IF CAPITAL punishment returned tomorrow and you were condemned to death, what form of execution would fill you with most dread: the electric chair, a firing squad or hanging perhaps? Variants on all these and more are imposed on 550 million farm animals in Britain each year to supply our carnivorous appetites. But it takes research, not anthropomorphic intuition, to decide which method of slaughter causes the swiftest, least painful death. Recent research has shown just how inhumane several routine ways of killing animals really are.
In Britain, parliament is in the process of revising the regulations on the welfare of red meat animals at slaughter. A similar exercise is going on within the European Community. But neither will fully answer the criticisms of the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), the government’s own watchdog, set up by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) in 1979 to advise it on matters of welfare. Nor will the new regulations, in Britain or Europe, fully reflect the findings of recent research.
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One of the key welfare issues is what happens to the animals at the abattoir before they die. In three reports published between 1982 and 1985, the FAWC concluded that many animals are subjected to terrifying experiences in the final moments of their lives. Many are not properly stunned before they are ‘stuck’ – that is, have their throats cut.
The new British regulations should improve the current situation. In Britain, three million cattle and 1.5 million sheep slaughtered each year are stunned by the captive bolt system, which propels a bolt into the brain by compressed air or a blank cartridge. The new regulations will require that the heads of sheep, pigs and cattle stunned by a captive bolt pistol are restrained in some way, to reduce the chances that the stunning gun misses its target. They will also do away with the anthropomorphic rule that these animals should not see each other being stunned. The FAWC’s members are convinced that it is the sudden isolation from their fellows, the noise, excessive human handling and the unforgiving harshness of the metallic environment that causes animals the greatest distress at slaughter. This change will open the way for the redesign of stunning areas, which have been almost unaltered for 50 years. The Farm Animal Care Trust, which funds research on the welfare of animals farmed in nonintensive systems, is offering a prize of Pounds sterling 500 for the best ideas on what pens and head restraints should be like.
The forthcoming European directives will also require head restraints for both electrical and captive bolt stunning. They will also require abattoirs that stun pigs and sheep by electric shocks to use higher voltages. But the present proposals still do not demand that stunning be intense enough to stop the animal’s heart, as well as disrupt the brain, a requirement that many researchers would have welcomed. The EEC is also likely to ban the injection of the tenderising enzyme papain into cattle shortly before they are slaughtered. British legislators rejected a similar ban because they were not convinced that research has proved that the tissue-destroying enzyme causes the animals pain, provided that they are slaughtered within a few minutes.
Whatever the precise content of the new laws, one of the main threats to animal welfare at slaughter will continue to be inadequate enforcement. Existing legislation requires that animals must be ‘rendered insensible to pain until death supervenes’. On the everyday slaughter line, often inadequately trained personnel must assume insensibility on arbitrary grounds, such as a motionless carcass or a failure to respond to a painful prod or threatening gesture.
This has put the main focus of research on finding the quickest, least painful death for farm animals. With this in mind, researchers at the Agricultural and Food Research Council’s Food Research Institute at Langford near Bristol have tried to devise more rigorous criteria for ‘insensibility’ after stunning. Their work builds on studies of people with neurological diseases carried out by researchers at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol.
Neurologists have long established that you cannot tell whether an animal or person is conscious, asleep or anaesthetised simply by measuring the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. Such electroencephalograms (EEGs) are difficult to interpret reliably. So the researchers at Langford have turned to so-called evoked cortical responses, which disappear only at a very deep level of unconsciousness, as the test of unequivocal ‘insensibility’. The researchers place electrodes in the cortex of the animal’s brain to measure any response to flashes of light or to mild electrical pulses applied to wires under the skin of a forelimb.
Armed with these stricter criteria, Clyde Daly at Langford last year carried out a survey of nearly 2000 cattle stunned by the captive bolt system. The only cattle not stunned in this way are those destined for ritual slaughter .
Researchers at the Food Research Institute say captive bolt stunning is effective, when properly applied. But Daly found that 6.6 per cent of the cattle in his survey were ‘less than effectively’ stunned. The giveaway signs are rapid, shallow breathing and rolling of the eyes. ‘Abattoirs which on average were shooting more inaccurately had the highest incidence of poor stunning. I’m not saying the animals were conscious and feeling everything, but the depth of concussion is not as great as it could and should be,’ he says. Daly’s survey also showed that 15 per cent of abattoirs were apparently trying to save money by not using full-strength cartridges, which means the guns worked slowly. Bolt speeds of 55 metres per second or more are most effective.
Stunning with captive bolt pistols can be humane if properly done. But 13 million pigs and 90 per cent of the 14 million sheep killed each year in Britain are electrically stunned, through tongs applied to either side of the head. The FAWC has found that abattoir staff often seemed unaware of the voltage or current they should use, or how long they should apply the stunning tongs – in its surveys, times ranged from half a second to 13 seconds.
Ruth Harrison, a long-standing campaigner for animal welfare and a member of FAWC as well as founder and chair of FACT, recalls the results of several surveys of current practice in abattoirs: ‘As a general tendency, the tongs were kept on for far too short a time. A lot of animals were shackled and bled and hung without being unconscious.’ She also saw tongs intended to stun being used to immobilise restless animals: ‘Electricity applied to the body without prestunning is excruciatingly painful,’ she says. ‘Because animals can be paralysed by this, they cannot express the pain. People who do the stunning often don’t understand this.’
The new regulations in Britain and the EEC will ban the use of stunning tongs to immobilise animals, and restrict the use of electrical goads to drive animals through the slaughterhouse. But there is still continuing debate about the stunning current and voltage requirements now being proposed by the European Community.
One of the problems is that no one is certain that the changes in brain activity that stunning causes are truly anaesthetising. To try to find out, Neville Gregory and his colleagues at the Food Research Institute have studied what goes on in a sheep’s brain after it is stunned with currents typical of those in use in abattoirs. Stunning produces an electrical wave form called the epileptiform phase. This seems to be similar to the grand mal epilepsy of human experience. But what the animals feel is still unclear. In some cases, Gregory found, stunning had only transitory effects. He recorded bursts of brain responsiveness – indicating momentary flashes of awareness – as little as 9 seconds after electrical stunning. Yet the time lag between stunning and sticking is usually much longer. A survey of 10,000 sheep slaughtered at 40 British abattoirs found that an effective stun must not wear off for at least 96 seconds – to cover the longest recorded intervals between stunning and sticking.
In later experiments, Gregory and his team tried to find out whether bursts of awareness could be equated with pain. They electrically stimulated a sheep’s tooth once the sheep was stunned to look for signs of responsiveness in the brain. They found that there was indeed a period of painlessness after effective stunning, lasting for about 9 minutes.
On the strength of these results, which suggest that insufficiently stunned animals may still be aware of their environment in some way, Gregory believes the law should be rewritten to demand that an animal should be ‘insensible’ rather than merely ‘insensible to pain’. Such a change would require an amendment to the Slaughterhouses Act 1974. The government has promised to update this act, but no parliamentary time has yet been reserved for it.
Meanwhile, the researchers at the Food Research Institute say that they have found a more humane way to slaughter animals. Abattoir workers could use sufficient electrical force to stop the heart, by jolting it into rapid, uncontrolled contractions, at the same time as stunning the brain. The electrodes would be applied to the head and back, so that the electrical current crossed the heart. This would reduce the risk of the animals recovering some consciousness before being killed.
Halik Anil of the institute is now experimenting with a variety of electrical systems for stunning pigs, including high-frequency, high-voltage ones as well as the low-voltage systems in conventional use. His results suggest that 74 volts, the lowest permissible level under British law, is not enough to stun an animal effectively. He suggests a minimum of 150 volts, which would ensure a minimum current of 406 milliamps. The meat industry has long opposed the use of high voltage in the belief that it interferes with the quality of meat by retaining blood in the carcass, and so promoting bacterial growth. ‘This myth has persisted for decades,’ says Gregory. Research at Langford has shown that high voltages do not lower meat quality – in fact, stunning that leads to a cardiac arrest substantially reduces bruising – and bruising currently leads to the rejection of all or part of 50,000 carcasses a year.
Genuine concerns to the industry are that high voltages can cause other damage to the carcass, such as shattered shoulder blades in pigs, and investigations are con tinuing. It would also slow down the throughput in the abattoir, as each animal would have to be individually restrained, and greater care would be needed to avoid electrocuting the slaughterhouse staff.
One way out of the voltage dilemma is to switch to an entirely different stunning method. Gas chambers filled with carbon dioxide are already commonplace on the Continent and may soon be so in Britain. This approach avoids the risk of damaging the carcass. But losing consciousness through this sort of suffocation may not be a painless route to death. ‘I used to be very much a proponent of CO2 stunning,’ says Harrison. But a visit to a mink farm in Denmark made her reconsider. There, mink were stunned by placing them in individual compartments in a circular apparatus which revolved each in turn through a well of gas. ‘I was perturbed by the state of a rotary stunner after use. It smelled awful, partly from urine and partly from the anal gland which minks use when they are distressed.’
Harrison decided to subject herself to a similar treatment by sniffing different concentrations of the gas. She found a concentration of between 30 and 35 per cent CO2 ‘manageable’ but at the 70 per cent used in pig stunners, she found herself fighting for breath in the pungent gas. ‘Pigs are very like us physiologically and I thought it was terrifying.’ She has now become concerned about the routine use of CO2 for stunning day-old chicks, which she once condoned: ‘In my opinion, it is no better than the old practice of filling up a dustbin with them and letting them suffocate.’
Gregory believes that anoxia – or lack of oxygen – is a better way to stun animals, and perhaps particularly chickens. People who have experienced anoxia say it is rather like being drunk. But although it may be quite a pleasant way to lose consciousness, no one has yet used it as a stunning method because it is even less likely than CO2 to lead to instant insensibility as demanded by law. Nevertheless, Gregory believes anoxia may cause chickens far less suffering than electrical stunning and may also eliminate much of the stress that the birds experience before slaughter.
At the moment, chickens to be slaughtered – 480 million of them each year – are removed from their travelling crates by hand and hung upside down by their legs from a shackle. Thus suspended, they pass along the production line until their heads dip into an electrically charged water bath. Then they have their throats cut, either by machine or by hand. Most machines work by cutting the birds’ necks from the back, although the essential blood vessels are at the front, and so many birds probably enter the scalding tank while still alive and possibly still aware.
Chickens hurtle to their deaths through this process at a speed that scarcely allows time for staff, adequately trained or otherwise, to check whether stunning has rendered them ‘insensible’. In its report on poultry, the FAWC comments that the speed and scale of the operations mean that birds are treated unsympathetically or even with indifference.
For turkeys, the situation is even worse. Their long wings often hang below their heads, dipping into the water bath before their heads. So the birds experience a very painful electrical shock before they are stunned. A survey carried out by the Food Research Institute showed this happened to almost half of the birds – at one plant it happened to as many as 87 per cent.
Now the institute, assisted by the agriculture ministry and the British Oxygen Company, is researching the possibilities of an anoxia stunning system. The inert gas argon is pumped into gas chambers containing the birds, displacing the air and lowering levels of oxygen in the air from about 20 to 2 per cent. This procedure does not seem to cause the sense of suffocation induced by carbon dioxide, and the birds show fewer signs of gasping for breath. At 2 per cent oxygen, the cortical responses die out in about 27 seconds.
From a welfare point of view, the advantages of this are overwhelming. Birds arriving for slaughter might not even have to be unloaded from their transport crates and could be spared the shackle and electric bath altogether. There are potential economic advantages too. After losing consciousness from anoxia, birds often go into violent convulsions, which are distressing to anyone not familiar with slaughter, but are painless. These convulsions accelerate the acidification of the muscle and lead to slightly more tender meat. Carcasses could then be chilled straightaway without any danger of the meat turning tough.
But the welfare of farm animals depends on more than finding the ideal, painless kill for each species. Staff must be fully trained and supervised, and be able to work in conditions that allow them to kill animals humanely.
A recent report from the FAWC again spells out the problems. Many staff have little understanding of the animals they are handling. To make matters worse, ‘considerable economic problems’ in the slaughter industry leads to enormous pressure for high throughputs, with workers often paid by piece rate.
Harrison comments: ‘However gentle people are when they start working in a slaughterhouse, the edges are soon worn off. You cannot be a tender person in a slaughterhouse and there is a philosophy that the sooner the job is over the better.’
Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that three things most influenced the job satisfaction of abattoir workers: levels of humidity, speed of the production line and relations with colleagues and supervisors. According to Geert Gerats, now at the Commodity Board for Livestock and Meat at The Hague, workers who had to deal with more than 300 carcasses an hour, doing tasks that took less than 10 or 12 seconds on each, were the most dissatisfied. Turnover of staff, at 8 to 15 per cent a year, is high, Gerats says.
John Pratt, chief veterinary officer of the Meat and Livestock Commission, which represents the industry in Britain, says he would welcome legislation to limit the number of animals per hour that pass through a slaughterhouse. Normal throughput in an abattoir dealing with sheep and pigs is now about 200 animals an hour, but it can rise to 400. ‘After 300 an hour, things get frenetic. If you want to talk to anyone at that speed, they have to stop the line to answer you,’ Pratt says.
Another problem is the lack of supervision. Despite the FAWC’s recommendations, the new regulations will not require each slaughterhouse to designate an official in charge of welfare. The ministry says that this role will eventually be filled by the official veterinary surgeon, but many welfare organisations question whether vets employed by the local authority can be sufficiently independent to guarantee the welfare of animals.
At the moment, only a tenth of the abattoirs in Britain are licensed by the EEC and only these have a vet in attendance. Welfare and hygiene are meant to be monitored by the State Veterinary Service, but the agriculture ministry has allowed the number of its staff to fall by almost a third since 1979.
British abbatoirs face closure
Britain’s meat industry estimates that at least half of the nation’s 992 abattoirs will close after 1992 because they will fail to reach stringent new licensing standards laid down by the European Commission. Pessimistic forecasts put the figure as high as three-quarters.
Pratt says that the abattoirs that fail to achieve European standards will fail mainly on the grounds of structural shortcomings. Brussels demands high standards of drainage, discrete areas for each procedure and a clear-cut movement of production in one direction through the slaughterhouse with no crossover between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ stages, as well as nonslip and easily disinfected surfaces. But the large-scale closure of abattoirs in Britain does not mean that things will get better for British livestock. For a high proportion of farm animals, the last and most stressful journey of their lives will be far longer, and the abattoirs that remain may be under even greater pressure to keep throughput high. With ever faster production lines, it seems likely that more and more animals will face the slaughterer’s knife in a semiconscious state.
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THE PRIVILEGE OF SLAUGHTER BY RITUAL
CATTLE about to be killed in accordance with the dictates of religious slaughter are first herded into casting pens, then bodily rotated onto their backs to expose their necks for an unanaesthetised knife cut. Merely being upside down is excruciatingly painful for such a large ruminant, because its lungs are crushed by the weight of its huge, complex digestive tract. These casting pens are to be banned two years after the new national regulations on slaughter take effect. From then on, a MAFF-approved upright pen must be used.
EEC regulations will also require that all meat killed by religious slaughter be identified as such to the consumer.
But to the dismay of the animal welfare lobby, both British and European legislators stopped short of ending the privilege of religious slaughtermen to kill without stunning the animal first. For Shechita slaughter, Jewish doctrine states that an animal must be healthy and uninjured – and stunning is classed as injury – at the time of death. Some Muslim leaders accept stunning, so long as the slaughterer is then allowed to cut the animal’s throat while reciting the prescribed Allah Akbar.
In its report on religious slaughter, the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) noted that the ‘single transverse’ cut demanded by Jewish law in practice means a backwards and forwards stroke: ‘On one occasion we observed a Jewish slaughterman make as many as seven backwards and forwards strokes with the knife, using a sawing action which was clearly in contravention of the Shochet’s training.’ Ruth Harrison of FAWC says she is not satisfied that the new legal requirement for ‘an uninterrupted movement of the knife’ will eliminate such action.
The FAWC observers also found that the demand for totally healthy birds can lead to rejected poultry being left overnight in transport crates without food and water. Individual treatment, advanced as an advantage of religious slaughter, often meant in practice ‘callous and careless’ handling with birds being thrown or rammed into bleeding cones after their throats were cut.
For researchers, the debate over religious slaughter turns on the speed of death for the animal. Advocates of Shechita claim that it is more humane than stunning as practised under gentile rules. Leon Gerlis, a cardiac pathologist, argues: ‘Electric stunning as carried out in this country at the present time is clearly a farce. The vast majority of animals on which this barbaric practice is inflicted are probably just paralysed, but remain fully conscious of the electric shock in addition to the subsequent shackling, hoisting and sticking.’
Researchers at the Food Research Institute at Langford near Bristol showed that in cattle brain activity sometimes persisted for some time after Shechita. Neville Gregory and his colleagues measured brain activity by recording responses in the cortex to flashes of light or electrical impulses. Responses died out between 20 and 126 seconds after the animal’s throat was cut, whereas after captive bolt stunning they disappeared immediately and irreversibly. One of the problems with ritual slaughter, Gregory says, is that sometimes the carotid arteries balloon up within 10 seconds of being cut, causing an increase in blood flow to the brain, and so maintaining its activity.
According to Gregory, more research would be needed to settle whether this variability in brain response indicates episodes of consciousness. But having taken the political decision not to demand stunning for religious slaughter, MAFF will not now fund research on this issue.
Annabelle Birchall is a freelance writer based in Sussex.