A Century of Cruelty: The Jungle Revisited |
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February 13, 2006
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| Compassion Over Killing |
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| Truckloads of turkeys await shipment to slaughter. |
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In February 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle shocked the nation with its exposé of Chicago's slaughter plants and the systematic abuse rampant throughout the meatpacking industry. The book detailed horrific cruelties—including the killing and butchering of still-conscious animals—and led to a massive public outcry.
February 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of The Jungle's publication, and, in the intervening years, more people have begun to pay attention to the novel's descriptions of slaughterhouse abuses. Although a century has passed, the majority of the cruelties Sinclair depicted remain widespread in U.S. slaughter facilities, affecting more than nine billion chickens, turkeys, and other birds each year. Indeed, fully conscious animals are shackled, hung upside-down, and cut with mechanical blades. Some are even scalded alive.
The cruelties that Sinclair described have endured, despite mid-century action by Congress. In 1958, Senator Kefauver described the then-current slaughter process:
I have witnessed...the terrible screaming as the animals are dragged aloft by one foot, seen the grim struggle when the [slaughterhouse employee] knifes them, and observed in this whole barbarous procedure a combination of pain and terror for animals and danger and degradation for men which ought to have been stopped long ago in the United States of America.
Out of concern for the continuing abuses occurring in the nation's slaughterhouses, Congress passed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 (HMSA) to outlaw these practices. The HMSA clearly requires that "cattle, calves, horses, mules, sheep, swine, and other livestock" be slaughtered in accordance with humane methods. But the USDA—the very agency charged with administering the regulation—systematically excludes birds from its protection, despite the fact that they make up more than 95% of all land animals slaughtered for food in the United States.
As a result of this policy, processors continue to slaughter birds using some of the very same methods that Sinclair described in 1906. Despite the availability of more humane alternatives, the current industrial poultry slaughter process often causes extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering.
That's why The HSUS, East Bay Animal Advocates (EBAA), and five poultry consumers, filed suit, challenging the USDA's policy of excluding chickens, turkeys, and other birds from the HMSA's protection. Not only does the USDA fail to protect birds from even the most terrible practices, but as in Sinclair's time, inhumane slaughter methods put consumers at an increased risk of contracting dangerous food-borne illnesses. The cruelties of yesterday and today are inexorably tied to public health concerns and enormous animal suffering.
What You Can Do
You can help put an end to cruelties that have persisted for more than 100 years. Urge Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns to follow Congress' intent and provide all farm animals with legal protection from the worst abuses.
