Happy Victims: A Discussion of Animal Welfare

Oct 07, 2019

"How we treat the vulnerable is how we define ourselves as a species."
-Russell Brand

No Such Thing

There is a widely-believed myth that it is somehow ok – just, even – to kill animals when it satiates our own desires. But to appease the few that disagree with this, we decided to tell ourselves that they were treated well before they died. Because it’s alright to kill someone if they had a good life or something like that beforehand. Let’s get one thing straight: there is no “right way” to take the life of someone else when it is entirely unnecessary. (Whether it’s ever really necessary is a discussion for another day.) No matter what excuses you use or rationalizations you imagine in your mind, they’re wrong. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s delve further into how this “humane” myth and “happy meat” absurdity is perpetuated.

Cute Piggies

The source of inspiration for this discussion comes from restaurants, barbecue joints in particular. When I was about ten years old, I stopped eating “red meat.” (I use quotes here because I don’t like referring to the flesh of these animals in this way.) Ever since then, I’ve despised barbecue restaurants. They’re greasy and grimy, but the worst part to me is their depiction of animals, which I discussed briefly in "The Power of One: How One Vegan Changes the World." Oftentimes, the logo for the restaurant is a picture of a cartoon pig, smiling or doing something very un-pig-like. (Something like being dressed in a cute apron, cooking the flesh of another pig!) I just find it so disturbing that people somehow believe it's enticing to look at a picture of a cute little pig and then go shovel heaps of barbecue sauce-slathered pig flesh down their throats.

Torture Devices

It’s been more than a decade now since I stopped eating pigs, and I still cannot stand driving past those places. (Plus, they seem to like to show off their flesh smoker contraptions, and they remind me too much of brazen bulls. If you’re unfamiliar with ancient torture devices, as a normal person probably should be, they were large hollow metal bulls. They were big enough to lock a human inside, under which a fire was lit, so they died a painful, slow death.) This is also an unfortunate trend for many restaurants, grocery stores, food suppliers, and animal exploiters of all kinds. Places like Zaxby’s, Red Lobster, and Piggly Wiggly absolutely give me the creeps. If you’ve never seen the terrifying serial killer-looking Piggly Wiggly pig, consider yourself lucky.

Thanksgiving

I’ve found that holidays, Thanksgiving in particular, have become incredibly difficult for me precisely for this reason. I used to like watching the parade, the dog show, and football games. But now I see all the stuffed (no sick pun intended) turkey hats, both alive and dead, adorning people’s heads, and it – if I’m being totally honest – makes me want to give those people a little smack in the face. I know they’re just misguided and don’t understand the torturous life of a factory-farmed turkey, but it’s just so upsetting to see such disrespect on a day where we’re supposed to be thankful for what we have.

Wishbone (And Not the Cute Dog on TV)

One of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving was when I got to make a wish and break the turkey’s wishbone with the hopes that my wish would come true. How sick is that? We kill the turkey, stuff bread in his or her corpse, bake it for hours, gather around it and gorge ourselves 'til we're sick, and then we play with breaking its bones. If this weren’t real, it would be a very disturbing scary story told to frighten children. Honestly, it scares me that I ever could so willingly participate in this. But that's just what we're conditioned to do.

"See our minds become conditioned,
As we swear by these traditions,
Lose our hearts and breed division,
Oh my God, why can't we wake up?"
-Nothing More,
“Christ Copyright”

Turkey Pardon

And the turkey pardon – oh my goodness. It is the sickest of sick jokes. Last year, 2018, I saw on the news that you could vote online between two turkeys on which one would be pardoned. I'm sorry, but what the actual hell? It’s like Jigsaw came into the real world and said, “I want to play a game.” Is no one else extremely perturbed by the fact that the American public has this fun online voting game where you get to select who lives and who dies? There are no words to describe how incredibly disgusting and despicable we are as a species. Anyhow, I’m all worked up now, but I will be coming out with a post soon about how to deal with the holiday season as a vegan. Hopefully, I’ll be able to heed my own words this year.

The Worst in Our Society

Carnists are, albeit unknowingly, kind of like child molesters or serial killers that you see in horror movies – the really messed-up kind. We lovingly bring animals into our home, yet we mercilessly destroy basically every other living creature. We hang pictures of them on our walls, yet we gorge on their flesh. Going back to my Thanksgiving point, I remember drawing cute turkeys with my hand on paper around this time of year when I was in elementary school. I would carefully select five separate Crayons to make each finger a different color, and I was so proud of that. But then a few days later, I would be surrounded by family eating a turkey. What if a pedophile acted like that – drew pictures of adorable little children, went to daycares or elementary schools to take pictures of them, and then molested them? What if a rapist did that? What if a murderer did that? Even thinking about how depraved a person would have to be to do something like that with their victims sounds too disturbing to possibly be true; it makes my skin crawl. But "normal people" do that every day.

Change the Victim

And if that analogy doesn’t work for you, just switch the victim. What if everything in our society was the same, but we ate dogs, cats, exotic birds, dolphins, and sea turtles instead. What if we celebrated Thanksgiving with a roasted Labrador, stuffing pouring out of its rump on the dinner table? That makes it much more sinister. It’s impossible for me to imagine seeing rows and rows of packaged dog flesh in the grocery store. And there are very few people, even those who think they’re funny by making bacon jokes or saying they like eating baby cows, who would feel comfortable doing what we currently do to pigs to dogs or cats instead.

Brainwashing Children

And this way of thinking gets into our heads at such a young age. I always loved animals, but I never truly realized I was hurting them, especially when it came to every animal product except meat. Looking back, I see that I made up certain images in my head to try to understand things that were beyond comprehension for a young, innocent child. I enjoyed collecting and admiring feathers that stuck out of pillows at my house. They made me feel close to the animals I so desperately longed to know, because when do you ever get close enough to a duck or goose to feel its feathers? The image I had in my head was one of someone like me, gathering fallen feathers from the ground and collecting them so they could be beautifully repurposed. Now I know that’s completely the opposite of what birds endure in the down industry. But the possibility of that level of torture was too great for me to ever consider, because I knew humans couldn’t be that evil.

What Actually Is "Humane" Slaughter?

In order for an animal to be slaughtered properly, they still have to be alive when they are drained of their blood in order for the heart to pump it all out. (Because no one wants blood in their rotting flesh, right?) The animals are hung upside down and their necks are stabbed or sliced, depending on the slaughterhouse, and the blood comes gushing or spurting out. Now, many carnists that are unfamiliar with the whole process may see a bolt gun and believe that is the simple, easy trick to slaughtering an animal – clean and tidy (I’m thinking in particular of the 2017 version of IT, in which the sheep Mike has to “kill” are being “killed” with a bolt gun). However, all this does is render the animal unconscious.

The immense pressure and velocity the bolt creates by shooting through their skull, in a perfect stun, immediately incapacitates the animal. I say "perfect" here because sometimes this doesn’t work, either due to the terrified animal moving out of place (yeah, no kidding) or simply because it's just not a foolproof technique. In that case, it is virtually impossible for the animal to be rendered unconscious for the actual killing process, as the whole purpose of the bolt gun is to create that initial explosion of pressure within the animal’s head. Attempting to create that same impact again is unlikely since the skull is already broken. However, slaughterhouse workers often will shoot the animal one, two, three, or even four more times, not fully causing incapacitation, but enough to get the job done with a slightly lower risk of complication when it comes to stabbing time. In this case, the animal is in extreme pain, experiencing every aspect of being strung up and bleeding out until they finally, excruciatingly die. This is how “humane” slaughter works for many animals.[1]

Birds

Chickens and birds, however, are usually handled differently. Since they are small and easy to handle, they are strung up by their feet on the kill line. One by one, they are dipped into a tub of electrified water to immediately render them unconscious. This, obviously, is easily avoided by birds who simply lift up their heads to avoid the electric bath. Those that are stunned are met swiftly with a blade across their necks, but those that aren't also tend to avoid being killed here. Instead, as they jerk around trying to free themselves, they may accidentally cut the top of their heads or miss the blade altogether. In that case, an employee comes around and slits their throats, killing them fully conscious. If there is still a little life left at this point in the birds, the next stop on the line is a vat of scalding water to remove their feathers; they are fully submerged, drowning and burning to death. (This step also occurs with pigs to remove their bristly hairs.)

Pigs

In most slaughterhouses, as it has legally been declared as the most "humane," pigs are lowered into gas chambers, choking on CO2 for 20-30 seconds until they are finally, hopefully, incapacitated. The sensation is similar to burning from the inside out. This is also the same technique used in Nazi death camps – go figure. Generally, the only instances where this “humane” technique is not used is for religious practices. Kosher and Halal slaughter insists on the animals being fully conscious while murdered. In some places where this is practiced, it can take 15 minutes for an animal to die, usually due to ineffective slitting of arteries.[2]

Christianity

Funnily, Christianity is one of few religions with no regard for animal lives. In Judaism and Islam, pigs are not eaten. In Hinduism, cows are sacred. Other Asian religions – like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism – have the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence to all beings. Admittedly, this means little to people following these religions today, but the precedent is still there. In Christianity, however, there is nothing of the sort. Perhaps there is, and I’m just not aware of it, but growing up Christian, I certainly never learned of anything. It’s hard to teach compassion to all beings when we so ruthlessly kill and/or eat most other species on the planet.

The Forgotten of the Forgotten

Finally, let’s look at possibly the greatest atrocity at all, the most inhumane of inhumane practices, and the reason why many people finally choose vegan. The number of animals we kill for food is unfathomable, around 60 billion land animals and 2.7 trillion marine animals per year, and that’s likely on the low end of estimates.[3] But, of those land animals, there remains a victim category that is itself in the billions, yet they never even reach the dinner plate. Nearly all male chicks and calves in the egg and dairy industry are killed within hours or days of birth.

Eggs & Dairy

Male chicks are most commonly ground up alive, gassed to death, or suffocated in plastic bags and thrown away. This is known as "chick culling," a disgusting term for a disgusting practice. Male dairy calves are sent to a slaughterhouse; imagine what it must be like to be working in a place like that when one of those babies is next in the kill chute.[4, 5] If they are not killed then, they will be raised about six months for veal and killed in the same way. (I'd also like to note that there is a certain timeframe, which differs depending on the type of animal, after birth in which babies can be killed on farm property. This can be carried out with blunt force trauma to the head, including being slammed onto the ground repeatedly. This is legal and "humane.") In both these industries, a remarkable number of female babies are also killed at this time, due to illnesses, disabilities, or simply because there are too many.

While these acts are horrendous, we can’t forget about all those left to suffer. Most of the animals in the agriculture industry become sick or deranged due to their living accommodations. While this is less of a concern on small-scale farms, let’s not forget that calf & chick culling still occurs. (And that 99% of animal products come from factory farms.) It’s simply not profitable for these farmers to keep all the babies, so they are still killed. Remember, they are killed in the billions every year. And all animals, as long as they are old enough to live their first few days, endure painful mutilations: tail docking, castration, ear clipping, tooth cutting, beak slicing, dehorning – all without pain relief. When you’re born to die, you don’t get the respect of the living.

Just a Label

An unfortunate many die before they ever reach the slaughterhouse, due to illness, disease, or, if you’ve seen Dominion, just because. Next time you go to the grocery store and see those “grass-fed,” “free-range,” “organic,” or “cage-free” labels, you know now what that really means: absolutely nothing. It’s just a way for us to feel better about killing innocent animals, usually still babies when murdered. And that’s not very appetizing, is it? At the end of the day, they all go to the slaughterhouse, or as Gary Yourofsky so aptly put it, “a house of slaughter.” So, they’ve either been massively betrayed by people that had been taking care of them their entire lives or death is a mercy, though generally a very painful and terrifying process, to finally end their suffering. Either way, both are wrong.