Hello everyone I am not a vegetarian I regulate meet and also my father's pastime is deer Hunting which had been brought up with from a very Young age. It has come to my awareness reticently that the horse scandal. As it's being known. Basically I've seen some video footage about the slaughterhouses. Seem completely inhumane. I'm very much aware that everyone is not going to simply stopped eating meat. Thought I would like to question how can we make these places more humane and regulated as it seems pretty much the law to themselves. Looking on YouTube for more footage I found fanatics which can piss me off If I'm honest. What are other peoples thoughts on the subject. Does it turn your stomach.
It does and it doesn't I'm very aware that there are some very good slaughterhouses, typically local trade only and have good relationships with their butchers. Clearly, there are some quite poor ones, more likely the industrialised ones and so on. I think quantity has something to do with the general feel and behaviour of them, and I imagine quality does too. Sadly, because of the nature of the industry, it is a job that attracts...unusual characters. Killing animals all day may end up being a coping mechanism of sorts and let's be honest, only so many people could bear to be around that. I do think it is probably an industry which really falls victim to only having bad news reported about it, though. Hand in hand with that though, it's probably an industry where the really bad is really pretty bloody bad indeed. The bad however attracts nutter activists from the other end of the spectrum which means that standards in general, I don't think really get the correct, rational attention that it should. I do think it would do the world quite a lot of good if everyone could experiencing killing their own food themselves, or at least see with their own eyes what goes in to it. Makes you a lot more grateful for a plate of meat.
I went to a slaughterhouse aged about 6-8. We had a friend who owned a small holding whom we purchased meat from, and being a curious soul I wanted to know what happened in between. My father has never been one to shy away from reality found out which slaughterhouse our friend used and we went and had a look. Saw both sheep and cows being slaughtered whilst there, and I've no objections to anything that I saw. The animals were not in any great deal of distress, and all the kills were performed cleanly. It certainly didn't put me off eating meat, that's for sure.
I would very much doubt you will find a balanced view on slaughterhouses on you tube. You will get bad ones and cases of cruelty but then we get that in the NHS. It does not mean the whole industry is bad. Our slaughterhouses are highly regulated and operate as humanely as possible. My personal opinion is that if we eat meat we owe it to the animal to have best life possible, kill it as quickly and humanely as possible and should use as much of it as possible.
I'm with you DRB - I'm not against the meat at all, but I believe we should do as much as we can to reduce the suffering and increase the happiness of our animals. Unfortunately slaughter quality can vary greatly depending on where, who and when the animal is being killed. My OH is a final-year vet, she's just finished a project about surveying stun characteristics in sheep in the field, and the variation of results is huge. Occasionally there are animals who will suffer due to improper slaughter techniques, and it comes down to the usual problems of equipment and/or personnel not operating correctly. For example, a stunner may be poorly maintained or reaching the end of its working life - we all know that old equipment can be a bit flaky, this is nothing different. On the flip side you'll find that people who've been on their feet for 8 hours doing a hard job will start to fatigue towards the end of their shift. What can we do? Increased monitoring and more rigorous equipment regulation seems the obvious answer, but it's not as easy to implement as suggest from a comfy chair.
I agree with whats been said so far. It's interesting to know how others see things. But I not shore with this being in the serious thread it might be slightly biased. With the people that might be attracted to this part off the forums.
I think you're more likely to get a more educated, balanced and unbiased opinion in the Serious forum than if it were in the General forum. As with anything in life, it depends very much on how much you are willing to spend for your meat. If you want to buy a kilo of minced beef for a stupidly cheap price from a supermarket, then frankly you have to be willing to accept that animal welfare and meat quality is going to suffer - at such a low price, throughput at the abattoir and the use of mechanically recovered meat are going to be used in preference to humane slaughtering and manual butchering. There are humane ways of slaughtering animals, from the way they are kept outside the abattoir, to the way they are lead into the slaughter pens, to the way that they are actually slaughtered - but at the end of the day, there is a real disconnect between the animals people see in the farms (or, more likely, on Countryfile) and the produce people see on the shelves. Many people just do not even consider that much of what they eat comes from a living animal, and to get it onto their plates, that animal has to be killed in some fashion.
As others have said, it just isn't possible to produce ethical meat for the price that people expect. This kind of food is being sold at the moment but it costs far too much for most of the public to buy.
To be fair if you buy British meat then it will have been kept and slaughtered to a pretty high standard, European meat to a lesser welfare standard and with the rest of the world, who knows? I get quite annoyed when people talk about Danish bacon as being something special. It's not as good as quality UK produced bacon and the pigs are kept in horrible conditions. It is unfortunate that the UK meat is more expensive because of our higher standards when the supermarkets and the majority of consumers focus solely on the price.
The problem was that meat was being imported into scotland from romania for example then being sold as scottish burgers as that was where it was sorted.
This. Also, ditto for New Zealand lamb. The British versions of either a far superior choice, but because Danish Bacon and New Zealand lamb have had decades of advertising, most people think that they're better. Think about it: how on earth can it be cheaper to produce lamb in New Zealand and ship it half way round the world than produce it here and ship it no more than a couple of hundred miles? Madness. But the problem isn't with the slaughtering and production of meat in the UK, it's meat slaughtered and processed outside the UK that's the source of the problem.
As others have said, you're not going to get a wonderfully humane slaughter and other qualities from buying a cheap load of minced beef from Tesco, and that area of meat is where the supermarkets mainly seem to compete. I agree with what Julian says, the bad productions can almost be vile at times, but everyone has to eat.
A larger portion than ever can't afford to choose on anything more than price. While I am poor it's price first, quality second and then animal treatment.
The thing about slaughterhouses is that they kill animals. You're never going to make them humane while they still kill animals but that needs to happen in order to generate the end product - the meat. So long as everything is correctly labelled, how it happens doesn't bother me.
I'm not sure about that. I see your point, but there really are some pretty abusive slaughterhouses and then some that go to great lengths to keep the animals stress free and out of pain where possible. Meat is meat, yes, but I'll always argue that there should be as less suffering as reasonably possible.
I totally disagree with that to. Meat is meat yes something has to die. I got to say I shot a few rabbits and birds and deer in my time and non of them new it was coming. Quick clean, tasty. But when the Jews where lining up for there death. That's not humane. But thay new it was coming. And so do animals there not a stupid as a lot off people think. The suffering is not only in the end it could also be threw its life. There's a big disconnection between packaged meat and the animal I think I offen for get and think of chicken as something in a packet and cow as just stake.
You don't see how tighter control, more frequent inspections and better equipment will increase the cost?
I was a veggie for four years and then broke the habit with a mixed grill from a local family owned pub which had a farm attached. My problem was never with the thought of eating meat but with the way animals get treated which as suggested here isn't always great. Now I try to buy quality meat as much as possible but I'm not rich so sometimes price considerations do come into play. Its a difficult issue as a lot of the time regional attitudes come into play and its hard to tell someone what they have always done is wrong. Look at the complete disregard for endangered species in the east for example. I hope the scandal will make people think more about where what they eat comes from and how it got to their plate, if that means we eat less meat that's no bad thing either.
