To think bad of people that work in slaughterhouses??

[RiverMeadow]

I was reading something earlier and it got me thinking about the members of staff who actually work in slaughterhouses and who see these things first hand.

Regardless of whether you eat meat or not we're all still human and I'd assume it's a job that's a very hard one emotionally... or am I wrong?? Do the colleagues just look at it like a job and not physically killing animals? It would break my heart 😭

YABU. Someone's got to do it.

YANBU because it’s a vile way to earn money. But then, I don’t eat meat and that’s specifically because when I was at uni my flat mate was studying environmental health and showed me stuff on abattoirs that knocked me sick. I think having seen all that, I will never ever be persuaded that it’s not a vile job. If others disagree with me, if they’ve not seen what I saw I’m hearing none of it!

I used to work in the food industry and that involved slaughterhouse visits, whoever said chickens are the worst was correct. It is awful they way they are hatched, reared and killed.

Anyway I’m now vegan.

I think to work doing that job day to day you have to quickly become very desensitised to it, the people I saw doing it didn’t speak or treat the animals very nice. Is it a way of coping? I assume most people couldn’t stomach the job at all.

It's a position of great privilege to wonder how and why people do a certain job, especially one as unpleasant and poorly paid as a jon in slaughterhouse.
People need to work and often don't have a great deal of options open to them.

@countchocula

I really hope you're a strict vegetarian or vegan OP. Would be next level idiotic to judge the person who does your dirty work for you.

What’s your definition of a “strict” vegetarian?

Yesterday 21:54 Wewearpinkonwednesdays
Well apparently, having children causes the biggest Carbone footprint. So if your that worried about the planet, and you really were doing everything you could to save it, you would have chose not to have children.

Mmmmn yes I thought that might be what you were alluding to. Well with my one child, I wouldn’t say I am over populating. If you wish to be pedantic , I can rephrase to future generations. Sadly another deflection from what is actually an important point that the consumption of meat is the major cause of climate change.

You think bad of people having a job? How odd
I have respect for them, it wouldnt be easy. They allow me to have meat on my plate that i enjoy.
Just like i respect say plumbers, aint no way im digging round in human waste, simply eww but i still use a toilet

And yes, I know animals are killed as a result of crop production. As I indicated further up the thread, animal agriculture requires 80% of The world’s agricultural land but provides only 20% of its calories. A worldwide switch to veganism could reduce agricultural land use by up to 76%, which would in turn massively reduce both the numbers of animals killed in crop production, and the animals killed because their habitats are destroyed (not to mention those currently at risk due to climate change). The best way to reduce the harm caused to animals by crop farming is, therefore, to go vegan.

This isn't really very accurate. It's not the animal production driving the crops, it's the industrial crop production crops driving the animal production. Soy meal fed to livestock is a by-product of soy production for oil, for example. Or in the US, corn is grown in excess because of the way it is subsidised, beef feed lots became a way to add value to the corn glut.

There has been at least one major attempt to model diets that are most efficient from a food production perspective - veganism didn't come out on top, or even really near the top.

It's a position of great privilege to wonder how and why people do a certain job

Well said! Easy to judge when you are not in the position of having to take what you can to pay the bills.

Well said @HermioneWeasley .

To those of you who have heard, or seen, footage of what happens in slaughterhouses, you do realise that this is sometimes not actually truthful? I'm thinking of a campaign against sheep shearing from a few years ago as an example. It showed a completely false image of how a sheep is shorn, and yet so many people were taken in by it. Slaughterhouses are highly regulated these days, and yes, there can be cruelty from some, but it is in the minority. I also wonder how many of you who won't eat meat use leather goods. .

To those of you insisting that the entire world should become vegan - it's never going to happen so you might as well give up and throw yourself into something that you can actually change!

The practice of killing an animal to use its body is inherently, unavoidably inhumane.

You do realise that animals kill and eat other animals? As much as you might like to think the natural world is a wonderful place for animals, birds etc it can actually be very brutal.

Or in the US, corn is grown in excess because of the way it is subsidised, beef feed lots became a way to add value to the corn glut

I think there is an obvious solution to that rather than saying we have to have animals in feed lots...

'You do realise that animals kill and eat other animals? As much as you might like to think the natural world is a wonderful place for animals, birds etc it can actually be very brutal.'

Yes but as I said earlier they don't have the option of popping to Tescos and buying alternatives.

The natural world may well be brutal, but nothing so brutal as carting terrified animals crammed into wagons to slaughterhouses to be then shoved in queues to be brutally killed.

When people say it's all humane have they actually seen the lorries with poor animals rammed in? It's just an awful process from start to finish.

Mmmmn yes I thought that might be what you were alluding to. Well with my one child, I wouldn’t say I am over populating. If you wish to be pedantic , I can rephrase to future generations. Sadly another deflection from what is actually an important point that the consumption of meat is the major cause of climate change.

Ah so once again being selective. So you can preach to people about the effects of meat consumption on the planet, but you want to close your eyes to the fact that having children is actually worse. 🤔

I wonder, if everyone went vegan over night, what would happen to all the live stock, farmers, factory workers involved in meat production? Do we just set all the animals free? Put all those thousands of people on benefits?

You do realise that animals kill and eat other animals? As much as you might like to think the natural world is a wonderful place for animals, birds etc it can actually be very brutal.

Ah yes, the ‘natural world’ fallacy.

When lions start intensively rearing genetically manipulated antelope in farms and consuming wildly in excess of their calorific requirements thanks to great and ease of availability, I’ll accept that the way humans consume meat is ‘natural’.

To compare yourself to an obligate carnivore who has no choice but to kill only as much meat as it needs to survive is clearly nonsensical.

I have seen an antelope killed by a lion. It wasn’t pretty, or clean, or quick. But it was infinitely less distressing, inhumane, and morally abhorrent than footage I have seen from slaughterhouses in this country.

This isn't really very accurate. It's not the animal production driving the crops, it's the industrial crop production crops driving the animal production. Soy meal fed to livestock is a by-product of soy production for oil, for example.

This is not accurate. 85% of soy is crushed into meal and oil; oil makes up only 11-18% of soy beans, depending on the variety. 98% of the remaining meal is used for animal feed, and ultimately 70-75% of the world’s soybean crop is fed directly to livestock.

Sources:

www.oilseedandgrain.com/soy-facts

www.ucsusa.org/resources/soybeans

sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/dairy-cows-livestock-behind-growth-soya-south-america/

www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/why-tofu-consumption-is-not-responsible-for-soy-related-deforestation/

I wonder, if everyone went vegan over night, what would happen to all the live stock, farmers, factory workers involved in meat production? Do we just set all the animals free? Put all those thousands of people on benefits?

The world isn’t going to go vegan overnight. So let’s imagine instead that it happens over the next 50 years.

As demand for meat decreases, fewer animals will be bred for meat / milk / wool etc. to satisfy the reduced demand until eventually we aren’t breeding any animals for human use / consumption any more.

Farmers, slaughterhouse workers and factory workers involved in meat processing will lost their jobs as farms and factories close. They will require to diversify, either into other types of farming or into entirely different industries. It is always a difficult process when an industry no longer becomes viable - the collapse of the U.K. mining industry is evidence of this. There will therefore require to be significant government investment in both re-skilling workers who have lost their jobs in factories and farms etc, and investment in new industries to create new jobs for these workers.

'The world isn’t going to go vegan overnight. So let’s imagine instead that it happens over the next 50 years. As demand for meat decreases, fewer animals will be bred for meat / milk / wool etc. to satisfy the reduced demand until eventually we aren’t breeding any animals for human use / consumption any more.'

Exactly. It's the culture that needs to change, people thinking all there is to eat is a roast dinner on a Sunday or a burger at the pub.

Yes nothing happens overnight but hopefully as new generations influence change at some point people will become to realise the practice of industrial farming and brutal killing of harmless animals is really unacceptable and quite revolting. People are horrified at the wild life markets in china, not just because of the health risks but because it is stomach churning to see what is sold for human consumption. I hope the same will happen here with liver and onions or steak and kidney pie one day.

You can only judge if you are vegan. Otherwise you are paying for this whole industry’s existence.
Being vegetarian and consuming dairy and eggs results in the killing of male calves usually soon after birth, female dairy cows go to slaughter when milk production slows. And male newly hatched chicks are put through a grinding machine alive. The rspca approved this method!
Pregnant dairy cows cut open after slaughter, and a fully formed calf falling out. Pigs being kicking and taunted, tiny lambs who just want to be close to their mothers having their throats cut.The pigs who are gassed, they scream and writhe and fight for their lives . Farmers are legally allowed to hold the legs of a tiny piglet and smash its head into concrete to dispatch them. All these animals were brought into existence by humans to be exploited and it is wrong.
It’s the huge scale mass factory farms which are literally hell on Earth for animals. They live a miserable, short life and are terrified at the time of death. And yes abuse goes on in abattoirs. There is a huge amount of footage on YouTube and Twitter.
I know there are some good farmers producing food who do care for their animals, there are also some abbatiors who do the job well, I have seen it done well. But on the whole the whole industry honestly sickens me, and I will not pay someone to harm an animal for my benefit. As far as judging an abattoir worker, the answer is yes I do. You have to be a certain type of person to do work on the kill floor. To look hundreds of distressed animals in the eyes every day, to be the one with the bolt gun or just the knife to the throat. It’s also disturbing as others have previously mentioned up thread that many abbatior workers are low skilled immigrants, people released from prison and others who are struggling and desperate. Think about it, does this paint the picture of a safe and efficient work force to you?
Because these are the people who these poor sentient creatures are coming face to face with in the final moments.

You can only judge if you are vegan

You can but it makes people very cross

When people say it's all humane have they actually seen the lorries with poor animals rammed in?

I live in NZ - I see them every day.

Yes but as I said earlier they don't have the option of popping to Tescos and buying alternatives.

Quite right, but even if they could do you imagine they would? For crying out loud, they are carnivores, meat is what they eat, and they kill to eat. Even in our own society cats for instance have to eat meat, they can't survive without it. I rarely eat meat myself but am not naive enough to believe the entire world population is ever going to give up eating it - anyone who thinks that is seriously deluded.

It is completely natural for wild animals to catch and eat their prey. This is as it should be, exactly as nature intended. There is no issue here at all.
You can not compare this to the mega farms of suffering that humans have created to benefit themselves.

'For crying out loud, they are carnivores, meat is what they eat, and they kill to eat. Even in our own society cats for instance have to eat meat, they can't survive without it. I rarely eat meat myself but am not naive enough to believe the entire world population is ever going to give up eating it - anyone who thinks that is seriously deluded.'

There's no need to 'cry out loud'. We aren't animals, do you compare any other human behaviour to cats and say well if they do it why can't we?

We need protien in our diets, we are intelligent enough to find other means rather than rely on the suffering of animals on a massive scale. Fine if you don't mind animal cruelty just don't pretend it isn't exactly that.