Why we need CCTV in slaughterhouses

In May 2017, Animal Aid released a dossier of evidence entitled Britain’s Failing Slaughterhouses that revealed that 93 per cent of slaughterhouses filmed were breaking animal welfare laws.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Last November, a new development in animal welfare on farms took place. No, pigs were not released from their farrowing pens and dairy cows not reunited with their lost calves - but still, it was vital and it was significant. Last November, cameras became mandatory in all areas of the slaughterhouse where live animals are present. 

Why was this necessary? Because of the regular physical abuse meted out to animals before they went to slaughter. The campaign was spearheaded by campaign group charity Animal Aid which first began investigating slaughterhouses in 2009. The organisation filmed inside 14 slaughterhouses, and found lawbreaking on a disturbing scale including animals being beaten, having cigarettes stubbed out on them, and even being deliberately given electric shocks. 

In May 2017, Animal Aid released a damning dossier of evidence. Britain’s Failing Slaughterhouses revealed that 93 per cent of slaughterhouses filmed by Animal Aid and others had been found to be breaking animal welfare laws. By the time CCTV was made mandatory in English slaughterhouses in November 2018, millions of animals had been cruelly treated before being killed.

Animal welfare is a devolved issue. Scotland announced it would made CCTV mandatory in Jan 2019,  and Animal Aid is still working on Wales and Northern Ireland. Central to the 9 year campaign was animal activist Kate Fowler. Here, she describes how she worked and what she hoped to achieve.

This is a difficult thing to talk about.

Yes. It’s not like we don’t know that slaughter happens. Anyone can tap into the internet and can find out but we choose not to because it’s self-preservation - and that has definitely been a barrier to getting information across. 

The genesis of the campaign was in 2009.

We’d done a lot of undercover work inside factory farms, so we knew the discrepancy between marketing and the truth. But we didn’t know anything about slaughter. I asked Andrew Tyler [then Director of Animal Aid) if we could get inside  the slaughter houses  - and we did. The footage was heart-breaking. At that point, I’d been vegan for 15 years and I knew about slaughter - but I didn’t want to see it. I made myself [watch the footage] and it was awful. And not just the slaughter but the abuse around it.

It sounds almostunbearable.

Yes. I found myself sort of gasping and shocking with every single punch and kick. I was in tears in the office with people all around me, who knew what I was seeing but couldn’t watch it themselves. Every time it got too much, I’d put on my trainers, go for a run, come back, sit down and go again. 

Animal Aid gathered evidence from up to 15 slaughterhouses.

We’ve seen the whole range of species, of sizes of slaughterhouses, of different geographical locations, of stunning techniques, depending on animal species - and [times when there was] no stunning at all. So we’ve been able to compare the worst and the less bad - because there is no good - in a way that nobody else has been able to.

Goats try to avoid slaughter. Picture: Animal Aid.

How did you decide to use the footage?

We had two aims. One was to get people to understand and to make a change personally. And the other was to get regulation tightened up. Animal Aid’s view - as is mine - is that we shouldn’t have slaughterhouses at all because we shouldn’t have slaughter. But, at the same time, we couldn’t walk away from the fact that abuses were happening. So we took a dual path.

What was the response?

The national press were fantastic. Everybody likes to kick journalists but every investigation we did got national media - as it should have done. It was powerful stuff. And that had spinoffs to local press and into government, politicians and regulators because they obviously read papers. The other route was to go directly to regulators and to lobby behind the scenes. So, while we were quite stringent about what we said in public, behind the scenes we were trying to get changes made.

That sounds like a juggle. 

I lost track of how many times I’d say “Animal Aid doesn’t agree with any [form of ] slaughter’. We had two lines to walk. 

You talked to the slaughter men.

Four or five years into the campaign, we went to the annual slaughter conference. Initially, they’d come to us because no one could speak about slaughter the way we could. We were the experts - because you become an expert quite quickly when you watch hundreds of hours of footage. You can read slaughter laws and regulations, but until you see it …. there are practices that happen that aren’t mentioned. 

The conference couldn’t have felt very friendly. 

It was like walking into the lion’s den - just me speaking to a room full of slaughter men and regulators. I stood there, looking out on the sea of people. And I thought, they can believe me or not, but if I show them what we’ve filmed, they can’t criticise too much. So I said, ‘I’m just going to let the films run behind me while I talk and you can see for yourself what I’ve had to see’ . That quietened them down because they couldn’t argue with that. You can’t have somebody punching an animal in the face and defend it. 

So I let that run all the way through. I was dreading the questions at the end. But, one after another, people I’d never seen before stood up and said, “I’d like to thank Kate and Animal Aid for what they have done. They’ve raised this issue in a way that we never have. We didn’t know any of it.” That’s when I thought, we’ve actually done something quite powerful. A lot of these people didn’t know, even though they were in the Industry, because who would know what was going on in slaughterhouses? 

And what was going on? 

We found abuse in every slaughterhouse bar one. Some of those were individual acts of violence, like burning animals with cigarettes, kicking, using the tongs. Sheep and pigs and goats and calves are generally stunned using electric tongs. These are big shears, supposed to clamp on the side of the head and send a current through the brain. If you miss the brain, it just sends out a powerful electric current and it hurts, but people use these tongs as a means of subduing an animal, or delivering pain. They would use them around the abdomen, around the ears, the tail, the legs. In one case, one man took a pig to the ground - she was screaming - and he put the tongs inside her mouth so the pain went through her face. Misuse of tongs is really common, as is kicking, beating, punching, all those things.

You refer to a culture of silence.

People couldn’t say they knew it was happening. The slaughter men knew but no one listens to them. The FBOs [Food Business Operator] may or may not have known and they all blame the vets, because the vets should be picking up on this stuff. The vets are paid for, partly by tax payers, but partly by industry. And, if they’re not in the stunning pen, they’re somewhere else. Everybody blames somebody else. The bottom line is there is no way nobody knew. They just wouldn’t say they knew. 

There is a strong sense of community around the silence, then.

We met a lot of people who said yes - but then you’d never hear from them again. The problem is, it goes beyond slaughter into farming. We wanted farmers to support us and, at first, they did. They were just incensed by this. As far as they were concerned, they rear their animals as well as they can - and then they send them off for this to happen to them? So we had pages and pages of supporter testimony from farmers - and, after that, we never heard from them again. I suspect they felt it was an attack on the whole industry. But, just because people don’t talk to me, that doesn’t mean they’re not working behind the scenes. So I always felt that farmers would be pitching in somewhere and all that helps drive change. I don’t need to be part of the conversation - as long as the conversation is happening.

You mention a slaughterhouse in Dorset where there was no ‘head shelf’ to keep the animals’ heads steady during stunning.

Yes, we documented many cases where they misfired. Sometimes, it took four goes to stun the animal. And that stun box had been running like that for at least three months. So that’s thousands of animals killed with additional suffering. The vet there must have either ignored it, or let them carry on. And that was just one instance. 

Another one was at Bowood, Yorkshire, where the entire set up was makeshift and badly designed. Animals were being delivered in a chute at speed and then fell to the ground. They couldn’t get up, they were struggling on a slippery floor, and somebody was in a tight space trying to get them into another shaft. He couldn’t manage because of all of this chaos, the animals falling and crying and bleating, so he was getting angry and taking it out on the animals. Again, the vet should have stepped in and said this slaughterhouse isn’t set up properly, but he or she didn’t. That’s why vets can’t always be relied upon. Plus, if they work in a slaughterhouse for months or years, they become part of the fabric. It’s hard to call out people you know.

Where does the cruelty come from?

In a lot of cases, it’s frustration. Nobody wants to be a slaughter man. They’re people with no other choice. Around half of slaughter men in the UK are people that have come to this country to find a job and all they get is this. Nobody wants to do it, so no one is listening to them. The slaughter men often were not treated with any respect.

You sent two abusers to jail.

I sat in court behind the wife of one and she was really angry, not surprisingly. But, once she got it out of her system, she said to me “my husband isn’t a bad man” - even though I’d seen him burning pigs with cigarettes in the face. They had a young baby. He was Polish, she was English and she talked about how [the slaughtermen] were given five minute toilet breaks. But, to get to the toilet alone took five minutes and they’d have had to get out of their overalls and protective kit, get it back on, and get back. So they just peed around the animals. That’s just an example of how they are treated. I understood then that it’s not about individual slaughter men. They’re paying the price, and they are going to jail. But their bosses are still making a mint and turning a blind eye to this. It just shows that the justice isn’t really fair. I don’t hold those individual men responsible for the wider issues. They have to take responsibility for what they did, but there are an awful lot more people who didn’t go to jail who should have done. 

So CCTV is in place?

It’s supposed to be in every area where live animals are - from unloading, the areas between stunning and slaughter. After slaughter, I’m not bothered. Once they are dead, nothing more can be done for them. 

Monitoring is key.
They agreed to independent monitoring but their view of it and ours might be different. We commissioned a report to look at how to set up a cost effective, independent body, to get trained people in under the auspices of, say, the RSCPA, the FSA, Compassion in World Farming. Their job would be to watch the footage and get the support they need, emotionally and physically. And the results were that they could deliver a reasonable level of coverage - additional spot checking, for example, so the vets are still there - for around £400,000 a year. It’s peanuts but so far that hasn’t been taken up. We have to show that the current system isn’t going to work, and we know it probably won’t - but we’ve got to give it a try.

Any recourse to the law? 

I find it intriguing. In law, there are things we obviously can’t do to animals - and yet it seems to be that there is a massive loophole for the farming industry. You can’t put your dog in those conditions, but we can allow thousands and millions of pigs to be in those conditions. As it stands, the law means we should be able to prosecute the whole damn lot of them. But we can’t, because where would you even begin with that? The law is important and it helps drive change, Going through the public route, through the legal route, through the media, through social media through investigations, all that helps drive change.

What gives you the strength to continue working for animals?

I’ve done animal protection work all my life. I’m driven by it, I’m heartbroken by it, but I’m never beaten by it because I can’t afford to be. It’s not for me to fall apart. Not many people can watch slaughter footage. The fact that I can is a valuable addition to campaigning generally. I just felt that that was my role and, when you have got a role, it allow a bit of distance between: that I wasn’t watching [the footage] as me; I was watching it as a campaigner who could help change the world. 

But there have been consequences .. 

The early years were difficult. I became very desensitised. I have rescue animals myself and I realised I lost connection to them. I fed them and walked them and cleaned them out, but I didn’t have that heart-to-heart connection and that was all part of the cutting off process that I had to do to watch that footage. I think I’m probably still desensitised. So I have some empathy with slaughter men because they’re desensitised too. They have to be.

For more information and ways to support the work, visit http://www.slaughterhousecctv.org.uk/

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People use these tongs as a means of subduing an animal, or delivering pain. Slaughterhouse in Essex. Picture: Animal Aid.