Livestock, living stock and recently departed beasts

Many of us enjoy meat products, and the work of various red meat organisations mean that we do so with a measure of confidence that the process of turning live animal to meat product was a humane one. Our meal may be accompanied with a silent thank-you to the recently departed beast (which is what “saying grace” before meal time in most religious communities is meant to be about) but we don’t think of it again, or at least not until the next meal.

But let me tell you about the time we changed the name of the section dealing with animals in an earlier edition of our book from “Livestock” to “Living stock”. It happened literally minutes before PDFing the publication for print, nearly ten years back, a knee-jerk response to a horror story of meat that was distributed — while the animal was still alive and in a clamp! “Living stock” was to make the point that the term  “livestock” no longer does, namely that animals are stock which live i.e. livestock. And being alive, they feel sensations like pain, hunger and thirst. Needless to say, the red meat organisations too voiced their horror at the incident.

I regretted my impulsiveness before the book came back from the printers. I certainly regretted it afterwards but weathered the storm (which included a scolding from an academic: “It’s ‘livestock’, never ‘living stock’”!) and we duly reverted to “livestock” and “animal husbandry” in subsequent editions.

Abattoirs is one of the pages in the Adding Value chapter at Agribook.Digital.