Killing time for small abattoirs?

These are not easy times for small abattoirs. Once many butchers’ shops had a slaughterhouse attached, now the meat we eat is often killed many miles from where it was reared and where it finally ends up on sale.

A mixture of regulations and the economies of scale have led to the concentration of killing in large industrial plants a million miles removed from the countryside.

The first problem for many small abattoirs is that out of necessity they tend to be located close to people, and many people… particularly in urban areas do not like to the idea of animals being killed at the bottom of the garden. Most of them are of course happy enough to eat the meat that comes out at the end of the process, they just don’t like the idea of what goes on inside.

As the world moved on from the horrors and deprivation of the war years, the pressure was on to become a modern nation. Convenience led to a disconnection with the food we eat. By the nineteen seventies meat had moved from behind the butcher’s counter where it hung as a carcass, cut up in front of the customer, to the chiller cabinet where it sat ready prepared in polystyrene trays. With this move to convenience packaging came a move to a meat industry centralised into bigger players. It became more economic to move thousands of cattle and sheep, every week, to bigger plants where they could be killed and cut-up on a highly mechanised line in a similar fashion to the car industry.

This made the larger plants more efficient, and the smaller ones closed. At the start of the nineteen seventies there were almost nineteen hundred slaughterhouses in England, Scotland and Wales. Twenty five years later that number had fallen to just under five hundred. This year that number dropped below three hundred for the whole of the UK.

Many of these are the larger abattoirs, which can handle hundreds of animals a day. In the case of cattle, more than half the animals killed in England meet their end in just twenty of the largest plants, according to Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue documents setting out guidance for the valuation of business rates.

With sheep three quarters of the slaughter takes place in just seventy six plants, but in pigs four fifths of the British animals we eat are killed in just twenty slaughterhouses. This has as much to do with the specialist skills and equipment needed for dealing with pigs.

However what has really spelled the end for the small slaughterhouses is the increasing weight of regulation they have to follow. At the top of this list is a set of controls which are designed to protect meat eaters from BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. The disease was first discovered in the UK in 1986 and has been linked with a variation of a brain disease in humans, v-CJD, Variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
A hundred and sixty four people in the UK are thought to have died have died from the disease since 1995 when it was first identified as being different from Classic CJD.

Research into BSE found that the prion, the infective agent which causes the disease, was thought to collect in certain parts of the animal, namely anything to do with the nervous system, the brain and for some reason the spleen. Controls were introduced which ruled that these parts of the body… given the title Specified Risk Material must be cut out and discarded.

There was also a growing feeling that BSE wasn’t just confined to cattle. There were suspicions that the disease had emerged from the practice of feeding sheep brains to cattle. A theory emerged that BSE originated from a similar sheep disease called scrapie. Sheep too became subject to rules on the removal of SRM.

Animals over a certain age are now required to have their spinal cord taken out.
All of this significantly ramped up the requirement for those who were doing the killing… or to be more accurate, the preparation of the carcass, to follow some pretty heavy duty rules. And rules mean just one thing these days… enforcement.

Both abattoirs and licenced red meat cutting plants, where the carcasses are butchered on an industrial scale are regulated by the Meat Hygiene Service, which is part of the Food Standards Agency. It provides the inspectors and official veterinarians, who have to be present every time animals are slaughtered.

Until now fees paid by these plants have been based on the number of animals needing to be inspected, so the smallest slaughterhouses paid the smallest fees. That though is about to change with the headage payment of the past replaced by a charge based on the number of hours MHS inspectors spend at the plants.

This is coupled to a twelve percent increase in all charges, and the introduction of a new charge for inspecting the removal of SRM.

The package of measures however will only reduce the subsidy paid by the taxpayer to the MHS from £28m to £25m per year. And many in the meat industry say the real answer lies in reducing the operating costs of the MHS. At the moment it costs £m91 per year to run, and Norman Bagley of the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) which represents the operators of small and medium sized plants reckons this can be reduced to about £50m-£55m. The FSA itself says it is aiming to reduce the operating costs of the MHS to £74m by 2012/13.

The FSA says small abattoirs will be protected under the new regime, but many within the industry fear quite a few will still disappear. This, according to supporters of this way of food production, will mean more food miles, greater stress for the animals and the potential for a greater risk of disease as animals are moved around the country to go to larger killing plants hundreds of miles away.


See inside a small abattoir - Noel Chadwick and Son Standish