Maybe "Humane Slaughter" Is an Oxymoron

Keith Burgess-Jackson directs our attention to this article in the Washington Post on the conditions in modern slaughterhouses. Despite the passage of the (somewhat Orwellian-sounding) Humane Slaughter Act, the level of enforcement appears to vary greatly:

For example, the government took no action against a Texas beef company that was cited 22 times in 1998 for violations that included chopping hooves off live cattle. In another case, agency supervisorsfailed to take action on multiple complaints of animal cruelty at a Florida beef plant and fired an animal health technician for reporting the problems to the Humane Society. The dismissal letter sent to the technician, Tim Walker, said his dislosure had “irreparably damaged” the agency’s relations with the packing plant.

“I complained to everyone — I said, ‘Lookit, they’re skinning live cows in there,’ ” Walker said. “Always it was the same answer: ‘We know it’s true. But there’s nothing we can do about it.’”

Some blame the lack of enforcement on the “privatization” of inspection processes:

In the past three years, a new meat inspection system that shifted responsibility to industry has made it harder to catch and report cruelty problems, some federal inspectors say. Under the new system, implemented in 1998, the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter violations its inspectors find each year.

We are also offered this interesting paradox:

Industry officials say they also recognize an ethical imperative to treat animals with compassion. Science is blurring the distinction between the mental processes of humans and lower animals — discovering, for example, that even the lowly rat may dream. Americans thus are becoming more sensitive to the suffering of food animals, even as they consume increasing numbers of them.

The article goes on to detail some of the mishaps that have resulted in gruesome suffering in animals such as cattle being skinned alive and botched stunning techniques that allow conscious pigs to be dunked in tanks of hot water where they are scalded and drowned.

If these were cats and dogs instead of cows and pigs, would we be more outraged by this kind of thing? But pigs and cows are just as intelligent and sociable as cats and dogs and are just as sensitive to pain. What is the morally significant difference?