Eating Animals

by Eating Animals (retail) (epub)

  At a typical slaughter facility, cattle are led through a chute into a knocking box — usually a large cylindrical hold through which the head pokes. The stun operator, or “knocker,” presses a large pneumatic gun between the cow’s eyes. A steel bolt shoots into the cow’s skull and then retracts back into the gun, usually rendering the animal unconscious or causing death. Sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or later wakes up as it is being “processed.” The effectiveness of the knocking gun depends on its manufacture and maintenance, and the skill of its application — a small hose leak or firing the gun before pressure sufficiently builds up again can reduce the force with which the bolt is released and leave animals grotesquely punctured but painfully conscious.

  The effectiveness of knocking is also reduced because some plant managers believe that animals can become “too dead” and therefore, because their hearts are not pumping, bleed out too slowly or insufficiently. (It’s “important” for plants to have a quick bleed-out time for basic efficiency and because blood left in the meat promotes bacterial growth and reduces shelf life.) As a result, some plants deliberately choose less-effective knocking methods. The side effect is that a higher percentage of animals require multiple knocks, remain conscious, or wake up in processing.

  No jokes here, and no turning away. Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they were being singled out.

  When Temple Grandin conducted an industrywide audit in 1996, her studies revealed that the vast majority of cattle slaughterhouses were unable to regularly render cattle unconscious with a single blow. The USDA, the federal agency charged with enforcing humane slaughter, responded to these numbers not by stepping up enforcement, but by changing its policy to cease tracking the number of humane slaughter violations and removing any mention of humane slaughter from its list of rotating tasks for inspectors. The situation has improved since then, which Grandin attributes largely to audits demanded by fast-food companies (which these companies demanded after being targeted by animal rights groups) but remains disturbing. Grandin’s most recent estimates — which optimistically rely on data from announced audits — still found one in four cattle slaughterhouses unable to reliably render animals unconscious on the first blow. For smaller facilities, there are virtually no statistics available, and experts agree that these slaughterhouses can be significantly worse in their treatment of cattle. No one is spotless.

  Cattle at the far end of the lines leading to the kill floor do not appear to understand what’s coming, but if they survive the first knock, they sure as hell appear to know they are fighting for their lives. Recalls one worker, “Their heads are up in the air; they’re looking around, trying to hide. They’ve already been hit before by this thing, and they’re not going to let it get at them again.”

  The combination of line speeds that have increased as much as 800 percent in the past hundred years and poorly trained workers laboring under nightmarish conditions guarantees mistakes. (Slaughterhouse workers have the highest injury rate of any job — 27 percent annually — and receive low pay to kill as many as 2,050 cattle a shift.)

  Temple Grandin has argued that ordinary people can become sadistic from the dehumanizing work of constant slaughter. This is a persistent problem, she reports, that management must guard against. Sometimes animals are not knocked at all. At one plant, a secret video was made by workers (not animal activists) and given to the Washington Post. The tape revealed conscious animals going down the processing line, and an incident where an electric prod was jammed into a steer’s mouth. According to the Post, “More than twenty workers signed affidavits alleging that the violations shown on the tape are commonplace and that supervisors are aware of them.” In one affidavit, a worker explained, “I’ve seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive. . . . The cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. I’ve been in the side puller where they’re still alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there.” And when workers who complain are listened to at all, they often get fired.

  I’d come home and be in a bad mood. . . . Go right downstairs and go to sleep. Yell at the kids, stuff like that. One time I got really upset — [my wife] knows about this. A three-year-old heifer was walking up through the kill alley. And she was having a calf right there, it was half in and half out. I knew she was going to die, so I pulled the calf out. Wow, did my boss get mad. . . . They call these calves “slunks.” They use the blood for cancer research. And he wanted that calf. What they usually do is when the cow’s guts fall onto the gut table, the workers go along and rip the uterus open and pull these calves out. It’s nothing to have a cow hanging up in front of you and see the calf inside kicking, trying to get out. . . . My boss wanted that calf, but I sent it back down to the stockyards. . . . [I complained] to the foremen, the inspectors, the kill floor superintendent. Even the superintendent over at the beef division. We had a long talk one day in the cafeteria about this crap that was going on. I’ve gotten so mad, some days I’d go and pound on the wall because they won’t do anything about it. . . . I’ve never seen a [USDA] vet near the knocking pen. Nobody wants to come back there. See, I’m an ex-Marine. The blood and guts don’t bother me. It’s the inhumane treatment. There’s just so much of it.

  In twelve seconds or less, the knocked cow — unconscious, semiconscious, fully conscious, or dead — moves down the line to arrive at the “shackler,” who attaches a chain around one of the hind legs and hoists the animal into the air.

  From the shackler, the animal, now dangling from a leg, is mechanically moved to a “sticker,” who cuts the carotid arteries and a jugular vein in the neck. The animal is again mechanically moved to a “bleed rail” and drained of blood for several minutes. A cow has in the neighborhood of five and a half gallons of blood, so this takes some time. Cutting the flow of blood to the animal’s brain will kill it, but not instantly (which is why the animals are supposed to be unconscious). If the animal is partially conscious or improperly cut, this can restrict the flow of blood, prolonging consciousness further. “They’d be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic,” explained one line worker.

  The cow should now be carcass, which will move along the line to a “head-skinner,” which is exactly what it sounds like — a stop where the skin is peeled off the head of the animal. The percentage of cattle still conscious at this stage is low but not zero. At some plants it is a regular problem — so much so that there are informal standards about how to deal with these animals. Explains a worker familiar with such practices, “A lot of times the skinner finds out an animal is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens, or if a cow is already kicking when it arrives at their station, the skinners shove a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord.”

  This practice, it turns out, immobilizes the animal but does not render it insensible. I can’t tell you how many animals this happens to, as no one is allowed to properly investigate. We only know that it is an inevitable by-product of the present slaughter system and that it will continue to happen.

  After the head-skinner, the carcass (or cow) proceeds to the “leggers,” who cut off the lower portions of the animal’s legs. “As far as the ones that come back to life,” says a line worker, “it looks like they’re trying to climb the walls. . . . And when they get to the leggers, well, the leggers don’t want to wait to start working on the cow until somebody gets down there to reknock it. So they just cut off the bottom part of the leg with the clippers. When they do that, the cattle go wild, just kicking in every direction.”

  The animal then proceeds to be completely skinned, eviscerated, and
cut in half, at which point it finally looks like the stereotyped image of beef — hanging in freezers with eerie stillness.

  6.

  Proposals

  IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT history of America’s animal-protection organizations, those advocating vegetarianism, small in number but well organized, were definitively at odds with those advocating an eat with care stance. The ubiquity of factory farming and industrial slaughter has changed this, closing a once large gap between nonprofits like PETA that advocate veganism and those like HSUS that say nice things about veganism but primarily advocate welfare.

  Of all the ranchers I met in my research, Frank Reese holds a special status. I say this for two reasons. The first is that he is the only farmer I met who doesn’t do anything on his ranch that is plainly cruel. He doesn’t castrate his animals like Paul or brand them like Bill. Where other farmers have said “We have to do this to survive” or “Consumers demand this,” Frank has taken big risks (he’d lose his home if his farm failed completely) and asked his customers to eat differently (his birds need to be cooked longer or they don’t taste right; they also are more flavorful and so can be used more sparingly in soups and a variety of other dishes, so he provides recipes and occasionally even prepares meals for customers to reeducate them in older ways of cooking). His work requires tremendous compassion and tremendous patience. And its value is not only moral, but, as a new generation of omnivores demands real welfare, economic.

  Frank is one of the only farmers I know of who has succeeded in preserving the genetics of “heritage” poultry (he is the first and only rancher authorized by the USDA to call his birds “heritage”). His preservation of traditional genetics is incredibly important because the single biggest factor preventing the emergence of tolerable turkey and chicken farms is the present reliance on factory farm hatcheries to supply baby birds to growers — almost the only hatcheries there are. Virtually none of these commercially available birds are capable of reproducing, and serious health problems have been bred into their genes in the process of engineering them (the chickens we eat, like turkeys, are dead-end animals — by design they can’t live long enough to reproduce). Because the average farmer can’t run his own hatchery, concentrated industry control of genetics locks farmers and their animals into the factory system. Aside from Frank, most all other small poultry farmers — even the few good farmers that pay for heritage genetics and raise their birds with great regard for their welfare — usually must have the birds they raise each year sent to them by mail from factory-style hatcheries. As one might imagine, sending chicks by mail poses serious welfare problems, but an even more serious welfare concern is the conditions under which the parent and grandparent birds are reared. Reliance on such hatcheries where the welfare of breeding birds may be as bad as in the worst factory farms, is the Achilles’ heel of many otherwise excellent small producers. For these reasons, Frank’s traditional genetics and skill in breeding give him the potential to create an alternative to poultry factory farms in a way almost no one else can.

  But Frank, like many of the farmers who hold a living knowledge of traditional husbandry techniques, clearly won’t be able to realize his potential without help. Integrity, skill, and genetics alone do not create a successful farm. When I first met him, the demand for his turkeys (he now has chickens, too) couldn’t have been higher — he would sell out six months in advance of slaughter time. Though his most loyal customers tended to be blue-collar, his birds were prized by chefs and foodies from Dan Barber and Mario Batali to Martha Stewart. Nevertheless, Frank was losing money and subsidizing his ranch with other work.

  Frank has his own hatchery, but he still needs access to other services, especially a well-run slaughterhouse. The loss of not only local hatcheries, but also slaughterhouses, weigh stations, grain storage, and other services farmers require is an immense barrier to the growth of husbandry-based ranching. It’s not that consumers won’t buy the animals such farmers raise; it’s that farmers can’t produce them without reinventing a now destroyed rural infrastructure.

  About halfway through writing this book, I called Frank as I had done periodically with various questions about poultry (as do many others inside the poultry world). Gone was his gentle, ever-patient, all-is-well voice. In its place was panic. The one slaughterhouse he had managed to find that would slaughter his birds according to standards he found tolerable (still not ideal) had, after more than a hundred years, been bought and closed down by an industry company. This was not merely an issue of convenience; there were quite literally no other plants left in the region that could accommodate his pre-Thanksgiving slaughter. Frank faced the prospect of enormous economic loss and, what scared him more, the possibility of having to kill all his birds outside a USDA-approved plant, which would mean the birds could not be sold and would literally rot.

  The shuttering of the slaughter plant wasn’t unusual. The destruction of the basic infrastructure that supported small poultry farmers is nearly total in America. At one level, this is the result of the normal process of corporations pursuing profit by making sure they have access to resources their competitors don’t. There is, obviously, a lot of money at stake here: billions of dollars, which could either be spread among a handful of megacorporations or among hundreds of thousands of small farmers. But the question of whether the likes of Frank get crushed or begin to nibble at the 99 percent market share enjoyed by the factory farm is more than financial. At stake is the future of an ethical heritage that generations before us labored to build. At stake is all that is done in the name of “the American farmer” and “American rural values” — and the invocation of these ideals is enormously influential. Billions of dollars in government funds marked for agriculture; state agricultural policies that shape the landscape, air, and water of our country; and foreign policies that affect global issues from starvation to climate change are, in our democracy, executed in the name of our farmers and the values that guide them. Except they’re not exactly farmers anymore; they’re corporations. And these corporations are not simply business magnates (who are quite capable of conscience). They are usually massive corporations with legal obligations to maximize profitability. For the sake of sales and public image, they promote the myth that they’re Frank Reese, even as they labor to drive the real Frank Reese into extinction.

  The alternative is that small farmers and their friends — sustainability and welfare advocates — will come to own this heritage. Few will actually farm, but in Wendell Berry’s phrase, we will all farm by proxy. To whom will we give our proxy? In the former scenario, we give over immense moral and financial muscle to a small number of men who even themselves have limited control over the machine-like agribusiness bureaucracies they administer to immense personal gain. In the latter scenario, our proxy would be entrusted not only to actual farmers, but to thousands of experts whose lives have been centered around the civic rather than the corporate bottom line — with people like Dr. Aaron Gross, founder of Farm Forward, a sustainable-farming and farmed-animal advocacy organization that is charting new paths toward a food system that reflects our diverse values.

  The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. But what if farmers like Frank and longtime allies like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy got together with younger groups like Farm Forward that are plugged into networks of enthusiastically selective omnivores and activist vegetarians: students, scientists, and scholars; parents, artists, and religious leaders; lawyers, chefs, businesspeople, and farmers? What if instead of Frank spending his time hustling to secure a slaughter facility, such new alliances allowed him to put greater and greater energies into using the best of modern technology and traditional husbandry to reinvent a more humane and sustainable — and democratic — farm system?

  I Am a Vegan Who Builds Slaughterhouses

  I’ve now been vegan for more than half my life, and while many other concerns hav
e kept me committed to veganism — sustainability and labor issues most of all, but also concerns with personal and public health — it’s the animals that are at the center of my concern. Which is why people who know me well are surprised about the work I’ve been doing to develop plans for a slaughterhouse.

  I’ve advocated for plant-based diets in a number of contexts and would still say that eating as few animal products as possible — ideally none — is a powerful way to be a part of the solution. But my understanding of the priorities of activism has changed, and so has my self-understanding. I once liked to think of being vegan as a cutting-edge, countercultural statement. It’s now quite clear that the values that led me to a vegan diet come from the small farming in my family’s background more than anywhere else.

  If you know about factory farming and you’ve inherited anything like a traditional ethic about raising animals, it’s hard not to have something deep inside you recoil at what animal agriculture has become. And I’m not talking about some saintly farm ethic, either. I’m talking about a ranch ethic that tolerated castration, branding, and meant that you killed the runts and one fine day took hold of animals that perhaps knew you mostly as the bringer of food and cut their throats. There is a lot of violence in traditional techniques. But there was also compassion, something that tends to be less remembered, perhaps out of necessity. The formula for a good animal farm has been turned on its head. Instead of speaking of care, you’ll often hear a knee-jerk response from farmers when the topic of animal welfare is raised: “No one gets in this business because they hate animals.” It’s a curious statement. It’s a statement that says something by way of not saying it. The implication, of course, is that these men often wanted to be animal farmers because they liked animals, enjoyed caring for and protecting them. I’m not saying that this is without its contradictions, but there is truth in it. It’s also a statement that implies an apology without giving one. Why, after all, does it need to be said that they don’t hate animals?