I'm not a vegetarian, but.....

The other day I had a confluence of news stories that got me thinking about the role meat has in our society. Now I should clarify that I am really not a vegetarian, or vegan, and I don't have a problem with the principle of eating animal products. But you see, there is that word, the principle of eating animal products. "What", I wondered, "is the reality?".

I should mention the news stories that got me thinking about this; the first is an article I saw in the Independent where Michael Mansfield argues that humans should abolish eating meat. This got me thinking of a TV show I once saw which had one of our many celebrity TV chefs in an abattoir looking distinctly uncomfortable with the situation their producer had landed them in. I then recalled the look on the face of the abattoir worker who was with the chef - I remember thinking how unwell he looked. Then, while driving home from work the next day, I heard on a radio panel show that humans consume 52 billion chickens a year. 52 billion! The presenter of the panel show laughed...so did I, both of us quite nervously. I don't think dying chickens are funny - perhaps I (and the presenter) felt that this statistic was telling us something rather big about ourselves and we couldn't really get our heads around it and dealt with it by using a childish giggle. That is what convinced me to have a closer look at this issue.

On researching this, I have seen three angles which consistently come up when talking about human consumption of meat:

1. The health angle
2. The animal welfare angle
3. The sustainability angle

Anyone who has a read of Michael Mansfield's article for instance, will see that the thrust of his argument is coming from the animal welfare angle. Now I am not really interested in rehearsing these here as there are plenty of other people out there doing that - I wanted to have a look at this from another angle. Is it possible to contemplate what meat consumption is doing to our society in a more measured, yet more human way? I thought back to the abattoir worker I saw on TV, and reflected on the vast numbers of animals who meet their end in these institutions. We can't ask the animals how they feel, but how do humans feel doing this work?

I came across an interesting publication which has allowed me to look at this in this way: A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress through Legal Reform, by Jennifer Dillard (see below for full citation). There are a number of interesting findings, but two key themes emerged for me. The first is the connection between slaughterhouse work and violence. There are plenty of stories of workers, either under instruction or by their own volition, ripping off the heads of chickens and throwing around dying birds 'for fun', actions that in any other context would surely have the perpetrator being examined by men in white coats very quickly. In fact, the report states that while the connection between 'general' animal abuse and violent crime has been well documented, the link between what the report calls 'institutional' animal abuse and violence has not received as much academic attention. It describes, however, a study which demonstrated that US counties with slaugtherhouses have: "higher arrest levels for sex offences and more frequent reports of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson". It also found that the presence of slaughterhouses had a higher effect on crime levels than the presence of any other industry.

On an individual level, the report found that the impact of working in a slaughterhouse gave rise to measurable psychological harm in the individuals involved. They were found to be exhibiting signs of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress, a form of post traumatic stress disorder which results from being an active participant in an event which would cause the victim to have post traumatic stress disorder. The most intriguing trait of this disorder displayed by slaughterhouse workers is that of 'doubling', which is usually used to describe the behaviour of executioners, soldiers and Nazi doctors. Basically, doubling is when an individual 'splits' their character into two, a situation which allows them to switch between being a normal human outside of work, but then switching back to another character capable of contributing to the gruesome requirements of their work. Slaughterhouse workers clearly manifest this trait, which is aptly encapsulated by this quote from one of them:

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where the hogs are killed] for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, God, that really isn’t a bad- looking animal. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them—beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.

I was struck by how you had to look for situations experienced by executioners and soldiers to explain the mindset brought about by working in this environment.

I realise that this is an American study which specifically deals with the situation in the US - I couldn't readily find similar studies specifically about this from the UK or the EU. I should note however, that a quick google search of "abattoir animal abuse uk" will give you the unpleasant sense that this is likely to apply here as well.

So what can this tell us about our society now and the role meat consumption plays? Well, the first thing that came to my mind when I reviewed this was the contrast with the long lived societies I recently read about. While no known society has sustained itself exclusively on plants alone, on average these long lived societies consumed far less meat (between 1% and 10% of overall diet from animal products - the exception was the Okinawans at 16%, though this was due to high levels of fish consumption which accounts for 2/3rds of this), and crucially were not, by and large, traditionally separated from the context in which that meat was obtained. For example, the Abkhasians would very occasionally slaughter an animal, but this would be from a herd kept by the community (Robbins 2006). The very low amount of meat consumed meant that large quantities of animals are not killed in a single episode, and communities can be selective in how and which animal they choose. In fact, these societies traditionally saw all of the food they consumed grow in front of them, always understanding the impact their eating decisions have on the land and the animals they raise. I can't but contrast this with how we live now in the West, where I would say the food we eat is decontextualised for the vast majority of us, in particular the meat products, with one group of people mass breeding, another mass killing and another mass consuming.

My conclusion upon reviewing this is that these slaughterhouse workers shouldn't really be doing this to animals. I am not making a judgement here about the merits of consuming animal products. I am just stating that, given the clear suffering this type of work inflicts on those who make their living from it, and to those around them, they shouldn't really be doing it - it would seem to force them to think and act in ways which are by and large contrary to their, and by extension our, that is human, nature. Maybe this is what the panel show presenter and I were nervously giggling at: 52 billion chickens a year aren't 'produced' and consumed without some serious mechanisation. Mechanisation which you would normally associate with the production of something like pens, or hair clips. The juxtaposition of that level mechanisation with the fact that chickens are living animals just caught my unconscious mind, pointing me to the enormity of human action which that figure represents and, now that I have thought about it, I find this disturbing.

Now, I am not saying that we, as a society, want to be so devoid of empathy as to treat animals as abstracted commodities, whose suffering we will happily delegate to low paid workers, who can for their efforts suffer the psychological consequences of this gruesome work. Generally we think we like animals, just look at all of those pampered cats and dogs out there. I think that the very structure of our society - the 'market', the drive for efficiency - is making this happen whether we really want it to or not. Choices are being made with reference to principles and ideas ("profit", "consumption", "commodities", "feeding the hungry", "demand from China for a Western diet"), but not with reference to the underlying reality, part of which is so poignantly described by Dillard's report.

I am not going to pretend I have an answer to this - but perhaps we need to think more carefully about the wider ramifications of meat consumption. After all it is not only the animals who suffer, but people are suffering, sometimes being dehumanised by their actions. This can't be acceptable.

Dillard, Jennifer, A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress through Legal Reform. Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1016401

Robbins, John  2006 Healthy at 100: How you can - at any age - dramatically increase your life span and your health span