THE CONGRESS: Killing with Kindness

All things come to him who serves in Congress, even responsibility for slaughtering hogs and cattle. Climaxing three years of hearings, debate and mountainous mail, the Senate last week passed (72-9) a bill condemning most U.S. packinghouses' slaughtering methods as cruel and specifying "humane" techniques.

For the bill's lobbyists, passage climaxed an uphill fight. Some 30 years ago, U.S. humane societies were aghast to discover that a steer being led to slaughter was first stunned by a hammer blow—often ineffectively—then slashed across the throat and allowed to bleed to death. Hogs...

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