The killing process we never get to see

1684:

Humans enjoy eating animals and animal by-products. We wear their skins and skin coverings. We experiment with them to test the safety of drugs and cosmetics. We downplay empathy for animals and emphasise the need for a more cold-hearted, pragmatic attitude. Perhaps we regard animals as the spoils of a war. This is, after all, a war being waged against them, and they are our trophies. We eat and exploit animals as a celebration of our status as the ‘dominant’ species.

         

Animal-based foods are eaten at almost every meal. We have a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude about these animals, and this won’t change until we see how ugly the whole system is and what we are buying into.

         

We need to remind ourselves what actually happens to the animals we are about to eat. Lobsters and crabs are boiled alive, fish are slowly suffocated or crushed under the weight of other caught fish, chickens are hung upside down by their legs, and carried on conveyors, one behind the other, to have their throats cut by revolving blades. Cattle have a bolt fired into their foreheads before they have their throats cut and are bled to death. Pigs have electrified tongs clamped to their heads to immobilize them before being knifed. Male chicks are thrown live into mincing machines because they are useless to the egg-laying industry, and so it goes on.

         

The way in which we kill and mutilate animals is cruel by any standard and yet the consumer accepts this as part of the essential food that they must have. The supermarket trolley, filled with styrofoam packets of the muscle tissue of killed animals, are a familiar sight in the supermarket. (We never get to see the whole of a dead animal, unless with fish, where often their whole bodies can be seen, dead, laid on ice and gutted. As gruesome as the sight of a dead fish might be, it’s such a familiar sight that the customer doesn’t turn a hair).

         

The way these animals are caught or killed at abattoirs is not often witnessed, the customer only sees the body of the dead animal when it has been cut up and packaged, by which time it bears no resemblance at all to the whole animal. We never get to see the animal in the process of dying; the animal is either fully alive or fully dead. That’s a long way from being personally involved in the complete process. It’s a very long way from fulfilling our hunting instinct which involved stalking, killing, skinning and butchering.

         

Today we eat animals that have been caught or imprisoned by other people and then killed and butchered by others too. We’re not too fussy how it all happens, just as long as we don’t have to know too much about it. If we use animals for food or clothing we comply with an industry that cares nothing about the feelings of the animals they use; they simply coral, breed, fatten and execute them for us. Our hands are clean, our consciences numbed.