Slaughterhouse Quotes

“Vegetarianism”

“Animal rights”

“Cruelty to animals”

“As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields.”

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

“You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be. I wouldn't want to have my guts ripped out by a lion. I'd much rather die in a slaughterhouse, if it was done right.”

“No child, I think, can walk through a common market or slaughter-house without receiving moral injury; nor am I quite sure that any virtuous adult can.”

“Quite often the young person is horrified at innocent animals being driven to the slaughterhouse to satisfy the appetites of the human species which could easily feed itself in other ways.”

“Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words, "Eat or be Eaten!" and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!”

“Has anyone ever known a school to organize a field trip to a slaughterhouse? Never. Why? Where does this sense of shame come from that obliges us to keep silent in front of our children about the fate that we impose on animals? Throat-cutting, electrocution, and evisceration—are these scenes that would be obscene in the eyes of innocents? The answer is yes.”

“The cow doesn't grow fast enough for man / So through his greed he makes a faster plan / He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker / Through the stress the cow gets sicker / Twenty-one different drugs are pumped / Into the cow in one big lump / So just before it dies, it cries / In the slaughterhouse full of germs and flies / Off with the head, they pack it, drain it, and cart it / And there it is, in your local supermarket / Red and bloody, a corpse, neatly packed / And you wonder about heart attacks?”

“The assembly line, the foundation of modern capitalism, came from perfecting methods to slice up animals while—and this is the important part—preventing them from resisting. And once capitalists figured out how to turn animals into component parts (just a leg, just a throat, just a head), they realized they could do the same thing to human workers (just a hand, just an arm, just a cutting motion). Ideas of how to prevent human resistance came from first figuring out how to prevent animal resistance.”

“I am amazed when I see young people eating meat. It seems to me so much thing from other times! The carnivore youth is not with the times, it has a stomach of the nineteenth century, who carnivorized Europe... Eating pieces of slaughtered animals is an anomaly, out of a vegetarian diet there is no real youth. Meat is mostly an anguished habit of old people. Requiring meat dishes, talking about it, remembering it, it's a thing of old people, old and unable to rejuvenate with a decidedly alternative diet.”

“Now, I'm no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half of my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I'm extremely competitive on a tennis court—I'll dive for any ball on any surface. But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew I would never again harm an animal! I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was that firsthand experience of man's cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism.”

“I presume that very few men and very few women would be willing to go and catch hold either sheep or of oxen and themselves slaughter the creatures in order that they may eat. […] Now, I venture to submit that if people want to eat meat, they should kill the animals for themselves, that they have no right to degrade other people by work of that sort. Nor should they say that if they did not do it the slaughter would still go on. […] Every person who eats meat takes a share in that degradation of his fellow-men; on him and on her personally lies the share, and personally lies the responsibility.”

“All these animals are put in cages, never see the sun or grass, and they leave this hell only to go to the slaughter-house. For me intensive breeding is a sign of human degeneration. If one can find that acceptable, then we humans have lost all moral value. … [How long have you been a vegetarian?] Since 1962, when I went on French television to denounce conditions of animal slaughter. That is when I became aware of the horror of factory farming, live transports and the killings of farm animals. I have always been sensitive to animal distress but from then on I refused to be involved in such inhuman industrial deaths.”

“Again and again workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of creating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations and amputated limbs are difficult to conceal from authorities. But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped discs, pinched nerves.”

“One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn't stop. And when I finally did stop, I'd expended all this energy and frustration, and I'm thinking what in God's sweet name did I do. (Quoting a slaughterhouse worker)”

“I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher … He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.' But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.”