Tuesday 6 March 2007

The Story of Lamb

Kill it, Cook it, Eat it

6th March 2007

Our story begins with 8 month old lambs which we see happy in the field where they apparently live all their lives. They are produced from specially bred parents who have new lambs every year. We don’t learn at what age they leave their mothers or the conditions in which their parents are kept. The farmer says sometimes it is hard to put them to their death, but is consoled by the fact that she has produced a quality animal that will be enjoyed when it is eaten.

The lambs are given and electric shock with tongs producing an epileptic fit and making them unconscious. Then they have to be bled out quickly or else they could regain consciousness.

The lamb being knocked out seems less painful than that of the cow, maybe because it falls down and looks asleep and there isn’t the harshness of the shot. However they are moving around a lot when hung up and bleeding and that makes it seem like they are still feeling the pain even though we are assured this isn’t the case.

To me as soon as the head is gone and the skin starts to be removed then the lamb's no longer look like something that was living. It would be easy for me to disassociate the slab of meat with a real animal; I guess that’s what most people do.

The people butchering the animals ‘respected the carcass’ says one audience member.

One lady said she cried and couldn’t watch the whole process but thinks she will be eating meat in a few weeks time.

The male vegetarian in the audience who hasn’t eaten meat for 6 months after seeing a film about how they were treated, ate the meat saying he was happy that these lambs had a good life but wasn’t sure if he would eat it again.

Another member of the audience who eats lots of meat, wouldn’t touch his. The ordeal has made him feel ill because he is squeamish about seeing the blood but is unsure of how it will affect him in the future.

A farmer’s wife couldn’t watch the killing of the animals but says she loves meat, and as long as she doesn’t watch the animal being killed can eat it.

Again we have the view of the sole vegetarian asking people to think carefully about what they are eating.

Like yesterdays program the word ‘humane’ was used many times to describe how the animals were treated.Would we really do that to another human – stun them, cut them up and eat them? You would get locked up for doing that, so why do we let ourselves do it to animals?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, very conveniently my meat eating partner, left the room when the lambs were going to be slaughtered.

I watched it to reinforce my view that I am doing the right thing being a vegetarian.

Glad they re-showed the slaughter at the end, so that my partner could witness the murder.

Rachel said...

You make an interesting point that we would not away with treating fellow humans in this supposedly humane way. I think that just proves that most people put humans above animals and feel hat they deserve better treatment and respect.

This is a useful attitude in the 'survival of the species' as killing and eating each other would not help us to survive. however, in today's society it is not necessary for us to eat animals to survive and in fact from breeding them we are using up space which we could be living in ourselves. So perhaps, with our population increasing at such a large rate. we should consider whether breedinga nimals to eat is such a good thing.