E-MANCE-PATION: Writer gets a job in an abattoir to witness the inconvenient truths about our treatment of animals
During his stint at Forge Farm Meats, a shipment of several hundred pigs arrived. This was worse than slaughtering sheep, because pigs can smell blood and will communicate with one another. They panic and squeal before they are stunned and killed.
SOPHIE MCBAIN: When the Financial Times’s chief features writer Henry Mance turned up at Forge Farm Meats, an abattoir about an hour outside of London, and asked for a job, he was expecting to make use of the cover story he had prepared. Instead, he didn’t even have to give his surname. He was led right away to a device called a puller, used to tear the hide and wool from a sheep carcass. He had 20 seconds to skin each sheep before he’d hold up the production line. Sometimes, if he slightly misjudged the force required to pull off any remaining wool by hand, blood would spray from the sheep’s neck stump into his face.
An abattoir does not look like the food-processing plants we are used to seeing on TV – those neat conveyor belts, the transfixingly nimble machinery and the workers in white coats and hairnets. Everything is splattered with blood, skin and guts. Shortly after arriving, Mance saw another worker accidentally cut the skin off his own knuckle, “as if opening a boiled egg”…
During Mance’s stint at Forge Farm Meats, a shipment of several hundred pigs arrived. This was worse than slaughtering sheep, because pigs can smell blood and will communicate with one another. They panic and squeal before they are stunned and killed.
Later, Mance worked at a pig farm with an RSPCA gold rating, meaning it adhered to the industry’s best welfare practices. One of his jobs was to retrieve “overlays”, the piglets that are killed when their mothers, bred to be three times bigger than sows in the Middle Ages, accidentally lie on top of them. Alive, piglets are “roughly the size of human babies, with a similar skin tone and warmth”, Mance writes, but the dead ones he fishes out of the straw have turned “grey and taut”.
Our attitude towards meat reveals the limits and contradictions of our professed love for animals, Mance argues in How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World, his first book. On the one hand, the proliferation on social media of cute animal videos and the bond we form with our pets suggest that we love animals, or at least some animals, and recognise their sentience and individual worth. On the other hand, we are often cruel to them – supporting inhumane agriculture, keeping them caged in zoos, depriving them of their natural habitats.
Even our affection for our pets represents a twisted, unequal kind of love, one that has fuelled an industry of monstrously inhumane puppy farms and designer breeds that are so unhealthy many dogs live in pain or suffer breathing difficulties and other major health problems. We are often blind, sometimes wilfully, to the consequences of our actions, and of our love…
Mance was vegetarian before his book research took him inside abattoirs and farms and on hunting and fishing trips. He’s now vegan: the dairy industry, he discovered, is as cruel as beef farming. Dairy cows are separated from their calves after 24 hours, and often bellow for days for their young. Some of these calves are killed immediately; others are slaughtered later for meat. The cows are milked so much that many suffer from an excruciating, sometimes fatal condition called mastitis, in which the udder becomes inflamed.
And what about eggs? Well, even free-range hens are bred to be so heavy that 86 per cent have fractured keel bones, and they are so stressed they often attack and smother one another. Virtually all male chicks are culled almost immediately after birth, and laying hens are culled after 17 months…
And what about fish? We tend to feel less affinity with cold-eyed, impassive sea creatures, but scientists are learning that fish too can feel pain and show signs of higher intelligence and self awareness: cleaner wrasse, for example, can recognise themselves in the mirror. And yet when they are trawled up from the depths of the sea many are crushed on the way up, or else suffocate for hours on deck…
Unlike some of the most radical animal rights activists, Mance does not oppose using animal tissue to save human lives, and he thinks it’s “simplistic” to argue that killing animals is intrinsically wrong. Conservationists, for instance, are concerned with animal welfare, but may think culls are required to rebalance an ecosystem. Mance acknowledges there are no simple ethical answers.
Nature can be harsh and cruel, so to what extent should humans feel obliged to intervene to prevent the suffering of wild animals? He speaks to the philosopher David Pearce, who believes we should learn to gene edit animals to turn carnivores into herbivores. This sounds insane, but Pearce thinks you should put forward “crazy ideas” to make it easier for others to voice theirs…
The uplifting message of Mance’s book is that the individual decisions we make can have an impact, that individual action is often a precursor to collective change… I truly believe that in years to come we’ll look back in horror at our barbarism, at how callous we were to creatures with minds not so different from our own. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: