When I was nine, I watched the slaughter of poultry on a French farm. I was there as part of a language exchange programme, and watched as chickens had their necks slashed and were hung upside down until they bled to death. Not something a small child should have seen, certainly, but equally something that should not have happened full stop.
There is always a level of hypocrisy involved in meat-eaters such as myself complaining about the treatment of animals before they are killed for our consumption. Yes, I would like you to kill sheep and chickens so I can eat bits of their dead corpses, but could you do it as nicely as possible please? Eww, those lambs won’t suffer before I chew on their legs, will they? A vegetarian could rightly object – if being confronted with the true horror of killing living creatures repulses you, perhaps you should desist from eating meat.
But the story of sheep being tortured in a halal factory in Yorkshire will have sickened omnivores, vegetarians and vegans alike. Contrary to popular belief, most animals killed under halal are stunned, and they are all supposed to die quickly with a surgical cut. But the footage appears to show sheep being killed slowly with blunt knives, kicked and punched, and watching each other being killed (forbidden under halal); other films have revealed other horrific forms of mistreatment.
For the obsessive anti-Muslim brigade, the horror is all too convenient. Islamophobes display no interest in gay rights until Muslims are involved, and then suddenly drape themselves in the rainbow flag. They berate the left on Twitter for complaining about sexual harassment while supposedly “ignoring” female genital mutilation, a horrible practice inflicted by people of various faiths, which this newspaper and other campaigners have been at the forefront of combating. And so it goes in cases such as this: those with no prior interest in animal rights (and who devour meat as readily as me) suddenly seem to become paid-up members of the Animal Liberation Front.
Cases like this should really open a debate about how animals are treated in this country. I don’t believe that animals have “rights”, which is a human concept. But I believe humans have a duty to protect the welfare of animals, which is something we should all agree on, whether we eat meat or drink milk or not. The horror of battery farming chickens was finally banned in the EU in 2012 after much campaigning, but other mistreatment continues. Animal Aid – which filmed the sickening scenes – pointed out that there were no government vets as there should have been, and are rightly calling for compulsory CCTV at abattoirs.
According to vegetarian campaigners Viva!, slaughterhouses abound with cruel practices: animals are not killed properly, retaining consciousness before death, and birds die painful deaths before even getting to the abattoir.
People like me will continue to eat meat. But that doesn’t mean ignoring the misery and suffering inflicted on livestock. The distressing revelations from that Yorkshire slaughterhouse should galvanise us to do all we can to eradicate unnecessarily cruelty to animals, whoever commits it.