Abattoir

 Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday in the New York Times calls our attention to a recent undercover video released by an animal rights activist that offers a glimpse into the inner workings of one of the slaughterhouses that puts chicken on Americans' plates. 

The indelible video shows the assembly line manner in which the chickens are strung up in rows by the heels (I think of Ezra Pound: "by the heels at Milano") on an electronic conveyor belt. As the birds rotate through the room past a series of knives, the latter cut their throats. 

Kristof explains in his column that the birds are supposed to be dunked in an electrical bath that renders them unconscious before they are killed. Then, their throats are slit by machines, and they are eventually dropped into boiling water so their feathers can be removed. 

He observes, however, that many chickens manage to survive the first two stages of the ordeal and end up going alive into the boiler. 

Either way, they spend the last moments of their lives in an agony of fear—and whatever constitutes for chickens the condition of radical uncertainty, as they move upside-down toward the automatic knives or shocks or boiling water that will end their lives. 

Kristof adds: "Meanwhile, the terrified chickens are defecating, so bird poop is flying all over the workers[.]"

I am tempted to cry out, as Thomas Hardy did of his "Blinded Bird": "all this indignity / With God's consent, on thee! [...] Who is divine? This bird."

Why are we doing this to these divine birds? Are there not other ways to get protein in our diets? 

And look, I'm no saint in this. I'm a pescatarian, so I'm far from pure. But the good doesn't have to be the enemy of the perfect. Best of all would be to eat no animals whatsoever. But if we find we cannot manage that, we could still eat fewer of them. 

There is much to gain from such a course on both sides of the transaction. As Kristof observes, the conditions for the human workers in these abattoirs who are tasked with this bloody service seem scarcely better than those of the birds. 

Alfred Hayes captures the whole scene best in his poem, "The Slaughter-House"—and his words speak as well to the way this industry exploits both animals and human laborers:

head down from hooks and clamps, run on trolleys over

      troughs,

the animals die.

Whatever terror their dull intelligences feel

      or what agony distorts their most protruding eyes

the incommunicable narrow skulls conceal.

      Across the sawdusted floor,

ignorant as children, they see the butcher's slow

      methodical approach

[...] struggling to comprehend this unique vision upside down,

and then approximate a human scream

      as from the throat slit like a letter

the blood empties, and the windpipe, like a blown valve, spurts

      steam.

[...]      I, too, misjudge the real

purpose of this huge shed I'm herded in:  not for my love

      or lovely wool am I here,

but to make some world a meal.