Meat consumers often ignore the fact that animals are killed and cut up for food. Workers in slaughterhouses, on the other hand, can hardly ignore death like one ARD-Documentary shows.
He takes you on a journey behind the facades of slaughterhouses ARD-Documentary film “Us and the Animal” by Grimme Prize winner David Spaeth the audience with. It introduces people who slaughter animals and at the same time love and respect them. It also shows possible future scenarios.
The contradictions of slaughter
The report goes to those at the beginning of the chain – to those who do the slaughtering: a young trainee, her master and two other butchers. The film shows the contradictions in their work and how they deal with them. On the one hand, they enjoy the job, it fulfills them and they understand its relevance.
“And it doesn’t matter whether it’s shaving or gutting – if it works and you’re now able to do it reasonably well,” says Amelie, a trainee at the slaughterhouse, “then you think to yourself: I’m having fun with this now. And then you think to yourself somehow “Can I have fun now or can I not have fun?”
On the other hand, the work is not always easy for them. The job is physically demanding and also mentally stressful.
Not easy ones working conditions
The butcher Ionel, who works in the largest cattle slaughterhouse in Europe, describes how he sometimes even closes his eyes during the killing process. His workplace is the so-called “shooting range”; several hundred cattle pass through his box every day. He does his job well when the animals fall out as motionless as possible.
Sometimes he pets a cow to make it feel good. “You can stroke her back and play with her. Or she licks your hand. That calms her down before she’s shot,” says Ionel. After his shift he goes home and tries to put work out of his mind.
Even after 40 years of experience as a butcher, Jürgen, head of an organic meat production facility in Bavaria, feels that the work is not getting any easier. “It’s actually becoming increasingly difficult for him to do that.” He is aware that meat consumption is increasingly being criticized these days.
Slaughtered by hand or with robots?
What does the future of slaughter look like? Scientists from the University of Environment and Life Sciences in Ås in Norway are researching a modern battle robot. Their goal is to develop a fully automated system for the industrial cutting of pigs.
For this purpose, pig bodies are clamped into a solid metal frame. Robotic arms circle the animal body, use artificial intelligence to calculate and then cut it open. Mistakes still happen and the technology has not been fully researched. The difficulty for the robot is the animals’ natural differences: the joints, the muscles and the distribution of fat.
Moral and emotional facets
The research raises questions: Will machines do the killing in the foreseeable future? Will the workplace change so that animals no longer meet people? And do people then get rid of responsibility?
Until now, it has been “absolutely okay” in society to eat meat, says butcher Elisabeth. “We have a large majority who eat meat, and the meat has to be produced in some way if society thinks it’s okay to eat it.”
And yet the employees in the slaughterhouse ask themselves whether what they do every day is the right thing. In doing so, they discuss the moral and emotional facets of the slaughter process on behalf of meat consumers.
Although people are eating less and less meat in Germany, the numbers are increasing worldwide. The profession of butcher, regardless of its form, is likely to remain.