Menu
To see a higher resolution version of the video, visit YouTube.
At the farm, animals who have grown up together are loaded onto transport trucks with strangers. The trucks are often very crowded. Up to 275 pigs can be transported in a single truck. Birds are packed into boxes. Every year, about 200,000 animals die on Swedish roads while being transported to slaughter, mostly chickens. Swedish law allows animals to be transported for a maximum of eight hours, but this limit can be exceeded if certain requirements are met.
For many animals, the arrival to the unfamiliar atmosphere of the slaughterhouse can be very stressful. To speed up the process of offloading the animals from the trucks, the animals are often struck with plastic paddles or driven by an electric prod, despite both of these methods being illegal. It is common for animals to be forced to spend the night at the slaughterhouse. Cattle often stand overnight in cramped single-animal pens where they cannot turn around or scratch themselves. Fighting among pigs is common since they come from different places.
In Sweden, there is a law that all animals must be stunned prior to slaughter. It is easy to get the impression that this is painless, but this is hardly the case. Pigs are forced into a steel box into which carbon dioxide is pumped. Veterinarian Lina Gustafsson worked at the largest pig slaughterhouse in Sweden. This is how she described the process: “The chamber is filled with gas. The sows begin to move about worriedly. First, they breathe for a few seconds. Then comes the scream. Everyone who has heard a sow scream know that they have strong voices. I have heard their screams everyday when they fight, when they refuse to walk, when one sow jumps up on another or when they are startled. But this is something else. This is a roar. They throw themselves forward and backward, doing everything they can to get out, to get air. The whole box shakes. They jump, try to run, bounce like balls between the walls, while at the same time, their roars cut through the air. Then they collapse.”
According to a study by SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), the average time from which the pigs begin to feel uncomfortable until they are unconscious is two minutes and seven seconds. In the same study, the researchers write that the pigs’ behavior indicates “the highest possible level of fear and anxiety in the animals’ fight for survival.” Consequently, SLU is researching milder ways of stunning pigs.
A bolt gun is a common tool for stunning cows and bulls at Swedish slaughterhouses. The bolt gun is held up to the head. When fired, a metal rod is thrust forward and is pulled back. The intent is that the bolt should hit the brain and that the animal should immediately be rendered unconscious. Since the often-panic-stricken animal is moving about, however, the bolt gun often does not hit correctly.
Stunning of birds in Sweden is done by two different methods. At smaller slaughterhouses, the birds are strung up by their feet while fully conscious. Then they are dipped into electrified water. At larger slaughterhouses, birds are rendered unconscious with carbon dioxide.
Blood loss is the cause of death for every slaughtered animal. For pigs, cows, and bulls, this is done by the slaughterer slitting their throats. For birds, it is a rotating blade that slits their throats.
After the animals are killed, the bodies are processed. Pigs are scalded after bleeding out and their hairs are removed by flames. The animals are cut up, organs are removed, and the skin is removed.
How does the industry describe slaughter in their own words? LRF, the Federation of Swedish Farmers, run a program called, “The farmer in the school,” which they describe as “a unique initiative where students, in a simple and fun way, can learn where the food on our plates comes from and why we really need farmers.” The material is aimed at children from preschool up to sixth grade. It is difficult to find something in this material about what happens at slaughterhouses in Sweden. On the entire website for “The farmer in the school,” there is only this statement about the slaughter of pigs: “Upon arrival at the slaughterhouse, they are offloaded and enter in groups of twelve into what resembles a Ferris wheel with a wall that slowly moves so that the pig is lowered into a bath of carbon dioxide, where they fall asleep and die.” A Ferris wheel – what kinds of associations does your mind make? How would it be if it were instead described as a gas chamber? The carbon dioxide that causes the pigs to panic is called a “bath.” And they write that the pigs fall asleep. Does this match the description above that was given by the veterinarian?
For wild fish, stunning is not required. On a commercial fishing boat, a single net can collect as many as 100,000 fish at once. The ones at the bottom die by being crushed by the weight of the other fish. The fish above them die of suffocation. A Dutch study showed that it took between 55 minutes and 450 minutes for the fish to lose consciousness when they were pulled up out of the water. “So, for the time being, billions of fish every year die of suffocation that lasts for hours,” says SLU researcher Albin Gräns in an interview with Animal Welfare Sweden. Deep sea fish, on the other hand, often die from the large change in pressure that sometimes turns their organs inside-out.
On Swedish fish farms, there is a law that requires fish to be stunned before the throat is cut. This is most often done using carbon dioxide, which is very painful and takes a long time. They then die of blood loss from their gills being cut. Since the stunning method is ineffective, it is not unusual that the fish are killed while fully conscious. Carbon dioxide stunning has been condemned by the World Health Organization and the European Food Safety Authority.
https://www.djurensratt.se/djur-i-livsmedelsindustrin/slakt
Rapport från ett slakteri: en veterinärs berättelse by Lina Gustafsson. Natur & Kultur, 2020.
Field trip in the death factory: http://www.xn--ettrfrdjuren-vcb4v.se/blogg/studiebesok-pa-dodsfabriken
Död på löpande band: http://www.xn--ettrfrdjuren-vcb4v.se/blogg/dod-pa-lopande-band
Slakterinspektionen: https://www.youtube.com/c/Slakteriinspektionen
Hidden camera at Skövde slaughterhouse: https://doldkamera.xn--skvdeslakteri-jmb.se/
Hidden camera at KRAV-slaughterhouse Djurrättsalliansen: https://vimeo.com/499656292
Fish are the animals who are killed in the greatest numbers. What differs from the other animals who are slaughtered for food in Sweden is that the number of fish who are killed are not counted, so no one knows the total. However, in 2020, 156,000 tons of fish were collected from the sea by Swedish fishing boats. This corresponds to several billion fish killed in a single year. When it comes to land animals, chickens are the animals who are killed in the greatest numbers. In 2020, 110 million chickens were killed. Of larger animal species, pigs are killed in the greatest numbers by the animal agriculture industry. Every year, about 2.5 million pigs are killed at Swedish slaughterhouses. In 2020, the total number of animals killed at Swedish slaughterhouses was about 118 million. The slaughter of land animals has increased nearly every year. In 2010, the total was 80 million.
However, in recent years, the consumption of meat in Sweden has decreased. “The total consumption of meat has decreased over the past four years, from the Swedish record level of 88.4 kg per capita in 2016 to 78.6 kg per capita in 2020,” according to the Swedish Board of Agriculture. Fish are not included.
Statistics for slaughtered chickens and turkeys
Statistics for slaughtered other animals (excluding fish)
Statistics for slaughtered cattle