Happy Cows: Stress-Free Meat?

According to an article in the Observer Food Monthly, happy cows make for better meat. As a life long vegetarian, I am not writing this as an advert for anyone’s meat or a justification for its being ‘produced’ in the first place. But I do think the experiences of farms which do everything to provide a stress-free life and death for their cattle are, as well as a lesser evil, interesting for us humans too.

The mind body connection seems to be proved once again, this time in our animal relations. The meat produced by these methods is not full of stress hormones — it is literally relaxed meat. While there has been an outcry on health grounds about antibiotics and growth hormones given to animals reared for meat, there has until now been little awareness of the power of natural hormones produced when the animal is in the slaughterhouse in a state of terror.

So what is needed to provide these animals with a truly stress-free life and death? They are not shouted at, whistled at, hit or prodded. They are not transported too far to the slaughterhouse and once there, if they show signs of nerves they are allowed to live another night. It all sounds ultimately rather perverse to me, but nonetheless it is a clear way of testing what relaxes animals, with a financial motivation as well as a humane one, and the results, the superiority of the meat, seem contested by no one. (For a similar experiment on the same principle, try an egg laid by a battery chicken and a true free range one).

Professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Temple Grandin, who suffers from autism, has used insights from her own condition — in which she sees and thinks in shapes — to design new ways of handling cattle to minimise stress, including precisely measured curved runs to gather cattle together and a lack of sharp corners in, for example, slaughterhouses.

It may well be the case that all of us mammals prefer to be spoken to with kind attention and respect rather than yelled at or hit. Let’s just hope that in our efforts to reduce anxiety and depression we are not part of a manipulative experiment to produce good tasting meat for a higher race!

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