Witnessing the Killing of Animals

Nevertheless, we encountered a couple of ex-slaughterhouse workers who later became vegetarians, so not everyone is able to habituate to the daily carnage. Given the emotional impact of visiting a slaughterhouse, it seems likely that many people would become vegetarian if animals were killed and processed in supermarket parking lots instead of behind closed doors in remote country areas. For some people, however, witnessing the slaughter of animals is not necessary; merely the sight of animals being transported to slaughters common experience in rural areas - is the final straw. One respondent, an English Rastafarian, had already taken the first tentative steps toward giving up meat when he had an unsettling experience. As he said, "During a car ride following a cattle truck, a cow looked straight into my eyes, and I was certain it knew that it was going to its death." After that, he became a vegetarian.
Two individuals in our sample were influenced by the killing of companion animals. One man, a university student, worked for a time as a veterinarian's assistant and had the unpleasant duty of euthanizing animals. Similarly, a woman who managed an animal shelter became concerned about the "massive killing of healthy pets and ex-pets." For her, vegetarianism "helps to compensate for all the animals I must kill as part of my job."

A Visit to a Slaughterhouse

When the suggestion was made that I visit a slaughterhouse to observe first-hand blatant infractions upon the rights of animals, I was very skeptical. The reason for my skepticism was that I felt a slaughterhouse did not present an example of cruelty far enough removed from everyday life to be poignant or relevant in a discussion of animal rights. I felt that I should be writing on something a little more esoteric or something considered cruel or immoral, such as the clubbing to death of baby seals. I was gravely mistaken. And the fact that what goes on inside a slaughterhouse is done because of the demand the vast majority of the American public has for the flesh of other living beings makes it all the more poignant and relevant. There is no convenient escape from guilt by association for what goes on inside a slaughterhouse as there is from the case of the baby seals in the Arctic. While it is easy for most of us to refrain from purchasing the goods for which seals were slain -- thus incurring no guilt for their deaths -- most people willingly (and thoughtlessly) eat the flesh of one type of animal or another whose life has been terminated within the walls of a slaughterhouse. As I stepped from my car in the parking lot of the packing plant, the combination of sounds and smells emanating from the corrugated metal structure made me question whether or not this was something I really wanted to go through with.The first thing to hit my senses was the sound of cattle -- not the pleas- ant bucolic mooing one might hear on a stroll down a country lane next to a small farm, but a rapid, frantic mooing. It was the kind of mooing I heard during a weekend stay at my uncle's dairy farm when one of the cows was attacked by stray dogs.