I am playing fast and loose with DU's excerpts rule but I hope Vox forgives me...I promise them a donation in 2021. So much of this article is so important:
The politics of animal — and human — suffering
David Coman-Hidy is the president of the Humane League, an animal welfare organization. In May, I had a conversation with him I’ve had trouble getting out of my head. My question was innocuous. I wanted to know what he was working on. “Switching from live shackling to the atmospheric killing of chickens,” he replied.
Oh.
I wasn’t familiar with these terms, and maybe you aren’t, either. And I’m sorry for what I’m going to force you to imagine as I explain them. “The process of how we slaughter broiler chickens is the cruelest thing imaginable,” says Coman-Hidy. These are, functionally, malnourished, young birds. Workers flip them upside down to shackle them by their legs. In many cases, the process dislocates their hips.
Chickens aren’t meant to be upside-down. They have no diaphragm. Shackled and inverted, their organs crush into their lungs, making it hard for the birds to breathe. The point of the shackling is to put them on a conveyor that drags them through electrified water, stunning them before the kill. But the birds panic, thrashing in wild terror. Some of them miss the water, or the stun setting is too low. Those birds have their throats cut while they’re still conscious, and then they’re pulled through boiling water to defeather them. If the blade misses the bird, the bird boils alive.
Almost no human experiences this outside of human trafficking rings and this is the common lot of chickens which share about 60% of their genome with us.
What I like about Booker is his pragmatism. This is REAL pragmatism and imagination in action:
Coman-Hidy and his organization are working to convince agricultural producers to slaughter chickens by simply gassing them, en masse. It’s easier on the chickens, and less traumatizing for the workers. And the campaign is seeing some success. McDonald’s has pledged to move to atmospheric killing, for one.
Coman-Hidy is vegan; he’s devoted his life to reducing animal suffering. Didn’t it feel strange, I asked him, to become part of this machine whose very existence he loathes? Even if atmospheric killing was more humane, wouldn’t it unnerve him to become one of the people shaping the architecture of animal slaughter?
“The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas?” He replied. “And the answer is everything.”
That question btw is a bit whacky-not blaming the author..it is just that it is based on the stereotype of animal activists as self righteous, irrational, purity-test pushing extremists.
You may give up meat in your personal life and still push for/expect and even welcome incremental progress. The world is not going to give up animal products. Our goal should be to eliminate the torture and confinement of living animals and to make their deaths as painless as possible.
The more we learn about animal intelligence, the less scientific/philosophical justification there is for this crass worldview. A little imagination is all it takes, even if information is lacking....
= new reply since forum marked as read