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28/07/2009

Cruelty to Animals in Slaughter houses

Maneka Gandhi

(Bihar Times) Idgah is the official slaughterhouse of Delhi. It is the mostly shockingly cruel and unhygienic place in India and its butchers break every rule. The Supreme Court saw a film of what happens there and one judge fainted. It was closed down for six months and only when its butchers and the Delhi administration agreed to be more humane and follow the rules strictly was it allowed to be reopened. Needless to say , after a few months , it went back to being a hell on earth. The Supreme Court ordered it to be permanently closed down and a proper modern slaughterhouse which followed to the rules to be made in Ghazipur. Now the new one is ready , the butchers have today threatened to go on strike because they say that they cannot follow the rules and they object to electric stunning because they say that in their religion , animals have to take hours to die while the blood pours out of them. So the meat association led by Mohammad Aquin Quereshi, has declared they will stop killing until they can kill in their own style and fashion. They want to go back to Idgah. Seeing the “ secularism” of this government I have no doubt that they will allow these criminals to have their way.

Meat truly turns men into monsters. Based on years of interviews, secret footage and personal visits, Gail Eisnitz’s book “Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the U.S. Meat Industry”, documents the terrifying levels of animal abuse that slaughterhouse workers consider ‘business as usual’. KFC and McDonalds suppliers have been filmed kicking chickens around like footballs, punching and smashing shackled animals , blowing them up with firecrackers, twisting their heads off, spray-painting their faces, spitting tobacco in their eyes and shoving their hands into the birds’ vaginal cavities for ‘fun’. One worker is seen ramming a broomstick down a chicken’s gullet and hoisting it up in the air to ‘teach it a lesson’. A turkey farm manager is seen bludgeoning sick birds with a pair of pliers so that they do not ‘eat’ into profits. Cattle slaughter plants show workers jabbing cows in the eyes, ripping out their windpipes, blasting them with high-pressure hoses and slicing off their ears. They string up even pregnant animals to bleed to death with the unborn babies visibly kicking inside the mothers' wombs.
Just listen to these interviews:

p. 93 : “One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death . It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.”
p. 133: “In the wintertime there are always hogs stuck to the sides and floors of the trucks. We go in there with wires or knives and just cut or pry the hogs loose. The skin pulls right off. These hogs are alive when we do this.. Animal abuse is so commonplace nobody even thinks about it."

p.145: "One time the knocking gun was broke all day, they were taking a knife and cutting the back of the cow's neck open while he's still standing up. He would just fall down and be shaking. And they stab cows in the butt to make 'em move. Break their tails. They beat them so bad. Bringing them around the corner and they get stuck up in the doorway, just pull them till their hide be ripped, till the blood just drip on the steel and concrete. Breaking their legs pulling them in. And the cow is crying with his tongue stuck out. They pull him till his neck just pop."

Here is a description of the standard piggery practice of "thumping" where workers pick up pigs by their hind legs, whirl them over their shoulders, and bash them headfirst into the concrete floor "We've thumped as many as 120 pigs in one day. We just swing them, thump them, then toss them aside. After you've thumped ten, twelve, fourteen of them, you stack them up. If some are still alive, you do this all over again.. There've been times I've walked in and pigs would be running around with an eyeball hanging down the side of their face, just bleeding like crazy, or their jaw would be broken. I've seen them with broken backs still trying to get up. Some of these guys thump them, then just stand on top of their throat, smashing their jaw and everything, until they die.. If you get a pig that can’t move, you take a meat hook, stick it into his anus and drag him backwards. A lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams—thighs and even intestines spill out. If the pig collapses near the front, you shove a meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward. I’ve seen sows being beaten with gate rods, stomped on, and dragged having their throats slowly cut with a tiny scalpel while they were still fully conscious and moaning. One day there were twenty little hogs out there and these two guys were having themselves a good old time, beating them to death with metal pipes.”

Workers are casual about the thousands and thousands of animals that go through the whole process alive--still conscious chickens are dropped into scalding water to de-feather them 'When this happens, the chickens flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They come out disfigured at the other end with broken bones and missing body parts because they've struggled so much in the tank.' Similarly with pigs. Fully conscious cattle are skinned and dismembered in a proces lasting upto 25 minutes. " You can see them blink and moan as we cut off their hooves. Some survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. They die, piece by piece. "

Indian slaughterhouse workers are as wicked. Goats and sheep are dragged across the floor bleating and excreting in terror. A man sits on top of the struggling creature, plunges a knife in its throat and pushes it aside to bleed to death. Cattle, their legs roped, have their feet pulled from under them causing them to fall heavily on their side. The four legs are then bound together to await the butcher. At his approach, two men will grab the creature's head and stretch its neck by twisting the head back with all their force.

The masks worn by workers at our ‘modern’ mechanized slaughterhouses do nothing to disguise their evilness. They throw tired, broken animals down from trucks then shove chilly powder into their eyes to force them up. After starving them for four days to push the haemoglobin from the blood into the fat to get better prices, they break their legs and poke out their eyes to certify them ‘useless’. Then they hose them with boiling water to soften their skins for removal. The animal may faint at this point, but is not yet dead. A chain is wrapped around a rear leg and he is hoisted into the air, kicking, thrashing and often breaking his bones. Hung upside down with one leg on a chain-pulley conveyor, half the neck is slit. This drains the blood, but does not kill the animal because a dead animal’s skin becomes thick and less valuable. On one side the animal is bled and on the other, a hole is drilled in the stomach through which air is pumped to make the body swell, making it easier to de-skin. A visitor allowed into these plants reports having nightmares.” The animals were hitting the walls and their bellowing could be heard in the parking lot. In some plants, the suspended animal's head is restrained by a nose tong.” Workers, however, remain unperturbed as they do this to 10,000 animals a day at Idgah( Delhi) Al Kabir (Hyderabad), Frigorifico Allana (Aurangabad), Hind Industries (Aligarh), Allana Sons (Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra), and Deonar (Maharastra) and the thousands of illegal slaughterhouses all over.