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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    England and Wales: 1,850,000 beasts, 8,500,000 sheep, and 3,200,000 pigs. These figures are hard to come at, and may be a million or so out, one way or the other, but even if they be, is. there any feature of the national life which can touch this for possi- bilities of preventible physical suffering? And is there any department so utterly neglected by public Opinion and the law? Save the eating of bread, have we any practice in our lives so consistent as that of eating meat, or any from which we consider that we derive more benefit, or any about whose conditions, sanitary or humane, we are so careless? If a donkey is badly beaten, a dog stoned, or a cat killed with a riding-whip, the chances are that a prosecution will ensue or a question be asked in Parliament ; for public opinion and the law lay it down that the infliction of unnecessary suffering on animals is cruelty, an offence punishable by fine or imprisonment. But if in the dark and sacred precincts of our slaughterhouses some 8,000,000 sheep are killed yearly, without first being stunned, by a » method which, even in the hands of an_ expert, produces some seconds of acute suffering (Report of the Admiralty Committee on Humane Slaughtering of Animals, 1904); if thousands of cattle, stunned by inexperienced young slaughtermen, require two or more blows of that primitive instrument, the pole-axe; if pigs are driven in gangs into a small space and there killed, one by one, while the others squeal in terror round their dead bodies; if all this preventible suffering is inflicted daily in our slaughter- houses, what does public opinion know of it, and what does the law care? One of the quaintest things in life is the inability of the human mind to see that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. There was a time in this country when men beat their donkeys
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