Cow Beaten in Head with Mallet, Possibly Skinned Alive--Not Cruelty, Says Sheriff

Well, this story out of Georgia just ruined my night (commentary following the extract):

The man said he was cooking out for his family when he hit the cow over the head two or three times with a five pound mallet. Investigators reviewed the incident and they say no crime was committed. . . .

"I don't consider it an act of cruelty. They're gonna be butchered and done any other kind of way, so I don't consider it animal cruelty," argues Chris Thomas.

According to the incident report, a caller witnessed their neighbor tie a cow to a tree, then two men strike the cow on the head with a heavy mallet until it fell to the ground. Then the caller says the men started skinning the cow while it appeared to still be alive. . . .

"Some may consider this crude, but crude does not equate to illegal, says Columbia County Sheriff's Captain Steve Morris. . . .

"If he had killed this animal for the purpose or intent to make it suffer, or torture it in someway that would be a completely different situation but that's not the case here," adds Captain Morris.

Georgia law does have exceptions to it's [sic] animal cruelty law, including butchering and food processing -- which this falls under.

Investigators say if he killed it just to torture it, that's a crime but because he killed it for a purpose,which is food -- it's okay.

In other words, it doesn't matter if you torture an animal, as long as you call that animal food. Hell, under these guidelines, you could indeed torture an animal for fun and then just claim that you also ate or plan to eat the animal, and all would be forgiven.

Whether it's a cow being beaten and skinned alive on private property or flailing in terror upside down at the slaughterhouse while the blood drains out her slit throat, before possibly having her limbs hacked off while she's still alive, and whether it's a turkey thrashing, fighting desperately for his life on a small farm or a chicken sent into the scalding tank alive at a large slaughterhouse, they're just "food" animals, and exceptions will always be found and allowed to permit these kinds of horrifying practices. Indeed, these kinds of horrors are happening every day. People just usually aren't so bold as to commit them in broad daylight in front of their neighbors. But like the man said, there's really not much difference between what he did for his neighbors to see and what the vast majority of people pay to have done behind closed doors millions of times a day for meat, dairy, eggs, and leather.

The response to such stories is often a call for stronger anti-cruelty laws. But I really don't believe any additional welfare or anti-cruelty law is ever going to change this, is ever going to eliminate the acts themselves or the loopholes and the exceptions that let people, companies, industries, and slaughterhouses get away with them. The majority of people (or at the very least, far more people than now) have to start seeing these animals for who they are, as deserving of life for their own sake rather than to serve our interests--have to stop seeing them as "food" animals and start seeing them as fellow animals--before we're going to reach a point where something such as this is seen as wildly criminal instead of just business as usual. And that--the educating, the expanding of minds, the opening of hearts--is our job as advocates.

And we need to use these terrible stories, not to convince ourselves that all is hopeless and that we're not getting anywhere, but to remind ourselves why we have to talk with people about these issues and as an opening to talk to people. I'd like to think that very few people would hear or read a story such as this and not be horrified. And my suggestion, frankly, is to share stories such as this and, when your friend or family member is horrified, horrify him or her some more; use those moments when people already have their guard down and are letting themselves feel something for the animals, are disgusted at what happens to animals, to further educate them, for example, on what happens in slaughterhouses regularly, on what they too are contributing to without even knowing it. These aren't pretty conversations, and they aren't the final or only conversations that need to be had about why it's wrong to unnecessarily kill animals (e.g., we don't want to give the impression that if the deaths were less gruesome, they would be any more acceptable), but they provide an opening and a potential starting point.