HUMANE SLAUGHTER : A SLAUGHTER- MAN'S POINT OF VIEW [To
the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—S0 much has been written from various points of view that I have thought it would not be amiss to give to the public that of a slaughterman. Let me state that it is from one who has with his own hands slaughtered all kinds of stock, cattle, sheep, pigs and calves, and also has spent much of his time in shop work and in the making-up trade and curing also. This experience is not confined to any one town, for I have plied my trade in various places and under different conditions.
Many of the slaughterhouses arc quite unfit for the purpose, and, even in some of our towns, slaughtering is carried on under the most objectionable circumstances. Some of them are dirty, cramped, insanitary and devoid of the space required • for the cooling of carcases. Many are in close proximity to the dwelling house and are frequented by the children of the tenant. In some places in the northern counties animals are slaughtered in the sale shop with blinds drawn down. In one place in which I worked for years a family was reared in a house in the slaughterhouse yard, which consisted of about twenty lock.up slaughterhouses, and the Jewish slaughtering was conducted on the ground floor while the family resided above. A very large number of the slaughterhouses have cattle and sheep huddled up in the back part of the slaughter- houses with only open partitions, and in these you could see the sawdust and manure clotted on the floor, and the carcases of the animals we have to consume hanging under these con- ditions. Many of the slaughtermen keep clogs and old jackets and aprons at the slaughterhouses for slaughtering in. which lie from week to week unscraped and unwashed, and the colour of the boots is just as if they had been dipped in a tub of dirty red paint. •
I have little patience with those of my trade who state that the poleaxe and other methods are not the producers of immense suffering. If the battering to death of an animal, the knocking out of an eye, the driving of the poleaxe into the nostrils and other parts- of the head through a misdirected blow, the breaking away of an animal from the slaughterhouse , after having been struck with the axe, sheep lying with three of their legs tightly bound within sight of their companions slaughtered, the jumping off the crutch, as some sheep do, when a youth attempts to stick it with a blunt knife, the hanging up of calves by hind legs till they bleed to death—if these things are not suffering then tell me what really is. These sights are not tales of the past, but present-day realities. Having given you these facts may I state my candid opinion of the Humane Killer ? With the use of these all this suffering among these tens of thousands of animals is swept away. My experience is that these instruments save much time and remove all pain. Having been also engaged in the cutting-up of carcases, I am absolutely certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is impossible to detect the difference between the flesh of an animal shot and one otherwise slaughtered, and I do not know of a single slaughterman who would undertake
to say that he could. The one is equal to the other. The talk of the blood being discoloured is to my mind silly and unworthy of the trade, and-the assertion that pigs will not cure is abso- lutely ridicidous and untrue. The instruments which I have always used are perfectly safe and there is no fear of accident from their right use.
I have stated my case ; I have no axe to grind and no interest in the sale of either instruments or cartridges, but I have a duty to perform as an eye-witness and wish to record my experience.—I am, Sir, &c.,
JOHN DODDS
(Late Superintendent of the Carlisle Public Slaughterhouses).
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