The Innefficient HMSLA & How it Should be Revised

American adults are currently utilizing the convenience of fast food to order three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week. That's 90 grams of fat and 2,520 calories. The average person needs about 2,000 calories for a whole day. We have become obsessive meat eaters because of convenience even though we have a choice in what we eat. We continue this act even though we would be deriving more energy and lead healthier lives by eating food from the producer level. It is embarrassing that Americans support fast food restaurants, such as McDonalds pictured at the right, for their inexpensive convenient food without considering the inhumane slaughter animals suffer in order to keep prices low for consumers. They are able to inhumanely slaughter chickens because they are one of the many animals not protected under the Humane Slaughter Act. Prior to this course, I never considered where this meat came from or how the animals that were slaughtered led a despicable life and suffered inhumane slaughter. As Americans, most of us trust that our government in Washington is passing laws and enforcing them to ensure that we lead moral, safe, and respectable lives. However, the Humane Slaughter Act (HMSLA) is incredibly flawed to allow religious based slaughter houses to reap millions of dollars in profit at the expense of killing animals in the most inhumane and painful way possible.



The HMSLA is defined as a “United States Federal Law designed to protect livestock during slaughter.” It is expressed within this law that “animals should be stunned into consciousness prior to their slaughter to ensure a quick, relatively painless death.” However, the wording of this law allows for a “broad exemption for all animals slaughtered in accordance with religious law. This generally applies to animals killed for kosher and Halal meat market. Strict interpretation of kashrut generally requires that the animal be fully sensible when its carotid artery is cut.” Thus, we are using the excuse of a religious belief to inhumanely slaughter animals at little expense and reap profits. As pictured below, animals subject to kosher slaughter are placed in a metal holding device to keep their throats easily accessible to the slaughterer. Is it morally sound for animals to suffer in a kosher slaughter house to make larger profits while other slaughter houses that use anesthetic at the expense of the animals’ suffering? It is fairly obvious that animals sent to a kosher slaughter house have been dealt a vicious fate when compared to others sent to a non-religious slaughterhouse. Their slaughter is far less humane when comparing their levels of cortisol, a hormone produced in the body as a result of stress. “The cortisol range for both on-farm handling and cattle slaughter was to 63 ng/mL. The one exception was a kosher plant that inverted cattle on their backs for 103 seconds; those animals had 93 ng/mL.” Therefore, our government is endorsing animal cruelty through inhumane slaughter as long as it has a religious affiliation. Shouldn’t a secular based business feel some sort of remorse from financial gains earned by inflicting the largest degree of pain while killing an animal?



The answer is that they do not. Agriprocesors is “the nation’s biggest supplier of kosher meat, [and] was raided by US immigration agents in May [of 2008]. Nearly 400 workers, mostly Guatemalans, were swept up and jailed and are likely to be deported as illegal immigrants.” At the time of this article investigators were suspicious of the company’s “annual revenue of $250 million.” In addition, “the influential Brooklyn rabbi Moshe Robashkin, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 2002 after writing $325,000 in bad checks related to a family textile business.” A study of Jewish slaughter houses in France found that “none of the abattoirs (French word for slaughter house and the act of slaughter) practices slaughter according to the Jewish rite. This is because they lack the equipment required to respect the demands of the ritual as well as those concerning the humane treatment of animals. Slaughter in accordance with the Muslim rite poses similar problems.” It is morally and ethically unjust for the US government to continue rewarding religious slaughter houses with large financial profits under a religious exemption that results in inhumane animal slaughter.

The US government would see far more success for animal rights if they allowed inspectors to return to the slaughter houses to ensure that all laws and provisions are being followed. “In 1978, the HMSLA was updated and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors were given the authority to stop the slaughtering line when cruelty was observed. Officially, slaughtering was not to continue until said cruelty, whether as a result of equipment or abuses by personnel, was corrected. However, the USDA eventually stopped authorizing USDA inspectors to stop the line, since doing so incurs considerable cost of time for the industry.” Because there is no regulation at the slaughter houses anymore, the degree of animal cruelty has more than multiplied. An official with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Sioux Falls explained that “animal abuse is so common that workers who’ve been in the industry for years get into a state of apathy about it. Nobody knows who’s responsible for correcting animal abuse at the plant. The USDA does zilch. Especially in the hog kill, where you have hogs going through at eleven hundred an hour, the abuse is out of control.”
By keeping inspectors off the kill floor it seems as though the government is acting like the American public: they know animal abuse is occurring in the slaughter houses, but they do not want to regulate it in fear of rising meat prices or a decrease in convenience. Currently, inspectors work in offices where they are prohibited to inspect on the killing floor of a slaughter house. USDA meat inspector Dave Carney explained that if an inspector went to the kill floor today “he’d be subject to disciplinary action for abandoning his inspection duties. Unless he stopped the line first, which would get him into even more trouble.” Even worse, this inspector’s answer to the question of “So what’s the procedure for checking inhumane slaughter?” was that “there isn’t one.” If there were provisions and inspectors on the floor, then cattle such as these pictured at the right would not have been slaughtered while fully conscious. Therefore it is true and unjust that the HMSLA has no effect in the slaughter house and is merely a provision on paper to appease animal rights groups. Carney even admits that “The Humane Slaughter Act is a regulation on paper only. It is not being enforced.” It is unethical and shameful that our government approve a law to support animal welfare and then not enforce it so that those in the slaughtering business can receive financial profits at the expense of heightened degrees of animal cruelty.

The obvious and attainable goal for Americans is to encourage the US government to enforce the HMSLA by writing to their State Senators and House Representatives. By enforcing this act inhumane slaughter for thousands of animals could be reduced. On a day to day basis consumers should only by meat from markets who abide by humane slaughter. As a market based economy, boycotting meat produced by inhumane slaughter will result in decreased profits. As a hopeful result, slaughter houses will also push the government to allow inspectors on the kill floor so that they may endorse humane slaughter to increase their profits.

The largest constraint to the enforcement and revision of the HMSLA is that most American citizens are not aware of what it stands for, means, or what it lacks to regulate. Thus, educating the public on inhumane slaughter will be the largest component of gaining attention from Washington to make a real difference. Interest groups should educate young consumers on college campuses and those in the work force about the cruelty imposed on animals that do not experience a humane slaughter. Anyone containing any ethical or moral values will be distraught in hearing the true facts of inhumane slaughter that garnering support for animal welfare will not be difficult. Another popular misconception is the issue of feeling as though one person cannot make a difference. One person can join the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) Action Team where members are informed of “upcoming events and demonstrations in your area, breaking news, urgent alerts, and tips for how you can improve the lives of animals every day.”

A goal for the immediate future would be to revise HMSLA to give inspectors rights to inspect the kill floor and not permit exemptions to the law because of religious affiliation. Also, the law should be rewritten to include all the animals subjected to factory farming. All animals feel pain regardless of what anyone thinks. Humans do not have the right to determine which animals should be given ethical humane treatment and which should not. The public should show the powerful interest groups that have an established reputation in Washington of their concern with the current HMSLA. The easiest way would be to encourage people to express their concern to PETA or any other animal interest group so that this law can be revised to not allow inhumane slaughter at all.



Finally, a reach goal for our society and government would be to include provisions in the HMSLA to protect the entirety of animals’ lives rather than the few seconds it takes to slaughter them. Animals subject to factory farming have zero quality of life. Ethically, we have a moral responsibility to these animals that we bring into life for the sole purpose of consuming them. While they are alive on this earth they should be given a quality of life that allows them some time to act as an animal in their natural habitat. By granting a higher quality of life to these farm animals by allowing them sufficient space in pastures with open air, we would also be contributing to the profits of the American farmer rather than the businessman.

Word Count: 2318
WC without quotes: 1983