Make up
your own mind

1 Trepidation…

The day of the abattoir visit had arrived and I was wondering what would await me. Only a few weeks ago, I was in the farmer’s field amongst his herd of cattle, admiring them and their surroundings and the farmer’s respect and keen sense of welfare for his animals. Was the abattoir about to let the chain down or would I be pleasantly surprised?

If I am honest, I had mixed feelings about the visit to the abattoir. I had asked to visit it and had wanted to know the whole process from field to fork, but on the days leading up to the visit I will admit I had started to dread it. As a student I had dallied with being a vegetarian. I stuck at it for a whole 12 months, until a visit to a local Chinese restaurant and a Peking Duck dish shot that right out of the water – excuse the pun! But seeing the animals killed here… would I be ok with that or would I become a born-again vegetarian?

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2 Stress-free?

St.Merryn Meat Ltd, based in South Wales, is a large abattoir and has some prestigious customers – McDonald’s obviously being one and Tesco Finest being another. Their reputation locally amongst food producers and farmers is excellent and their local representatives are very well thought of in the food and farming community, but how would they stack up on a visit by a McDonald’s Quality Scout (me) and how would the whole process affect me?

The arrival at St.Merryn started very pleasantly. They even had a welcome sign with my name on in reception and I was met by the livestock director. He took me to a meeting room on the first floor of the manufacturing plant which was huge. Two floor managers met us and I was given a brief of the whole process, what I could expect from the time the animals arrived, were penned, killed and then processed.

I was also given the full health and safety drill. I was very impressed by the initial meeting. The livestock director and his team were very efficient, welcoming and knowledgeable, and most of all they all seemed to really love their jobs. Not that they were blood thirsty cattle killers, but, like the farmers, they had a genuine concern for the animals’ welfare and were intent on ensuring that the whole process was as stress free as possible.

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3 How clean is your abattoir?

For hygiene and health and safety reasons, before we could go to the processing floors we had to get kitted out. By the time I had my full gear on I looked like a cross between a surgeon, with his gowns and wellies, and a builder, replete with hard hat!

We started at the ‘clean’ end i.e. the final phase where they package the cuts and joints of meat ready for shipment to the customer. This is so that we did not contaminate the end product. If we had started at the beginning we would have trampled straw and muck through to a pretty sterile packing area. Stages 1 (animals come in from the trailers), 2 (animals are ushered through to the pen to be killed) and 3 (blood-letting) were the stages I was not looking forward to!

The packing area was pretty standard stuff, with the cuts being arranged as you would expect in your butcher, except on a much larger scale. The meat was then packaged and labelled and moved via a conveyor belt onto the final packing stages for shipping to clients all over the UK. Here I saw the beef being packaged, ready for Esca to process into a McDonald’s burger.

From the packing area we moved onto the cold store rooms. But not before washing and sterilising our hands – again much like a surgeon would – and walking through sterile foot baths – like the ones you get at the swimming pool.

The cold store room was a massive fridge freezer, where the full and half sides of beef were kept until thawed for final butchery and packaging. The sides were massive! Seeing them hanging by one corner made you appreciate the size of the animal and also the heavy work involved for the people at the abattoir. From the fridge freeze, again we moved to a cleaning room for our hands and feet, and then came into the area where the animals had not long been killed and were being arranged, ready for the freezer.

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4 Still a meat-eater!

From here on in there really is no easy way to “pretty-up” the description for the remaining, or in reality, the initial stages of the process. But I must say that I was pleasantly surprised that at no point did I feel upset or think, “Blimey, I can’t eat meat ever again”.

From the freezer cleaning area we walked to the butchery area where some of the joints and cuts of meat were being handled and were still fairly recently off the line from being killed. This area was bloody, but was by no means a chainsaw massacre. From here we walked down the line to the point where the full animals, having been killed just three minutes before, were being skinned. At St.Merryn, they also process the skin and sell onto leather dealers. So there is very little waste from the animals. Only the heads and some inner organs that can’t be eaten are not used. They are destroyed by burning at a specialist incinerator off-site.

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5 A skilled process

I was offered to see the point where the animals are blood-let (stage 3 of the process), but felt that I couldn’t see that as I am pretty queasy at the sight of blood. Amazingly, up until now, there had been very little blood and I was happy for it to stay that way. The skinning process was fascinating and far from being messy – as the animal had already been blood-let, it was a clean and swift process. Again the physical nature of the job and the precision with which the workers had to work was amazing. The skill involved is under-rated by those who buy meat from a supermarket, where buying the end-produced packaged item is a world away from the field and the butchery.

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6 Everyone remained calm

Sidestepping stage 3 and moving outside on to stage 1, I did for a second, feel a little sorry for the animals. The same pretty breed of cattle that had been in the farmer’s field the previous week were in the cattle shed, waiting for the kill pen. All of the animals were calm and seemed oblivious to the fate to befall them. Just as well, otherwise there may have been a riot! The cattle, all kept close to one another to keep them stable, are never kept for more than 16 hours in the sheds before the kill pen, and were housed very well. An independent vet employed by the Government, checks over every animal that comes to St.Merryn and ensures that it is fit, healthy and fit for introduction into the human food chain. Along with the vet, one of the men working in the shed looks at each animal and checks the ear tags. This is to ensure that the passports correspond, to ensure no illegal animal is introduced into the food chain (the tags are located on the ears of each individual animal and is given from the day it is born on the farm).

I wasn’t sure if I would watch the actual kill and even though the livestock director had gone through the process with me, I still worried that there would be writhing and sounds of pain from the cattle. So when he pointed to the top of the shed and said that the kill pen was there, I was very surprised. You would never know it was there, apart from the men on the ramparts pressing some buttons. No noises, no thrashing movements, nothing at all.

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7 A quick and painless end

I walked up onto the gallery rails and watched the kill process as described below:

The kill pen itself was situated at the end of a 4m long pathway, flanked by railings, for the cattle to walk along. At a checkpoint on the path, one of the men working in the shed again stops each animal and checks that the ear tags and the passports correspond. At the top of the path is a ramp and then the kill pen. The pen is basically a metal box with an upward sliding metal door at one end and a sliding metal door at its side. As each animal enters through the door, end on, the door closes and the animal is unable to turn or move because of the small size of the pen. This keeps it calm. A small metal plate then rises up and touches the animal on the nose, at which point the animal looks like it decides to sit down. A second metal plate rises and touches the animal on the chest and the animal shivers for about four seconds and then is still.

The metal plates are electrified and the first touch delivers a charge to stun the brain in the animal – effectively knocking it out and killing it there and then in about three seconds flat. The second touch ensures that the animal is dead and not just stunned. At this point, the sidewall of the pen rises up and the animal falls to its side and rolls onto a counter. This is where the blood letting takes place - the only stage I couldn’t watch.

After this process was shown to me, we left the cattle shed to go back to the office meeting room. Not before cleaning our hands and washing down our boots thoroughly, however.

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8 As good as it gets

I was very surprised by the whole process at St.Merryn - from the kill pen to the packaging. Far from being an upsetting and blood curdling experience, I was pleased to see that the animals were treated with respect from the time they were unloaded off the lorry to the time they were processed into joints and cuts of beef. I think the farmer would have been pleased that his cattle were well looked after and that their produce was handled by skilled staff and then shipped out to some prestigious customers.

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