Temple Grandin

Professor of Animal Science, Colorado State University

Diary entry, July 31, 1973

Almost every packing-plant employee has ambivalent feelings about the destruction of cattle. In some ways the meat-packing plants are more humane to the cattle than the feedlots. It is easier for a feedlot to deny the reality of the fate of the cattle because they do not actually witness the animal’s death. The feedlot just loads the cattle on a truck that takes them to market.

On the wall in the office at Swift is a picture of the first steer butchered and the one-millionth steer butchered. These two cattle are now individuals and they even had a kind of ritual for those steer. It’s very ambivalent and there is not a cut and dry answer as to what is right or wrong.

Some of my friends were very shocked when they found out that I had knocked some cattle at the slaughterhouse. They felt that it was wrong and I should not have done it. I told them that when they buy the meat in the store they pay the knocker’s salary.

After I pulled out of the parking lot at Swift one time, I looked up at the sky and the clouds were really spectacular. All I could think of was maybe all the cattle go up in the clouds. It is a paradox: unless there is death, life could not be appreciated. Having first faced the paradox of power at Swift with regards to the role of producer and consumer, I was now faced with the paradox of life and death.

The thing that is upsetting is that there is no answer. Philosophers have written about it for centuries. Unanswerable questions have forced people to look to God.