BLUE-792 sits down in the straw, lifts the bowl in his palms and drops his head towards it at the same time. The same smell, the same taste, the same amount as always. Much like a dog with its snout bred flat, he attacks the warm thick mush that is his breakfast with his toothless mouth. The process of eating is more like inhalation. He cannot chew much nor does he stop to bother. In five minutes of chopsy slurping and sucking, the base of the bowl shines dully through. He wipes it out with the stumps of his fingers and licks them. He licks the inner surfaces of the bowl. He smears the mush left on his face with his palms and tongues them clean. The bowl drops from his stubby hands.
He lies back in the straw and belches deeply twice. The erection is gone. Brown flecks of mush still stain his cheeks, chin and neck. Soon, BLUE-792 is snoring so hard that the panel nearest him vibrates in harmony with his breathing.
The chain is long but the Chosen pass through it quickly.
It begins in the crowd pens where herds are brought in directly from the fields and feed lots, just a few hundred metres away on the same mega-plot of MMP land. Even for this short journey, the cattle are loaded into gas-driven transport trucks to control them more easily. A ramp slams down from the back of the transporter at the entrance to the crowd pens and the stockmen use electric prods to encourage the cattle down from the truck.
The ‘hotshots’ as the stockmen refer to the prods, create high voltage static that is harmless to the cattle but impossible for them to ignore. The trucks empty quickly, the speed at which they do so directly affecting efficiency and productivity. Hold-ups whilst unloading mean hold-ups for everyone else on the chain.
Once the cattle are in the crowd pens, stockmen use their hotshots to move them, still as a herd, towards the single file chute. A series of high, barred gates are then closed behind the moving animals to maintain the herd’s density as they are funnelled towards the chute.
At the mouth of the single file chute, there is a gradual narrowing until there is space for only one animal. The herd becomes a queue. The weight of cattle behind is usually enough to keep individual animals moving into the chute but sometimes extra encouragement from the hotshots is necessary. A stockman known as a ‘filer’ remains in position to keep things moving and to prevent spooked animals from reversing out of the chute.
The first in line at the chute will find a ‘wall’ of steel against which they will be pressed by those behind. When the wall slides open, they will be impelled through either by weight of numbers or by a final prod from the filer. On the other side of the wall, each animal finds itself in a tall, narrow steel box. The box is moving away from the queue in the chute and the animal has no choice now but to be swept along inside it.
This is the stunning box or restrainer. As it moves, a small cage descends from above, trapping the animal’s head and preventing it from moving. At this point, the animal’s instinct is to bend its knees and sink downwards, away from the cage. However, the moving cubicle will now have encountered a rail at knee height that prevents leg movement. The stunning box is also too narrow to allow lateral movement so the animal is rendered immobile – more by the dimensions of its surroundings, than by actual bindings or shackles.
The box will be moving in a start-stop motion that depends on the skill and accuracy of the stunner. Each time the stunner uses the captive bolt gun successfully, he presses a button that advances the next stunning box in the sequence to a position in front of him. For the animal that has just entered the system, five stops and starts will bring it to a hatch directly level with its face. Within a second or two, this hatch will slide upwards and the animal will be looking briefly out onto the factory floor. The last thing it sees will be the stunner bringing the captive bolt gun towards its forehead.
The captive bolt gun is a humane means of rendering an animal unconscious prior to exsanguination. It is a pneumatic handheld firearm that employs a sudden compression of trapped air to fire its captive bolt. The ‘bolt’ is a four-inch spike with a groove along the upper part of its shaft. The rear part of the bolt is mushroom shaped. This serves two purposes: first it acts as the piston that is forced forward by the compressed air and second it prevents the bolt from leaving the gun when it is fired. Hence, captive bolt.
Firing the captive bolt gun into the head of an animal has two major effects. The first, obviously, is to pierce the skull and enter deeply into the brain. The second is to cause a massive and sudden rise in intracranial pressure; in other words, to create a very small but significant explosion of force inside the brain, bringing about immediate and painless unconsciousness.
Occasionally, the bolt gun may need to be employed a second or third time. This is rarely to do with the design of the equipment. More commonly, poor maintenance or human error is to blame for the necessity of a second or third firing of the bolt gun. Bolt gun maintenance should be performed daily, between shifts, to ensure proper functioning and all stunners should be fully trained and certificated before being allowed to operate at this point in the chain.
Once the stun procedure is deemed successful by the stunner – a process that should take no more than two or three seconds – the panel will close and the unconscious animal will proceed to the next station in the chain for exsanguination. Viewed from above, this machinery is like a waterwheel lying on its side, with each cubicle acting as a bucket.
Next, the stunning box will open and the animal will fall and roll down an angled steel slope to the ‘bleeder’. A bleeder’s job is simple and must be performed quickly. They must loop a chain around one or both of the animal’s ankles and haul it vertical. In this position exsanguination will occur more swiftly than if the animal is left horizontal. Using a long thin blade, the bleeder must then cut both carotid arteries and the trachea in the neck of the unconscious animal. A bleeder’s skill lies solely in speed and efficiency. He should aim to complete the exsanguination process before the animal regains consciousness. Animals that have regained consciousness at this point should quickly lose consciousness again as blood loss continues.
The animal will now move to the next position in the line where it will be dipped into a vat of boiling water for four seconds. This is long enough for the hide to come loose without cooking or damaging the valuable tissue below. It is extremely rare for an animal either to regain consciousness or still be conscious at this point in the chain. The scalded animal now proceeds for beheading – another automated process – then is flayed and disembowelled by skinners and gutters. Skins and organs are all placed on a conveyor for sorting into uniform batches of products and by-products. The lower intestines are reserved and sent for processing at the gas facility. The skin is retained for tanning.
The body of the animal now moves onward for quartering, hanging and boning.
The stockmen watched WHITE-047 on and off over two twelve-hour shifts without getting involved. She was a fourteen-year-old that had mated thirty-seven weeks earlier along with hundreds of others. Her calf would be BLUE-792 stock and it was for that reason that they let the labour continue unaided for so long. Assisted births rarely went well for cow or calf. Stock from BLUE-792 was among the best, and damaging or killing it would be an expensive waste of the bloodline.
The first shift watched her face twist in tightened agony when her contractions came irregularly and infrequently. After the first few hours WHITE-047 was bent over, hobbling from one corner of the calving pen to another. She kicked up piles of straw exposing the dirt floor of the barn. She rocked her body, shook her head from side to side, thrust her hands flat against the panels and panted.