Our slaughter-house system : a plea for reform / [C. Cash].

  • Cash, C.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Our slaughter-house system : a plea for reform / [C. Cash]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    105/230 (page 89)
    polluted with human excrement. Later on the meat is removed to the butcher’s shop in carts of questionable cleanliness, with no covering over it. There it remains hanging till it is sold in spite of the appearance it acquires by the continued process of decomposition. Or, again, it may be laid on ice in dirty ice-cellars, where it becomes coated with a greasy mould and contracts a decidedly ‘ mousy ’ smell, which cannot be removed even by washing. Meat laid on ice, moreover, always has an unpleasantly red colour. In the times we are speaking of any place was thought suitable for slaughtering small cattle in—a wash-house or a backward, however small or dirty. The animals were tightly bound with cords and laid on a bench; calves hung up alive by their hind-legs and bled without being stunned. With pigs, as soon as the blood for making sausages had been collected, and almost before the animal’s cries had ceased, it was thrown, still kick- ing, into the scalding vat, and the bristles scraped off. For disembowelling the animal was hung up to a wooden hook-frame, which was fixed up in any corner hand}7, often near a heap of manure or a w.c.; there the carcass was left hanging until it was cut up. Often the room or yard used for slaughtering had no special entrance, and the cattle were driven through the passages and rooms of the houses to be slaughtered. If the weather were cool, the meat was left hanging in un- cleanly slaughter-houses or in the living rooms of houses, even in rooms where sick persons were lying. Anyone who can read such facts without being seized with a feeling of nausea at the idea of using meat as food must be thoroughly case-hardened. It is characteristic of the German race to cling to old- established customs, and a rude shock was needed to rouse the public to the necessity of reform. For years