The recently released footage of workers at a slaughterhouse in Essex punching, beating and stubbing out cigarettes on pigs makes for extremely distressing vie wing. Animal Aid should be applauded for documenting such horrific and illegal abuse, and exposing it to the public and relevant government authorities.

The fact that Defra has decided that it cannot prosecute such obvious violations of animal welfare standards – on the grounds that the footage was obtained by trespass – is incredibly frustrating. Moreover, it is not entirely clear that trespass has to serve as an absolute roadblock to prosecution. Given the gravity of the incidents, it certainly seems like a proper use of Defra's resources to pursue the case further.

In any case, recording and publicising footage from this and other slaughterhouses is not of value only insofar as it leads to the prosecution and punishment of the wrongdoers. It is also of value in that it makes us confront a much wider issue: the very processes by which our food is obtained.

After all, while the cruelties shown in the footage appear to be in breach of legal standards, it is worth reflecting on what those standards are designed to regulate: a process that is quite astonishing in terms of its scale and efficiency.

At bottom, of course, that process is a massive slaughter. But it is one that is planned, industrialised and breathtakingly efficient. It is an organised slaughter that successfully "processes" around 100,000 cattle, sheep and pigs every single day in the UK. Across the EU as a whole, 800,000 cattle, sheep and pigs are slaughtered every day for food. Moreover, despite the good work of animal protection organisations, and despite much talk of a growth in public sentimentality towards animals, these systems of industrialised slaughter are on the increase. For one, the efficient processing methods perfected in Europe and North America are now being adopted elsewhere around the globe, as the modern westernised diet grows in popularity. Indeed, global per capita consumption of meat has more than doubled between 1961 and 2007 and is expected to double again by 2050.

Even when legal animal welfare standards are met within these modern slaughterhouses, we must question the "humanity" of the process of which they are a part. Societies introduce animal welfare standards, quite rightly, because they recognise that animals such as pigs are beings that can experience joy and suffering in their lives. And yet, those standards regulate a system in which vast quantities of those sentient creatures are lawfully bred, confined, mutilated, fattened and transported in lorries to death on an assembly line. It is hard to see what is humane about such a process, even without deliberate beatings, burnings and other such cruelties.

Crucially, within the context of an industrial system designed to dispatch animals so routinely and in such massive numbers, it can hardly be much of a surprise that there are some workers who commit the kind of horrific cruelties exposed by Animal Aid.

I do not say this with the intention of excusing those individuals. Undoubtedly, those who commit such acts do so of their own free will and should be held accountable and punished as such. But at the same time, it has to be acknowledged that a system which reduces so many millions of sentient, social and intelligent animals to "units" to be dispatched on an assembly line is likely to have some undesirable consequences. Not least, the fact that these animals are sentient, sociable and intelligent is likely to be neglected or ignored.

To expect humane practices within a system that is so fundamentally inhumane is perhaps to expect too much.

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