Everything You Need to Know About Animal Slaughter

WARNING: This article contains some confronting descriptions.

A cattle rancher stuns a cow before taking her life. Slaughterhouse workers herd frightened pigs into claustrophobic chambers, where they’ll suffocate and collapse. A worker at a poultry plant shackles chicken after chicken to a metal conveyor belt to be paralyzed, slashed, and boiled.

What Is Animal Slaughter?

Simply put, animal slaughter refers to the killing of animals. Enacted for food, for clothes, and—sadly—for fun, animal slaughter is a uniquely human activity. So often, it’s also uniquely cruel. To make matters worse, these innocent creatures lead lives of incredible pain before their untimely deaths, full of disease and trauma and injury.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

By demanding that corporations end their abuses on factory farms and in slaughterhouses, and electing to eat a plant-based diet, we can give animals a chance to stretch their wings, graze on fresh grass, and feel the warmth of the sun on their backs. Will you help to end the cruelty these animals face every day with one simple action.

Animal Slaughter: Facts and Statistics

While death is an inevitable part of all animals’ lives, slaughter doesn’t need to be—especially at the nauseating scale that intensive industrial agriculture demands.

The numbers alone paint a grim portrait. Every day, people slaughter an incomprehensible number of chickens, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, goats, and cows for food. According to one estimate, 200 million land animals are slaughtered around the world every single day. That’s 72 billion a year.

• In the United States alone, roughly 25 million animals are slaughtered every single day.
• An average slaughterhouse kills up to 1,100 pigs every single hour.
• Globally, animal slaughter numbers have only increased since the 1960s.

How Are Animals Slaughtered?

In places like the US, animals are slaughtered in buildings that go by many different names. Slaughterhouses. Meatpacking plants. Abattoirs. Often erected beyond city limits—out of sight and out of mind—these facilities expedite the deaths of trillions of land and sea creatures each year.

Transport

After enduring lifetimes of abuse, these animals’ final moments begin on the harrowing journey to the slaughterhouse.

Either herded onto crowded trucks or stuffed into tiny cages, the animals are driven to the grisly warehouses where they will breathe their last breath. The journey can be long, stretching across vast distances and spanning many days. Along the way, the animals might suffer from frigid cold or baking heat, huddling together for warmth against the windchill or sweltering in the humidity. They might go without food or water, their bellies empty and their throats parched. Exhausted, confused, and caught in a heightened state of stress, many won’t survive the journey. In the US alone, 4 million chickens, 726,000 pigs, and 29,000 cattle die in transport every year.

And for those who do make it, the terror is far from over.

Stunning

Billions of animals each year suffer a stunning blow to the head, electrocution, or gassing. These ‘humane' acts are meant to make slaughter less brutal—by swiftly and surely rendering the animals unconscious for their imminent killing. The hope is that these animals won’t feel any of the pain to come.

The trouble is that stunning doesn’t always work. Too many times, the animals are awake, alert, and panicked as they go to their deaths.

Slaughterhouse workers use an array of methods to stun the animals, but no method is fool-proof. Far from it.

Firearms

Many slaughterhouses use firearms to stun gentle animals like cows. Rather than using bullets, which would stay lodged in the animals’ skulls, these facilities use something called a “captive bolt.” When the trigger is pulled, a thick piece of metal drives into the brain and, just as quickly, retracts back into the barrel of the gun. Even without a bullet, the result is the same: cow after cow is knocked unconscious by a decisive shot to the head. Unfortunately, not all cattle fall senseless. As many as 12.5% of cattle in the European Union are not properly stunned and continue to kick as they go on to be hung upside down and slaughtered—all while conscious.

Electricity

While cows suffer fractured skulls, birds like chickens and turkeys are forced to endure electrified baths. Shackled upside down in bone-breaking metal stirrups, the birds are lowered into waters carrying an electricity current on a fast-moving assembly line. While the electrical currents are meant to stun the birds, many survive electrocution and remain conscious—seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling—as their throats are slit.

Gas

Meatpacking plants often use high concentrations of gas to knock highly sensitive and intelligent animals like pigs unconscious. Herded into metal cages and lowered into sealed chambers, the pigs thrash against the cold bars, trying desperately to escape as toxic plumes of carbon dioxide fill the air. Every gasp and heave draws the poisonous gas deeper into their bodies. As the acrid fumes sear their throat and lungs, they panic. With nowhere to hide, they writhe in agony for up to a full minute—and sometimes longer—until they lose consciousness and fall to the floor.

Sadly, stunning by gas doesn’t always work. If the chamber is overloaded, or if the animals are left within long after the gas dissipates, the pigs sometimes regain consciousness and face slaughter in full possession of their senses. As this heartrending video depicts, not all pigs will go to their deaths quietly.

How Are Animals Killed in Slaughterhouses?

Stunning is only a prelude to the horrors of slaughter.

Cattle

Calves, cows, and bulls, whether raised for veal, dairy, or beef, are stunned and then hoisted mid-air. Suspended upside down by their legs, their major arteries and veins are severed by knife. While a seasoned operator might deal the fatal stroke on a first attempt, less experienced workers might make several haphazard gashes. Once the throat is cut, blood gushes forth and steam rises from the wound. A bull’s horns are shorn away. His head is skinned and promptly removed, leaving the rest of his body to be scraped, flayed, and eviscerated. Slaughterhouse workers and inspectors have recalled witnessing animals that, against all odds, stayed awake through this torture.

Poultry

Killed using a cruel method called live-shackle slaughter, chickens, ducks, and turkeys fare no better than cattle. These frightened birds are held upside down and their legs forced into metal shackles. So secured, they endure electrocution before an automated blade tears their throats. Many birds survive both the stunning and the slashing, and as the blood drains from their bodies, their final moments are filled with nothing but the extreme pain of drowning in tanks of scalding water. One percent of chickens in the US meet this fate each year—an unconscionable 1,400 birds every day.

Hogs

Following their brutal round of carbon dioxide, pigs—like cattle—are slashed across the throat and left to bleed. Then—like chickens—they might be lowered into vats of hot water or resin to loosen their hair. Alternatively, their hair might be scraped with a special knife or, in some cases, a gas torch. These pigs are then sawed and split down their backbones. Their organs are removed one at a time.

Do Animals Feel Pain When They Are Slaughtered?

If the animals are stunned correctly, they might suffer little pain afterwards—or even none at all.

But that’s a big if.

Given how many animals are stunned the wrong way, leaving them conscious through the worst moments of their lives, it’s safe to say that thousands upon thousands do feel pain, not only before the slaughter but during it. When their throats are slashed. When their bodies are boiled. When their limbs are severed.

And the physical anguish of this punishment is only exacerbated by the emotional trauma that begins as soon as the animals arrive at the slaughterhouse. Too scared to move an inch unless they’re spurred by electric goads or dragged by sharp hooks. Too disoriented to make it all the way from the transport truck to the kill floor. Too distressed by the shrill screams and bleats and cries that echo around them.

Does Humane Slaughter Exist?

So-called “humane slaughter” refers to a method of killing that seeks to cause as little stress to the animal as possible. In 1958, the US passed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which “requires the proper treatment and humane handling of all food animals slaughtered.”

However, this law is riddled with problems. Most notably, it excludes all birds from its purview—a baffling oversight, given that more than 9 billion chickens, representing close to 90% of all land animals raised and killed for food, are killed for meat every year, just in the US.

Moreover, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act is easy to avoid and notoriously difficult to enforce. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the law, can’t send a representative to every slaughterhouse in the nation, ensuring that every single animal is humanely slaughtered. It just isn’t feasible.

What Constitutes a Humane Slaughter Violation?

It’s not hard to violate the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Animals must be fully stunned—unconscious and insensible to pain—before they’re shackled, strung up, and slaughtered. But so many animals remain alert to what’s happening through to the very end.

Animals must also be able to walk into the slaughterhouse on their own. Sadly, many animals are so sick or so injured, with broken bones or lame feet, that they cannot carry their own weight from the truck to the kill floor. Many workers—themselves the victims of exploitative labor practices—end up dragging these weakened animals into the meatpacking plant in spite of their “non ambulatory” condition.