The following is an interesting message from a young woman who has gone from working in slaughterhouses to becoming vegan. Its a great insight into what really goes on behind closed doors. Dad has always been a slaughterman and would kill animals for farmers around town for an income. We were very poor because he raised us on a pension, he had a veggie garden and an endless supply of meat so every night it was meat and veg, meat and veg. The boys would always go hunting and we had bows and arrows. I would go too and would shoot animals, mostly rabbits but sometimes foxes, kangaroos. Dad would kill animals in our backyard and I would come home from school and there would be half a dead big getting chopped up on our kitchen table. Thats just how things were. The killing of animals for food and recreation was normal part of life for me from a very young age. When I finished high school I worked in a pork abattoir. I was saving for uni and it was easy money, I was earning about $1000 a week. I was working on the slaughter floor and was the only girl. I would pull gall bladders off the warm livers, pack hearts, feet, lungs, livers, tongues into boxes to be sent away. I worked there for probably a total of six months all up. Now in my fifth year of uni, I still have nightmares about being in the abattoir. Despite all of this, I am happy to say that I have a vegan diet. I never felt bad about killing the animals because by the time they got to me they were already dead, so they were just bodies, but one day I went for a walk down to where they are still alive and I was so devastated and shocked. The screams of the pigs are the most horrific sounds I have ever heard, and you can see the fear in their eyes as they are getting herded into the gas chamber by big metal machines. The exceptional cruelty happens daily, they get kicked and bashed and prodded by the men into the different cages and pens before being killed - I saw it whilst I was back there but also heard about it on a daily basis as a lot of them talked about it jokingly. At the final stages before going into the gas chamber the pigs are herded by machines, which are big metal hydraulic arms that come down and then push the pigs forward into the gas chamber - the worst thing is that if there are pigs standing underneath it when it comes down, it just lands on their back, leg, head or whatever and pushes them to the ground, so they often get broken back and necks and legs just prior to going into the gas chamber. That is horrible. Also it was very cruel that some of the bigger pigs are still conscious when they get out of the gas chamber and so their feet are cut and they are hung upside down and they are stabbed in the heart while they are still alive - that was horrible. And sometimes the gas chamber would break down completely so all the pigs that go in all come out fully conscious and as it is a production line there is no way to send them back through again - they just stick them in the heart while they are still alive and let them bleed to death. I also worked in the meat lab for a few months which is where they test the meat products for taste, tenderness etc and perform control groups on pigs by feeding them different diets and then testing how tender the meat is. There was a freezer full of half formed piglet foetus that they had collected for another study. In order to get them, they artificially inseminated the sows (which is common practice in pig farms) and then killed the sows when they were at the desired gestation period, removed the fetuses and the sow went onto woollies shelves or wherever it goes. That disturbed me a lot. It was all pretty gross. When is the raising pens the pigs would be given injections in their shoulder of antibiotics and the needles would more often than not, break off in the pigs should, so then when it comes to getting up, there is a big cyst that has formed around the needle that would burst onto the conveyor belt, they would just cut it out and then pack it up into christmas rolled shoulder bags. And cysts would burst all over the pigs skin and would be roughly washed off - WHY DO PEOPLE EAT CRACKLING??!! I justified it by saying that 1)I really needed the money and 2) everyone does it so it must be ok 3) I have seen this my whole life so I need to get over it and 4) if abattoirs didnt exist, thousands of people with families and kids and mortgages would be out of a job - many of them cant read or write and this is all they have ever done. So as much as I hated it I saw it as necessary for them. In the nightmares I am always running around in the chilled fridges where there are hundreds of bodies of pigs for as far as you can see and I cant get out and I am bumping into them. And I keep slipping over on the blood and there are baby pigs hanging up. Its really weird. I went to India to volunteer and I was in this paddock one day and there was a little calf standing around alone because his mum was off providing milk to the village, so I went up and petted him and he kind of just fell onto my lap and so there was this little, kind of big, calf sitting on my lap getting cuddles, and thats when I realised that animals are sentient beings and I would never want to eat something that comes into my arms for a cuddle . And milk! I started reading about all of the puss and mucous that ends up in our milk and I was disgusted to drink milk or eat cheese. I had a raw diet for about a year and that led me to research which proves that YOU DONT NEED DAIRY TO GET CALCIUM. Then I started thinking about taking the milk away from the baby cows and I find that sad and disgusting and unnecessary. I have always been a bit shy and passive about my views though and have never wanted to force it upon other people - I just lead by example. So I cook a lot for my friends and it is always vegan and I have a lot of energy and do lots of exercise and am still really strong despite being vegan. I never get sick and Ive never had an iron problem. It has been such a great flow on effect though, to not purchasing products with palm oil, and talking to people about the horse racing industry and how cruel that is. Bravo friend, and thank you for sharing your story with us all!
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:35:46 +0000
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