How is meat slaughtered in usa

Every day, people slaughter an incomprehensible number of chickens, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, goats, and cows for food. According to one estimate, million land animals are slaughtered around the world every single day.

In places like the US, animals are slaughtered in buildings that go by many different names. Meatpacking plants. Often erected beyond city limits—out of sight and out of mind—these facilities expedite the deaths of trillions of land and sea creatures each year. Either herded onto crowded trucks or stuffed into tiny cages, the animals are driven to the grisly warehouses where they will breathe their last breath.

The journey can be long, stretching across vast distances and spanning many days. Along the way, the animals might suffer from frigid cold or baking heat, huddling together for warmth against the windchill or sweltering in the humidity.

They might go without food or water, their bellies empty and their throats parched. In the US alone, 4 million chickens, , pigs, and 29, cattle die in transport every year. Billions of animals each year suffer a stunning blow to the head, electrocution, or gassing. Too many times, the animals are awake, alert, and panicked as they go to their deaths. Slaughterhouse workers use an array of methods to stun the animals, but no method is fool-proof.

Far from it. Many slaughterhouses use firearms to stun gentle animals like cows. Even without a bullet, the result is the same: cow after cow is knocked unconscious by a decisive shot to the head. Unfortunately, not all cattle fall senseless. As many as While cows suffer fractured skulls, birds like chickens and turkeys are forced to endure electrified baths. Shackled upside down in bone-breaking metal stirrups , the birds are lowered into waters carrying an electricity current on a fast-moving assembly line.

While the electrical currents are meant to stun the birds, many survive electrocution and remain conscious—seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling—as their throats are slit. Meatpacking plants often use high concentrations of gas to knock highly sensitive and intelligent animals like pigs unconscious. Herded into metal cages and lowered into sealed chambers , the pigs thrash against the cold bars, trying desperately to escape as toxic plumes of carbon dioxide fill the air.

Every gasp and heave draws the poisonous gas deeper into their bodies. As the acrid fumes sear their throat and lungs, they panic. With nowhere to hide, they writhe in agony for up to a full minute—and sometimes longer—until they lose consciousness and fall to the floor. If the chamber is overloaded, or if the animals are left within long after the gas dissipates, the pigs sometimes regain consciousness and face slaughter in full possession of their senses.

As this heartrending video depicts, not all pigs will go to their deaths quietly. Stunning is only a prelude to the horrors of slaughter. Are big slaughterhouses as bad as we imagine? Should we be paying as much attention to how animals die as to how they live? Even under the best circumstances, just how humane can slaughter ever be? Slaughter is an issue as personal as it is philosophic as it is systematic. She could relate to cows and, she said, think like them. In her book Animals in Translation , Grandin explains that going through life as an autistic person — feeling anxious and threatened by unfamiliar surroundings — is not unlike what cows feel when passing through handling facilities.

She found that cattle were being stressed-out unnecessarily by their handlers. Cattle were slipping and falling and getting hurt. Then in , ground beef served at Jack in the Box killed four children in an E. Today, Dr. Grandin is a best-selling author, and her Animal Welfare Audit is the standard in the industry. Half of the cattle in the United States and Canada are now handled by equipment Grandin designed. No more than 1 percent falling. No more than 3 percent mooing.

No more than 25 percent being hit with an electric prod. Still, she stresses, without constant management and supervision, people backslide. New Yorkers, she explains, are the people least likely to understand what really happens on your farm. In other words, Grandin is describing my general type — suburban raised, urban dwelling, mechanically unskilled — rather pointedly.

Now for full disclosure: I am far from dispassionate toward cows. When I was 23, I spent a few days on a free-range organic farm in Australia, at which point I resolved to someday buy a cow and name her Jenny. At the end of a mile, five-hour drive from San Francisco and at the very end of a long gravel road, I said a polite hello to the cows that stood silently welcoming us to Prather Ranch.

Early the next snowy morning, we enter a compact room in the Prather slaughterhouse. All the available space is taken up by one hanging cow being sliced, another hanging cow being skinned and a third, just-stunned cow hanging and being cut open while 5 gallons of blood gush from its body a few feet away from me. Moments ago, we heard this very cow mooing from the knock box on the other side of the wall.

Grandin — whom the Rickerts have met, and who sits on the Scientific Committee behind the nonprofit Certified Humane label — considers this a sign of distress. Mary says that Grandin once told her Prather cows might moo because they smell blood and get hip to the scheme.

The next cow, the cow I watch die, is quiet. It is black. It comes casually down a walkway. Scott Towne, the guy in charge of the killing, hits it with a CASH Knocker, a blank shell shooting from a metal apparatus at the end of the long, wooden-handled device and into the front of the head above the eyes, denting the skull but not penetrating its brain, rendering the animal insensible.

Its neck is lax and its mouth open, easy as a child asleep at the dinner table, or a businessman asleep on a plane. Whether or not farmers should torture animals, or keep them in disgusting and overcrowded and shit-filled conditions, or murder them slowly, are not even questions. For those who kill animals for a living, making peace with those imperfections is a daily affair. He says that that can happen anywhere, even when a small farm hires him to kill one cow in a field.

At Prather, it happens about twice each slaughter day. I rented space on a farm, raised them in open pens but not on pasture , fed them quality grains no corn or soy and whatever grew on the farm they could eat apples, vegetables.

The butchering process had me fascinated. For me, a butcher with a mobile unit came to the farm, put the animal down, and took it back to their shop and turned it into cuts I want. Your meat dies — it has to if you want to eat it. Is it pretty? Probably not to the average person. Many of you hear about terrible conditions and a stressful end of life for all the animals that enter a slaughter facility. Popular food writers like Michael Pollan and Dr.

Aysha Akhtar have written about slaughterhouses and animal rights activists have created extremely biased documentaries about them. Not all of the claims and portrayal that the media and activists show is entirely true.

In fact, most of what you read, when you really pay attention, is written to push their own agendas. That leads me to say: The slaughter process is a topic in animal agriculture that needs to be clarified. In the U.