Paul Tritschler,
CounterPunch.org
January 2018
Change must begin at the level of the self: it is driven from the bottom up, and by the strategy of the refusal. That refusal can begin with what we choose to eat – changing the world in bite-sized chunks.
Photo by Matthias Ripp | CC BY 2.0
We saw them peer out from between the slats of tightly packed trucks as
they were steered through town. Often when lorries slowed at a road
crossing, groups of children – myself among them – hung on to the rear for a
free ride (a risky street game we called ‘going for a hudgie’), but the idea
of hanging on to a slaughterhouse truck filled us with revulsion. As city
kids, our view of farm animals was filtered through the misty lens of
Disney, but anyone could see the slaughterhouse run was wrong. Given the
chance, we would most definitely have sprung our gentle friends free to roam
the streets and our imagination: cows, pigs, chickens – the lot.
They were terrified in those rattling high-sided vehicles; mothers were
separated from their young, and some gave birth in the cramped conditions of
the truck itself. It was not unusual for a litter to be born and trampled in
transit, and for some to slip through the slats as a bolus of blood and
flaccid flesh; we once saw a newborn piglet slide out onto the tarmac in
Saltmarket, but were unable to find out if it was alive before it was
crushed under heavy traffic.
There were three places involved in animal slaughter close to where I grew
up in Glasgow Cross, and I routinely passed each on my route to school.
Every morning, after stepping over heaps of rotting fish heads bulging with
maggots in the Briggait fish market, I passed the poultry processing plant
where I witnessed the slaughter of a seemingly endless line of roughly
handled and severely distressed chickens. Shackled by the neck on an
automated conveyor rail, the ones who missed the chance to have their throat
cut were scalded alive. The stench was awful, and I held my breath when I
passed.
Cattle were killed in Calton, the slaughterhouse I passed on my way to
secondary school. I was never inside, but once, when my older brother was in
the fire service, his unit was called out to this dismal place in the middle
of the night. A fire had broken out in one of the offices, and remained
there, but smoke filled the building, and he was forced to wade through it
in full breathing apparatus. The smoke was intermittently illuminated by two
large, dizzying red lights at the far end of the killing floor that flared
in tandem with the long, pulsing blasts of the alarm. He cautiously walked
towards them, gripping a metal rail for support. In those unreal moments of
red visibility he saw carcasses, hewn, hacked and hooked on rails, sprays of
blood across the walls, and blood pools on the stone floor. He had been
walking through those blood pools. Finding charred bodies by the blocked
fire exits of old warehouses, and in overcrowded tenement slums, he often
caught a glimpse of hell – Glasgow East was the busiest fire station in
Europe – but the walk across the killing floor could have been the entrance
to that hell. It was a walk that would haunt him.
I never saw inside the Calton slaughterhouse other than through the eyes of
my brother – understandably, business managers are usually quite keen to
conceal the carnage from the wider public – but from people in the
neighbourhood I gained an insight into what passed for humane slaughter
behind those sinister arched gates. I learned about death, dealt out on an
industrial scale and devoid of compassion, of the agony animals endured as
part of the slaughter routine, and of the banal brutality carried out to
enliven the boredom of the killing floor – a range of unspeakable cruelties
invented solely for the purpose of entertainment.
On one occasion, I remember, a bullock bolted at the slaughterhouse entrance
and along the Gallowgate. Like a mindless mob captivated by the sport of a
slave running for his life, people carrying beers poured out of pubs to
merge with a bulging crowd of amused spectators spilling over the edge of
the pavements. They laughed as the desperate animal weaved its way through
the traffic, and they mocked the uniformed police officers and
slaughterhouse workers giving chase on foot. I saw the look on the faces of
the crowd, apparently numb to the animal’s panic and its frantic efforts to
be free. A local newspaper covered the story by way of light relief,
reporting that after a few hours, and several miles, a cow was brought along
to lure the bullock towards a ramp and into a cattle truck. Far from
relaying the gruesome horror that lay in store, the article carried the hint
of a happy ending. In reality, once rendered ‘manageable’ – at best, stunned
– the bullock would be hoisted into the air by a chain attached to the ankle
of one of its hind legs, and it would be cut open at the throat, whereupon
its entire body would convulse violently for the last few moments of its
life as the heart pumped blood out onto the stone floor. It is also likely
the cow and the bullock would be slaughtered in view of each other – a
common feature of the killing floor, and somewhat disturbing given research
findings from de Waal and Preston that suggest food animals experience that
one characteristic above all others that defines our humanity: empathy.
The bullock’s death, audited against a baseline measure of key efficiency
indicators, would meet favourably the performance criteria of any quality
management system used in slaughterhouses today. Above all, this kind of
killing (the industry-preferred euphemism is ‘processing’), would be
considered humane – a concept that, by definition, means to show compassion.
Many people have come to accept the legitimacy of the words humane and
killing in the same breath: the right to die with dignity, to end
unremitting suffering, to release organs for transplant from someone in a
permanent vegetative state. Death on any other grounds crosses a line. Yet
questions about compassion are rarely raised within the exigencies of the
meat and dairy industry – a collection of businesses driven by the desire to
maximise profit from the ‘processing’ of caring, breathing, thinking things
that have the capacity to suffer and a longing to live.
With the exception of India, where thirty percent of the population are
vegetarian, the vast majority of people in almost every country in the
world, around ninety percent, eat meat and dairy products. From this it is
reasonable to infer that people do in fact believe it is acceptable for
businesses to own, breed, castrate, fatten and kill animals for profit. A
majority, of course, does not make it right – one need only consider
widespread support for slavery, ethnic cleansing or capital punishment.
Somewhat encouragingly, there are signs of a shift in public opinion, with a
growing number of people asking for animal slaughter to be carried out as
humanely as possible. This raises the question of where we draw the line
between humane and inhumane. Given the tools of the trade – knives, saws,
hammers, electricity, chains and hooks – might it be more humane to gas them
in the very trucks in which they are transported from farm to city? Or if
there might be a concern with the carcasses being spoiled in transit –
either for food or skin-based products – might it be more efficient to lead
them at the point of arrival into chambers to be gassed en masse? The
parallel with human atrocities may be disturbing, but it is reasonable to
ask whether the rationality underlying the selective slaughter of animals –
on a continuum from pets to food animals – is any different to the
rationality underlying the extermination of human populations in the camps.
(It is perhaps worthy of note that gas is increasingly, and somewhat
horrifyingly, being used to kill pigs, as shown in this link. Warning: it is
disturbing).
Morality is at the heart of the matter. As a child, I found it difficult to
draw the distinction between martyred saints and murdered animals. My
teacher was eager to convey the distressing story of St. Andrew, the patron
saint of our country, who was dismembered with a hatchet – his hands and
feet first – whilst conscious on an X-shaped cross. It was equally
distressing to learn that the dismemberment of conscious animals was a
regular occurrence in the Calton slaughterhouse. If animals survived the
overcrowded journey from farm to killing floor – the stress, dehydration,
heat exhaustion or freezing conditions – they were then beaten, broken,
scalded, skinned and dismembered. This is very much the character of the
meat and dairy industry today, but on a far more rapid, intensive and
inhumane scale.
With regard to the suffering of farm animals, the only reference I recall
from those years growing up related to their unfortunate ability to sense
approaching death. It was common knowledge that animals could suddenly
change behaviour on being offloaded from the trucks into the slaughterhouse
– seized by terror, they became frantic towards the last few minutes of
their life – and it was not unusual for people to question how they could
possibly know that they were about to be killed. The explanation going round
was that their death instinct was aroused. This convenient justification, a
form of denial, adjusted the focus from the blood spattered mayhem of the
killing floor to that of an evolutionary quirk: a genetic defect that
somehow enabled animals to sense their impending death.
Animals may well have some sort of psychic antennae, some mysterious means
to transcend the known substance of this world, but it seems more likely
that their hysteria on the approach to the slaughterhouse has its source in
the stench of entrails and in the distress calls of fellow creatures being
mutilated and dismembered a short distance away. The notion of a profound
death instinct at once masks this reality and assuages guilt: it allows
people to acknowledge a discrete form of animal suffering, and at the same
time to dissociate from the animal’s dreadful ordeal – in short, it shifts
the responsibility for suffering from humans to the animal itself. Viewed
from this perspective, the problem is not our desire to consume animals, but
their desire to live.
The idea of a death instinct on the part of inferior life forms, otherwise
referred to as food animals, is reminiscent of the mindset prevalent among
many psychiatrists in the mid-nineteenth century – men such as Doctor Samuel
Cartwright, who observed the outbreak of a curious condition among black
slaves: the impulse to be free. Having dreamed up a diagnosis (dubbed
‘drapetomania’), for this mental illness – an illness with clinical
characteristics that included a persistent longing for freedom, mounting
unhappiness, or even occasional sulkiness – Cartwright concocted a cure:
pain. He recommended the afflicted slave be whipped until their back was
raw, followed soon after by the application into the wounds of a chemical
irritant to intensify the agony. It brought the desired result: this mental
shackling didn’t cure the condition, but it helped control the outbreak,
greatly reducing the compulsion on the part of slaves to break away from
their masters.
As revealed by researchers such as Gail Eisnitz, a similar sort of logic
prevails in slaughterhouses, where clubs or hammers are used to break the
legs or spine of frantic animals in order to settle them down, and where
cries of agony are addressed by cutting the animal’s vocal chords –
especially when they get caught in the gate and are forced, fully conscious,
to have their legs or head sawn off to speed up the line. And speed-up is
very much the character of the slaughterhouse today, as increased efforts
are made to meet the wholly unrealistic and unnecessary rise in global
demand for meat – a rise that is monstrously resource intensive,
environmentally damaging, and a major contributor to climate change. If not
for reasons based on personal health, ethics or simply disgust, evidence
suggests that becoming vegan is one of the most immediate and effective ways
for an individual to reduce harmful emissions that affect climate change.
Research by Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford found that
switching to a vegan diet – depending on the choices made for meat
substitution – was a more realistic option for most people as a way of
reducing carbon emissions than attempts at reduction within the areas of
travel, such as driving or flying. The vegan diet, according to the
research, cut the food-related carbon footprints by 60 per cent, saving the
equivalent of 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
Animal slaughter has an adverse impact on the climate, the quality of life
in society, and our identity. The extent to which we are willing to accept
animal exploitation, and to tolerate animal cruelty – increasingly the key
feature of the industrially-paced slaughterhouse today – bears some
influence on how we see ourselves and others. At a number of points along
the continuum, for example, there are clear indications that animal cruelty
is a predictor of human violence and crime. The dangers in this regard were
raised in Counterpunch Magazine by the investigative health journalist,
Martha Rosenberg, who found that criminologists and law enforcement
officials were at last beginning to acknowledge what the anthropologist,
Margaret Mead, declared back in 1964: “One of the most dangerous things that
can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.”
Rosenberg cites evidence that shows a relationship between animal cruelty
and violent behaviour patterns, ranging from domestic beatings, to murder
and mass killings. According to Rosenberg, what Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy,
Jeffrey Dahmer, Devin Kelley (the Texas church killer), Anders Breivik (who
killed 77 people in Norway in 2011) and a host of others have in common is
the fact that they tortured animals and delighted in the pain they
inflicted. One might reasonably question whether our tacit acceptance of
animal cruelty, of the slaughter that serves simply to satisfy our tastes,
in the end desensitises us – albeit to varying degrees – to the suffering of
others.
Many take the view that simply taking an animal’s life is an act of cruelty,
and that this too is not without consequences for the nature of social
relationships – both at the societal and the individual level. The
preference for meat-eating has itself been the subject of study with regard
to social consequences, where links have been established between meat
eating and notions of prestige, power, hierarchy and patriarchy, and of
strength, superiority, domination and oppression. In The Sexual Politics of
Meat, the seminal thesis of Carol J. Adams, the key focus is the connection
between meat-eating and women’s oppression. For over four decades her work
has inspired international research that aims to empirically ascertain the
link between meat-eating, virility and violence, and to explore the workings
of an industry that promotes the degradation of women and animals.
Adams develops the concept of ‘the absent referent’, the idea that there is
an absence behind every meal of meat – namely, the death of the animal whose
place the meat takes. It separates the meat eater from the referent, and
thereby permits the moral abandonment of the living being. Moreover, the
absent referent disguises the violence central to killing and to
meat-eating: the animal is sold off as body-parts, thereby shielding the
meat eater from any moral difficulties that could arise from connecting a
life form to the end product. If the way meat is presented desensitises the
meat eater to the killing of a living being, something similar happens by
way of desensitisation towards women in the way meat is advertised. Meat
adverts are often feminized and sexualized using female body parts,
resulting in the objectification and degradation of both human and non-human
animals. As Adams puts it, we literally consume animals and visually consume
women. In the end, both have little or no meaning beyond their function on a
purely physical level. The fact that some men had sex with cows in the
Calton slaughterhouse – a depravity not unknown in other slaughterhouses –
is perhaps not entirely unrelated to the sorts of power abuse and
degradation alluded to by Adams.
The idea of living beings as absent referents and the link between virility
and meat-eating pervade a variety of texts, from children’s books and
classic literature, to advertising campaigns – what Adams calls ‘the texts
of meat’ – and all serve the underlying imperative of profit maximisation
and patriarchal power. For Adams, both female and animal bodies are
commodified as a means of production and reproduction, or reproductive
slavery; they are both seen as available and controllable, and they are both
considered livestock. Adams provides numerous examples throughout her
ongoing work to illustrate the ways in which the objectifying language of
misogyny, the body parts imagery or associations, and the desensitisation
toward animals and women, are used within meat advertising – ‘are you a
breast or thighs man?’ – and concludes it is so deep in our culture that it
is hardly noticed. Consequently, Adams argues, veganism in itself embodies a
challenge to patriarchy, because patriarchy is a gender system implicit in
both human and non-human relationships.
Studies of personality characteristics show that the principles underlying
the ‘texts of meat’ may serve to reinforce existing prejudices. Research by
psychologists, Dhont and Hodson, found that those who consider inequality
and social dominance to be natural and inevitable, and who place power and
authority in high regard, are more likely to enjoy eating meat, and to be
above average in terms of their meat consumption. Their study found strong
correlates between high levels of meat-eating and exaggerated notions of
masculinity, a strong belief in evolutionary determinism, and right-wing
authoritarianism.
It is probably safe to say that most people do not set out to be cruel to
animals, and that few would relish the opportunity to engage in killing
them. Judging by the high rate of pet ownership in most societies, it would
that appear people love animals, but that they also love meat – a
contradictory relationship on the part of many omnivores that psychologists
Steve Loughnan, Brock Bastian and Nick Haslam, among others, refer to as
‘the meat paradox’ – a phenomenon explained in part by the concept of
cognitive dissonance. In the 1950s, Festinger described cognitive dissonance
as the mental stress people undergo when they hold contradictory ideas or
values, and stated that they try to reduce or resolve the conflict by
choosing a belief that suits them. In the case of omnivores, certain groups
of animals are categorised as intelligent, emotional and suitable as pets,
whilst others are classed as lacking in these capacities, and therefore
suitable for food. A number of laboratory-based social psychology
experiments demonstrated that in order to reduce concerns about their
welfare, and to resist the desire to empathise with them, people typically
deny that food animals have minds: reasoning capacities, emotions and moral
qualities.
The question of whether animals have minds and emotions is hardly new. In
The Emotional Lives of Animals, Marc Bekoff credits Charles Darwin with
being the first scientist to give serious attention to the study of animal
emotions, and to the belief that there is continuity between humans and
other animals – both emotionally and cognitively. In keeping with the
experience of Jane Goodall – who wrote about Flint, a chimpanzee that died
of grief – Bekoff’s research revealed a range of emotions on the part of
animals: love, grief, despair, fear, joy, jealousy, embarrassment and shame.
It is likely most people know this instinctively, but to reduce their
cognitive dissonance, and thereby overcome the meat paradox, the majority
mentally sever the connection between meat and animals. The meat and dairy
industry greatly assists in this: killing is deceptively worded as
processed, pigs become pork, cows become beef or sirloin, the exploited
animals are described as food animals, and the cruel reality of the
slaughterhouse and pre-packaging process is kept hidden from view. We are
schooled in the supremacy of meat, not its alternatives.
One might imagine widespread condemnation of the meat and dairy business if
more people witnessed the slaughter of pigs, cows and chickens – a brutal
industrialised killing system somewhat less harshly described as the
pre-packaging process for bacon, burgers and breast. If one’s pet dog or cat
had to be taken to a vet to be put down, one might be appalled to learn it
would be sent to the slaughterhouse to have its life end in a way that was
considered humane for a ‘food animal’ – methods quite unthinkable in their
possible application to humans. Ignoring the routine cruelty towards animals
has its equivalence in the tolerance of torture, human trafficking, and
ethnic cleansing – an equivalence that exists within the precincts of moral
insanity. Veganism offers an immediate and logical alternative to the
reality of the slaughterhouse, but it also has a key role to play in ending
world hunger, in improving human health, and in reducing climate change.
Veganism, in the view of Carol Adams, is a condition of feminism, and simply
by becoming vegan one plays a pivotal part in the campaign against
patriarchy. This cross-pollinates freely to an awareness of the
psychological tendency towards dehumanisation, and towards desensitisation
to the suffering of all living things. Consequently, veganism is also a
condition of socialist morality, for socialism is the antithesis of
exploitation, grounded in the core principles of fairness and kindness.
After all, what else could it be?
Running parallel to the slaughter in those dark places throughout my years
growing up, was the full scale slaughter of the Vietnam War, and I paid
attention to its development because my cousin from New York, a Captain in
the US Air Force, was stationed there. On leave once, he visited our home in
Glasgow Cross – a tenement apartment he referred to as a ‘cold water flat’ –
and during one of our many conversations I raised the matter of the massacre
at My Lai, which had recently been on the news. He responded sharply and
heatedly, declaring everyone was the enemy in Vietnam, even six-year-olds:
“Those bastards put shredded glass in your Coke.” The enemy, even kids,
became ‘gooks’: lesser beings – animals. In keeping with the
rationalisations of meat eaters, who considered food animals to be devoid of
mind and moral capacities, dehumanisation became a psychological defence
strategy, a means of moral disengagement.
On one of our excursions around Glasgow, we walked the length of Argyll
Street past umpteen building works towards Kelvingrove Art Gallery. “Just
like New York,” he said – “always tearing things down and digging things
up.” I didn’t dig things up, I didn’t ask him what he saw or what he did,
but deep down I feared the worst. People were increasingly aware of what was
going on in the war: news broadcasts constantly covered carpet bombing and
chemical warfare in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and occasionally some orgy
of brutality was revealed or hinted at. It seemed to me then, as it does
now, that there is nothing human beings won’t do to each other so long as we
can find the right switches to turn off the morality protocols. It is the
same rationality underlying the horrors of the death camps, and the
brutalities of prison torture camps such as Abu Ghraib, that underlies what
we do to animals simply to put meat on our plates.
Killing has always been the way of things, at once representing a kind of
progress and the elimination of hope. We kill on behalf of others, for
so-called just causes, and for love. Insofar as we have a choice – and many
would say we always have a choice – killing, and all the moral
responsibility that goes with it, is personal. That is where it starts and
ends. Change must begin at the level of the self: it is driven from the
bottom up, and by the strategy of the refusal. That refusal can begin with
what we choose to eat – changing the world in bite-sized chunks.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
0 marine animals
0 chickens
0 ducks
0 pigs
0 rabbits
0 turkeys
0 geese
0 sheep
0 goats
0 cows / calves
0 rodents
0 pigeons/other birds
0 buffaloes
0 dogs
0 cats
0 horses
0 donkeys and mules
0 camels / camelids