I have a problem with meat, which I have eaten all my life. During my childhood, meat was hearty—roasts, chops, steak, ham, liver, bacon, sausage, faggots.
Meat was the centre of every meal, bought from my mother’s preferred butcher in town, the meat displayed there on cool slabs of marble, later in refrigerated trays, the butchers always cheerful with rubicund cheeks, looking as if they enjoyed life, with badinage ever-to-hand for their housewife customers.
The butcher’s was a good place to go, despite the sweet-sickly smell from the meat which permeated the shop. I had no difficulty with that, nor with watching a scrubbed pig’s carcase carried at shoulder height from a van across the street. Dismemberment denatures meat, it is not an animal, it is something else.
The trouble is the denaturing is false. Every time I walk to town these days, I pass between fields of grazing sheep. There is one particularly fine flock of black sheep, though they are not strictly black but a very dark brown, the colour of Java coffee. They are not as timid as white sheep, the ram, especially, with his curled horns, stands his ground, though he is wary, his body tensed, ready to turn and run if this human makes a move.
Perhaps it thinks, if it thinks at all, that the fence is there to keep humans out, not sheep in. All the more shock, then, when the farmer comes with his dog and they are rounded up, crowded into a lorry and taken to the slaughter house. (Slaughter house being a more honest name than abattoir.)
From my earliest childhood I was used to seeing sheep at Abergavenny cattle market, packed in small pens, heads resting on the backs of their fellows. The auctioneer stood above them on a plank walkway. Below him stood the farmers, lean men in cloth caps from the Black Mountains, watching the auctioneer as he took bids at great speed. To the uninitiated it sounded like rhythmic verse—a trobar clus which only the troubadour-auctioneer and the farmers understood.
There was the auctioning of cattle, too, though we never stayed for that, and outside the Butter Market canary-yellow chicks packed jostling in cardboard boxes like animated squeaking toys.
I accepted this as normal, which of course it was. Humans were on top, while animals were live products to be passed from farmers to the market to the slaughter house, then back to us via the butcher’s, ending as roasted, fried, boiled meat on our table.
If you shake the kaleidoscope, however, you get a different picture. Then animals become the slaves of a superior species who possess power over life and death—but death always for the animals in the pens.
The slaughter house in Abergavenny was attached to the market, and if you walked past after the market was over you heard the melancholy lowing of the cattle, the wrenching squeals of the pigs, the baahing of the sheep, penned overnight awaiting death. And that smell again, stronger than at the butcher’s.
Evenings, strolling by, perhaps on the way home from the Coliseum Cinema, remain with me. I can visualise them clearly, though sound is harder to articulate in retrospect, except as a faint echo of the animals’ fear and despair. I would need to be a great impersonator to give a sense of those sounds and I don’t believe I could bear it.
Some years ago, there was an advert in one of the newspapers which affected me. It consisted of a photograph of a skip filled with pigs’ heads, around which people with pig masks stood, hands raised to their cheeks in pig-horror.
Shake the kaleidoscope and what seems normal becomes a nightmare. I visited a pig farm once in Denmark. It consisted of a very large shed filled with small pens containing perhaps two or three hundred pigs, many with piglets wriggling and sucking from their prone mothers’ teats.
The air was acrid with the stink of ammonia and rent with squeals and grunts. The farmer bred trout as well, and while I was there the fish were being transferred from one dam to another, propelled at great speed through a pipe which must somehow have sucked them up with the water, discharging them into their new quarters.
On the train from Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury you pass dozens of farms, many with outsized closed sheds. I know what they contain, battery-farmed chickens, or pen after pen of pigs, or cattle in stalls. Outside nothing stirs as the train rattles past, but inside, the air will be fetid and filled with the cries of animals deprived of all semblance of a natural existence.
When we go to the butcher’s or the supermarket we don’t usually think of this. Perhaps, even, we say we didn’t know, just as many Germans said they ‘didn’t know’ about the death camps at the end of the war. Not knowing is best until the wall of self-imposed ignorance collapses. Perhaps, too, factory-farming learned a thing or two from them? The methods are similar, only the species are different.
You can of course choose to eat free range and organic meat which is what we do, salving your conscience by thinking ‘at least they had a good life in the fields’. The endgame, however, is the same.
Feeling as I do, I ought to give up meat, and I know there are sound environmental reasons for doing so. I do eat less and less of it but I enjoy cooking and selfishly there are too many meat dishes I like to cook and eat.
I live therefore with the gap between the sheep I pass every day in the fields and the denatured lamb I dice for a curry. These are irreconcilables and I live by trying and failing to keep them apart.
Slaughterhouse Days
Are they brutal to the sheep
because they hate their job
and hate themselves; I think so;
cruelty sits nursing a grudge
the clock ticks neither fast nor slow
the universe is what it is
and has its way of doing things
ready to give the blow to life
to hopes, blood finding runnels
as sure as rivers find the sea.