Diet for a New America 25th Anniversary Edition. John Robbins

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СКАЧАТЬ they are dumb and don’t recognize their unique presence. Rooted deeply in the rhythms of the earth, they move through life with a peacefulness that is not easy to disturb. They are not troubled by much of what bothers us, and when they are alarmed—usually by things we cannot see—they are still slow to panic and rarely overreact.

      Aldous Huxley once said that in this century we have added onto the seven original deadly sins an eighth that is just as deadly—the sin of hurry. In terms of this sin, at least, cattle are saints.

      Few of us today have much opportunity to experience for ourselves what kind of creature cattle are, and so we are easy prey to the common prejudices about them, which are born and thrive in ignorance. But a naturalist who knew cows well, W. H. Hudson, spoke movingly of

       the gentle, large-brained, social cow, that caresses our hands and faces with her rough blue tongue, and is more like man’s sister than any other non-human being—the majestic, beautiful creature with the Juno eyes. ⁴

      People of less sophisticated times, living in closer contact with the earth, had great respect for these patient and gentle souls. 2,000 years ago, the poet Ovid wrote:

       Oh ox, how great are thy desserts! A being without guile, harmless, simple, willing for work.5

       How Now, Brown Cow?

      For centuries, these animals have pulled our plows, sweetened our soils, and given their milk to our children. Today, however, these peaceful and patient creatures have been rewarded for their centuries of service by being treated in much the same way as today’s chickens and pigs. You might think there are laws requiring them to be treated humanely. But harkening back to darker times, the Animal Welfare Act specifically excludes creatures intended for use as food from its regulations governing the “humane” treatment of animals.⁶ And though this law places some restrictions on how cruelly animals can be treated, cows, pigs, and chickens are evidently not considered animals within the meaning of the act. The current philosophy is that you can be as cruel as you like, as long as the animal is later going to be eaten.

      The result isn’t very pretty.

      You may wonder, as I have, how the people who actually handle the animals rationalize what they do. I asked a livestock auction worker named George Kennedy if he was ever uncomfortable with the way the animals were handled. He replied:

       Look, if you want beef, this is the only way you can have it. There’s no room in this business for a “be nice to animals” attitude. There’s work to be done, and that’s all there is to it.

      Later, I talked with the owner of the auction, a man named Henry F. Pace. I asked him how he felt about the charges from animal rights groups that the auctions were cruel to the cattle. He sized me up for a moment, then answered:

       It doesn’t bother me. We’re no different from any other business. These animal rights people like to accuse us of mistreating our stock, but we believe we can be most efficient by not being emotional. We are a business, not a humane society, and our job is to sell merchandise at a profit. It’s no different from selling paper clips or refrigerators.

      In the eyes of the law, Henry Pace is right. There are almost no legal limits on what can be done to the animals destined for our dinner tables.

      A federal law, passed in 1906, does put certain basic restraints on the way cattle can be shipped by railroad. This law was passed to curb the cruelty that most of us would like to think belonged to a less enlightened time. But this law puts no restraints on the way animals can be shipped by truck, because trucks did not yet exist at the time this act was passed, and apparently the cattle industry has managed through the years to block the passage of any legislation that might extend the cow’s protection to include more modern transportation.

      With a sharp eye for this kind of loophole, the meat industry today almost always ships cattle by truck. The journey, as you can probably guess by now, is a horror from start to finish.

      If you were to step inside one of these trucks you’d be immediately struck by the smell. It wouldn’t take you very long to know that the ventilation is terrible. And you’d soon find out that the temperatures are scorching hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. You’d see that these animals—ruminants whose stomachs function properly only with a more or less continuous supply of food—may spend as long as three days and nights without being fed or watered. One authority wrote:

       It is difficult for us to imagine what this combination of fear, travel sickness, thirst, near-starvation, exhaustion, and (in winter)… severe chill feels like to the cattle. In the case of young calves, which may have gone through the stress of weaning and castration only a few days earlier, the effect is still worse.7

      Today’s cattlemen regard it as a normal part of the business that some of the animals will die in transit. It’s a calculated loss. They find it more profitable to absorb the loss due to deaths and injuries than to handle the animals differently. They fully expect to find some of the animals dead on arrival, and they calculate the loss simply as one of the costs of transporting the animals, along with the price of gasoline.

      Most of the deaths are caused by a form of pneumonia known quite appropriately as shipping fever.⁸

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