If Gandhi is right, we have an obligation to know what happens to animals when they are killed to feed us, and to let that knowledge inform our actions. These feelings matter to the animal and they should matter to us. Animal behavior scientists have proven unequivocally that animals are not machines but sentient beings that experience feelings of pain, fear, anxiety, and despair.

Mohandas Gandhi said that a nation’s moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals. The media attention was on food safety, not the welfare of the animals, but for a brief moment the veil had been lifted on the brutality of the process that turns living creatures into meat.Īnd why should anyone want to inquire further? Can’t we just assume that the same industry that maximizes profits by confinement so extreme that chickens can’t flap their wings and pigs are prevented from turning around will also routinely mistreat animals at slaughter? What sense is there in focusing on the final hours of animals whose entire short lives are often a study in misery? But every now and then that reality flashes briefly across the public consciousness, as it did during last year’s news stories about mad cow disease, when television viewers glimpsed a sick cow being dragged along the ground to a slaughterhouse.

Even readers of books and articles about conditions in factory farms may not be aware of what happens to animals at slaughter. Most Americans, largely disconnected from their food supply, assume these animals met a painless end, if they think about it at all. TO SATISFY THE PUBLIC’S ever-growing appetite for meat, slaughterhouses in the United States killed ten billion animals last year.

Slaughterhouse by Gail A. Eisnitz