From Living a Buddhist Life: Vegetarianism by Bodhipaksa

Neither with their legs nor with their horns do the cows hurt anybody, being obedient like lambs and yielding jars of milk. The king, seizing them by the horns, had them killed by a sword.

Then the gods, the ancestors, Indra, the titans and the demons cried out as the sword fell on the cows: ‘This is unjust!’

Few of us would wish to visit an abattoir [slaughterhouse]. They are hellish places. The stench of death, the blood-slicked floors, the noise of machinery, chain-saws tearing flesh and bone, the report of the captive bolt pistols that stun animals before they have their throats cut and, above all, the noises of fear and distress as animals are led to their deaths; all contribute to make a slaughterhouse a hell on earth.

In the abattoir, haste is essential to keep costs down. Animals have to be bullied to come forward to the killing area as quickly as possible. Some abattoir workers believe that a distressed animal makes for better meat due to the release of adrenaline. This ‘fight or flight’ hormone - released in conditions of fear - tenderizes the muscles and helps stop the meat from becoming infected with bacteria. Slaughtermen are often therefore at no pains to make the animals’ last minutes less distressing than they need be. Electric cattle prods goad animals towards the slaughtering area. That these implements are distressing can be inferred from the fact that they are a favoured instrument of torture in countries with the worst records of human rights abuses.

Abattoir workers have to stun all animals that are to be slaughtered to lessen the animals’ distress. The exception to this is Muslim (halal) or Jewish (kosher) slaughter, where animals are fully conscious while they are turned upside-down and have their throats cut. The distress of this is unimaginable, and it is worth remembering that many animals slaughtered in this way end up on the shelves of our supermarkets.

A common method of stunning is by captive-bolt pistol. A metal rod is fired from a gun into the brain, destroying the higher functions. A flexible plastic rod is then inserted in the bullet hole and stirred to destroy the reflexes in the lower brain - a process known as ‘pithing’. Pithing is done to prevent the corpse from thrashing around and injuring the workers. Pigs, and sometimes sheep, are often stunned with electric tongs, which, in theory, render the animal unconscious. More rarely a carbon dioxide gas chamber may be used. These have been described by researchers as causing ’severe respiratory distress’.

Electric tongs are, understandably, dangerous to the workers, and problems arise because low voltages are used in order to render them less hazardous. Animals commonly begin to recover consciousness before they are killed. In any event some people believe that animals stunned in this way are not unconscious at all, merely paralysed. One hopes that this is not true - it must be appalling to be aware of what is happening but unable even to cry out. Even when carried out effectively the electric stunning is likely to be extremely painful, as humans who have experienced similar shocks report. The actual killing is achieved by cutting the arteries that carry blood to the brain.

Chickens are killed in specialized processing plants. They too have to be stunned first, and this is usually done by suspending them upside-down by the legs on a conveyor line that leads them towards an electrically charged saline bath. Inevitably, as some of the birds struggle, they manage to miss being stunned and are still conscious when they reach the rotating blades that sever the carotid arteries.

Some authorities believe it is better to allow animals destined for slaughter to see their fellows being killed in order to shorten the time they have to wait in terror.

Others hold that animals should wait longer so that they are spared seeing their fellows being killed. It is a useful exercise in empathy to decide which we would prefer if such circumstances were forced upon us. Afterwards we could reflect on whether we want to put animals in that situation at all.