Buying Meat

People argue that hunting is cruel, inhumane, unfair or damaging...the list can go on and on.  My question for those people is, where do they get their meat?  These days the average shopper gets their meat from a local grocery store or possibly a butcher...if one can be found.  These meat providers get their product from a slaughterhouse; unless they run the entire process themselves...not likely.  Grocery stores are the main source for people to buy their meat, including myself.  While I consider myself a hunter, I don't hunt enough to provide myself with enough meat for a full year; in fact I hardly provide enough meat to last much longer after a hunt.  So just like everyone else, including those that argue against hunting, I go to my local Safeway and buy meat. 

This process of purchasing meat products from a store is awesome, all a person has to do is walk in, pick a cut, and buy it.  When hunting, I have to find my prey, kill it if I’m lucky, field dress it --- cleaning the animal and butchering it properly in the wild --- then transport the meat home, butcher it a little bit more, store it, and then finally cook and eat it.  I'm not complaining I love hunting and everything about it, but to end up with my final product, meat, it's a bit of a process.  Comparing the two, buying the meat at a grocery store is a piece of cake.  But if we look further into the process of how the meat gets to the grocery store, things start to look a little different.  Now just because the customer buying meat in a store isn't killing the animal themselves, doesn't mean they aren't contributing to that animal’s death.  The customer might not literally be killing the animal, but the value they create buy buying the meat provides the incentive so kill the animal. 

Not a lot of room to move around when
raised to be slaughtered.

Everyone wants to eat the bacon, but no one wants to kill the pig.  Because of this we have slaughterhouses.  The key point I want to make is that not all slaughterhouses are the same.  Some are more efficient than others, cleaner than others or more humane than others.  In truth it's hard to know where exactly your meat comes from and how it's handled before being processed.  I found a video showing the process inside a slaughterhouse with one of the leading companies in the U.S. Just to warn, this video does contain the full process of cows, from living to packaging, the actual killing part isn't shown.  Despite the killing not being shown, it shows the reporters face as she watches it happen, and just by watching her reaction you can tell it's not exactly a pretty sight.  If you have never seen a video like this I highly suggest you do.  Keep in mind that Cargill is a top slaughterhouse, and not all companies operate as humanely as they do.  

A cow so fat from food provided it has to be
moved with a forklift.

When I hear people talk about hunting and how it isn't humane or how it's damaging to the animal, I can't help but laugh a little inside.  The video showed how the cows were being fed an unhealthy diet just to make them fat for slaughter, comparing this to an animal that's hunted and eats properly I can't help think that the cow is being treated less humanely. The cows in the video have absolutely no chance of survival, they were born to be killed and will be killed, an animal being hunted has a considerable chance of survival, not all hunts are successful...trust me I know from plenty of experience.  When hunting a proper kill will actually kill an animal almost instantly, in the video it took in between one and two minutes for the cows to actually die.  One or two minutes for the animal to die, in a leading slaughterhouse, that’s shocking. 

A good thing about hunting is I know that I am killing the animal properly and humanely.  I will only take a shot at an animal if I know I can kill it, and kill it quickly.  I respect every animal I kill, doesn’t matter if it’s as small as a dove or as big as an elk.  Keep in mind I consider myself to be an ethical hunter, just like Cargill is an ethical company; not all companies and hunters are ethical and that’s the problem.  By hunting I can control how humanely the animal dies, when buying meat I have no idea if that specific animal was treated properly or not.  It’s hard to write how these animals are treated improperly, when it comes to something as serious as this; videos are the best way to show it.  Now I warn you, if the Cargill video was hard on you, this video might be too much.  It shows the improper handling of chickens at a Kentucky Fried Chicken slaughterhouse, but I recommend you watch it so you get the full effect of what can happen when things go wrong.

If you didn't watch the video I don't blame you, those kind of images turn my stomach into knots and makes me want to do to them what they do to those poor animals.  That video was a good example of what can go wrong in a slaughterhouse.  The chickens were being kicked, thrown, burned from high amounts of ammonia, transported covered in feces, and even when they were stuck in their cage employees would literally tear the birds apart to get them out...horrific.  That's a problem with buying meat from an outside source, a person can never be sure of how the animals were treated; even when it comes to a massive company like KFC. It's hard to imagine that a company I've supported before by buying their products treated animals this way.  Another small company that hardly anyone supports has had problems with their slaughterhouses, McDonalds. 

I think it's safe to say that nearly everyone at one point in their life has either eaten or bought McDonalds for a family member.  Now I'm not trying to point fingers I've eaten McDonalds plenty of times, as much as I don't want to admit to it.  I have one last video to post, now this one is truly upsetting, even made me a little sick.  Half of the video is sharing facts on McDonalds and their food, and the other part of the video is on a slaughterhouse that provided McDonalds with their meat.  If you didn't watch the first two videos, I doubt you'll want to watch this one.  It shows many disturbing acts being performed by employees including a cow being beaten with a crow bar for no apparent reason, a calf literally being punched repeatedly in the head by a worker...I’d rather not describe the rest, that was hard enough to write.  A person might argue what’s to stop a hunter from doing what these workers are doing, and the truth is there really isn't anything to stop them.  But I can tell you that if two hunters came across another hunter mindlessly beating a dear to death or treating it inhumanely like the men in the video, they would stop him.  But what happened in the McDonalds and KFC videos was different.  The workers were beating and treating the animals inhumanely and no one stopped them even though there were other workers around.

This McDonalds video showed what can happen to employees after working in those kinds of conditions, making me think not only of the animals but also of the employees.  After working so long in a position where killing an animal is the job side effects can happen.  A study done at Colorado State University described how employees are rotated among different positions, from slaughtering to packing for example, so they don't become sadistic.  An employee participating in the study said that by rotating between the kill chutes and driving cattle up the chute made it easier to maintain a humane attitude.  The study described how the people that actually do the killing approach their job three different ways, mechanical approach, sadistic approach, and a sacred ritual approach.  This study can be viewed at here.

Before when I heard people argue against hunting I'd laugh a little, knowing that they don't know everything that goes on with hunting.  But now when I hear someone call hunting cruel, inhumane, unfair or damaging I'll know the differences between how meat is gathered through hunting and how it's produced through slaughterhouses, and wonder if they know the same.  My aim wasn't to attack the non-hunters with this post, like I stated before, I also buy plenty of meat from my local grocery store; but before pointing the judgment finger at hunters maybe it should be pointed elsewhere.  Just remember the next time you’re buying meat from a grocery store doesn't mean you aren't contributing to that animal dying.  Maybe hunting isn't that bad after all.