The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

It was a three story building and there were other buildings spread around it, (it is an) enormous, big property. I worked on what they called the “mutton chain,” where they killed and butchered sheep.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television. On today’s program, the first in a two-part series, we’ll hear from former slaughterhouse worker-turned animal rights advocate Carl Scott of New Zealand about the unimaginable, sickening cruelty that occurs behind the bloody walls of abattoirs.

For most of his life Mr. Scott had a connection of some sort to the livestock industry, but became a vegan in his 30’s and began valiantly speaking up for voiceless farm animals. In April 2011 he made media headlines after locking himself in a cage for 31 days to raise awareness of the unconscionable abuse of egg-laying hens in factory farms and to experience firsthand the appallingly cramped conditions that chickens around the world endure daily. Let’s now hear from Mr. Scott about his background.

I was born and grew up in a small, rural town in South Canterbury (New Zealand). Waimate is the name of the town, and I went to primary school there and high school. But being a rural town, the main industry was agriculture, predominantly animal agriculture. It was mainly sheep when I was young, but there were also cattle and pigs and other things.

Carl Scott’s father was a slaughterhouse worker, and at the age of 10, young Carl got his first job in a factory farm cleaning chicken eggs. Then at age 12, through pressure from a friend and to make extra money, he began trapping possums with cruel, barbaric leg-hold traps, commonly used to catch foxes, minks and raccoons.

You’d set the traps, then you’d come back the next morning. Yes, you’d see the possum fighting to get out. His leg would be trapped. He would be trying to get away and he couldn’t, and you’d have to try and hit him on the head; it was a horrible business. I still remember the first one because I thought, “I so don’t want to do this,” but I had to, and did it, and after that I think it kind of got easy. After you’d done it a few times you sort of switch off that part of your brain that says, “I don’t like this.”

And I remember one, about the second or third to last ones, because I thought I’d killed him. I took him out of the trap and just left him there, because if you take the skin off while he’s alive, all the fur falls out. You let him go cold for 24-hours before you skin him.

So I left him overnight and we came back the next day and he was still alive with his head half smashed in. It was hideous. And that really put me off, and not long after that I told my friend, “I just don’t want to do this anymore,” and I never really got involved much with hunting.

After finishing high school and experiencing a long period of unemployment, Mr. Scott finally found work in a sheep slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is one of the most dangerous workplaces on Earth, with serious accidents being commonplace.

In one such case in July 2011, a 26-year old man named Michael Raper from southwestern Oklahoma, USA was tragically killed as he fell into a meat grinder at a sausage factory. He was still fully conscious when his legs were macerated by the powerful grinding metal jaws of the machine. It took emergency services two hours to free him from the grip of the machine as he was rushed to hospital but sadly died the following day leaving behind four children and his soon-to-be wife.

Many people falsely believe that lambs and sheep are humanely treated prior to slaughter because they aren’t factory farmed. But this is a myth. Before being murdered, lambs undergo a number of horrific procedures. At only a few days of age male lambs have a plastic ring put on the reproductive organs. The ring cuts off the blood circulation to the point that the organs shrivel and fall off after a while. The lamb experiences severe pain and suffering during this period and no painkillers or anesthesia are provided.

Having to undergo this savagely inhumane process causes shock in some lambs and they stop feeding from their mothers. They then die with the ewes unable to do anything to save them. The torture does not end there. Tender babies, both male and female, have tags stapled to their ears and undergo “tail docking.”

This heartless practice that is done to supposedly prevent parasitic infections has no scientific basis whatsoever. The tail is either barbarically sliced off or a plastic ring is used to cut off blood circulation and the tail eventually falls off.

Lambs may also be disbudded, meaning they are burned with an electric disbudding iron to prevent their horns from ever growing. The young ones struggle mightily to escape while their sensitive heads are seared with extremely high heat. Carl Scott witnessed countless horrendous atrocities committed on innocent animals at the abattoir, including torturous murder.

I went down on a couple of occasions to see what they call the “sticking pens.” The sheep came from the yards … they would come through a hole in the wall into the building. And I remember watching them come through the hole in the wall, and they would come in, a device would sort of clamp them around the head and neck, and they would get an electric shock and the theory was they would go unconscious.

You would see them, they would tense up, and then they would just go like that. And the animal would fall down. Occasionally, an electric shock wouldn’t work, the sheep was still conscious so the guy would have to flick the switch again. I saw on one or two occasions, bang! No – bang! No – bang! Okay, they are unconscious now. I saw that once or twice.

And I don’t know what the percentage is because I only ever went to the sticking pens on two or three occasions and I saw enough botched killings just on those two or three occasions. I don’t know what the actual statistical ratio would be. And I saw on a couple of occasions the sheep regained consciousness.

Now the terrible thing for this particular individual sheep is they would be grabbed, sent out through another trap door back out into the yards. They had to repeat the whole process again.

In his online article, “From Slaughterhouse Worker, to Vegan. A strange journey,” Mr. Scott elaborates on the extreme fright experienced by sheep in the “sticking pens”: “Sometimes the sheep would go running through the building. It must have been a nightmare for them. A few times a sheep came right up to the floor I was working on (about three stories up). Many of the people would laugh. Somehow I knew that that sheep was terrified, and I couldn't bring myself to laugh.”

The sheeps’ guts come past on this big conveyor full of stainless-steel trays with bits of dead sheep in it, and I had to sort them and process them and drop them down stainless-steel chutes. It was kind of gross and kind of ghastly but after two or three days you’d just sort of stop thinking about it. And you’re watching all these dead bodies go past, all these dead sheep, and it kind of feels sort of surreal for the first few days and then you just switch off.

Besides seeing the unbearable anguish endured by these highly sensitive, intelligent animals, Mr. Scott also began to notice issues related to the carcasses he was cutting up.

And the other thing I saw – after I went from the gut trays, on about my second or third season -- to trimming carcasses, the diseased and damaged bits. I realized some of these animals weren’t very healthy. I saw animals that had been fly-blown, there were maggots still crawling around, and it had obviously been a living animal only 20 minutes ago, and it had maggots crawling around its anus, eating its flesh.

In “From Slaughterhouse worker, to Vegan. A strange journey,” Mr. Scott also reveals a shocking truth about what some of us feed out beloved animal companions: “I later worked trimming the 'carcasses' (corpses). I spent a couple of days at the pet-food department, when someone was off sick. That was an eye opener. The smell was the worst thing. They just chucked all sorts of leftover crap that wasn't fit for human consumption into a huge vat, and cooked the hell out of it.”

Carl Scott eventually left the abattoir and went on to become a vegan. During the time he spent locked up in a cage to protest the insanity of battery cages, he came to an important realization regarding how to change our world for the better.

People kept saying what I was doing in the cage… “Carl, you’re a hero, this is awesome,” and I kept trying to say to people, “You don’t need to do something grand and big and crazy to make a difference in the world. It’s all about drops in a bucket.”

If every person does their little bit, that bucket will fill up and eventually it will overflow, and I see the bucket as the world building good. Every drop we add, we’re adding goodness till it overflows, that’s where we have achieved utopia. (It) might not happen in my lifetime but that’s the goal, fill the bucket.

Every word we say, every act we do, interaction with another person, with an animal, with nature, every product we buy, everything we do makes the world slightly better or slightly worse, sometimes much better or much worse. It’s this cumulative effect.

It’s not if we just get that one guy who’s ruining the world and stop him, we’ll all be right, it’s not. There are a lot of people doing a lot of little bits of damage. And to extend the analogy, I think there are a lot of people taking drops out of the bucket. We need to stop people (from) taking them out, and we need to be putting them in. The bucket is nearly empty.

So what’s the best way we all can “fill the bucket”? The answer is the organic vegan diet. By adopting this compassionate, healthy lifestyle, we all can end the suffering of the 56-billion land animals killed each year for meat as well as that of countless marine beings, and also help prevent the immense environmental damage caused by the livestock industry including land degradation, deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Humanity will become healthier and cases of hypertension, cancer and diabetes will become rare. If everyone chooses to adopt the plant-based diet, we can fill the bucket and create a heaven right here on Earth. We salute you Carl Scott for your exemplary, brave efforts to stop animal cruelty. You are a true vegan hero and are to be applauded for your determination to change our world.

For more details on Carl Scott, please visit www.Facebook.com
Search: person in a cage Read “From Slaughterhouse Worker, to Vegan. A strange journey.” at www.VegSense.net/articles.html

Thank you for your presence today on our program. Please join us again next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty for the second and final part of our interview with the courageous, benevolent Mr. Scott. May all life on Earth enjoy everlasting respect and protection.