Improving Animal Treatment in Slaughterhouses: An Interview with Dr. Temple Grandin
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz: As someone who has been at the forefront of the issues of the more humane treatment of animals, many of us really look up to you.
Dr. Temple Grandin: I’ve worked with improving conditions in slaughter plants for over forty years. When I first started, I thought I could fix everything with equipment. But the other half of the equation is management: management’s got to care. I developed a simple scoring system. We used to evaluate animal handling and welfare at a regular slaughter plant and then also at a kosher slaughter plant.
You mention things like electric prod use, animals falling down, and vocalization. Vocalization is a really good measure: if you’ve got something really bad going on when you restrain the animal, you’ll fail the vocalization [test]. When you’re doing things right, no more than five percent of the cattle vocalize. When you’re doing things wrong — squeezing them too hard — you might have thirty percent of them vocalizing. And then in kosher slaughter, you can [measure] collapse times and in regular slaughter [you can measure the] percentage [of slaughter] done correctly on the first attempt. So the first half of my career I’ve pretty much just worked on equipment, the second half of my career more on the management.
Yanklowitz: Where did this interest come from for you?
Grandin: Well, it gets back to getting exposed. Students get interested in things they get exposed to. I came from a non-agricultural background: I was exposed to beef cattle when I was a teenager. When you look into how a lot of students get interested in a career, it’s exposure. And then they learn: do I like this or do I hate it?
Yanklowitz: But what resonated with you? What happened in seeing animal suffering?
Grandin: I just wanted to fix it. I worked in the ’80s on tearing out some really bad shackle and hoist operations, some really bad ones. Back in 1980, Spencer Foods had vocalization scores probably a hundred percent and I worked on tearing that system out and replacing it with a better system; I wrote about it one of my early papers.
Yanklowitz: What would you say was your big your biggest success in this field?
Grandin: Getting rid of a lot of shackling and hoisting. Most of the big places stopped doing it. When I was working with Spencer Foods back in 1980, you could hear the bellowing in the parking lot, in the cafeteria. We tore that system out.
Yanklowitz: Was it hard for you to watch those kind of things?
Grandin: I just did everything I could to get rid of these things. In the early ’90s, I remember another plant in Montgomery, AL that was horrible. I went right down to the engineer’s office and I got a bid on new equipment, and I went up to the manager’s office and he said, “How do you like our coaster operation?” and I said, “You can’t sign a purchase order fast enough!” I just shoved that in his face and he signed it.
Yanklowitz: What do you think about stunning?
Grandin: Stunning done right works fine.
Yanklowitz: What type of stunning?
Grandin: Captive bolt stunning. The problem with a slaughter without stunning: if you get sloppy, it goes bad really quickly. It requires much more attention to details of procedure than regular slaughter with stunning. You get the least bit sloppy and you can have bad stuff happening, like live cattle walking around.
Yanklowitz: What about stunning after the slaughter? Would that help as well?
Grandin: That definitely would help.
Yanklowitz: Because how long would you say an animal is alive after a typical slaughter process?
Grandin: Well, the heart beats for a while. If you stun an animal with a captive bolt, the heart may beat for two or three minutes if you don’t bleed it right away. That’s something a lot of people don’t realize.
Yanklowitz: So the animals feel pain for quite a while still. Now, I’m curious about your experiences in the kosher slaughterhouses. What sort of things were you involved with there?
Grandin: In the mid ’80s, I was involved with the Utica Veal plant [and its manager, Frank Broccoli] tearing out a shackle and hoist system for kosher slaughter and putting in a double rail, center track restrainer system. Prior to that I worked at the Spencer Foods to get rid of their shackling and hoisting and then with the old John Morrell plants in Sioux Falls and Montgomery, AL (that was in the early nineties).
Yanklowitz: What have you seen change in the kosher slaughterhouses?
Grandin: Most of the people have gotten rid of the shackling and hoisting. Some of them have gone to the rotating boxes, which is much more expensive. But again I want to hold you to the scoring system: keep your vocalization score under five percent of the cattle! And what I’ve seen — and I have a good colleague of mine also going to many of these plants — is that it gets back to management. Some managers care and some managers don’t care.
Yanklowitz: Over the decades, is your experience that the management of kosher slaughterhouses today care more or less?
Grandin: There are some that are good, there are some that are terrible. But what I have found that brought the biggest change was that in 1999, I was hired by McDonald’sCorporation to implement the scoring system for their suppliers. And it kicked a couple of people off they approved supplier list. When you have a customer that big insisting things get done right, things change. I think in the future, around the world, the biggest amount of change is going to get brought about by customers that buy meat, insisting on it.
Yanklowitz: In general, do you see us going in the right direction?
Grandin: Yeah, things are gradually going in the right direction. But we’ve got to have simple things. There’s a tendency for stuff to get way too complicated. I think it’s difficult for some people to realize you can take a simple score, like if the animal bellowed in the restraint box: yes or no. And if you’re doing things right, they’ll be low, like five precent. You start doing things wrong — electric prods, sharp edges, squeeze them too hard — you have vocalization scoring at about twenty to thirty percent percent.
Yanklowitz: What is the reason for your primary measurement being through vocalization?
Grandin: It’s an easy way to measure the animal’s distress. You’ve got to have simple, easy things that people can do. I have a paper on applied animal behavioral science where ninety-nine percent of the vocalizations were directly associated with something nasty like electric prods, doors slammed on them, or getting squeezed too hard, or sharp edges.
Yanklowitz: So, if one looks at the various dimensions of the beef, dairy and poultry industries, where do we see the most suffering? Where do we see the least?
Grandin: We have to separate slaughter issues from housing issues. Of course you don’t eat pork, but the species that have the biggest issues are: the laying hen and the sows in gestation crates. Now, a lot of people are moving away from those small cages. And there are some new housing systems for chickens that are working well. But the thing that drives change is customers insisting on it. We have to make sure we get the producers doing the right things and not doing something stupid that’s not going to work.
Yanklowitz: I’m curious how you answer both those to the right of you and to the left of you. Those to the right of you say: “We shouldn’t care at all and humans are what matter; animal suffering doesn’t matter. What matters is the low costs.” What’s your response to them?
Grandin: Twenty years ago or so, I was working for a major buyer of eggs and I said, “Well, these hens look like they got put through a clothes wringer. If I brought ten people out here from the Chicago Airport, I don’t think they’d like this very much.” And you know there’s a point when you’re doing stuff that’s just wrong. I grabbed the broidery that’s on my shirt and I said, “What if you had child slaves who had sewed these cattle pictures on this shirt?” I think everybody would agree that that’s wrong. There’s a point where we’re cramming them in so tight they can’t even sleep at night without being on top of each other.
Yanklowitz: And what’s your response to those on the on the left who say that there shouldn’t be any slaughter in the first place?
Grandin: Well, there is slaughter going on right now. What I’m doing is working to make it better. I have thought about, maybe someday in the future, there’ll be no more slaughtering. I can remember when insulin switched from being collected from pancreas glands of cattle to one growing in a vat with a recombinant DNA; the first GMO. Someday, we’ll have the power to make any kind of life we want and when the slaughterhouses become obsolete, then we’re really going to have the ethics issues because you can make any animal you want.
Yanklowitz: Right! All these lab burgers and the like. What I hear commonly from people is that they say, “Yes, I’m a customer and I care, but I feel nobody can hear me…”
Grandin: In 1999, when I was hired by McDonald’s and Wendy’s — you got that kind of buying power behind you — you can really bring about change in a really big way. That’s what makes change.
Yanklowitz: How can folks do that? Where should they be calling? Where should they be advocating?
Grandin: I think most of it is going to be working with big buyers. On the other hand, let’s take something like slow-growing broiler [chickens]. Well, if I go with really slow growing broilers, I take twenty-five percent more feed to feed the chickens. So if I got four truckloads of feed, now I’ve got to add a fifth truckload of feed. That’s a lot of feed. No, the boil industry has actually done some things to improve the problems with the fast-growing broilers, like breeding bigger legs on them. But taking a twenty-five percent hit on the amount of feed you have to buy, that’s not very good from a sustainability standpoint.
Yanklowitz: Of course, you’re most well-known for two areas (although you’re involved with so many things): the more humane treatment of animals and autism awareness and advocacy. I wonder is there any connection between those two for you?
Grandin: I’m an extreme visual thinker. Everything I think about is in a picture. An animal’s world is sensory based; it’s not word based. So being a visual thinker helped me with my initial work with livestock because I noticed little distractions that people tend to not notice.And the cattle might not want to walk over the shadow, or maybe there’s a chain hanging down, or a coat on a fence. And most people just did not notice that.
Yanklowitz: So it’s really been a gift for you to be able to experience this in a way that many people can’t.
Grandin: I talk about this in my book Animals in Translation. When I first started my work, I thought everybody was a visual thinker. I didn’t know that my thinking was different…
Yanklowitz: Until when?
Grandin: Until I wrote Thinking in Pictures in the mid-‘90s. I started interviewing people about how they think and was shocked to find out that if you said “factory” to some people that had a vague image of the roof going like this [makes wave motion], whereas I see specific ones.
Yanklowitz: Do you experience it more intensely?
Grandin: I don’t experience it verbally. I see pictures in my mind of a specific factory, not a generalized factory with a roof like this [makes wave motion].
Yanklowitz: Let’s go back to kosher slaughterhouses for a moment. What are some of the best practices that we still see in kosher slaughterhouses today that we should be advocating for? What are some of the worst?
Grandin: You have to separate your variables out. Restraint method from slaughter without stunning. Some of the worst stuff has been with the restraint method. If they’re using a rotating box, it has to be a really good rotating box or you’re going to fail on all your scores. The other thing is good technique in cutting. You do good technique in cutting, ninety percent of your animals will collapse in thirty seconds. Sloppy method of cutting, you can get prolonged periods of consciousness.
Yanklowitz: Is there anything that’s better in the kosher industry than in the general meat industry?
Grandin: Well, stunning with a captive bolt that’s done correctly is absolutely instantaneous. You know, kosher slaughter — no matter how well it’s done — is not instantaneous. So, basically I’m going to say that kosher slaughter can be acceptable from an animal welfare standpoint but it requires much more intensive attention to details for the procedure than regular slaughter.
Yanklowitz: There’s nothing that’s naturally a higher standard of kosher slaughter then?
Grandin: Well, the thing is that it’s not instantaneous. The other thing is that if you get the least bit sloppy, it goes bad really fast. And this is where people get into trouble. They start pushing the system trying to go too fast, then you end up skinning or taking the foot off an animal that hasn’t bled out enough to lose consciousness. You have to make sure that kind of stuff is not happening.
Yanklowitz: Was the Agriprocessors case in Postville, Iowa normal? Or was that an anomaly?
Grandin: Postville was horrible. I remember that awful video where the trachea was hanging out… I couldn’t believe it. That particular plant, I think, is one of the better ones. But it’s under totally different management.
Yanklowitz: You’ve been inside the new plant?
Grandin: I haven’t been inside it since they fixed it. But people I know really well have been there. But that was crazy… yanking out those tracheas.
Yanklowitz: I know that the kosher community imports shackle and hoist meat because it can’t be done in America. But what’s happening in America, culturally, that this meat can still be imported?
Grandin: One of the things happening with it — they’re probably importing the meat from Uruguay — lots of times they resist putting in restraining equipment because it’s slower than just shackling them and dragging [the animals] all around.
Yanklowitz: It’s all about speed for these meat producers, right? So what’s happening in American kosher slaughterhouse that we should be advocating against?
Grandin: Well, most of the big ones have put in decent restraint equipment. Some of its operated really badly, some of it is designed really badly. The first thing it’s got to pass the audit: five percent vocalization score, one percent falling — this is the whole facility. If they want an excellent score and pride use, five percent on pride use and 90 percent of the cattle collapse or have eye roll back within 30 seconds.
Yanklowitz: But they don’t have to have this type of supervision right? A lot of them probably avoid doing this.
Grandin: Well people that are doing a scoring are companies like McDonald’s or supermarkets…. If the buyers don’t do the scoring, there are certain plants that are going to get very sloppy. The problem is it’s all exempt from USDA. They have what they call the Bubble: the area of intimate restraint; USDA can’t go in there. If the cattle fall down the loading ramp, they could tag them up for that. But basically, inside the bubble, the USDA can’t go in there. And so some people think there’s the license to do whatever they want.
Yanklowitz: Why has the USDA blocked transparency? Why have they been allowed to not be transparent?
Grandin: Customers haven’t demanded it. It’s going to get back to customers demanding it; that’s what made the big plants turn around. Now, I’m not going to say they’re perfect. But compared to the 80s and the early 90s, the great big regular plants are 100 percent improved.
Yanklowitz: Are there kosher plants doing the scoring process right now?
Grandin: There are some that do a good job and there are some that do a lousy job. And it’s gonna get back to the people who buy meat making them change it. And there will need to be some plant managers we need to get rid of. One of the things I learned when we did the McDonald’s audits: out of the seventy-five suppliers I had, three plant managers had to go down the road. It gets back to management.
Yanklowitz: Who are the types of people who are going in to do the scoring? Is that something you’re still doing?
Grandin: It’s mainly food safety auditors. There are third-party auditing companies that go in and monitor the food safety. We’ll do the animal welfare scoring. Also, people need to put in video auditing. There are some companies where they can tune into the video cameras and do the scoring. But it is oversight by a third-party entity. But there’s a lot of stuff that won’t change until the buyers make a change.
Yanklowitz: That seems to be your main message here: that the buyers need to demand this change.
Grandin: They need to demand a change because it’s an exemption. And the only thing that can make a change is the buyers. We also have to find things that are practical. For example, with the broiler chicken: you might want to slow the growth down a little bit. They can do some other things to get rid of the lameness by growing a stronger leg on the bird. But a twenty-five percent hit on feed conversion, that’s not very sustainable.
Yanklowitz: It feels like one of the things we’re put in this world to do is to reduce the suffering of others. And it seems to me there’s no population that suffers more than the animal population.
Grandin: That gets into that big is bad or little is good. What is bad is badly managed. I’ve seen badly managed small and well-managed small; well-managed big and badly managed big. It gets back to management: do not understaff and overwork. Because if you overwork your people, they can’t do a decent job.
Yanklowitz: And so probably bad worker treatment is correlated with bad animal treatment, right?
Grandin: You can’t overload the worker to where they can’t do the job right.
Yanklowitz: Why is there so much deception around things like cage free and free-range? A lot of places advertise that, but it’s not necessarily the case, right?
Grandin: Cage-free means you don’t have them in a cage. What does free-range mean? What it usually should mean is that the chickens are going outside, whereas in cage-free, they’re still inside a building but not in the cage; that’s normally what that means.
Yanklowitz: So free-range still means in a building?
Grandin: This is where labels need to start getting clear. One time, I got after an egg company I was consulting with. They showed me a picture of a chicken out on pasture and a carton of eggs. I said, “Your chickens go out to pasture?” They said, “No.” “Then get rid of those egg cartons!” If they’re cage free and they stay inside the building, don’t put a picture of a chicken on pasture on your carton.
Yanklowitz: Have you been involved with fish at all?
Grandin: I haven’t.
Yanklowitz: How do we get legislators to care? It seems that so much of their money is tied up with a big AG.
Grandin: I think the biggest change is gonna be customers driving it. When I worked at McDonald’s in 1999, I saw more improvement than I’d seen in a 25-year career prior to that. The other thing that made it work was a scoring system. It was simple. They knew exactly what they had to do to pass. It was like traffic rules for slaughter. Traffic rules will work because they are simple.
Yanklowitz: This has been deeply informative. I’m grateful for all you’ve done and for all you continue to do.
Grandin: You might be interested in my book Improving Animal Welfare: A Practical Approach.
Yanklowitz: When did you write that?
Grandin: It came out about four years ago. It’s my main book on animal welfare issues and it’s aimed at people that are going to implement actual programs
Yanklowitz: So, is the book technical?
Grandin: Its technical, but it’s also practical: How do we actually implement programs that improve things?
Yanklowitz: We need to raise our voices to advocate whether someone eats a lot of meat, very little meat, no meat, or a lot of dairy, very little dairy, that these types of things are things we need to advocate for. You have been at the forefront for decades on this. I’m grateful for you taking this time to chat. You should be blessed with good health and lots of strength in your continued work.
Grandin: Thank you very much.
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the President & Dean of the Valley Beit Midrash, the Founder & President of Uri L’Tzedek, the Founder and CEO of The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute, the Founder and President of YATOM, and the author of thirteen books on Jewish ethics. Newsweek named Rav Shmuly one of the top 50 rabbis in America and the Forward named him one of the 50 most influential Jews.
The opinions expressed here represent the author’s and do not represent any organizations he is affiliated with.
