This is the latest in a series of articles about animal rights, justice, and liberation. Both animal and human rights are principled on the idea that all sentient beings have inherent value, and should be able to live natural lives free from oppression, servitude, and fear. The constructs of abuse and exploitation used on humans are rooted in those we see used on animals. Animal justice is the moral baseline because of the sheer scale of abuse (it is estimated humans slaughter between eighty and ninety billion land animals each year) and because animals are unable to operate politically, leaving them marginalised and without agency. They are our most vulnerable.
Three miles outside Guildford is Slyfield Industrial Estate. It boasts several car dealerships, a recycling centre, and a few builders’ merchants. Getting there on foot from Guildford can be treacherous – you need to cross several main roads and busy roundabouts, and navigate dim underpasses and narrow broken pavements. But for some, getting there by vehicle is deadly.
The Green Gate
Once on the industrial park, you are greeted by wide roads lined with low-level buildings. Many are dense with glass and decorated with familiar logos. Frontages are open – you can gaze into large showrooms and see neat people sitting at neat desks. It is all very orderly. One location is different. The entrance is recessed, the perimeter menacingly fenced off. There are large security lights looming overhead and various warning signs: CCTV in Operation, Caution Guard Dogs. Unlike nearby buildings this one has a solid industrial green gate. It is clear – the building behind the barricade does not want to be seen.
A Place of Violence
Uncomfortably sandwiched between Howdens kitchen furniture shop and Audi Guildford, is a two-and-a-half-acre site of violence and death. The site is owned and operated by Anglo Beef Processors (ABP), a privately held company that is in the killing business with nineteen slaughterhouses across the UK. The Slyfield location consists of a small set of offices, a docking bay, a kill floor, and processing facilities where animals are dismembered. ABP doesn’t disclose the exact number of cattle slaughtered at its Guildford site but the company claims to kill approximately one million animals each year, half of which are slaughtered in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. ABP is the largest so-called ‘processor’ (their term) of beef in Ireland and the UK, and one of the top three in Europe.
It is strange to think that within a few hundred metres of people choosing kitchens and buying cars, cows are having their throats slit open, and bled to death. The calmness of the showroom is completely at odds with the depravity of ABP’s industrialised killing, and yet they are neighbours. In this bizarre and surreal spot – the muzak plays while the animals scream.
Death By Numbers
About three million cattle are killed in the UK each year, and if you consume beef you are funding not only their slaughter but also a brutal regime that involves week-old calves being stolen from their mothers, being held in isolated confinement, and executed, possibly while still conscious. They will then bleed to death while hung by their rear legs, have their skin stripped, and their flesh butchered away. What is left will be tossed into metal bins and disposed of. If they are female, they will be repeatedly raped, by a human using artificial insemination, and will lactate most of their life. Their existence will be abnormally short – less than ten percent of their natural life expectancy.
The British Cattle Movement Service, part of the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs, has a simple job – it maintains a database of births and deaths of bovine (cow) animals. The way the database is structured means you can search for the age of a cow when it is slaughtered. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board compiled the slaughter ages for the period 2019 – 2021 and found the killing of male cows peaked at twenty-two months old, with a secondary spike at fifteen months old, while the killing of female cows peaked at twenty-three months old. Cows have a natural lifespan of up to thirty years, and yet the majority don’t live beyond their third birthday. Some male calves, raised for veal, are slaughtered before they are twenty-four weeks old.
The Smell of Death
It is December, early morning, crisp with a blue sky, but there is something in the air. It is a lingering smell, pungent and thick. I breathe it, and I taste it. Sweet and nauseating, musky and earthy. It is all around me.
The area outside the large gate has been decorated with placards and boards and a long black and white banner which reads: Slaughterhouse – where your food goes to die. The building in the recess, behind the barricade, the one trying to hide, is now in a spotlight illuminated by a dozen campaigners from Guildford Vigils, a voluntary organisation that bears witness to animals in their last moments.
They do the hard work – while most of us look away, they remain present. During the morning half a dozen lorries pull up to the gate, each transporting cows for slaughter. The cows are tightly packed, many are unable to move. Small open slats are their only source of fresh air, and now, with noses twitching, they are deciphering their ominous surroundings. They smell what I smell – death.
The campaigners gather around the lorries. They witness and preserve by filming – iPhones perched on long sticks peer through slats providing testimony of lives lived and murderously extinguished.
The Lone Trailer
The lorry is waved through, and the gate is closed. It is distressing. You can see the roof of the vehicle manoeuvre towards the unloading bay. There is noise but you can’t see what is happening. You know these animals have lived subjugated lives, been denied what is natural to them and will now be violently killed with throats slit in an upward movement from chest to chin (stunning, which is meant to render cows unconscious before slaughtering, has a conservatively estimated 25% failure rate). The cows will spend their final moments on the kill floor, in complete and total fear, as they are able to hear and smell and see the butchery of other cows. There is nothing dignified about what is unfolding on the other side of Slyfield’s notorious green gate. This isn’t so-called ‘processing’ as ABP would have you believe – it is outright brutality.
We stand in silence. In the distance a dirty blue 4×4 pulling a silver trailer approaches. It indicates, turns, and pulls up to the gate. The trailer is compact and stands some eight feet tall. It doesn’t have slats but a long horizontal opening. A single nose, sniffing, is visible. Then the head comes into view, solid black with flecks of light-coloured dirt and a small white patch high on its forehead. Strands of soft black hair whisp out from their ear, which has a yellow tag unceremoniously attached. It reads 203481. We have shrunk this life force, with a lineage dating back some 10,500 years, to six digits. Their inquisitive face tilts and tries to peer out further. We make eye contact.
203481
(Source: insta / darrellsawczuk)
When writing, most stories allow for closure, they evolve you. On occasion, there are those stories that take a piece of you, and instead of closure you are left with a piercing void. 203481 is one such story.
We are failing the planet’s animals on an unfathomable scale. We are their hell and devil all wrapped into one, with our psychotic and sadistic tendencies going unchallenged. We breed, torture and slaughter living creatures for no good reason. We strip them of their dignity and also use them as entertainment simply because we can.
As I prepare to leave Slyfield I look back towards ABP’s house of violence and notice a windsock on one of the rooftops. It is fluttering and contorted, as if gasping for air. Then, briefly it extends itself, and in that moment, it gives form to the smell of death, making it temporarily visible.
Between your dream kitchen and your swish new car is a place designed to terrify, torture, and execute. It was the last place 203481 saw before their short life was brought to a brutal and unnatural end, and it appears – for many people – that is okay.
Footnote:
Domesticated cattle date back some 10,500 years, and are believed to originate from an area stretching from eastern Türkiye to north-western Iran.
In 2017, Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and expert in animal behaviour with a Ph.D. in biopsychology, and Kristin Allen, from Florida State University’s Department of Sociology, undertook a major psychological review of the lives of cows.
“Despite a global reliance on cows for thousands of years, most people’s perception of them is as plodding herd animals with little individual personality and very simple social relationships or preferences. Yet, a review of the scientific literature on cow behaviour points to more complex cognitive, emotional, and social characteristics. Moreover, when cow behaviour is addressed, it is almost entirely done within the framework of their use as food commodities.”
Marion and Allen’s key 2017 findings included:
- Cows can smell the stress experienced by other nearby cows.
- Cows offer each other emotional support to get through difficulties in life. They comfort each other.
- Cows excel at spatial cognition.
- Cows have long term memory and retain information for extended periods after its usefulness.
- Cows can learn from another cow’s mistakes.
- Cows can tell other cows apart from each other, and from other species, even walking up to photos of familiar cows over spending time with photos of unknown cows.
- Cows can also tell human handlers apart from each other even when they are wearing the same clothes.
Surprisingly, Country Life featured Marion and Allen’s findings in a 2020 article titled Are Cows Actually Super Intelligent?, in which they acknowledged cattle ‘display the ability to rapidly learn different tasks, possess long-term memory, extrapolate the location of a hidden moving object and discriminate humans from one another.’
©2024 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
