In our "civilized" society, the slaughter of innocent animals is not only an accepted practice, it is an established ritual.

We do not usually see ourselves as members of a flesh-eating cult. But all the signs of a cult are there. Many of us are afraid to even consider other diet-style choices, afraid to leave the safety of the group, afraid when there is any evidence that might reveal that the god of animal protein isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. Members of the Great American Steak Religion frequently become worried if their family or friends show any signs of disenchantment. A mother may be more worried if her son or daughter becomes a vegetarian than if they take up smoking. We are deeply conditioned in our attitudes towards meat. We have been taught to believe that our very health depends on our eating it.

Many of us believe our social status depends on the quality of our meat and the frequency with which we eat it; and we take it for granted that only someone who "can't afford meat" would do without it. Males have been conditioned to associate meat with their masculinity, and quite a few men believe their sexual potency and virility depend on eating meat. Many women have been taught that a "good woman" feeds her man meat.

Our cultural conditioning tells us we must eat meat, and at the same time systematically overlooks the basic realities of meat production. We've been indoctrinated so thoroughly that it has become the ocean in which we swim. Our language is so disempowered by euphemisms and cliches, our shared experience so weakened by repression, our common sense so distorted by ignorance, that we can easily be held prisoner by a point of view beneath the threshold of our awareness.

THE TRUTH
It has often been said that if we had to kill the animals we eat, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically. To keep us from thinking along such lines, the meat industry does everything it can to help us blank the matter out of our minds.

As a result, most of us know very little about slaughterhouses. If we think about them at all, we probably assume and hope that the animals enjoy a quick and painless death.

But such, regrettably, is not the case. The reality of the slaughter- house, unfortunately, is as different from the images we tend to have of it as the reality of the factory farms is from the barnyard images most of us still carry.

But the men who actually do the killing for usknow what it's like. They finish their shifts, punch the time clock, change out of their blood-splattered clothes, and go home. And something of the slaughterhouse goes home with them:

"Barely three months had passed since Yoineh Meir had become a slaughterer, but the time seemed to stretch endlessly. He felt as though he were immersed in blood and lymph. His ears were beset by the squawking of hens, the crowing of roosters, the gobbling of geese, the lowing of oxen, the mooing and bleating of calves and goats; wings fluttered, claws tapped on the floor The bodies refused to know any justification or excuse - every body resisted in its own fashion, tried to escape, and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath."

"Meat-packing plants," as slaughterhouses are euphemistically called, are not exactly the most pleasant of working environments. Just being surrounded by death and killing takes an incredible toll on a human being.

The turnover rate among slaughterhouse workers is the highest of any occupation in the country. The Excel Corporation plant in Dodge City, Kansas, for example, had a turnover rate of 43% per month in 1980 - the equivalent of a complete turnover of its entire 500 person work force every two and a half months.

Slaughterhouses are particularly difficult to describe because we have been systematically taught not to think about them at all. You probably don't know where a single one is located, so whitewashed have been our minds to their existence. But I can tell you they are not places Walt Disney would want to make a movie about. One writer called them:

" . . infernos of nauseous smells, pools of blood, and screams of terrified animals.

Just about everybody finds the atmosphere of the slaughterhouse uncomfortable. Even the meat producers themselves don't exactly want to spend their vacations there. One meat producer described a typical meat-packing plant atmosphere:

"Earphone-type sound mufflers help mute the deadening cacophony of high-pressure steam used for cleaning, the clanging of steel on steel as carcasses move down the slaughter line, the whine of the hide and tallow removers and the snarling of a chain saw used to split carcasses into sides of beef here on the killing-room floor.

"The animals (have) their throats ... slit, and then - with tongues hanging limply out of their mouths - their bodies are unceremoniously hooked behind the tendons of their rear legs and are swung up into the air onto the overhead track, which moves them through the killing room like bags of clothes on a dry cleaner's motorized rack. Once bled, their hooves are clipped off with a gigantic pair of hydraulic pincers. They are then beheaded, skinned ... and finaIly eviscerated. "

Amidst this carnage, workers in blood-spattered white coats and helmets are in constant motion, removing cattle legs with electric shears, skinning hides with whirring air knives, disemboweling animals with razor-bladed straight knives. The floors are slick with animal grease, and the air is thick with stench.

It is a terribly difficult atmosphere in which to work. According to U. S. labor Department statistics, the rate of injury in meat-packing houses is the highest of any occupation in the nation. Every year, over 30% of packing-house workers suffer on-the-job injuries requiring medical attentions. It's a few steps removed from anything you'd see at Disneyland.

WE DO IT ALL FOR YOU
But if the slaughterhouse environment is less than ideal for the workers, it falls even shorter of the mark for the billions of terrified veal calves, pigs, chickens and cows who find themselves there.

When they arrive at the slaughterhouse, they are most likely exhausted, sick, and starving. Most likely they were given little food, water, or any other care for their needs on the journey. And now they may not be fed upon arrival, because any food that would be given them would not have time to turn into marketable flesh.

I'm sure most of the workers do their best to be humane, under the circumstances. But these people are under great pressure, in a hurry, and stressed beyond their capacity by the nature of the environment in which they work. It's a tremendous drain on their inner resources to take continually for granted the constant agonized cries of the animals being killed. As a result, they often vent their frustrations the only place they can, on the animals. The men whose job it is to move the animals along are called "floggers," a term which accurately suggests that their dealings with the animals are not always considerate. One industry spokesman pointed his finger at the animals themselves for the unpleasantries that often occur:

"Hogs ... are slow-moving and considered obstinate. These characteristics often provoke a handler to the point of undue vioknce vented through the toe of a boot, closest club, or even a rock or piece of concrete."

The hogs are accused of "provoking" the violence by refusing to do what is asked of them. But there is a reason the animals resist moving along; they are, as all animals, more closely tuned in to their environment than man, and they profoundly sense the danger awaiting them. The industry calls the animals "obstinate," but the truth is they are terrified for their lives.

EMPTY WORDS
You may have assumed an effort is made in this day and age to spare the animals unnecessary pain in the killing. That's what I assumed. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The Federal Humane Slaughter Act says, in part:

"It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States that the slaughtering of livestock and the handling of livestock in connection with slaughter shall be carried out only by humane methods. "

This sounds lovely, but in practice the Act falls tragically short of accomplishing its admirable aims. Technically, we now have the means to render the animals unconscious before they are killed, which would greatly reduce the pain they must undergo. But often this is not done. Calves are frequently still butchered in full sight of their mothers.

Chickens are piled in crates on the floor with a bird's eye view of their brethren being butchered. The whole thing is handled with monstrous callousness, and total disregard for the animals' feelings.

The Federal Humane Slaughter Act sounds good, but in practice it is so riddled with loopholes as to be virtually meaningless. Less than 10% of the country's slaughterhouses are inspected for compliance with the Act, and only a very small percentage of even these few plants are under any legal obligation to observe its guidelines anyway. Furthermore, chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese are not considered animals by the Act, and so receive no protection, even in the few cases where the Act does apply.

The vast majority of slaughterhouses today may legally use any method they choose, and are under no obligation whatsoever to take the slightest concern for the animals. With profits being the sole motivation, the result, as you might expect, is not a happy one for these poor creatures.

The same attitudes which determine policies in factory farms govern decisions in slaughterhouses, and these are not attitudes of compassion for the animals. A leading poultry producer discussed the philosophy underlying his endeavors in the trade journal Poultry World:

"I am in this business for what I can make out of it. If it pays me to do this or that, I do it and so far as I am concerned that is all there is to say about it."

The industry chooses the cheapest possible methods of killing. They do not purposefully choose to be brutal and sadistic. It just works out that way. The "captive-bolt pistol" is one of the most effective methods of stunning cow, pigs, and other animals unconscious prior to killing them. Unfortunately, however, the cost of the charges used to fire the thing is enough to deter many slaughterhouses from using it. You may wonder how much money is saved thus, at the cost of forcing the animal to be fully conscious when killed. I've become somewhat accustomed to the industry's callousness, but I was still stunned to learn that the savings amount to approximately a single penny an animal.

NO PICNIC
In the past, much of the killing of animals was done at the farms where the animals lived. The creatures were not starved, exhausted and disoriented from days of travel as they are today. They didn't have to smell or listen to thousands of their fellow creatures being killed as they waited their turn. And the people who did the job usually tried to minimize the animals' pain. But, still, it was a disturbing thing to do.

"I never saw our farm manager more upset than the day we were getting ready to butcher five pigs. He shot one through the nose rather than through the brain. It ran screaming around the pen and he almost cried. It took two more bullets to finish the animal off, and this good man was shaking when he finished. "I hate that," he said to me. "I hate to have them in pain. Pigs are so damned hard to kill clean."

The more I've seen of animals being killed, the more I've understood why McDonald's tells little children that hamburgers grow in little hamburger patches. And why the web of repression is so thick that otherwise intelligent people will say: "Don't tell me what happens to the animals. It will spoil my dinner." The more I've learned about what goes on in slaughterhouses, the more I've understood why these places are deliberately kept from our sight, and why the workers are under strict instructions not to talk to the press. I can see why the meat industry spends so much money feeding our children a cotton candy story of meat.

Animals do not "give" their lives to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it. No, we take their lives. They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place. The friendly and intelligent pig whose life we take does not simply accept his death as a necessary step in the production of bacon. And he does not line up for his turn at the slaughterhouse singing about how happy he is to be on the way to becoming an Oscar Mayer wiener. Chickens do not approach the knife that will kill them wanting to dance and sing about how much we will enjoy eating their legs. The gentle and patient cow does not surrender docilely to the knife. She twists and bellows for all she's worth, even as she hangs upside down by a leg broken from the strain.

The poet Dylan Thomas once admonished us, "do not go gentle into that dark night." The animals whose lives we methodically take by the millions day in and day out would have understood his meaning. They do not go gently. They go kicking and screaming, bellowing their protest, fighting for their lives, and calling, to the last, to be saved. Calling for somebody, somewhere, to please hear them.

HEARING THEM
The people responsible for today's slaughterhouses do not find any of this disturbing. They are professionals. To them, the whole business is almost ordinary. They have become so locked into denial that they simply go about their work, which just happens to involve coldly butchering millions of innocent animals. Interviewing them, I've seen what Hannah Arendt saw when she probed the minds of the Nazis.

She called it the "banality of evil;" human beings matter-of-factly carrying out unspeakable cruelty, then going home and playing with their children. I asked one manager if the killing ever bothered him.

"No," he said. "Some of the new guys have problems, but I tell them this is the way it's done. It's natural." I did not particularly want to get into an argument with this man, but neither could I let his remark slide by. So I gestured with my hand towards the machinery and conveyer belts in the main room, and shook my head sadly, as if to say, "God help us if this is natural." "Do you have some kind of problem?" he asked none too kindly, insinuating that if such were the case I was suffering from a significant defect in character. My heart felt heavy as I looked into the face of so much denial. What could I say? Later, I went out to my car and cried. My tears were not only for the animals; they were for this poor man who had become such a stranger to mercy.

BEYOND DENIAL
It is painful to break the shell of repression. It takes courage to see what these poor animals endure. It is painful to see how calloused human beings can become.

It can be shattering to see that in our ignorance we have eaten the products of such a system. It takes courage to keep our eyes open to such tragedy, and our hearts open to our deepest human responses. The feelings that arise when we learn what is being done to today's animals are not signs of weakness. They are proof that there is still hope for us, that we have not totally succumbed to psychic numbing. In a culture that takes indifference and denial for granted, we may fear that our distress at these developments bodes weakness, a signal that we can't cope, evidence that we have a problem. But the distress we feel at what is being done is real, valid, and healthy. It speaks of our commitment to stopping this madness. It is a measure of our humanity.

The pain we feel is not ours alone. Many of us, conditioned to take seriously only those feelings which pertain to our individual needs and wants, may not realize that we can suffer on behalf of others.

But we can, and we do. We suffer on behalf of the animals when we learn of their plight. We suffer on behalf of the people who in their blindness are the instruments of such cruelty. We suffer on behalf of a society that perpetuates such tragedy. And we suffer on behalf of life itself

Our pain arises from our kinship with life. We hurt because we are not separate from animals, nor from the people who are the agents of such suffering. We hurt because these animals are our fellow mortals; and because the people administering such cruelty are our fellow human beings. We hurt because we are part, as they are, of the great web of life.

Our pain is not something to fear, for in the heart of our grief we can find our connection to each other, and our power to act. Our power lies in our connection to all life. Our power lies in our deepest human responses. Our power does not, lie in looking the other way.