SLAUGHTER IS NOT A SPECTACLE

Ellie Harrison’s description of the slaughtermen’s gentle killing of the beast and bird (October issue) is nothing short of wearing rose-tinted glasses. Slaughterhouses smell of death and blood and animals lining up for death are stressed.

I farmed for many years, running a suckler herd and horse-breeding enterprise. I experienced life and death. Calving wasn’t always successful and calves were lost. Cows too old to breed again have to go to slaughter. We could never do that so had them seen to on the farm. A mobile slaughterman used to come and set up his race and van where the animal would go inside to be killed. Less stress, no smell of blood and no waiting.

The killing of chickens I’m not familiar with, but it sounds horrendous, if one has to put their feet into hooks first. Poor little beggars. As for the male chicks – “gently move them into a grinder” – I would think that “gently” would not be the appropriate word. “The bolt-gun operators who deftly dab the head of a cow between its ears and gently depress the trigger”;

which slaughterhouse was this taken from? There is no time for gentle. That’s also not the end of it as the animal has to have its throat cut to bleed out.

As for letting adults and children visit slaughterhouses, this is not the sort of thing anyone wants to watch. Even the most hardened farmers can find a tear in their eye when a favourite cow or horse has to go to meet their maker.

We do eat too much meat. As Ellie rightly says, in the days of yore, killing animals was to feed families and a village, and only for need. Now it’s gone too far.

Bless all animals that go into slaughterhouses after stressful journeys in wagons, taken from farms where they have lived their lives, to market where they are poked and prodded all day, to stand and wait for the killer’s knife. Kay Millward, Mold, Flintshire, North Wales