How Do They.....

I know at one point, they used a bolt gun shot to the brain to kill cows at Iowa Beef Processing.

I don't know if that's still how they do it.

 

they give the cows guns and force them to watch 'Gigli'

/tried my best

 

Uh, I don't think that it can be done humanely. They call it a 'slaughterhouse' for a reason.

 

I suppose that they could lovingly make every cow comfortable in its last minutes, give it a last meal, pat it adoringly on the head and make it feel loved, and then humanely put it to sleep with a combination of painless drugs, but I suspect that that would be extremely costly (do you want to pay $18.95 for that hamburger???) and time consuming.

Faster and cheaper to just give 'em a whack with the axe (or whatever) and send 'em on their way down the conveyer belt to the next station.

 

I always try to give thanks to the animal itself before I eat it.

While I acknowledge eating meat is natural and good, I think what is missing in our culture is a true respect for the animal being killed for food. We eat animals all the time not thinking about how they got on our plate etc. It is like McDonalds telling children that hamburgers come from hamburger trees. We now just push these thoughts from our minds and ignore them because they are hard to reconcile.


"One of the main problems of mythology (religion) is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives...don't kid yourself by eating only vegetables, because they too are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself!" - Joseph Campbell


Taken from here:
http://www.wildway.org/voice_p2_ahimsa.php

Ahimsa and the Reconciliation of Killing

In India there is a Sanskrit word "ahimsa" which means non-injury. In Hinduism, ahimsa is one of the moral requirements, or yamas, necessary to progress on the philosophical path of the Way of Knowledge, or jnana yoga. Ahimsa means nonviolence toward all living beings. This ideal is taken to its extreme by devotees of Jainism who believe every manifestation of nature has a soul and thus do not farm, move about during the rainy season, drink or walk about without using a fine net to filter water and cover the mouth for fear of inadvertently killing insects. Jains and Hindus are often strict vegetarians, some only eating that which has fallen from tree or vine so as not to kill any growing entity. (Fenton 1988 pp. 280-86)

In observing the great extremes to which the person who believes that each entity is a manifestation of God will go to avoid harming any living being one, wonders how North American Indian tribes such as the Lakota who obtained many of their sacred teachings from animal messengers from the spirit world and who champion the sanctity and unity of all life can justify the killing of wild animals for food, clothing, and utensils. It is the job of religion, myth, and ritual to reconcile this problem. Author Christopher Vecsey states: "American Indian environmental religions revealed human alienation from the source of life and revealed the means of overcoming that alienation." (Vecsey and Venables 1980 p. 24)

According to Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman), the North American Indian "believed that the spirit pervades all creation and that every creature possesses a soul in some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. The tree, the waterfall, the grizzly bear, each is an embodied Force, and as such an object of reverence." (Eastman 1980 p.14) Christopher Vecsey agrees: "In saying that animals...have life, Indians were declaring that their environment was a world of beings with souls...Humans and non-humans shared a basic characteristic, establishing an essential equivalence between them: they both possessed souls." (Vecsey and Venables 1980 p. 19) For the Lakota, each thing is a manifestation of the Great Mystery or Wakan Tanka; it is through nature which the reality of the supernatural is shown.

The animal is a manifestation of the Great Mystery and must be respected--how then can the Indian reconcile this situation? It has been suggested that the Indian practiced animal rituals of respect in order to secure bounty and out of fear of retaliation by animals in the form of disease and loss of hunting success. This interpretation is too simplistic. In the myths of both the historic Indian tribes and the pre-historic hunting cultures the animal is believed to be of the same if not higher status than the human and the dominant mythic theme is that the animal offers itself as a willing sacrifice. The animal voluntarily sacrificed itself for the life of the hunter and thus prayers and offerings made to the animal were necessary to bring the Indian into accord with the animal killed. For the Indian:


Every act of his life is, in a very real sense, a religious act. He recognizes the spirit in all creation, and believes that he draws from it spiritual power. His respect for the immortal part of the animal, his brother, often leads him so far as to lay out the body of his game in state and decorate the head with symbolic paint or feathers. Then he stands before it in the prayer attitude, holding up the filled pipe, in token that he has freed with honor the spirit of his brother, whose body his need compelled him to take to sustain his own life.
(Eastman 1980 p. 47)
The respect the Lakota Indian shows toward the animal stems not from fear of punishment for the hunter and the tribe if the animals are treated without respect but from a deep spiritual realization that all things are manifestations of Wakan Tanka. The reciprocal relationship between Indian and animal is proved in the practice of offering tobacco, sage, or other objects to the animal killed: if you take from nature you must give something back.

The hunting rituals of reciprocity and respect provide for the rebirth of the animal killed. Rebirth refers to both the physical body and the spirit. The killing of the animal by the hunter disrupts the delicate balance of the world order, a balance which must be restored. "When a deer was killed, 'somewhere in the mountains, there was a greater deer spirit whose power had been damaged to some extent, and an element of disorder thus introduced into the world.'" (Hughes 1983 p. 32) The animal is thanked directly in hopes that respect given to the spirit of the killed animal will re-establish equilibrium. In the myths, the animal sacrifices its life with the understanding that the proper respect and gratitude will be bestowed upon it by the hunter. According to Joseph Campbell:


The basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal. To the Indians of the American plains, it was the buffalo.
(Campbell 1988 p. 72)
The attitude of respect and covenant with the individual animal is taken to the level of a covenant with the animal "master" or "owner" in many Indian hunting cultures such as the Algonkian hunters in eastern Canada and the Indians of the Plains. "The animal guardian may be defined as a supernatural ruler whose function is to exercise stewardship over the wild animals, especially the animals which are hunted by man. He protects these animals, sees to it that if they have been slain by man, they get a correct burial, and sanctions or prevents the hunter's slaying of them." (Hultkrantz 1981 p. 136) The animal species which have animal masters are generally those of the greatest import to the Indian group and are often arranged in a hierarchy; for the Indian of the Plains the bison tops this grouping.

The following is part of the "Wiwanyag Wachipi" or Sun Dance of the Lakota and sums up the ideas of this section:


The chief of all the four-leggeds is "tatanka", the buffalo. Behold his dried skull here; by this we know that we, too, shall become skull and bones, and, thus, together we shall all walk the sacred path back to Wakan-Tanka. When we arrive at the end of our days, be merciful to us, O Wakan-Tanka. Here on earth we live together with the buffalo, and we are grateful to him, for it is he who gives us our food, and who makes the people happy. For this reason I now give grass to our relative the buffalo.
(Brown 1971 p. 90)

 

with chickens, as they are hanging by their feet upside down, they pass through a chamber that sends an electric shock knocking them out...then their heads are chopped off. It's all done by machines.