The slaughter of animals for food / by John Galsworthy.

  • John Galsworthy
Date:
[1913]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The slaughter of animals for food / by John Galsworthy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Note, however, that the Admiralty Committee refer above only to large establishments. It is notorious that numbers of pigs are still killed all over the country in ways that the following quotation describes: “I, with another witness, saw five pigs killed last Thursday afternoon—three small ones and two large ones. The pigs were ‘knifed’ one at a time and allowed to wander round the slaughter-house bleeding and ina drunken, reeling, rolling state, and at the same time uttering most plaintive cries.” (From a letter to a daily journal.) 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 hemorrhage 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, the other day, 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 1g)
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