The
Humane Slaughter Act (HSA) requires that animals be rendered
insensitive to pain before slaughter. The HSA is under the
supervision of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA),
but the law has not been consistently enforced since it was passed
in 1958. Technically, slaughterhouse production lines should be
halted for any violation of this law, but few of them are. Faster
production lines, an increase in the number of animals slaughtered,
and regulations that shift some oversight responsibilities to
slaughterhouses have made federal inspectors hesitant to halt these
lines. Federal regulators are even more hesitant to sanction
slaughterhouses. As a result, animals are frequently dismembered
while still alive and conscious.
In a Washington Post article dated April 10, 2001, "They
Die Piece by Piece," slaughterhouse workers revealed a serious
pattern of animal suffering in U.S. slaughterhouses. One worker,
whose position is "second-legger," cuts off hocks from carcasses. He
explained that dozens of animals reach him daily while still alive
and conscious, even though by law the line should be stopped in each
case. The Post reported that USDA records offer snapshots of
the extraordinarily inhumane slaughter practices at processing
plants:
- A Texas beef company was cited 22 times in one year for
violations such as chopping hooves off live cattle. The USDA took
no action.
- Inspectors at a livestock processing plant in Hawaii describe
hogs walking and squealing after being stunned as many as four
times.
- Another Texas plant was cited for 22 violations in a six-month
period, including allowing live cattle to dangle from an overhead
chain.
- Videotape from an Iowa pork plant showed hogs squealing and
kicking as they were submerged in scalding water to loosen their
hides for skinning. Because they were ineffectively stunned they
were scalded before dying by drowning.
The USDA is supposed to ensure enforcement, but instead has
fostered the problems. Even when slaughterhouses are cited for
violations, the federal officials take little if any action to
assure that remedies are adopted. Some USDA inspectors attribute
this to the agency's lack of record keeping. "Under the new system,
the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter
violations its inspectors find each year," reported the Post.
The Solution
Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) and Representative Connie Morella
(R-MD) introduced resolutions, S. Con. Res. 45 and H. Con. Res. 175
respectively, to ask that the USDA fully enforce the Humane
Slaughter Act to prevent the needless suffering of animals. In May
2002, the Humane Slaughter Resolution passed as a provision in the
Farm Bill, a massive, $190 billion piece of legislation.
It is now crucial that Congress allocate money specifically to
enforce the HSA. This is a necessary step toward the prevention of
cruelty to animals. It would also ensure that the federal government
would finally meet its responsibility to enforce this law, nearly
half a century after it was originally passed.
