"The animal could smell the blood, and see his or her former companions in various stages of dismemberment. During the last few seconds of life, the animal thrashes about the stall as much as its confines allow. All four of the cows whose deaths I witnessed strained frantically, futilely, and pathetically towards the ceiling -- the only direction that was not blocked by a steel door. Death came in the form of a pneumatic nail gun that was placed against their heads and fired.
The gun is designed so that the nail never completely leaves the gun, but simply is blown into the animal's head and then pulled out by the butcher as the animal collapses. Three of the four times I saw it used, it did the job on the first try, but one cow struggled a good deal after collapsing. After the animal has collapsed, the side of the killing stall is raised, and a chain is secured to the right hind leg. The cow is then hoisted by that one leg to a hanging position. At this point, the butcher drains the body of blood by slitting the cow's throat." (Gifford Dave, 2003).
After reading this, would you be able to look at the piece of meat on your plate and still consider it just a piece of meat? Could you still so casually and with the typical human sloppiness chomp and gulp down that part of a poor cow's slaughtered body? The reality is that these gruesome, unimaginable activities have been performed by us, humans, for decades, or even centuries. Farms and green fields in the cheerful countryside where cows, pigs and other domestic animals live happily were forgotten in favor of specialized slaughterhouses or laboratories. Clean stables have been replaced by undersized stalls, and fresh, healthy food has been substituted with high-caloric, fattening food, which is also filled with unhealthy, dangerous bacteria. Our society has developed immensely over the past few decades, but animals are still violently slaughtered, tortured and murdered everywhere around the world, all in order to satisfy our selfish and evil nature.
