You’ll have to excuse slight levels of delirium; I have drunk half a bottle of merlot in my continuing efforts to learn more about white wines (at least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).
Kill it, cook it, eat it – a BBC Three short series about linking the slaughter of cattle, pigs and lamb to eating the meat. Having spent a week in an abattoir myself the scenes aren’t shocking to me in the slightest – after my week I wasn’t even slightly inclined to become vegetarian and judging by my peers the general reaction to our experience (required for our course) is to go home and cook steak. Perhaps we’re special – we’ve been involved with the whole process from birth (three weeks lambing, working 6.30am to 12 midnight for 21 days straight in my case) to slaughter, and we’re trained to be able to ensure the whole process is both humane and hygienic. I actually feel quite lucky to have seen what I’ve seen. The technological advances and personal skill involved in slaughter is admirable in some way, and the gruesomeness that some people seem to imagine happens, just doesn’t happen. From what I’ve seen I perceive slaughter of red meat to be humane, and thus I can spend my time admiring the tech and skill side of it, knowing the animal welfare side is assured.
Slaughter isn’t much different to routine farming practices – the animals are treated and handled similarly, with the difference of the animal losing consciousness during slaughter. Everything that happens later is not important to the animal’s welfare. There is of course a question whether farming itself is ethical – but then, the stress an animal experiences going to the vets for its annual vaccination is not in my opinion dissimilar to the stress of a cow being examined for pregnancy or having its feet trimmed and thus cattle being slaughtered.
What I found most interesting is that on this programme the vast majority of meat eaters on the show watched the slaughter and then ate the meat, evidently satisfied that what they saw, though not enjoyable, was humane. And these aren’t people who have seen this sort of thing before and so aren’t desensitised in anyway, they are normal people. There’s a lot of mysticism about the slaughter process – the thought that it’s hidden therefore it must be bad – whereas when you’re brave enough to show people what it’s actually like their reaction is surprisingly positive. In days gone by of course when Animal Rights Activists didn’t exist, the practices weren’t so hidden and also weren’t so humane, and yet still people ate meat.
I still find myself questioning the ethics of eating meat – do I have the right to eat other animals, animals that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t eat them – but I don’t question the welfare of beef and lamb. I don’t question the slaughter of pigs but I do have reservations about the level of welfare when farming pigs, and I don’t question the level of welfare in farming free range or barn kept poultry, although I do question their slaughter methods. Thus I prefer to eat beef and lamb, rarely eat pork and occasionally eat free range or barn kept poultry though I much prefer having such meat from a known source if possible. The majority of pigs are kept humanely and the majority of birds are slaughtered humanely, but knowing there are some that are excluded from this makes eating the meat as a whole objectionable – unless source is known.
As far as the programme goes, I thought it was well delivered, and surprisingly well researched. It even included info about SRM etc. The abattoir I’d been to was large, and it was interesting seeing the difference between that and the programme’s small abattoir. The most important fact for most people to know is that a large abattoir differs in the level of automation in the post-slaughter phase, whereas pre-slaughter it’s similarly personal and careful, so from the animal’s point of view the treatment is identical – only the processing is different.
My reaction to Kill it, cook it, eat it was of course to cook a lamb curry, made from parts of a whole lamb I bought from my local farm. I think, that after several years of dithering my attitude to meat is relatively sensible and stable – if it’s humanely kept and humanely slaughtered I don’t have any real objections to eating it, but if I have concerns in either area I decline.
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