Every year in Britain, to satisfy our national hunger for meat, we slaughter some 450 million chickens, 25 million turkeys, 14 million sheep, 13 million pigs, eight million ducks, three million rabbits and one million quail. The end result on the national plate is more than two million tonnes of red meat, and close on another million tonnes of poultry.
Of the 1,000-odd abattoirs creating these meat mountains, all but a couple of dozen are privately owned, and most of the killing is carried out by those - fewer than 100 - licensed to export meat to other EC countries. Consequently the volume of livestock passing through the hands of these larger establishments runs into thousands of animals or tens of thousands of birds every day.
It would be comforting to think that every kill was a clean kill, carried out swiftly and efficiently with suffering kept to an irreducible minimum. Indeed, much legislation governing the slaughter of animals has been enacted to that end, and yet there is widespread evidence to suggest that, for a number of reasons, many thousands of animals are still the victims of unnecessary suffering.
With the exception of Jews and Muslims, who slaughter animals according to their own strict religious laws, the common ground is that animals entering the abattoir should be calm and unsuspecting, and that they are effectively and painlessly stunned so that they are unconscious at the time of slaughter.
"Once you have properly stunned an animal," says John Douglas of the RSPCA, "it doesn't matter what you do to it because it never regains consciousness." Unfortunately there are good reasons to suspect that this does not always happen.
All livestock entering the slaughter-house must pass through three stages on their via dolorosa. First, the lairage, where they are penned on arrival. Then comes the stunning area, divided into metal boxes in which cattle can be rendered senseless away from the sight of others, and open pens for smaller animals (pigs, sheep) which are stunned with electric tongs. Finally, shackled by the back legs and suspended from a conveyor, each unconscious animal is "stuck" (ie, its throat is cut) so that the blood can drain from its body. Only when so much blood has gushed from the body that the heart stops is the animal technically dead.
In Britain the law demands that all animals except those exempted through religious slaughter must be stunned before they are stuck. This enables the still-beating heart to assist in the bleeding out which, claims the meat trade, is needed to maintain the quality of the meat.
According to the FAWC, some 70 per cent of the total blood loss occurs in the first two minutes after sticking, and it was always assumed that the pumping action of the heart was needed to force the blood from the carcass. However, recent research undertaken on pigs suggests that cardiac arrest before sticking and bleeding has no effect on the amount of blood lost or on the quality of the meat. If this is so, it has major implications for the way we slaughter animals, since the present two-stage system means that thousands, possibly millions, of animals are going fully conscious to their deaths because they have been improperly stunned.
"I have watched while obviously imperfectly stunned, still-conscious animals have been shackled, hoisted and suspended with the whole weight of their bodies pulling on the muscles of one leg, have their throats cut and continue to hang until they bleed to death," says Ruth Harrison. "I have watched and wondered how we can do this to animals we know to be conscious. What sort of people are we?"
She believes that the welfare of animals at slaughter is the single most important issue in need of urgent government action. "Perhaps the word 'welfare' is a euphemism in this context, and it is extremely dispiriting that so little has been done," she says.
"Regulations are desperately needed to prevent this sort of cruelty - for cruelty it is. The FAWC report on the welfare of livestock at slaughter came out in 1984 and made 117 recommendations. We're still waiting for them to be implemented."
There is a common slaughterhouse philosophy which says: the animal is going to die anyway, so let's get the job over and done with as quickly as possible. But as Ruth Harrison says, this can lead to the emotional immunity of those who slaughter on our behalf, as well as to all kinds of unnecessary cruelties.
"Birds especially are treated as mere things in processing plants. There is nothing more disturbing than the sight and sound, especially the sound, of chickens being pulled out of crates and put on the shackles ready for the water-bath stunner."
Another area of concern revolves around the controversial issue of religious slaughter. Britain's Jewish and Muslim communities are not bound by the law that requires animals to be stunned before slaughter. Both groups use an exceptionally sharp knife to cut the animal's throat while it is still conscious.
This practice is strongly defended by its practitioners, who have produced authoritative scientific opinions which affirm that it is at least as humane as any other method currently in use. But the animal welfare lobby sticks to its belief that slaughter without pre-stunning causes pain and terror and should be abolished.
In 1985 the FAWC published a report proposing 17 changes in the way animals are slaughtered by religious methods, but the government has taken no action except to reject its two most contentious proposals. The first would have required Jews and Muslims to develop alternative methods which would permit effective stunning; but this was rejected on the grounds that non-observance of religious law would cause hardship to religious minorities by imposing a straight choice between eating the meat of stunned animals or not eating meat at all.
The second proposal advocated that all meat slaughtered by religious methods should be labelled. In Jewish slaughter-houses, all hindquarters are declared non-kosher, so a considerable amount of meat ends up on the non-Jewish market. But there is no way that consumers can tell where it has come from. This, too, was rejected as "impractical". Yet, as the animal welfare lobby points out, meat from New Zealand is labelled right down to the very last lamb chop. The decision not to label, declared one welfare activist, smacks more of the lack of ministerial will rather than impracticability.
Other recommendations in the report included the banning within two years of the rotary pen, used in Jewish slaughterhouses to turn the animal upside down so that its throat is exposed to the shochet's knife. This proposal was among those accepted by the agriculture minister but it will be another two years before such pens are phased-out.
The Jews believe that shechita - the Hebrew method of slaughtering animals for food - is divinely ordained and therefore immutable. The official Jewish response to the FAWC report describes how it is carried out: "Cutting the throat of the animal with a single swift and uninterrupted sweep of the knife, which is of more than surgical sharpness, horizontally, across the throat in such a manner that it severs the trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries and jugular veins."
This, argue its supporters, is not cruel and does not cause the animal pain. It creates a swift loss of consciousness by cutting the supply of blood to the brain. "It's a fundamental part of Jewish law not to cause pain to animals," says Rabbi Berkovits, registrar of the Chief Rabbi's Court.
The laws of kashrut (keeping kosher), he explains, have nothing to do with hygiene or improving the quality of the meat. They are simply a part of a religious code which is indivisible from everyday life. "In order for meat to be proclaimed kosher," he says, "it must be free from certain injuries, usually internal, at the time of slaughter." Hence the unswerving opposition to pre-stunning.
"Clearly, slaughter carried out by whatever means is an emotive subject. Yet even if it could be proved on empirical grounds that shechita was less humane than pre-stunning (something which science has so far failed to do), there remains the insurmountable, hurdle of religious faith. Orthodox Jews regard shechita as God's will, something which cannot be altered by mere human authority. However passionately and urgently animal activists campaign for change, it is hard to see how this fundamental disagreement can ever be resolved.
