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by chrisco255
2607 days ago
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No, 91% of cattle ranches are family owned and about half of all cattle are raised in small herds of 50 head or less. You are also belittling the work of these professionals. You sound like you have little knowledge of the industry in general. |
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I'll admit phrased that last part ("types of people") very badly, so let me clarify. First, I should say that I'm very keen to believe that most of these workers are (as you say) professionals. It sounds like, in your direct experience, they are, which is great. But here's the issue:
This work is dangerous (dealing with deadly equipment and huge stressed animals), dirty (in the Mike Rowe sense), and low-paying (at or near minimum wage, per Google). So the gist of what I'm saying is, in that type of high-pressure, low-ethical-incentive situation, it's simply inevitable that:
1. Mistakes get made. 2. Corners get cut. 3. Equipment fails. 4. A worker stops caring (or didn't care to begin with).
Even if we imagine that literally all workers in these jobs are infallible, professional, and compassionate, we still have to deal with equipment working non-optimally (see the link about the bolt guns above; they ain't perfect). This means that some nonzero % of cattle processed suffer during slaughter. Even if we're charitable and say that that number must be small, like 1%, that's still a hell of a lot of cattle suffering.
In addition, you can easily find first-person accounts from slaughterhouse workers who describe exactly this imperfect system in vivid detail, where some animals end up dismembered while still "sensate". (And this is totally skipping over all of the ethical issues with confinement and slaughter in the first place!) So, to sum up:
We know logically that we make cattle suffer at scale.
We know empirically that we make cattle suffer at scale.
I would really, really like to be wrong about this.