Part 4

And Mr. R. O. P. Paddison (one of the foremost workers in the cause of humane slaughtering) thus describes the method adopted in most of our bacon factories:

“First the animals are hung up alive head downwards by a chain fastened to a hind foot, and then they are stuck and bleed to death. The work is done quickly in a collective sense—at the rate possibly of 100 to 200 pigs an hour, but each individual pig suffers from forty seconds to two or three minutes, and several pigs struggle and shriek at the same time.”

I have not personally witnessed either of the methods so described.

I understand that some bacon-curers consider, or did consider, stunning cruel, on the ground that several blows were often required. The use of humane-killers disposes of this objection.

The late eminent physiologist, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, in a paper read before the Medical Society of London some years ago, says:

“Pigs, I have said, _suffer a mental terror of death_, and to them commonly is also given a severe degree of physical pain. . . . When they are killed by the knife alone they die by a hæmorrhage that may extend with persistent consciousness over three or four minutes of time.”

In relation to the pig’s mental horror of death, I myself saw the following sight:—Fifteen or so pigs in a slaughtering chamber just large enough to hold them and the slaughterer. Of these pigs three or four had already been stunned and knifed and lay dead and bleeding among their living brethren, who with manifest terror were squealing and straining here and there against the walls, while the slaughterer moved about among them selecting the next victim. A blow, a cut, and there was another dead pig, and this would go on, no doubt, till the whole fifteen were despatched and their bodies shot down the slide. Terror of death! Yes! At all this, by the way, a boy of about thirteen was looking on—and this in a public slaughter-house with a good superintendent and under municipal control.

SEGREGATION OF ANIMALS _about to be slaughtered from slaughtering operations_.—“It appears to be the common practice, even in modern and well-regulated slaughter-houses, to keep the animals, which are immediately awaiting slaughter, in pens which are mere annexes to the slaughter chamber itself, and in many cases in full view of all that goes on inside . . . There is no point which the Committee have more carefully investigated than the question as to whether animals do or do not suffer from fear from this contact, and the evidence of those best qualified to judge is so conflicting that no absolute verdict can be given . . . The animal should be given the full benefit of the doubt.” (Report of the Admiralty Committee.)

But the animal is _not_ given the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the degree of consciousness of animals awaiting slaughter (sometimes for a whole hour) just divided by a door which, all regulations to the contrary, is far from always shut, whether they know or not that it is death which awaits them, any spectator accustomed to animals in their normal state has only to look at their eyes, as they stand waiting, to feel sure that they are in fear of something.

Such then, in brief and in rough, are the conditions and methods of slaughter which still seem good to us. When the Admiralty Committee issued their report in 1904 they made the following recommendations:—

(_a_) All animals (cattle, calves, sheep, lambs, and pigs) without exception must be stunned or otherwise rendered unconscious before blood is drawn.

(_b_) Animals awaiting slaughter must be so placed that they cannot see into the slaughter-house, and the doors of the latter must be kept closed while slaughtering is going on.

(_c_) The drainage of the slaughter-house must be so arranged that no blood or other refuse can flow out within the sight or smell[4] of animals awaiting slaughter, and no such refuse shall be deposited in proximity to the waiting pens.

(_d_) If more animals than one are being slaughtered in one slaughter-house at one time they must not be in view of each other.

(_e_) None but licensed men shall be employed in or about slaughter-houses.

What has been done to carry out these recommendations, the fruit of most thorough and laborious investigations carried out at a considerable expenditure of public money and presumably with some object, by men well qualified for their task?

Just this much has been done. The recommendations have been adopted and are worked successfully by the Admiralty themselves, and they form the basis of certain clauses in the Local Government Board’s Voluntary Model Bye-laws, to which attention is only just beginning to be paid.

Seeing that the condition of affairs is such as I have detailed; seeing that the Admiralty Committee made the following wise remarks: “However humane and scientific in theory may be the methods of slaughter, it is inevitable that abuses and cruelty may result in practice, unless there is a proper system of official inspection”; and: “In the interests not only of humanity, but of sanitation, order, and ultimate economy, it is highly desirable that, where circumstances permit, private slaughter-houses should be replaced by public abattoirs, and that no killing should be permitted except in the latter under official supervision”; seeing the enormous dimensions of this matter, and that our methods are behind those of nearly every Continental country, and very much behind those of Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, it would occur to the simple mind that here was eminently a case for broad and sweeping action on the part of the Legislature.

I have not even thought it worth while to dwell on the _insanitary_ aspect of the present system, because the Royal Commission on Food from Tuberculous Animals (again at a considerable expenditure of public money) reported thus—“The actual amount of tuberculous disease among certain classes of food animals is so large as to afford to man frequent occasions for contracting tuberculous disease through his food. We think it probable that an appreciable part of the tuberculosis that affects man is obtained through his food”—practically without effect! If the public likes to spend its money on ascertaining a risk to itself and likes to disregard that risk to itself when ascertained, far be it from me to gainsay the public. But if any one be interested in the sanitary side of our want of system, let him go to the superintendent of some large public slaughter-house and ask what percentage of meat is condemned daily; then let him ask some medical officer of health how far it is possible to inspect the condition of carcases in _private_ slaughter-houses; and then let him go home and think! There I leave the matter. For, frankly, it is not this, but the disregard by the public of needless suffering inflicted on helpless creatures, bred and killed for its own advantage, that moves me. Surely no one can call the following suggestions unreasonable:

_No animal to be bled before being stunned (or otherwise rendered instantaneously insensible)._

_No animal to be slaughtered in sight of another animal._

_No slaughter-refuse and blood to be allowed within sight or smell of an animal awaiting slaughter._

_No stunning or slaughtering implement to be used that has not been approved by the Local Government Board._

_The licence of no slaughter-house to be renewed unless it possesses these approved stunning and slaughtering implements, a copy of official instructions how to use them, and can prove that it does use them and them alone._

_All offenders against these regulations to be liable to penalties on summary conviction._

Why has not this simple harmless minimum of decent humanity been—as in other countries—long ago adopted? For the usual reasons: Dislike of change; dislike of a little extra trouble and a little extra expense; liberty of the subject. To take the last point first. Dictate to a man how he shall slaughter his own animals—what next! Well! I am all for liberty of the subject. I am for letting him hurt _himself_ as much as ever he likes. I even go so far as to say that prosecutions for attempted suicide are wrong and ridiculous; but where the subject claims to hurt the helpless with impunity, then it seems to me time to hurt the subject.

I fancy that in most men’s minds there lurks the feeling: “Oh! a little extra suffering to animals who are going to die anyway in a minute or two—what does it matter? Now, if you were to put it on the ground that it hurts the slaughterer, there’d be something in it!” Yes! It certainly may hurt the _morale_ of the slaughterer—but not much, for he inflicts the needless suffering _without consciousness of cruelty_; and ill actions of which one is not conscious only negatively deteriorate _morale_, in so far as they are a waste of time in which good actions might have been performed. But to say that it does not matter whether we needlessly hurt the sheep or pig because they are going to die anyway is really to say that no suffering matters, however unnecessary, since we must all die and it will be all the same a hundred years hence. It is at all events not a saying that I can imagine coming out of the mouth of a human being in perfect health and the possession of all his faculties, with a knife going in just behind his right ear and wiggling about in his neck and head till it finds his spinal cord between the joints of his vertebræ. And though you may think that the infliction of some seconds of excruciating torture on an animal does not really hurt the animal because she cannot tell you that it does—it conceivably might hurt _you_ a little to feel it was needlessly inflicted.

The meat-trades and butchers generally deny the need for change, and claim that the humanity of existing methods cannot be improved on. I really cannot understand this. Take for example two conversations I had with quite humane butchers.

I: “So you never stun your sheep before bleeding them?”

First Butcher: “Oh! no.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“Not to avoid pain?”

“Oh! no; there’s no pain.”

Ten minutes later:—

I: “You always stun your cattle before bleeding them?”

Same Butcher: “Oh! yes, always.”

“Why!”

“Oh! it avoids a lot of pain.”

To the second butcher:—

I: “Then you never stun your sheep before bleeding them.”

Second Butcher: “No, never.”

“Why not? Is there any objection?”

“No, I don’t see any objection; only it’s never done. I’ve never seen a sheep stunned.”

“Just custom?”

“Yes, just that.”

The old, ignorant prejudice that animals do not bleed freely if stunned first is now, I think, never advanced.

So much for custom and dislike of change.

But now we come to what is perhaps the real gravamen of the resistance—a little extra trouble, a suspicion of extra expense. This touches all the points in the irreducible minimum of reform. For instance, the various R.S.P.C.A. humane-killers cost about thirty-five shillings; the Swedish cattle-killer ten shillings and sixpence, with cartridges four shillings per hundred. You must spend perhaps an hour in learning how to use them, and five minutes or so per day in cleaning them. They are still new things—“fads”—although they have passed all tests, been proved by dozens of testimonials from butchers in this country to be perfectly efficient; _and the Swedish cattle-killer is used throughout several countries_.

Again, it is convenient not to have to be careful to shut doors between slaughtering chambers and animals awaiting slaughter, or to have to pave your floors so that blood runs well away from the waiting pens. It is handy (especially in ill-constructed slaughter-houses) to kill animals in sight of each other. It is always, in fact, a nuisance to make any change that involves readjustment. And unfortunately animals have no force behind them, are not represented on the public bodies of the country; cannot lobby in the House of Commons, withdraw votes or commit outrages; cannot instruct counsel; have no rights save those which mere chivalry shall give them. “Besides,” says Defence, “everything is already done as well as it can be done. Switzerland, Denmark—who knows whether they are really better? The ways of our own country are good enough for us—the good old-fashioned methods—if there were any real need for reform we should be the first to undertake it!” Waste-paper, then, the Admiralty Report! Waste-paper!

I have reckoned that in the case of sheep alone the amount of needless suffering inflicted must amount to some 33,000 hours of solid, uninterrupted death agony each year (number of sheep slaughtered without stunning, 8,000,000; period of suffering, five to thirty seconds—Admiralty Committee’s report)—all preventable by a few strokes of the legislative pen.

But the truth is we don’t reflect; or if by any chance we do, we pass on with the thought: “Nothing can be done till the butchers themselves are convinced!” Is that true?

Just this far true: As in every other case of new law, there would be required at first a little special activity. It is only a question of starting a new standard. In two years’ time, if these simple, harmless regulations concerning the slaughter of animals for food were enforced—not merely recommended, as now—there would hardly be an animal in this country bled without first being stunned by humane methods, or any beasts watching their fellows being killed.

I attack no one in this matter; I blame no one, for I am not in a position to—the charge of callousness falls heavily on my own shoulders, who have eaten meat all these years without ever troubling as to what went before it. Nor can I hope that these words will do more than ruffle the nerves of the public; but I do trust that such of our legislators as may chance to read them may be moved to feel that it is their part to save patient creatures, who cannot plead in their own behalf, from all suffering that the proper satisfaction of our wants _does not compel_ us to inflict on them.

If what I have written has seemed extravagant, he who reads has only to go and see for himself. And let those who would attack this plea train their guns on the Report of the Admiralty Committee, 1904. For I have but conveniently summarized the unanimous verdict of able and disinterested men, who, officially appointed to examine the whole matter, held many sittings, heard many witnesses, saw with their own eyes, and made their own experimental investigations. I have, in fact, done nothing but give an added publicity to the deliberate conclusions of an impartial tribunal, which had an unique opportunity of forming and delivering a comprehensive, dispassionate judgment, and delivered it—to what end?

[2] Things have moved a little, I believe, but not nearly enough.—J. G.

[3] The Admiralty Committee on Humane Slaughtering, 1904 Chairman, Mr. Arthur Lee, M.P.

[4] I believe it is the smell of blood, rather than the sight, which affects animals.—J. G.

IV

ON PERFORMING ANIMALS

(1)

(A Letter to the _Daily Express_, 1913.)

Writing from the standpoint of one whose love of animals at one time caused him to enjoy the spectacle of them performing tricks and capers, into the educational history of which he never thought of going, I believe I well understand the attraction of “the animal show” in music-halls or circuses. Nor do I doubt that there are animal trainers with such a natural gift and love of beasts that the process of training becomes almost pleasurable to creatures who are not by nature intended to ape mankind.

I even believe that there may be animals, especially among dogs, who grow to appreciate the glamour of the footlights, and the sense of their own importance. But when all this is said, I have come to abominate the thought of the whole thing, and I fancy that any one who takes the trouble to think the matter out, any one who does not allow his natural delight in animals to run away with his sense of proportion and the fitness of things, must come to the same conclusion.

To simply bring a horse, a dog, a cat, or even an elephant or camel on the stage as part of the atmosphere or machinery of a play, treating it with the kindness that is invariable I believe in such cases, is one thing, and I by no means object to it. But the deliberate training and use, for the purpose of making a living out of them, of numbers of animals, taking them from place to place, hall to hall, suitable or unsuitable, is a very different “proposition,” as Americans would say.

The very nature of it invites suffering. And I do not well see how any amount of inspection and the granting of licences is going to do away with the greater part of a wretchedness that comes from forcing creatures away from more or less natural to highly unnatural conditions of life; nor can I see how, for the purpose of granting licences, satisfactory evidence is ever going to be obtained that training (which is and must be quite a private affair between trainer and animal) is not accompanied by cruelty.

In a word, I would like to see the “animal show” abolished in this country. It is too ironical altogether that our love of beasts should make us tolerate and even enjoy what our common sense, when we let it loose, tells us must, in the main, spell misery for the creatures we profess to be so fond of.

(2)

(A Speech made at Kensington Town Hall, 1913.)

I am here to say a very few words on the whole question of the treatment of animals by our civilized selves. For I have no special knowledge, like some who will speak to you, of the training of performing animals; I have only a certain knowledge of human and animal natures, and a common sense which tells me that wild animals are more happy in freedom than in captivity—domestic animals more happy as companions than as clowns. And, quite apart from the definite question of inhumanity, it is perfectly clear to me that these animal shows are among the many surviving evidences, the lingering symptoms, of a creed that—thank Heaven!—is beginning to pass, and must pass, from us. That creed said: We human beings have the right, for our pleasure, convenience, and distraction, to disregard, in the matter of dumb creatures, those principles which our religion, morality, and education fix as the guiding stars of our conduct towards human beings. (Please note that I do not touch on the question of our rights over dumb creatures in so far as our actual self-preservation is concerned; I limit my words to pleasure, convenience, profit, and distraction.)

Now, “Do unto others as you would they should do unto you!” is not only the first principle of Christianity, but the first principle of all social conduct—the essence of that true gentility which is the only saving grace of men and women in all ranks of life. And I am certain that the word “others” cannot any longer be limited to the human creature. Whether or no animals have what are called “rights” is an academic question of no value whatever in the consideration of this matter. But, lest there be any one who wishes to take up this point of abstruse philosophy, I admit at once that animals have no more rights than have babies under the age when they may be said to have duties (on which rights, we are told, depend), that animals have no more rights than imbeciles, or those who are deaf, dumb, and blind. Rights or no rights, I care not; the fact remains that by so much as we inflict on sentient creatures _unnecessary_ suffering, by so much have we outraged our own consciences, by so much fallen short of that secret standard of gentleness and generosity, that, believe me, is the one firm guard of our social existence, the one bulwark we have against relapse into savagery. Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering, and you have destroyed the very basis of human society, as we know it in this age. You have committed blasphemy, the only blasphemy that really matters—against your conscience. For the true conscience of this country is proved by the wording of the law, with its ruling that the infliction of unnecessary suffering is an offence; and in a country like this, the law does not precede, but follows, conscience. Let me quote the law, and the latest judicial _dictum_ upon it.

Section 1 (1) of the Protection of Animals Act, 1911:

“If any person (_a_) shall cruelly ill-treat any animal . . . or being the owner shall by . . . unreasonably doing or omitting to do any act . . . cause any unnecessary suffering,” he shall be guilty of an offence.

And Mr. Justice Darling, on November 19th, 1913, said:

“Where unnecessary suffering is caused by some act of an owner, it cannot be justified on the ground of old custom, and of benefit to commercial persons.”

Nothing so endangers the fineness of the human heart as the possession of power over others; nothing so corrodes it as the callous or cruel exercise of that power; and the more helpless the creature over whom power is cruelly or callously exercised, the more the human heart is corroded. It is recognition of this truth which has brought the conscience of our age and with it the law, to say that we cannot any longer with impunity regard ourselves as licensed torturers of the rest of creation; that we cannot, for our own sakes, afford it.

In all this matter, then, of the treatment of animals it comes to the definition of the words “unnecessary suffering.” And I say this: All suffering that is inflicted merely for our pleasure, distraction, and even for our convenience, and profit, as distinct from our preservation, is unnecessary and an abomination. And the fact that it is inflicted on creatures unable to raise hand to help themselves, or voice to tell us what they suffer, makes it ever the more abominable. Whether it be the destruction of mother-birds (with their whole families of nestlings) for the sake of the nuptial plumes to be worn in the hats and hair of human mothers, or the painful docking of the tails of horses, their sole weapon against the torment of stinging flies, for the sake of an ugly fashion; whether it be the treacherous sale of horses worn out in our service, the snaring of rabbits in needlessly cruel traps, the turning adrift of friendly but unwanted dogs and cats; whether it be the unnecessarily slow and painful slaughtering of animals for food, the wretched keeping in captivity of wild song-birds, the prisoning of eagles, hawks, and many another creature that cannot bear confinement, in zoos and other places; whether it be any of these, or this sometimes distressing and always unnatural training of performing animals, in all suffering is inflicted for our pleasure, distraction, convenience or profit, and all of it is unnecessary, all against the conscience of the age.

To those who, tempted by the devil of irreflection, say “But this is the creed of sentiment and softness,” I return the answer, “Sirs, no man ever became a stoic, and acquired the virtues of fortitude and courage, by inflicting pain on others.” There is nothing in this new creed that prevents any one from inflicting on himself as much hardship, risk, and privation as he considers needful to inspire him with fortitude.