Slaughterhouse for breakfast

One of things I love most about being a creative writer, is that I get to research so many topics in the name of a story. Often times these topics are beautiful and enlightening, like space and time, flora and fauna. But almost as equally, I make myself delve into the darkness of humanity. I force myself to understand the motives behind Hitler and his gang of serial killers, the plight of Earth as humans thrive and most abundantly - the factory farming industry.

This morning after breakfast I continued to read, in preparation for writing the next scene of a script I am working on, 'Slaughterhouse' by Gail A. Eisnitz. Compelling and full of first hand accounts into the factory farming industry the book of course makes it very difficult to hold down even my vegetarian breakfast and often has me toppled over in tears at the accounts of abuse so horrific only my unfortunate nightmares of hell compare. It speaks the truth about the 'greed, neglect and inhumane treatment inside the meat industry,' and I find it difficult to turn away from any truth that reveals innocent creatures being systematically tortured by an industry up to its eyeballs in blood and money.

After all this research I am left with many questions; one of them I want to discuss:

Where does all the blood go?

With all those animals being slaughtered daily, the blood waste must be ocean-like in quantity. What happens to it?

What I found after some online research was disturbing in two ways:

First of all it was really difficult to find solid answers on the question. Surprisingly my google search turned up so many interviews evading the question that I can't help but wonder if this is by design. I am thinking, yes it is.

Secondly, the answers I did find, mostly from articles in India, claim that slaughterhouse blood...

'is accumulated in troughs. The quantity is vast. It is stored in huge vats until tankers come to collect it -normally daily but at least once a week because of the 'offensive odour' that develops. It is taken to rendering plants with blood processing facilities, or disposed of in sewers (which lead into the nearest water body), in landfills or spread over land. Some amount is used to make human food and animal feed.'

The fact that millions of liters blood from slaughterhouses enters our water is my worst-case guess confirmed, but that it is used to create baby food, fed back to the animals so that oftentimes animals are eating the blood of their own kin, or even more pressing, that it is being modified as we speak to be used as fortified iron to potentially be used as a nutritive in todays grain, was more than I had bargained for.

The slaughter industry in the US alone creates 4.56 billion liters of blood from cattle annually.

4.56 BILLION LITERS OF BLOOD from cattle alone. That is the equivalent of an average 2,000 olympic size swimming pools of blood, ONLY from cattle blood, from ONE COUNTRY. This doesn't even count the 50 billion chickens, 1 billion pigs, 1 billon sheep... in total approximately 126 billion animals bled each year, and most statistics actually claim higher with rising numbers.

*Side note: 4.6 billion is the exact same amount that the entire European union produced in fuel ethanol in a year. So it makes me realize, that while all this ethanol and so much more is going into our air, a rival quantity of tortured blood, is going into our waterways, food supply and creating mad cow disease.

One more reason for this writer to curl up into bed and not come out. But the pen waits for no one. (Yes, I still write with a pen and pad) And it truly is the thing that keeps me moving. Keeps me circulating the facts from my eyes, to my brain, to my heart and finally to the ink on the page where it releases me of the burden and takes on a life of its own.

Allowing me at least on this morbid Alice curiosity trip, to keep my breakfast down.