Consider the Slaughterhouse

A blog reader and e-mail correspondent e-mailed yesterday in response to my post on the ethics of chronic pain and referenced David Foster Wallace’s 2004 Gourmet magazine article “Consider the Lobster” in which his assignment to report on the Maine Lobster Fest turned into a discursus on the ethics of eating lobster. I actually did read it when it came out, but I had long since forgotten it. I just reread it this morning and enjoyed it very much, especially how one could, as my correspondent stated “almost feel Wallace’s own anxiety about the issue, and about ‘the age we live in’ coming through in almost every paragraph.” I identify with that anxiety very much. I have often felt that much of the writing on this blog is more or less a chronicle of my anxiety over raising animals to be killed and butchered for their meat.

One of the interesting things about Wallace’s article is that it ends with the issue unresolved. Most of us that admit the ethical quandry into our lives end up living with it perpetually; very very few of us become vegetarians and/or vegans. Instead we become like funeral attendees who periodically have our laughs and giggles and general good time interrupted by the force of the lack in our social body effected by the loss of the loved one we are mourning. Every now and then in the midst of mastication, as teeth meet teeth through soft cooked flesh we are jarred by the realization that the taste and texture, the sensuous pleasure being ground between our teeth was very much a sentient critter with distinct identifiable interests, a personality, a face, and the capacity for a great deal of suffering. As at the funeral, however, the moment passes and the joviality continues.

A little more than five years ago, I encountered for the first time Peter Singer’s concept of speciesism, which I have discussed on the blog before. Basically the speciesism argument goes that we think it is okay to eat the meat of various animals because we believe they have lower moral standing because they are fundamentally, permanently, and definitely different than we are. Cows, while indeed sentient beings capable of suffering that have some moral standing (we shouldn’t abuse them, they should be well cared for, etc.), do not have a high enough moral standing to outweigh even our interest (it is not a need) in cooking (most often) and eating their flesh. The danger of speciesism, Singer argues, is that speciesism is no different than racism or sexism, which were based on the same belief in the lower moral standing of the subject based on what were believed to be at the time identifiable differences. It is speciesism above all else that interrupts me because it is so clearly the true ground for my meat eating justification. A pig is not a person. In fundamental and permissive ways, a pig is less than a person. In light of speciesism, with it, in fact, constantly tapping on my shoulder in an effort to get my attention, I make a reverse Pascalian wager and act as if the threat of speciesism will never come to pass. That threat being, recall, that we will discover one day, just as we did with racism and sexism, that there is no difference there and that animals of different species have equal moral standing.

Continually spinning the wheel round and round this inescapable (because I am unwilling to give up eating meat) ethical quandry, I make regular trips to the slaughterhouse. To continue eating meat, to continue raising animals for the express puropose of having them killed so people, myself included, can eat their meat, I must consider the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is, so to speak, the meat eater’s ethical moment.

There is a lamb, I mentioned her in post not too long ago, that I call “My Pretty Girl.” She is the cutest, most adorable thing I have ever seen. First, she is tiny. At five months old, she still probably only weighs forty pounds. (She isn’t unhealthy, just small in the same way that some people are big and some are small). Second, she has the whitest, cleanest, most delicately featured face you can imagine. She has great big doe eyes. Third, while skittish, she is bold and curious. She approaches me cautiously with her little nose stretched out crinkling as she sniffs the air between us. Of the 100 lambs in her group, she will be, because of her size, in the last group to go to the slaughterhouse, and as “My Pretty Girl,” she is the perfect lamb with whom (not, note, with which) to consider the slaughterhouse.

Ninety-nine point what, nine probably, percent of us never see the inside of a slaughterhouse, and this fact, incidentally is exactly how the jungle is able to thrive inside those windowless buildings. Not all slaughterhouses are jungles however. The one I use is not. To consider the slaugtherhouse, I would like to take us through My Pretty Girl’s journey through the slaughterhouse.

The morning that I take My Pretty Girl to the slaughterhouse will be stressful for her. For the past three months she will have been comfortably living in a familiar location following a comfortably familiar routine. When I come to load her group on the trailer, that routine will be shockingly interrupted. Because she will be in the last group to go, she will not need to go through the additional stress of being sorted out of a larger group. I will just open the pen and herd My Pretty Girl and her pen mates first into the holding area, then up an aisle, and finally onto the trailer. The group of lambs will be extremely anxious and will travel in a tightly wound blob, sort of like a school of fish. As they go up the aisle toward the trailer it will narrow and they will get more nervous. They will feel me walking behind them, urging them on. They might balk and try to turn around, only to find me standing behind them. My Pretty Girl and the rest of them will be wide eyed and nervous, no matter how calmly I work them. Livestock are critters of routine, which is one of the reasons working with them is possible. When we break that routine, no matter how calmly, it makes them anxious. At the trailer door, they will definitely balk. Because of the time of year, I need to load the lambs in the dark, and critters do not like moving from a lighted area (the aisle) to a darker area (the trailer with a nonfunctioning interior light). As I put pressure on them to urge just one of them to hop on the trailer their level of anxiety will rise because they feel trapped, penned in, not realizing that they can relieve the physical discomfort of the close space by hopping up onto the trailer. Within a minute or two one of them will hop on. I would be lying, however, if I didn’t tell you that I occassionally need to pick one up and toss it on to the trailer. As soon as the first one goes, they flow on like water.

Next, I am one of the lucky ones with a slaughterhouse nearby, so the trip only takes twenty minutes. I have always wanted to put a camera inside the trailer to see what the ride is like, but I have yet to do that. I drive as carefully as I can, but still, I imagine being jostled around by turns and bumps is unsettling. Maybe My Pretty Girl will lie down, which would make the trip much more comfortable for her.

Once at the slaughterhouse I will back the trailer up to the unloading chute and then walk around to the front of the building to let them know I have arrived. During that time the lambs will be standing in an anxious huddle in the trailer, completely adrift, cut off from the familiar routine. They will be anxious, not terrified, not frightened, just anxious. My Pretty Girl, though small, will likely be on the outer edge of the group because she is bold. She will face the slaughterhouse worker when he opens the door of the trailer ready to run for her life. But, instead, when the slaughterhouse worker steps onto the trailer (I will be outside the trailer on the other side of the chute) My Pretty Girl will get scared and turn with the rest of her group and scurry up to the far end of the trailer away from the slaughter man, who will walk slowly, calmly, and thoughtfully (he is good at his job) up the length of the trailer so that he can get behind the lambs. As soon as he passes halfway past her body, My Pretty Girl will rush to the other end of the trailer, but she and the rest of the group will balk at the edge of the trailer. They won’t simply hop down. In just that short twenty minute drive, the trailer will have become the familiar place compared to the concrete floored chute outside of it. The slaughterman will slowly walk up behind them, saying “Come on sheep. Come on sheep.” and making “woosshh, wissshhhh, wissssh” sounds. When he gets to the group, My Pretty Girl will dig in her heels and lean back so that she doesn’t get pushed out of the trailer, but as the slaughter man gently puts pressure on the lambs by pressing against them with his knees, eventually the pressure will be enough that one lamb, maybe My Pretty Girl, decides to step off the trailer, and once one goes, they all go. After that, they will walk about ten feet to the door leading into the holding pens where, once again, they will balk and the process will be repeated. Once one goes, they all will go and once they have all gone inside, the slaughter worker will slide the door closed, and then we’ll button up my trailer, and unless I have some business to do inside, I will be on my way.

Inside the holding pen, My Pretty Girl and her pen mates will continue to be nervous, a bit agitated, unsettled, but they will soon calm down a bit. In an hour or two depending on how busy the slaughterhouse is, the slaughter man will reappear, increasing once again the anxiety level of My Pretty Girl and her pen mates. He will herd them out of the holding pen into the kill chute. Just as before, he will do this calmly, thoughtfully, and deliberately.

Within a few minutes of being herded into the kill chute, My Pretty Girl will be led forward onto the kill floor. The slaughter worker will deftly and quickly place a captive bolt gun against her forehead and pull the trigger. My Pretty Girl, the cutest, sweetest, most adorable little lamb you can imagine will drop like a stone. It will have been a stressful morning, anyone who denies that is a liar or a fool, but, at the end, she will drop like a stone. In the time it takes her to flutter those pretty long lashes, she will go from conscious to unconscious.

Within five seconds of being rendered unconscious by the blow to the brain of the captive bolt, a shackle will be placed around one of My Pretty Girl’s hind feet, and using a motorized pully, the slaughterman will raise her up off the ground with her unconscious head hanging down. He will then deftly insert an very sharp knife into My Pretty Girl’s throat and sever the major veins and arteries. With the force of her still beating heart, My Pretty Girl’s blood will gush out of her neck onto the kill room floor. Within seconds My Pretty Girl will pass from unconscious to dead.

My Pretty Girl’s body will dangle for a while to ensure that all of the blood has drained out. Then she will be moved over to a sort of metal cradle and lowered onto it. The slaughter worker will skin her and cut off her feet. Then her head will be cut off. From the cradle she will be moved about ten feet away and then raised up into the air again with her belly facing the slaughter worker. He will the disembowl her, being careful not to spill any of the contents of her guts inside of her, which would foul the meat.

About fifteen minutes after being walked forward onto the kill floor, My Pretty Girl will be a familiar looking whole lamb carcass ready to be rolled along the rails and placed into the cooler where she will hang for a week before being cut up to my specifications by the butchers in the cutting room, while other lambs or cows or pigs, though almost certainly none as cute, are being killed on the kill floor.

I am a speciesist. I believe because only I and none of her sheep family will miss her and because only I and not she can imagine the future and because only I and not she can wish for something different and because I have considered the slaughterhouse it is okay to kill My Pretty Girl and eat her.

 

Suffering as a Guiding Principle

The other day I was filling the Icelandic sheep’s water trough and as I poured the bucket I saw a large spider fall into the trough. The momentum of the water stream pushed the spider down into the water. The spider swirled around against the side of the trough and then bobbed up to the surface. It was upside down and was flailing its legs around. Without really thinking about it, I reached down and broke off a long piece of grass and then placed the grass against the spider’s abdomen. The spider immediately wrapped its legs around the grass. I raised the spider up out of the water and dropped the grass on the ground next to the trough. The spider scurried off.

Why did I save the spider? Or, why was my reflexive response to seeing the spider flailing its legs around on its back on the surface of the water to save it? Why didn’t I just leave it there? Or, why didn’t I kill it, considering that I have killed hundreds of them in my lifetime?

I had started to ask myself those questions as I was raising the spider out of the trough. It was one of those fruitful juxtapositions that I just can’t resist. There I was providing water to sheep whose sole purpose is to live and grow until they are nice and plump at which time they will be methodically killed and cut up so that we can eat their flesh. At the very same time, I was tenderly rescuing a spider from drowning.

It seems highly contradictory, but I realized that I was acting according to a guiding principle that resolves the contradiction, a prohibition against suffering. I must act in such a way that the lives of the creatures in the world that I interact with are free of suffering. Relatively stress free, almost totally painless slaughter does not cause suffering. Rescuing spiders from drowning relieves suffering. Quick spider deaths by squashing with a magazine do not cause suffering.

Of course, “suffering” is a highly subjective concept, so such a thing does not relieve the tension between ethical vegetarians/vegans (especially vegans) and livestock farmers/meat eaters. For a vegan, nothing but narcissistic hubris grants me the authority to declare what does and does not cause a living creature suffering, although a vegan would certainly appreciate my tender care of the spider. I admit there is something to this criticism. Who am I to declare the subjective experience of a sheep, or a spider (note the high degree of anthropomorphism in the assumption of animal and insect “subjectivity”)? Livestock scientist Temple Grandin argues that frequency of cow vocalization is an adequate measure of suffering in a slaughterhouse environment. She has developed an “objective” measure of slaughterhouse animal welfare based on quantifying vocalizations. However, until very recently, animal scientists believed that giraffe’s don’t vocalize at all. It turns out, however, that they do so in a frequency below that of human hearing, and that vocalization is a very important part of giraffe community. The suffering of cows could be expressed in innumerable ways that we have not yet fathomed. It very well could be that vocalization is but one form of expression of an extreme level of suffering. We look out at a steadily moving stream of cows at an industrial slaughterhouse hearing only the occasional bellow here or a moo there and think with Grandin that we are therefore not causing those cows to suffer. Meanwhile, it might really be the case that the cows, with the giraffes, are bombarding each other with low frequency declarations of the most miserable suffering.

Granted. Nevertheless, I am not a vegan. I eat meat, and I raise animals to slaughter and butcher for their meat. So, in spite of the fact that measuring suffering is fraught, I use it as one of my guiding principles for providing a high level of animal welfare. Animals (creatures) must not suffer while in my care (or while in the care of those to whom I entrust them). Such a principle permits me to raise animals for slaughter while enabling me at the same time to rescue spiders from drowning. It does not, however, relieve me of the burden of the subjectivity of any declaration of the suffering of another creature. I feel in this regard that I am always balancing on the edge of a knife blade.

 

Izzy the Goat is Dead

Sweet, sweet “Izzy Girl,” by far my favorite goat, died suddenly yesterday morning. She was fine and appeared totally healthy the evening before.

However, yesterday morning at 7:30 or so, she didn’t come out with the rest of her herd mates for her grain, so I went in to check on her. She was huddled in a corner, lethargic, and more or less apathetic, although she was still reasonably alert. She had clearly had massive diarrhea. Her back end, back legs, and one of her front legs were covered. One pile of diarrhea was interspersed with opaque (whitish), viscous mucous. I took her temperature, it was a little more than 98 degrees (normal is 102-103). I set up a little infirmary in the barn office, where I could attempt to keep her warm, and at that point, she was able and willing to walk from the pen to the office. While we were walking, she crouched and expelled a small stream of clear, viscous fluid from her anus. She was not interested in warm water with molasses, and she would not swallow when I tried to drench her. By 8 o’clock, her temp was down to 97 and her breathing had become shallow and more or less rapid.

To make a long story short, she died about half an hour later, and had been uncomfortable the last few minutes, standing up, keening, stumbling around, eventually falling down, thrashing mildly about half rolled on her back, with her tongue sticking out, groaning. Finally, she stopped moving, although it was a number of minutes before she died; she quickly spasmed for a second or two every thirty seconds or so.

If the above seems a little clinical, that is because it is. I sent it, along with a health history, in an e-mail to one of the vets at Cornell in the hopes that she might have a clue what happened. I also decided to have one of the local vets do a simple necropsy to see what might have happened.

The reality of Izzy’s death  was much less clinical. As she died, I could barely contain my emotions. I was helpless. I could do absolutely nothing for her. She was in agony. Tears streamed down my face as her body quickly shut down. She screamed, over and over again. I sat there, limp, and impotent, stupidly petting her as she thrashed around. “I’m so sorry, Izz,” I kept saying, “I’m so sorry.” Near the end, she stopped moving and stopped breathing, and I thought she was dead, so I called Jen at work, who had been on her way out the door when I ran up to the house for my flashlight, so she knew that Izzy was sick. Horses, however, don’t die in a flash like sheep and goats do, so she couldn’t believe it when I told her she was dead. But, just then, she cried out again, weakly this time, and spasmed, and flailed her head. I started sobbing, and Jen stayed on the phone with me for a few more minutes until she had really died. I put my ear to her chest, her long white winter coat tickled my ear lobe as I pressed it against her. Silence. Stillness. Izzy, sweet sweet Izzy Girl, was dead.

I had obligations, so I whispered my goodbyes, stood up, ceremonially dusted myself off, and finished my chores, the wind biting my wet cheeks as I wheeled a bale of hay out to the sheep. I walked from death to life, and with death on my mind, I fed the living, I watered the living, I watched and listened to the living. I lived. I cried. I am crying again.

Izzy should have died a decade from now, an old friend, one of my first goats. Instead, she died yesterday and broke my heart.

Militant vegans/vegetarians scoff at the idead that livestock farmers can be or are deeply emotional about the animals in their care, and with industrial farming as the reference, I cannot blame them. On a pastoral farm, however, the contradiction, the paradox, of lovingly killing animals in order to eat them is resolved in the depth of the emotion and care given to their living moments. Care is more than an activity on a pastorl farm, it is an ethic, an ethic that permits, and demands, the development of a deep bond between a farmer and an animal that she may kill or have killed to eat.The fact of slaughter does not abrogate the ethic of care.

That ethic of care granted to slaughter animals is extended beyond care to kinship with breeding animals, even though farmers often have to make tough decisions about breeding animals who are not paying their way. A quality breeding animal may spend a decade or more on a pastoral farm, becoming as much a part of the farm family as the dog. Izzy, her voice, her eyes, her appearance, were deeply embedded in the tenor of my days. Her life, the continued beating of her heart, was an assumption implicit in my every act, from sliding on my boots in the morning, to cutting open a bale of hay. But, now she is dead.

Her body was cold and stiff yesterday when I lifted her from the bed of hay I had prepared for her in the office and carried her out to the truck. I laid her gently in the bed and closed the gate. I picked her up and laid her gently again on a few squares of brown paper on the floor at the vet’s office. I will pick her up twice more. When I see her this morning, she will have been cut and splayed open and probed to see what might have caused her sudden death. The second time I pick her up this morning will be to bury her in the compost pile where she will be slowly broken down until she is fertility for the soil. She will feed blades of grass and clover.