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Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
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I hadn’t had one of my favorite bacon cheeseburgers in several weeks, so I decided I’d have one for lunch in Port Angeles while I was in town running errands. I hadn’t seen the TV story, including videotape, about cattle being butchered and skinned alive. I hadn’t even known cattle are suppose to be merely unconscious, not dead, when they go through the slaughterhouse line that converts them from living animals to lunchmeat. My first contact with the conversion from cow to cutlet came on my uncle’s small farm in Texas one summer when I was a boy. Uncle Gene loaded a cow into a trailer and drove it to the local butcher. The cow stood in a wooden stall in the butcher’s shop, looking around at unfamiliar surroundings. The butcher took a .22 rifle from pegs on the wall, loaded it with a single cartridge, and slid the rifle between two rails of the stall. The cow turned to look at the butcher, the rifle popped, and the cow was instantly dead on the floor with the little bullet in its brain. That moment defined “instant” for me. There was no slow collapse of legs, no thrashing in pain, no sound. It was as if there was a splice in a movie with a couple of frames missing. The cow is alive on one side of the splice and stone dead on the other. So that’s how it’s done, I thought. My fifth-grade class went on a field trip to a packing plant in Denver. We didn’t see the killing of the cattle, and I don’t recall much beyond being nauseated by slaughterhouse odors and vowing to never eat hotdogs again. I knew that those cows weren’t killed by careful men with .22 rifles. The image I had of their being killed with a hammer blow to the head was probably far from the reality of the process, but I figured it was probably about the same for the cows as being shot in the brain with a bullet. I am not a vegetarian. I eat store-bought meat knowing where it comes from and generally how it gets from corral to kitchen. I hunt and fish and kill as cleanly and as close to instantly as I can. Death is unavoidable for all living things. All we can do is make it as painless as possible, whether for fellow human beings, for animals we choose to eat, or for pests and vermin. Barb had already read the story and the full-page ad in a Seattle newspaper and announced that she won’t be buying any more beef unless she knows where it came from and what it went through to get to our table. Seldom do I take statements and campaigns by animal-rights groups at face value. I side with them in their opposition to cruel treatment of animals, though I don’t always agree on what constitutes cruelty. I don’t see cruelty as being inherent in circuses and pet ownership, or in fishing and hunting. But, political agendas aside, there is the videotape and the testimony of workers that cattle in at least one slaughterhouse often remain conscious after the blow to the head that is supposed to knock them out. Because of the need for speed (time is money), the processing—including amputation of lower limbs and skinning— continues as if the cattle were unaware. I can imagine no death more painful than being skinned alive. If competition and profits demand such disregard for suffering, then I, too, will no longer buy beef except from people I know who know how their cows were killed and butchered. Perhaps hogs are treated with similar disregard. If that proves to be true, then we’ll stop buying pork, too. There will be investigations, hearings, myriad legal procedures, and maybe fines against the corporations that allow such cruelty. Big deal. If we were to skin a couple of packing plant operators alive on TV, the malpractice would end as instantly as the deaths of cattle should be. I wonder if the animal-rights folks would object to that. Back to archives Next Article |