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By Root 485 0

painless—for animal welfare, in others words, rather than rights. In fact, the “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage seldom quoted by animal rightists Bentham defended meat eating on the grounds that “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse…. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.”

My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what actually happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that in theory at least a utilitarian can justify eating humanely raised and slaughtered animals. Eating a wild animal that had been cleanly shot presumably would fall under the same dispensation. Singer himself suggests as much in Animal Liberation, when he asks, “Why…is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.”

All of which was making me feel pretty good about eating meat again and going hunting—until I recalled that these utilitarians can also justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn’t the problem for them that it is for other people, including me.

7. A CLEAN KILL

The day after my steak-and-Singer dinner at the Palm I found myself on a plane flying from Atlanta to Denver. A couple of hours into the flight the pilot, who hadn’t uttered word one until now, came on the public address system to announce, apropos of nothing, that we were passing over Liberal, Kansas. This was the first, last, and only landmark on our flight path that the pilot deigned to mention, which seemed very odd, given its obscurity to everyone on the plane but me. For Liberal, Kansas, happens to be the town where my steer, very possibly that very day, was being slaughtered. I’m not a superstitious person, but this struck me as a most eerie coincidence. I could only wonder what was going on just then, thirty thousand feet below me, on the kill floor of the National Beef Plant, where steer number 534 had his date with the stunner.

I could only wonder because the company had refused to let me see. When I’d visited the plant earlier that spring I was shown everything but the kill floor. I watched steers being unloaded from trailers into corrals and then led up a ramp and through a blue door. What happened on the other side of the blue door I had to reconstruct from the accounts of others who had been allowed to go there. I was fortunate to have the account of Temple Grandin, the animal-handling expert, who had designed the ramp and killing machinery at the National Beef Plant, and who audits the slaughter there for McDonald’s. Stories about cattle “waking up” after stunning only to be skinned alive—stories documented by animal rights groups—had prompted the company to hire Grandin to audit its suppliers. Grandin told me that in cattle slaughter, “there is the pre-McDonald’s era and the post-McDonald’s era—it’s night and day.” We can only imagine what night must have been like.

Here’s how Grandin described what steer 534 experienced after passing through the blue door:

“The animal goes into the chute single file. The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he’s straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a twenty-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground, and he’s being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can’t look down and see he’s off the ground. That would panic him.”

I had been wondering what 534 would be feeling as he neared his end. Would he have any inkling—a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line—that this was no ordinary day? Would he, in other words, suffer? Grandin anticipated my question.