We don’t seem to like mentioning death, do we? “Die” isn’t a word that should be mentioned in polite society – these days, we say someone has “passed”. We used to say “passed away”, but “passed” now seems sufficient, perhaps more for people than animals. You might say you’ve “lost” your dog, which could, of course, be taken the wrong way. I’ve been in a situation where in reply to the statement, “We lost our dog last week”, I was all ready to respond, “I do hope you find him soon”, until I realised that the loss might be most permanent… that could have been tricky!
We don’t like using the word “kill” either, do we? Pets are euthanised or “put to sleep”. Poultry with avian flu are “culled”, not “killed”, though they are most definitely killed. Laboratory animals are “sacrificed” at the end of a research study. Now, we’ve all read that word in scientific papers, but truth be told, it is rather a strange word for terminating an experimental animal’s life, isn’t it? Look back in history, and we see the word used for animals – or people – killed to appease the gods, taking the place of the ones doing the sacrificing. Maybe that was why the word was used to denote animals used as models for human physiology, or perhaps that is taking it too far. The term “sacrifice” comes, of course, in the religious context from the word “sacred”. The animal was transformed into a sacred offering. Instead, perhaps this accounts for the use of “sacrificed” to describe animals used as models for humans in research studies – though I’m not sure I have any evidence for that!
‘Culling’ birds in a poultry farm somehow takes away from the horror of techniques that kill hundreds, potentially thousands, of birds in ways we really would not consider appropriate in any other situation
Back in 1988, Michael Lynch wrote that sacrifice in this context was the equivalent of the transformation of the animal into scientific data, which seems a bit harsh – a bit dehumanising, or maybe we should say de-animalising. But that is, in reality, what is happening behind all these terms. “Culling” birds in a poultry farm somehow takes away from the horror of techniques that kill hundreds, potentially thousands, of birds in ways we really would not consider appropriate in any other situation. Being smothered with carbon dioxide, for instance, doesn’t seem like the best way to die. Well, I say that, but we need an evidence base, don’t we?
A quick Google Scholar search gives us a fair few papers on different techniques for the mass slaughter of poultry – that’s another word we don’t seem to use much these days unless we are aiming to convey a negative view of the process. Carbon monoxide is dangerous, maybe too dangerous to use without employing safety officers with gas masks, even though it kills birds without suffering. In fact, carbon dioxide increased gradually to a concentration of 40 percent seemed, in one big study, to kill the birds without sounds of agitation being noted and with only a very small proportion found dead on their backs (which suggests struggling before death). So maybe this isn’t so bad. Or, at the very least, not much worse than being loaded into a lorry, transported to an abattoir, hung upside down and electrocuted before having your throat slit. Gosh, writing that does bring home the whole reason for wanting to avoid using any words that might reveal exactly what we are doing.
Last night I watched the film Cow on BBC 2. It’s a really moving piece that brought home the reality of a dairy cow’s life and the monotony of the dairy parlour; the huge disparity between grazing in a field and being fed mixed ration from a hopper; the emotion of being separated from one’s calf and bellowing to have it back; the finality of the shot that ended the life of a cow that looked as if she still had plenty of milk and plenty of life left to live. Except, I guess, perhaps she failed to conceive, so had come to the end of her short productive life. Yet on Radio 4 last week there was a farmer with a very different attitude – who kept calves with their mother and kept animals that had gone through over 10, or maybe more, lactations.
All too often we choose to disregard [something], just because we can’t quantify it – just as ‘cull’ or ‘sacrifice’ somehow negates quite what we are doing when we take an animal’s life.
Now you are going to say, “what do you know?!” As an ophthalmologist, my main interaction with cows is through New Forest eye and has nothing to do with lameness or mastitis or failure to conceive – the things that really impact a cow’s life. Yet even when it comes to infectious bovine keratoconjunctivitis, I’ve been talking to a student today keen to do a project on the welfare impact of this disease on affected cows. We know how sensitive the corneal surface is – just remember that last time you had an eyelash caught in your conjunctival fornix and how irritating that was. So, imagine how excruciating a melting infected stromal ulcer must be for a dairy cow. We’ve got to work out some criteria for evaluating that in these animals before we make that into a scientific study. But all too often we choose to disregard it, just because we can’t quantify it – just as “cull” or “sacrifice” somehow negates quite what we are doing when we take an animal’s life.
Perhaps we could make our New Year’s resolution for 2023 to take the value of those animals whose life we end, either directly or indirectly, to heart more consciously over the next 12 months.
