The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [168]
“Does the animal know it’s going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them going into the squeeze chutes on the feedlot, getting their shots, and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die you’d see much more agitated behavior.
“Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered ‘gun’ that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it’s done correctly it will kill the animal on the first shot.
“After the animal is shot while he’s riding along a worker wraps one of his feet and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he’s carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they’re cutting live animals, but that’s because there’s a lot of reflex kicking. What I look for is, is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He’d better not be trying to hold it up—then you’ve got a live one on the rail. Just in case, they have another stunner in the bleed area.”
I found Temple Grandin’s account both reassuring and troubling. Reassuring, because the system sounds humane, and yet I realize I’m relying on the account of its designer. Troubling, because I can’t help dwelling on all those times “you’ve got a live one on the rail.” Mistakes are inevitable on an assembly line that is slaughtering four hundred head of cattle every hour. (McDonald’s tolerates a 5 percent “error rate.”) So is it possible to slaughter animals on an industrial scale without causing them to suffer? In the end each of us has to decide for himself whether eating animals that have died in this manner is okay. For my part, I can’t be sure, because I haven’t been able to see for myself.
This, I realize, is why Joel Salatin’s open-air abattoir is such a morally powerful idea. Any customer who so desires can see how his chicken meets its end—can look and then decide. Few will take up such an offer; many of us would prefer to delegate the job of looking to a government bureaucrat or a journalist, but the very option of looking—that transparency—is probably the best way to ensure that animals are killed in a manner we can abide. No doubt some of us will decide there is no killing of animals we can countenance, and they probably shouldn’t eat meat.
When I was at the farm I asked Joel how he could bring himself to kill a chicken. “That’s an easy one. People have a soul, animals don’t. It’s a bedrock belief of mine. Animals are not created in God’s image, so when they die, they just die.”
The idea that it is only in modern times that people have grown queasy about killing animals is of course a flattering myth. Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals to themselves for thousands of years, struggling to come to terms with the shame they feel even when the killing is necessary to their survival. Religion, and ritual, has played a crucial part in this process. Native Americans and other hunter-gatherers give thanks to the animal for giving up its life so the eater might live. The practice sounds a little like saying grace, a ceremony hardly anyone bothers with anymore. In biblical times the rules governing ritual slaughter stipulated a rotation, so that no individual would have to kill animals every day, lest he become dulled to the gravity of the act. Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves it was the gods’ appetite that demanded the slaughter, and not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (Priests! Now we give the job to migrant workers paid the minimum wage) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal’s head. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a necessary sign of assent.
For all these people it was the