Author: Sandra Kyle

In the Western world we love our pets, who we think of as part of our family.    When it comes to animals raised for food however, it is quite another story.   While we love and protect our pets, we accept as normal that the majority of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens farmed for food live in unnatural and difficult conditions their entire foreshortened lives.  All farmed animals regularly undergo painful procedures.

How can we justify making such a distinction between animals?

Let us consider just one aspect, that of sentience. Sentience is defined as  ‘to feel, perceive or experience subjectively’.   There is no evidence at all that animals farmed for food do not feel pain, or experience their lives objectively.  In other words, they are sentient.

It seems to me that all animals are pretty stoic when compared to human beings.   They often ‘suffer in silence’.   However, if a vet attempted to cut off a dog’s tail without anaesthetic it would clearly demonstrate by its behaviour and vocalisations that it feels acute pain.

Why should it be any different for farmed animals, who also share our evolutionary history and are biologically organised along the same lines as we are?

Most animals raised for consumption live in factory farms, and lead lives of unremitting suffering.    It is estimated that 43 million die even before they can be slaughtered, killed by systemic problems brought about through genetic manipulation, disease, exposure, starvation, an increasing amount of fires and floods, truck road crashes, cruelty and neglect.   Pasture-raised animals also suffer from procedures routinely carried out on them.  These include castration, dehorning, disbudding, tail docking and ear notching.   What’s more, dairy cows have to undergo yearly artificial insemination and presumably much of the time live with the uncomfortable feeling of a full udder.

As we know ourselves, different types of procedures result in different kinds of pain.   Farmed animals undergo cutting, searing, constricting, crushing, stretching, squeezing, singeing, and the application of caustic chemicals to their flesh.  The kinds of behaviours they show as a result of the pain they feel can include anything from bellowing, to crying out, to the attempt to flee, to the inability to move, to limping and slow movement, and restlessness.   I have recently seen two youtube videos where in the one case an entire herd of dairy cows were limping and moving as if in slow motion.      The other video showed a farmer singeing the udders of cows with a blow torch to remove hairs that get in the way of milking.  This shocking practice  is apparently standard procedure in some places.

The ability of all animals to feel pain becomes even more sobering when we consider that at the very end of their lives farmed animals can undergo extreme pain one final time.    Statistics show that a small (but given the sheer numbers of those slaughtered, significant) number of animals are not properly stunned and are conscious during their throat slitting, and, as is the case with chickens, scalding.    The stunning of pigs takes around half a minute in a C02 gas chamber, and before becoming unconscious they suffer nasal passage burning and choking.    It is pandemonium as they try to escape the torture.

What we routinely do to sentient animals is a horror story.  But the shoe is on the other foot now.   If we want to kill and eat animals then we had better be able to justify the pain we put them through for our palate.

If we cannot do that, we need to stop eating them.

The Kingdom of Tonga has no permanent vets and depends on the visits of SPAW (South Pacific Animal Welfare) to get their dogs and cats de-sexed and treated.

In the two years UK national Angela Glover has been living in Tonga she has noticed the enormous difference SPAW are making. Consisting of volunteer New Zealand veterinary personnel who travel at their own expense, they help out the island’s animals and raise awareness of animal welfare in Tonga and other parts of the Pacific.

But the need is great. There are around 20,000 stray dogs in Tonga alone. Charley was one. Starving, suffering from a brain tumour, Angela and her partner adopted him and gave him a loving home until his peaceful death this past June. They have set up ‘Charley’s Fund’ to raise money for the work SPAW are doing in Tonga. Listen to the interview with Angela here:

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The late musician and performer Prince famously said:  “We will need an Animal Rights Day when all slaughterhouses shut down”.  A long-term vegan and committed animal advocate, the singer/songwriter was trailblaizing not only in his music but also in his animal advocacy.  As he wrote in his song ‘The Animal Kingdom’:

No member of the animal kingdom ever did a thing to me
It’s why I don’t eat red meat or white fish
Don’t give me no blue cheese
We’re all members of the animal kingdom
Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea.

Prince inferred there would be great rejoicing when all slaughterhouses close for good.  Maybe as a visionary artist he could ‘see’ a future where the blood of tens of billions of innocents are no longer spilled every year.   Imagining a world without such mind-numbing violence and injustice, working to making it come about, is what this website is about.   Personally speaking,  I expect to see it to happen in the western world within ten years.  That’s the goal!

The meat industry, in order to get consumers to buy their products, has to keep the horrors of its workings hidden.   Animals suffer at every stage of their final journey to the slaughterhouse.   In order not to have feces everywhere during processing, animals are forced to fast for up to 48 hours before they go on the slaughter truck.  They are therefore hungry even when they board the vehicle that carries them to their death. On the truck, which can cover long distances in weather extremes  – animals can collapse with the heat, or literally ‘freeze’ to the sides of the trucks in subzero temperatures – they are also banned from drinking water.    I have videoed animals parked up for more than ten minutes on a swelteringly hot day in a metal vehicle, stamping their feet in distress, panting and sweating with the heat, while the driver was off getting his lunch.

When they arrive at the slaughterhouse the animals have to wait their turn.    In the facility near where I live cattle arriving on Sunday have to wait 24 hours until work resumes again on Monday.  While they are waiting they watch their peers disappearing one by one.    Please do not tell me that they do not sense something is terribly wrong, and do not fear what is going to happen to them.

No animal walks willingly to his or her death.  The self-preserving instinct they share with all other life-forms means they would strongly resist having their throats slit, so Industry manages this by stunning them first.    The way this is done varies. Pigs are commonly placed in a C02 chamber where they spend more than a minute screaming and trying to escape while the gas burns their throat and nasal passages.  Hens and chickens are passed upside down in a bath of electrified water, and cows have their skulls drilled with a special gun that places a retractable bullet into their brains.  After they are stunned they are hung upside down, which in heavy cows and pigs can cause tears and breaks.  Being upside down they can bleed out more quickly, which is more commercially beneficial – ‘Time is Money’. Depending on the slaughterhouse, it is not uncommon to have some animals survive one stage, or even two stages of the slaughter process.  These animals die, as slaughterhouse worker Ramon told the Washington Post: ‘piece by piece’.  The failure rate, however, is impossible to evaluate.

In so-called ritual slaughter, for halal and kosher meat, animals are not stunned at all, causing the animal to feel the agony and panic of having their throat slit and being bled out.

While slaughterhouses are places of sheer horror for the animals, what about the people who carry out the killing?  The correlation between violence and animal slaughter has long preoccupied social scientists.  If a worker has to cut the throat of 100, 200, 300 animals a day, then it follows that this will affect him negatively.   Very few people want to do this work for obvious reasons, and so it is those who have no other choice, such as poor migrant workers, who carry it out.   This takes a very heavy toll on their psyche.    In this example, as in so many others, the poor are disadvantaged.

This past week at my vigil here in Whanganui, Aotearoa/New Zealand, I videoed some lambs on a truck waiting to be let through the electronic gate leading to the slaughterhouse.  As I have seen so many times before over my years of bearing witness, I saw fear, uncertainty and confusion in their eyes.  These babies pressed against each other for comfort, and some turned their heads to look at me, but in generally they stood still.  I heard not even a faint bleat from them.  All I heard was silence.

The fear and pain we put other sentient beings through on a mind-bending scale has to come to an end.   It is time to begin the work of closing down slaughterhouses for good.  These places of horror and injustice are an appalling crime against the helpless innocent, and a terrible blight on our humanity and so-called ‘civilisation’.

We do not have to eat animals.  As has been well documented for decades now, not eating animals makes people healthier, and it is also much better for the planet.   With so many delicious vegan alternatives available, we don’t have to go without by giving up eating animals and their products.    If you eat meat and dairy, if you are one of the causes for the existence of slaughterhouses, then please consider transitioning to a vegan diet.   If you will not to do this, then the least you can do before you put your fork to your mouth is to take a moment to think of the bloody way your food got onto your plate.

Please help to create a non-violent world by refusing to be a cause for slaughterhouses to exist.  Please be part of the change.   Please begin now.