What Slaughter Is, And Methods

Let's get a little messy here... Time for slaughter. Do you know a lot about it, or does your knowledge consist of horrible videos you'e been shown in school - in high school - and which you haven't been able to let go off since then? Kinda same here. That, and also the political aspect of people complaining - rightly so, I'm sure, in most cases - about the methods which animals are slaughtered with. Anyway... let's go into some definitions here.

As you probably know, a slaughter is when an animal is killed, or butchered, to give us humans food. Usually it is tame animals, also known as "domestic livestock", that are killed in this way. The animals most often killed to give us food? I'm sure you know most of these, but for the sake of providing some information - maybe you have forgotten or whatever - I'll give them to you -- here: cattle gives us beef and veal, water buffalo (did you know this one), sheep gives us lamb and mutton, goats, pigs (for pork), horses gives us horsemeat, chickens, ducks and turkeys.

Can you slaughter any way you want - however brutally you want..? No, there are laws for this - and different animals are killed in different ways (depending on their ability to feel pain, I would assume; but I'm only guessing)

These methods are the ones used in the United States:
so... For sheep, swine and calves, we have "chemical slaughter" -- where carbon dioxide is used to asphyxiate the animal; it is gassed, and then bled.

For a big range of animals - sheep, swine, calves, goats, cattle, mules, horses we have the captive bolt -- shoots into the animal an electrical current which, hopefully immediately, renders the animal unconscious; and, after this, the animal is bled. This is, by the way, a type of "mechanical slaughter".

Another type of the same type of slaughter is the usage of a gunshot -- cattle, calves, sheep, goats, swine, horses and mules, and animals similar to the last few mentioned, are subject to this method. This method is relatively "harmless" - not in the way that it doesn't do harm, which it obviously does, but in the sense that the animal is, preferably, dead or at least unconscious with immediate effect.

For swine, sheep, cattle, calves and goats "Electrical slaughter" is used -- where an electrical current is shot into the animal; the animal isn't immediately killed, but the current provides anesthesia for the animal so that it doesn't have to suffer from the bleeding of it.