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Editor's Note: This is part one of a three part series on humane slaughter. SLM contributor Jenny Agnew examines its past present and future. Parts two and three are here and here.
Caring about how the cow or pig that’s on your dinner plate was raised has become routine, so much so that it’s ripe for parody as evidenced in this Portlandia skit. In the spoof, a couple in a restaurant have to visit the farm that produced their chicken—“his name was Colin”—to see how the bird lived before they can place their order.
What has been historically of less concern, but seems to be growing more relevant every day, is how an animal died—whether or not it was slaughtered “humanely” (a fraught term which has undergone almost as much scrutiny as the slaughter process itself). Some wonder, for example, how humane slaughter really is. The raising part is more transparent, as farmers and ranchers can show their animals out in pastures, ranging freely.
What’s murkier is the slaughter—the dying piece of the puzzle, in part because of the regulations surrounding the processing of some livestock, especially cattle, transmitters of mad cow disease. In the non-transparent world of industrial slaughterhouses, what goes on remains a mystery until undercover videos or narratives arise. When they do, however, their graphic nature does exactly what it shouldn’t: cause people to turn away.
With the recent takeover of pork producer Smithfield Foods (products above) by China’s Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. last month, one cannot escape questions surrounding slaughter, and industrial slaughter, in particular. And if that deal with China doesn’t evoke concern, this one surrounding processed chicken will.
If you have a few free hours, take a look at The Kansas City Star’s comprehensive 2012 report on industrial cattle slaughter, “Beef’s Raw Edges”—a report that covers topics beyond animal welfare, such as “processing, packaging, and health,” antibiotics, manure, the history of meatpacking in Kansas City, pink slime, and how “Big Beef” has influenced universities. In sum, the report illustrates the myriad issues attendant to slaughter.
Animated Advocacy: The wave of the future?
Several weeks ago, Chipotle introduced its “Scarecrow” ad, an animated video showing an unhappy scarecrow (left) who works like an automaton, among “Crowbots,” in an industrial plant, where animals are abused and the end product is called “100% Beef-ish!” Fiona Apple’s plaintive version of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory plays in the background, eliciting the same kind of emotional ambivalence—it’s both achingly beautiful and disturbingly creepy—present in Gene Wilder’s original rendition.
By the end of the video, the titular character—a farmer who presumably has had to join the factory in the wake of small farms’ deaths—quits his industrial job, prepares “real” food from his garden, and sells his product next to the fictional Crow Foods plant, with its ironic “Eat Crow” billboards. The video ad was released to promote Chipotle’s free app for the Scarecrow game. The player’s mission: “to protect, grow and serve delicious, fresh food.”
For all its emotional appeal, the video shows the Scarecrow picking peppers and making what looks like a vegetarian burrito. The campaign, then, brings up how animals can be mistreated in industrial plants but doesn’t offer any explicit solutions to that problem.
Since most people can’t stomach what happens behind industrial slaughterhouse doors, the use of animation cleverly allows a glimpse behind the screen, minus the gore but with all the pathos intact. Like The Scarecrow, The Meatrix, an animated parody of The Matrix, with Leo the pig, Moopheus the cow, and Chickity the chicken, exposes the abuses and violations that occur in industrial slaughterhouses and the dairy industry. The humorous videos—the first of which was released 10 years ago—entertain while advocating for conditions to change.
Going Undercover: First-hand accounts of industrial slaughter’s violations
Traditional accounts of industrial slaughter have also appeared recently: Timothy Pachirat’s 2011 book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, and Ted Conover’s May 2013 Harper’s article, “The Way of all Flesh.” As his title suggests, Pachirat is an academic, and his book is as much about the people and systems within slaughterhouses as it is about the animals; the title comes from the fact that 2500 cattle were slaughtered a day, or every 12 seconds, at the plant.
Interested in the physical space (inside vs. outside; public vs. private) of the slaughterhouse, Pachirat (right) writes that his goal was in part to “provoke reflection on how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in modern society."
Pachirat, who worked three different jobs at the undisclosed Great Plains plant, covers a number of instances of animal abuse, but the book is about so much more than that. If the animal abuse and health concerns don’t stick with the reader, the portraits he draws of his co-workers, many of whom become nearly crippled by performing the same monotonous tasks day in and day out, will leave one wondering why the system can’t be fixed. See this profile in The Atlantic for more on Pachirat and his book and this piece from NYT writer Mark Bittman, who writes about his growing concerns about animal welfare in conjunction with reading Every Twelve Seconds.
Conover (left), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, inserts himself like any good participant-observer into the subjects about which he is writing. Playing the part of a USDA meat inspector, the writer shares a slightly different but no less concerning perspective in his article. In one of the more disturbing anecdotes, Conover reports that there appears to be a link between antibiotics and abscesses in cows’ livers; the more antibiotics the cattle get, the more abscesses they have, which both renders their livers unfit for human consumption (though okay for pets), and raises concerns about what other potentially dangerous side effects antibiotic use produces.
While it’s easy to write off both men’s experiences as exceptions to the norm, a May 2013 audit report from The USDA corroborates Pachirat’s and Conover’s findings.
In part two, Agnew explains how the Food Safety Inpsection Service in the U.S. is failing.
