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Article Source: news.bbc.co.uk
You have to tell yourself the cows are going to die anyway.
Inside the abattoir at Swedish Meats in Linkoping, the cows stood patiently, occasionally nuzzling the lens of our camera.
From there, it was a short walk past the white-walled butchery, down the steps to the basement where the raw material for biogas, slid greasily down a chute.
Still bubbling and burping, and carpeting you with an acrid stench, came the organs and the fat and the guts. Enough, from one cow, to get you about 4km (2.5 miles) on the train.
A tanker collects the organic sludge and makes the short journey to the biogas factory, where the stinking fuel is stewed gently for a month, before the methane can be drawn off.
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Comments:
This really is disgusting. Whether the cows are also being used for food -- not clear from the article -- or not, it seems to be that this is a violation of whatever rights or respect we might want to apply to other living creatures. Eating meat is of course still a mainstay for most of us -- although it really is extremely inefficient as a use of land and resources -- but the killing of animals for meat is as old as vertebrates , and fits into some fuzzy notion of a 'circle of life' or 'chain of being.' Burning them in cars so we can get to the video store is really beyond the pale!
If they can figure out, like they have done in Indian villages, that cow dung can be slurried and will emanate biogas that can be used as cooking fuel - they will leap ahead. I agree that using entrails from an abattoir is the pits - pardon the pun.
HumanistMinister: I think you are a bit wrong here. They dont just kill a whole cow to make just biogas from it.
The cow go to the butcher. The butcher takes the good meat that we later buys from the shop as ordinary meat. The bad meat from the cow like all the fat etc etc, basically the leftovers that nobody wants, is stored and shipped to a biogas plant where they make the gas.
It's not awful. It is economical, enviromental friendly and smart. Why throw away something that can be used again - or in this case be transformed into biogas.
(Did you watch the short video?)
Sorry I missed the video. Ahem, I think I will miss the video. Feel better skipping it.
They also use old cows too that would only be putten to "sleep" anyways. I know, it sounds a bit disgusting, but it's not so bad.
Sri Sridharan, the video isn't disgusting at all. I promise you. It is mostly pictures on the train and on the Saab car.
Simon
I take your point. Indeed. when I was for many years able to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle I often struggled over whether the use of, say, leather shoes is good, given that the cows were being slaughtered anyway, or whether it tended to encourage more slaughter. I don't think there's an easy answer.
But, as I'm sure you are aware, your very argument "It is economical, environmentally friendly and smart. Why throw away something that can be used again - or in this case be transformed into biogas." could conceivably be applied o the disposal of human beings. (In fact, it was in the movie Soylent Green). And it really makes just as much economic sense to reuse human bodies as to reuse animal ones. Of course, when someone is cremated the remains often find their way into rose gardens, but to me that's a whole different thing from reusing the bodies as gasoline, and I think most of us would, in practice, be pretty horrified by soimething like that. Just as your argument can be streched to cover this possibility, I think it is possible for us to come to an understanding that the horror we would feel over the recycling of humans -- especially in ways that might not fit our idea of the inherent dignity of humans -- could come to apply as well to the indiscriminate explotation of animals.