'the eating’

1671: 

The most abused animals are the ‘food animals’. They're the ones who most need defending. We’ve chosen to exploit their vulnerability, by eating their bodies and their secretions and making them into our slaves. If an animal can be put to use by the human it will be. The animals are powerless to stop it. Only those of us who do NOT use animals are in any position to defend them, and even then the law, custom and tradition stand in our way.

What if the animals could speak? What would they say about our devices of mutilation or the caging of hens or cows being milked by machinery or the many other horrors they’re subjected to on farms and abattoirs? If their lives are being destroyed so too is their world. What would they say about denuded forests and the latest frightening changes to the climate? They’d condemn our species and never be able to get to the end of the list of our crimes against the natural world.

         

It’s just as well they’re voiceless. But it’s sad that they have been put in contact with the human omnivores who are solely responsible for this sadness. Our acts of sabotaging animals happen in the clinical, mechanised abattoirs or on farms. Whether the animals are killed for their carcass or they have their lives ended when their production of their appointed by-products diminishes, they are always put to death when keeping them alive no longer makes economic sense.

The heartlessness of keeping and killing animals has been part of human history for a very long time, but perhaps it has always impacted on the more tender hearted person, who has tried to disassociate themselves from it all. It comes to this: some are unmoved by an innocent animal suffering, and others are sickened.

This is well illustrated in the following extract from Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy - The killing of the pig:

It was thick snow, and the pig-killer was over-due. It seemed he was not coming and the pig had to be killed that day since Jude and Arabella had run out of  barleymeal mixture the day before. The pig had been starving since then. Jude says to his wife Arabella, “What - he has been starving?”

            “Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!”

            “That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!”

            “Well - you must do the sticking - there’s no help for it. It must be done”.

            He went out to the sty ... and placed the stool in front, with the knives and ropes at hand. A robin peered down at the preparations from the nearest tree, and not liking the sinister look of the scene, flew away ... Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of rage. ...they hoisted the victim onto the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling.

            The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry of despair; long drawn, slow and hopeless.

            “Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

            “Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife - the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

            “I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the chief thing.”

            “You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

“He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,” said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might.

            “ ‘Od damn it all!” she cried, “That ever I should say it! You’ve over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time - ”

            “Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature.”

            ... However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who seemed his only friends.

            “Make un stop that!” said Arabella. “Such a noise will bring somebody or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves. Picking up the knife from the ground whereupon Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole.

            “That’s better,” she said.

            “It is a hateful business!” said he.“Pigs must be killed.”