Ireland is awakening to the environmental impact of its livestock industry. Village has been to the fore in focusing on this unpalatable subject while the newspapers ignored it. RTE has been more craven still in its favouritism towards a livestock industry, often lovingly referred to as ‘our farmers’.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. It is likely that editors and producers fear offending advertisers. I submitted numerous articles to the Irish Times on the subject. Ironically the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times proved more receptive.
Belatedly the Irish Times has covered the issue and ran a series by Conor Purcell, a climate scientist in UCD earlier this year focusing on livestock emissions. More recently on April 2nd they ran a forensic article by some-time Village- writer John Gibbons entitled: ‘Meat is Madness: why it leads to global warming and obesity’ which joined the dots between the environmental and public-health impacts of meat production.
Nonetheless the public is still largely in the dark as to the manifest unfairness of ‘meatonomics’ in Ireland – where landowners receive endowments as rural communities flounder. One positive that could flow from the Brexit debate is that focus will be drawn to the perversion of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was designed to protect farmers but now leads to concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few, and continued rural depopulation.
The Irish media still avert their gaze from the meat-‘processing’ industry, a sinister euphemism that confounds the reality of millions of animals being slaughtered each year.
This bears out Ruth Harrison’s observation that:
“If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people”.
As far as I am aware no Irish newspaper has ever sent a reporter in to explore what happens in an abattoir or concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO). It is only when a case reaches the courts that it will enter the public domain.
One such was reported in the Irish Times in February 2015 in which pig farmer Rory O’Brien was given a jail sentence of 18 months. Judge Sean O Donnabháin said:
“This is cruelty on an industrial scale by one of the biggest pig farmers in the country. On a continuous basis he knowingly and without regard acted in this way”.
Inside the rat-infested piggery, animals were left to starve causing them to to eat one another the court was told. O’Brien’s farm, which closed in 2011, held over 2000 pigs. That implicates a lot of breakfast rolls.
Millions of animals are slaughtered in Ireland each year but no journalist to my knowledge has braved the killing floor. The excellent indigenous documentary film ‘Foul’ (2006) by Andrew Legge explored the poultry industry but it is usually left to the Guardian to investigate what is happening in our, Irish, killing industries.
Without journalistic coverage here we must draw on accounts of industrial slaughter elsewhere. Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book ‘Fast Food Nation’ paints a lurid picture that is unlikely to be different in Ireland:
“On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It’s one strange image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves as though they were twoby- fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler … Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, if I want to go any further. This is where some people get sick”.
He continues:
“The kill floor is hot and humid. It stinks of manure. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so far along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you onto the bloody concrete. It happens to workers all the time”.
Yet more scenes that recall Dante’s hell are revealed as he presses further inside:
“I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizard-brand knives peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned”.
Schlosser also encounters bestial working conditions usually undertaken by immigrant, unionised labour.
“For eight and a half hours, a worker called a ‘sticker’ does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and he must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely”.
In the last circle of this inferno he meets the ‘knocker’, the man who welcomes cattle to the building:
“Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner – a compressed-air gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose – which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stand over them and shoots. For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and he shoots the same animal twice”.
One can only imagine the psychological toll that such gruesome work has on those who are compelled to perform it. Another issue that Schlosser refers to is the cumulative trauma injuries in the meatpacking industry, which are higher than the rate in any other American industry.
These depredations are by no means confined to America. A report in El Pais in April explored the Catalan pork-processes sector which mainly employs migrants at low rates of pay. For the sake of jamon and chorizo workers are expected to remove the guts of animals at a rate of 700 carcasses an hour: “the repetitive nature of the work means that you can’t move your shoulders at the end of the day”.
The report identifies: “rampant racism, long hours and inhuman treatment of workers who fall or are injured” which led to a two-day strike in early April. A witness recorded how one of the Catalan boss ‘aristobutchers’ called him a “black piece of shit” and threatened to send him “back to Africa, where you’ll die of hunger”. Another worker claimed the same individual threatened “to pump them full of bullets”.
Most workers earn a basic salary of €800 a month, with €50 deducted for membership of a supposed co-operative, along with deductions for work materials, laundry and an €267 socialsecurity contribution. This in twenty-first century Europe.
The desperate treatment of workers in the livestock industry goes back to its emergence in the American mid-West. An influential novel called ‘The Jungle’ from 1904 by Upton Sinclair potrayed the appalling treatment of workers. It seems as if the absence of compassion towards animals shown by bosses in this industry extends to the way they treat workers.
Can Ireland really be avoiding these depredations?
Vulnerable immigrant workers, Pakistanis and Brazilians abused in the industry and the litany of illegalities – all resonate in Ireland from the horse-meat scandal all the way back to the Beef Tribunal. The Irish media must take another deep breath and join more dots.
