THE CONGRESS: Killing with Kindness

• Share

All things come to him who serves in Congress, even responsibility for slaughtering hogs and cattle. Climaxing three years of hearings, debate and mountainous mail, the Senate last week passed (72-9) a bill condemning most U.S. packinghouses' slaughtering methods as cruel and specifying "humane" techniques.

For the bill's lobbyists, passage climaxed an uphill fight. Some 30 years ago, U.S. humane societies were aghast to discover that a steer being led to slaughter was first stunned by a hammer blow—often ineffectively—then slashed across the throat and allowed to bleed to death. Hogs were shackled by a leg to overhead conveyor belts, jabbed in their jugular veins, sometimes dumped alive into scalding water. The societies pressured meat packers into joining a committee on humane slaughter that achieved some innovations, e.g., some packinghouses began using a captive bolt pistol, which fires a metal rod into the brain; George A. Hormel & Co. installed carbon-dioxide rooms where hogs were gassed before slaughter. But most packinghouses continued old methods. Angrily, the humane societies took the issue to Congress, early this year got a bill through the House.

As the bill came up for Senate hearings, the meat-packing lobby warned that new techniques would mean higher meat prices and the Department of Agriculture criticized the law as fuzzy and hard to police. Although the bill exempted kosher slaughter, Orthodox Jews opposed it as interference with shehitah, the ritual for killing kosher animals. The humane societies rebutted other arguments by pointing out that such countries as Switzerland, The Netherlands and England administer similar laws, predicted that rather than raising prices, new techniques would help packers recover $50 million in meat lost a year through careless slaughter.

Said an Agriculture Department official, throwing up his hands: "You can't be for sin, and that's what they make it out." Making it out best was Christine Stevens, president of Manhattan's Animal Welfare Institute and secretary-treasurer of the hard-lobbying Society for Animal Protective Legislation, and the humane societies' most effective spokesman. Trim, greying Christine Stevens, 40, badgered Congressmen, testified at hearings, used some of her own money (Husband Roger Stevens produced Broadway's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Time Remembered, once headed a syndicate that owned the Empire State Building) to crank out publicity.

Christine Stevens wore down the opposition. The bill sailed through both houses, is in line for quick conference action and presidential signature. The Agriculture Department will enforce it. And packers probably will fall into line. Although the measure contains no noncompliance penalties, packers who hammer cattle and hoist conscious pigs are ineligible to bid on Government contracts. And the U.S., purchasing $250 million worth of meat a year, is too big a customer to lose.