I understand that some bacon-curers consider, or did consider, stunning
cruel, on the ground that several blows were often required. The use of
humane-killers disposes of this objection.
The late eminent physiologist, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, in a paper
read before the Medical Society of London some years ago, says:
“Pigs, I have said, _suffer a mental terror of death_, and to
them commonly is also given a severe degree of physical
pain. . . . When they are killed by the knife alone they die by
a hæmorrhage that may extend with persistent consciousness over
three or four minutes of time.”
In relation to the pig’s mental horror of death, I myself saw the
following sight:—Fifteen or so pigs in a slaughtering chamber just
large enough to hold them and the slaughterer. Of these pigs three or
four had already been stunned and knifed and lay dead and bleeding among
their living brethren, who with manifest terror were squealing and
straining here and there against the walls, while the slaughterer moved
about among them selecting the next victim. A blow, a cut, and there was
another dead pig, and this would go on, no doubt, till the whole fifteen
were despatched and their bodies shot down the slide. Terror of death!
Yes! At all this, by the way, a boy of about thirteen was looking
on—and this in a public slaughter-house with a good superintendent and
under municipal control.
SEGREGATION OF ANIMALS _about to be slaughtered from
slaughtering operations_.—“It appears to be the common
practice, even in modern and well-regulated slaughter-houses, to
keep the animals, which are immediately awaiting slaughter, in
pens which are mere annexes to the slaughter chamber itself, and
in many cases in full view of all that goes on inside . . .
There is no point which the Committee have more carefully
investigated than the question as to whether animals do or do
not suffer from fear from this contact, and the evidence of
those best qualified to judge is so conflicting that no absolute
verdict can be given . . . The animal should be given the full
benefit of the doubt.” (Report of the Admiralty Committee.)
But the animal is _not_ given the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the
degree of consciousness of animals awaiting slaughter (sometimes for a
whole hour) just divided by a door which, all regulations to the
contrary, is far from always shut, whether they know or not that it is
death which awaits them, any spectator accustomed to animals in their
normal state has only to look at their eyes, as they stand waiting, to
feel sure that they are in fear of something.
Such then, in brief and in rough, are the conditions and methods of
slaughter which still seem good to us. When the Admiralty Committee
issued their report in 1904 they made the following recommendations:—
(_a_) All animals (cattle, calves, sheep, lambs, and pigs)
without exception must be stunned or otherwise rendered
unconscious before blood is drawn.
(_b_) Animals awaiting slaughter must be so placed that they
cannot see into the slaughter-house, and the doors of the latter
must be kept closed while slaughtering is going on.
(_c_) The drainage of the slaughter-house must be so arranged
that no blood or other refuse can flow out within the sight or
smell[4] of animals awaiting slaughter, and no such refuse shall
be deposited in proximity to the waiting pens.
(_d_) If more animals than one are being slaughtered in one
slaughter-house at one time they must not be in view of each
other.
(_e_) None but licensed men shall be employed in or about
slaughter-houses.
What has been done to carry out these recommendations, the fruit of most
thorough and laborious investigations carried out at a considerable
expenditure of public money and presumably with some object, by men well
qualified for their task?
Just this much has been done. The recommendations have been adopted and
are worked successfully by the Admiralty themselves, and they form the
basis of certain clauses in the Local Government Board’s Voluntary Model
Bye-laws, to which attention is only just beginning to be paid.
Seeing that the condition of affairs is such as I have detailed; seeing
that the Admiralty Committee made the following wise remarks: “However
humane and scientific in theory may be the methods of slaughter, it is
inevitable that abuses and cruelty may result in practice, unless there
is a proper system of official inspection”; and: “In the interests not
only of humanity, but of sanitation, order, and ultimate economy, it is
highly desirable that, where circumstances permit, private
slaughter-houses should be replaced by public abattoirs, and that no
killing should be permitted except in the latter under official
supervision”; seeing the enormous dimensions of this matter, and that
our methods are behind those of nearly every Continental country, and
very much behind those of Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, it would
occur to the simple mind that here was eminently a case for broad and
sweeping action on the part of the Legislature.
I have not even thought it worth while to dwell on the _insanitary_
aspect of the present system, because the Royal Commission on Food from
Tuberculous Animals (again at a considerable expenditure of public
money) reported thus—“The actual amount of tuberculous disease among
certain classes of food animals is so large as to afford to man frequent
occasions for contracting tuberculous disease through his food. We think
it probable that an appreciable part of the tuberculosis that affects
man is obtained through his food”—practically without effect! If the
public likes to spend its money on ascertaining a risk to itself and
likes to disregard that risk to itself when ascertained, far be it from
me to gainsay the public. But if any one be interested in the sanitary
side of our want of system, let him go to the superintendent of some
large public slaughter-house and ask what percentage of meat is
condemned daily; then let him ask some medical officer of health how far
it is possible to inspect the condition of carcases in _private_
slaughter-houses; and then let him go home and think! There I leave the
matter. For, frankly, it is not this, but the disregard by the public of
needless suffering inflicted on helpless creatures, bred and killed for
its own advantage, that moves me. Surely no one can call the following
suggestions unreasonable:
_No animal to be bled before being stunned (or otherwise
rendered instantaneously insensible)._
_No animal to be slaughtered in sight of another animal._
_No slaughter-refuse and blood to be allowed within sight or
smell of an animal awaiting slaughter._
_No stunning or slaughtering implement to be used that has not
been approved by the Local Government Board._
_The licence of no slaughter-house to be renewed unless it
possesses these approved stunning and slaughtering implements, a
copy of official instructions how to use them, and can prove
that it does use them and them alone._
_All offenders against these regulations to be liable to
penalties on summary conviction._
Why has not this simple harmless minimum of decent humanity been—as in
other countries—long ago adopted? For the usual reasons: Dislike of
change; dislike of a little extra trouble and a little extra expense;
liberty of the subject. To take the last point first. Dictate to a man
how he shall slaughter his own animals—what next! Well! I am all for
liberty of the subject. I am for letting him hurt _himself_ as much as
ever he likes. I even go so far as to say that prosecutions for
attempted suicide are wrong and ridiculous; but where the subject claims
to hurt the helpless with impunity, then it seems to me time to hurt the
subject.
I fancy that in most men’s minds there lurks the feeling: “Oh! a little
extra suffering to animals who are going to die anyway in a minute or
two—what does it matter? Now, if you were to put it on the ground that
it hurts the slaughterer, there’d be something in it!” Yes! It certainly
may hurt the _morale_ of the slaughterer—but not much, for he inflicts
the needless suffering _without consciousness of cruelty_; and ill
actions of which one is not conscious only negatively deteriorate
_morale_, in so far as they are a waste of time in which good actions
might have been performed. But to say that it does not matter whether we
needlessly hurt the sheep or pig because they are going to die anyway is
really to say that no suffering matters, however unnecessary, since we
must all die and it will be all the same a hundred years hence. It is at
all events not a saying that I can imagine coming out of the mouth of a
human being in perfect health and the possession of all his faculties,
with a knife going in just behind his right ear and wiggling about in
his neck and head till it finds his spinal cord between the joints of
his vertebræ. And though you may think that the infliction of some
seconds of excruciating torture on an animal does not really hurt the
animal because she cannot tell you that it does—it conceivably might
hurt _you_ a little to feel it was needlessly inflicted.
The meat-trades and butchers generally deny the need for change, and
claim that the humanity of existing methods cannot be improved on. I
really cannot understand this. Take for example two conversations I had
with quite humane butchers.
I: “So you never stun your sheep before bleeding them?”
First Butcher: “Oh! no.”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“Not to avoid pain?”
“Oh! no; there’s no pain.”