Kill It, Cook It, Eat It - Holocaust Edition

A new series of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It has started on the BBC. For those of you that haven't seen the programme before, it follows a format of showing the lifestyle and farming of animals - each breed being different each week - and then it's subsequent slaughter and processing into food.

Personally, I find the idea admirable in concept. I went through the thought processes about the morality of killing animals and whilst I'm fervent about the rights of the animal, I find that the necessity for meat in our diet overrides the idea of vegetarianism and being a vegan. It's undeniable that a lack of meat means that the vegetarian needs mineral and vitamin supplements. Even with such dietary needs satisfied on paper, it's accepted that the health of non-meat eaters is below par of that of those that partake.

Now I'm digressing from the point of the post - the show itself. When coming to my conclusion that farming is correct as long as fair, I find the idea of making a television programme where the animals are paraded on television, then slaughtered for the viewers and then munched. You could argue that they were going to be slaughtered anyway and whilst we have no information that they're just normal animals and not bred for the programme itself, there's a glaring error in the morality.

Chicken slaughter fine. Pork, sheep, ducks and most white and game - mostly fine. However, they take Cows, they slaughter them, and then make steak and mince for burgers. They even point out the problem with this. Beef should NOT be eaten within hours of slaughter. It needs to hang for sometime, and in some cases weeks. This blatantly shows that the cows are being slaughtered entirely for the whim of the viewers, and that their meat is being partially wasted - no butcher or supermarket is going to buy the rest of the meat other than that which has been fried up for the culinary consumption of the 'contestants'.

Next time you watch to programme, change the setting to a Nazi death camp. It's preposterous I know, but the instant you imagine Julia Bradbury jovially talking about the rearing of Jews and their subsequent slaughter in clinically clean environments it makes your skin crawl. I suppose then you can understand some of what the over-emotional animal rights people are on about. I can watch the animals being slaughtered, and I have a personal goal of killing my own meal at sometime during my life (to curb the hypocrisy of being a meat eater and avoiding the origins of my meals), but as soon as you take out the sense of "it's purely for feeding our populace" and into the realms of reality Big Brother television - the hypothetical smell of Zyklon B floods the senses.