Extract
This is an edited extract from Chapter 3 of Planet Carnivore
In the rich world, each of us consumes or uses 30 or more animals a year (the bulk – 52 of the 59 billion – are chickens). We don’t, in the nutritional sense, need these animals to feed us – certainly not in those numbers. Yet, in order to eat them at an acceptable price we have to imprison them, alter them genetically and chemically, and kill them. We have moved inexorably into ever greyer ethical territory. Any planning for a food future that still envisages using animal products and meat must debate the “moral cost”.
I am not sentimental. I have killed and butchered many kinds of animals, and have been on prearranged visits to slaughterhouses in Britain and abroad. I have seen the job done carefully and kindly. It would have been better if I had just dropped in to those abattoirs, but the business of meat production is secretive; if it were public, it would lose customers. In some places, the meat trade is less shy: I’ve seen puppies blow-torched in tiny cages to remove their hair before butchering – a normal village practice in Vietnam.
Many moral meat eaters think the horrors of the slaughterhouse are exaggerated. But impartial research by American scientist (and abattoir designer) Temple Grandin reveals extraordinary and unnecessary horrors. She reported “deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis” at 32% of the slaughterhouses she visited in the US: 26% of the chicken-killing facilities had abuses that should have meant immediate closure; chickens scalded to remove their feathers, thrown in the trash and found later, still alive; a worker dismembering a fully conscious cow; cows, which are usually stunned then bled while their hearts are still pumping, “waking up on the bleed rail”.
“What went on when she wasn’t looking?” asked Jonathan Safran Foer, in his fascinating moral dissection Eating Animals. Cheap meat means corners cut on safety, health and welfare: humane treatment generally slows down a production line. Safran Foer quotes research that shows “demand for lean pig meat … has led the pork industry to breed pigs that suffer not only more leg and heart problems, but greater excitability, fear, anxiety and stress … We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.”
via Planet Carnivore: Why cheap meat costs the Earth (and how to pay the bill)
