You can't escape the Berwickshire even in Norn Iron-but it is only the electronic version and sadly is far from complete. No Sheriff of Duns for example. The editor selects the best of the letters for the website-this weeks top choice is below. It is of interest to a farming community where animals are commercial products and not objects of sentimentality except perhaps Rosie the Cat,. Rosie one should mention is often glazed of eye and twitching gently-but not when she is being put to death but when she is dreaming of putting other creatures to death-little harvest mice or song birds. I don't think she worries if her victims are feeling pain-rather disappointed if they are not; she has not many other simple pleasures in her advancing dotage and is increasingly unable to catch anything apart from dead bits of chicken left outside the Old Manse side door.
Memory of this mornings broadcast is quite putting me off tomorrows dinner
SIR, This morning (Saturday, May 14) I tuned in to Radio 4, to find that Auntie Beeb was visiting a slaughterhouse. An operative was explaining how a sheep is slaughtered. Apparently, a forked device is affixed to the animals head and an electric charge is passed through the prongs of the fork. This stuns the animal, so that it does not feel any pain. The animals throat is then cut, so that the animal bleeds to death, under the pressure of its own heartbeats.The operative was asked how he could tell that the animal didn't feel pain. The evidence was, apparently, that there was no movement from the animal except a slight twitch of the back legs, and that its eyes were glazed. One or two more people, associated with the food and farming industries, were invited to comment, and the atmosphere was pretty upbeat, with talk of effective animal welfare, and so on.Not being a vegetarian I found all this very encouraging. The only pity is, that if we examine the argument more closely it seems pretty weak. A person who believes that we ought all, on moral grounds, to be vegetarians might say to the slaughterhouse operative. You have shown us that the animal becomes immobilised, and that its eyes glaze, but you haven't given us clinical proof that this means that the animal cannot feel pain. We might expect exactly the same outward signs if the animal were in pain, but the electric charge had effectually paralysed the creature, so that it could not express its agony.I don't know how we might reply to this, but it seems a pretty formidable argument. After all, we know less about the workings of brains than about any other part of living creatures. Neurology, whilst employing some of the keenest edged minds in the scientific world is still a fairly young science and recently neurologists have begun coming to the view that some brain-damaged human beings in Persistent Vegetative States (PSV), although we have always thought them totally switched off, may in fact have certain areas of consciousness still operating, possibly even being tormented by vague dreams. If we know so little about our own brains, how much can we know for certain about conscious states in animals?As a meat-eater I hope that someone is able to resolve all this soon, because it is now Saturday night, and the memory of this mornings broadcast is quite putting me off tomorrows dinner.
I am not really quite sure what the writer's point is. If he is worried about his lamb chops suffering while they are still lambs and en route via the stun gun and the executioners axe to the butchers he should boycott the meat industry. Death inevitably involves some passing discomfort but mankind must survive and eating helps in this respect. Until 'all this' is resolved I suggest he (as it is) abstains from fleshy delights and sticks to pizzas-but then many pizzas have eggs amongst their contents-and we cannot be sure that the hens did not suffer in laying those gnormous Very Large eggs so beloved of Morrison's customers. Better become a Vegan and keep on the moral high ground, often a drafty and lonely place. Although I don't speak from experience
