I’ve never hunted, nor fished, nor been apart of the killing/processing of any kind of meat.
My 6yo is asking me how animals end up on our plate. I tend to over-explain and I think that wouldn’t be healthy in this situation.
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I’ve worked at a slaughterhouse and there is no easy way to explain it to an actual child. It’s done as fast as possible so that animals don’t suffer too much, but it’s still, well, a slaughter. The english word is very on point.
The actual way may depend from country to country, so I’ll answer with how it is done here in France :
The animal is led to a trap, that is very tight. Someone put a gaz-pressured gun onto the animal’s forehead, and when pressing the trigger a metal bar pierces a hole right in the part of the brain responsible for pain (the metal bar is a part of the “gun”, nothing is left inside). Almost immediatly, the throat is sliced : the dying heart must pump all the blood out as fast as possible, because blood rottens meat (yeah, to many people’s surprise, meat “juice” is actually not blood). It’s beheaded, skined, cut in half by the length, and organs are removed. Then the long halves are colded with huge fans, put in fridges, and the next day when it’s cold enough we cut steaks and stuff.
TL;DR / less gore version : the animal is put to (definitive) sleep, cut open, and peeled and emptied so that only meat and bones remain. Kinda like an orange if oranges had a skeleton, if you put it that way.
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I’ve worked at a slaughterhouse and there is no easy way to explain it to an actual child. It’s done as fast as possible so that animals don’t suffer too much, but it’s still, well, a slaughter. The english word is very on point.
The actual way may depend from country to country, so I’ll answer with how it is done here in France :
The animal is led to a trap, that is very tight. Someone put a gaz-pressured gun onto the animal’s forehead, and when pressing the trigger a metal bar pierces a hole right in the part of the brain responsible for pain (the metal bar is a part of the “gun”, nothing is left inside). Almost immediatly, the throat is sliced : the dying heart must pump all the blood out as fast as possible, because blood rottens meat (yeah, to many people’s surprise, meat “juice” is actually not blood). It’s beheaded, skined, cut in half by the length, and organs are removed. Then the long halves are colded with huge fans, put in fridges, and the next day when it’s cold enough we cut steaks and stuff.
TL;DR / less gore version : the animal is put to (definitive) sleep, cut open, and peeled and emptied so that only meat and bones remain. Kinda like an orange if oranges had a skeleton, if you put it that way.
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Sorry to say there’s no way to go into specifics without it sounding cruel. Animals don’t want to die. There’s no kid friendly way to explain it unless you don’t want them to draw their own conclusions from what you tell them. Tell your kid what happens without any bias. It seems like you’re just afraid that telling them may make them not want to eat meat. I think that says more about your cognitive dissonance regarding meat consumption than whether or not your child is ready for the topic.
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Sorry to say there’s no way to go into specifics without it sounding cruel. Animals don’t want to die. There’s no kid friendly way to explain it unless you don’t want them to draw their own conclusions from what you tell them. Tell your kid what happens without any bias. It seems like you’re just afraid that telling them may make them not want to eat meat. I think that says more about your cognitive dissonance regarding meat consumption than whether or not your child is ready for the topic.
Avoid trying to sugarcoat it for them. Make it clear the animals are unnecessarily harmed for profit, and if they’re not ok with that buy them products that don’t require animal abuse
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