Killing Floor: the Business of Animal Slaughter
We saw them peer out from between the slats of tightly packed trucks as they were steered through town. Often when lorries slowed at a road crossing, groups of children – myself among them – hung on to the rear for a free ride (a risky street game we called ‘going for a hudgie’), but the idea of hanging on to a slaughterhouse truck filled us with revulsion. 
As city kids, our view of farm animals was filtered through the misty lens of Disney, but anyone could see the slaughterhouse run was wrong. Given the chance, we would most definitely have sprung our gentle friends free to roam the streets and our imagination: cows, pigs, chickens – the lot.
They were terrified in those rattling high-sided vehicles; mothers were separated from their young, and some gave birth in the cramped conditions of the truck itself. It was not unusual for a litter to be born and trampled in transit, and for some to slip through the slats as a bolus of blood and flaccid flesh; we once saw a newborn piglet slide out onto the tarmac in Saltmarket, but were unable to find out if it was alive before it was crushed under heavy traffic.
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