Abattoir.

No, it’s not a place where abbots live. While I’m in a religious digression, it seems the Pope resigned just before God tried to fire him. Now there is much racial tension in the Daily Hitler over the possibility of a black Pope. Why not? There are many, many black Christians and they (the catholic ones) believe everything the Pope tells them, even when this last one claimed that condoms don’t prevent the spread of AIDS. When that many people take your word as Gospel, popey, you have a certain responsibility, you know.

Another quick digression:

David Cameron praised Pope’s ‘tireless’ efforts to strengthen relations between UK and Holy See.

This is the same David Cameron who just pushed gay marriage through the Commons, which must have done wonders for relations between his government and Catholicism. I’m surprised the Pope didn’t leave one last retirement request with the Mafia. Then again, maybe he did, and that’s why Cameron has a horse’s head in his bolognese. No connection between Mafia-sourced horse meat and Cameron’s mad non-manifesto agenda? Maybe.

What was I talking about? Oh yes. Abbatoirs. Places where animals are killed en masse so we can have meat. I’m not going to make it sound nice because I have visited these places and it isn’t nice. It’s not a theme park and not a holiday destination unless you are Hannibal Lecter. There is blood and death and dismemberment in there and I can fully appreciate why some of those who have seen it have decided to not eat meat.

The animals are killed humanely, which means it’s done by humans, and the one being killed is dealt with out of sight of the still-living ones. A quick bolt to the brain and the lights go out. Should I object? I have killed a three-pound trout with several blows of a 3/4 Whitworth spanner, so no, I have no reason to object. I have snared rabbits and most of the time the snare snaps their necks but not always. I have set mousetraps and rat traps and those are not perfect killing machines either. Sometimes I had to finish the job manually.

I have stepped on spiders (accidentally) and deliberately napalmed ants. I have set up an open jam-jar with jammy residue and waited for wasps with a .22 air rifle (not that one, Bucko, an earlier one). I have blasted bluebottles with a Gat. I have trapped flies with a pin and seen the still-beating heart of a slug after I hit it with the round end of a ball-pein hammer. This was unusual, because the best way to dispatch a slug or snail in my youth was to hit the top of the stone wall with an airgun pellet just in front of the horrible little beast and let the splattered pellet ricochet through them.

I have killed my own food and killed many things that are not food. And yes, some of it was for fun. I’m not proud of it but I’m not ashamed of it either. It was just stuff I did in my youth. I have never killed or maimed one of my own species nor been responsible for such an atrocity, something many animal species cannot claim. It’s also something no government in living memory can claim.

Nature is nasty. Humans are part of nature. It’s nice and fluffy and cuddly to pretend that we are somehow above nature and we do like to pretend that we control it, but we are animals too. Nature cares about us as much as we care about bed bugs.

The home computer goes back how long? 1980? It was about that time I had a Sinclair ZX-81 which I expanded to a massive 16 kilobytes and spent six hours typing in a program that the tape recorder failed to record. I made that damn thing a proper keyboard and I made it run a word-processing program in BASIC but it only worked on one page at a time and the printer available was desperately crap and too expensive to bother with. Now I can get a colour printer for about £30. Thirty years. A damn generation has grown up thinking computers were forever!

Fifty years ago hardly anyone had TV or a landline phone. Fifty years before that, cars had to have a man with a red flag walking in front of them and only the very rich could afford one. Most traffic was still horse drawn.

There were no meat regulations then. None. You bought what was on the butcher’s slab and hoped it wasn’t human. You cooked it until the skin shattered at the prod of a fork and (without knowing why) rendered it bacteria-free and safe to eat. I remember being sent to the butcher by my grandmother to get a free bone for the dog we didn’t have so she could make soup out of it. That was less than half a century ago. No computers, no phone in the house, no games to make me vicious to small and little-regarded beasties, no fuss over what we had to eat as long as it didn’t come back up the way it went down.

Now we have a generation who think the internet was installed with the planet, and who believe that ‘now’ is all there ever has been. There can be no change in global temperature while they ignore the fact that temperature is a trifling thing compared to other changes.

There was once so much oxygen in the atmosphere that spiders could overlap dinner plates. There was once so little that only the bacteria could survive. Sometimes there was so much CO2 that the whole planet was sweatier than a Chinese Apple factory. Sometimes there was so little that the planet was a snowball.

We live on a lump of aggregated rock floating in nothing at all. It’s not a nice thought, just like the abattoir. But we cannot survive on nice thoughts. The conditions on this rock have changed in the past by vast degrees and they will change in the future. Species will die out and new species will appear, and humans are, like it or not, a species.

{Digression again – I have to wonder why science insists on promoting evolution as its primary weapon against religion, while at the same time working very hard to ensure that it does not progress beyond the present day.}

To the point. Is there one? You decide. I’m too pissed to care by now, Grant’s Ale Cask at £12 in Morrison’s could be blamed I suppose, but I was the one who drank it.

We have probably all eaten horse meat. With the possible exception of the readers from the Other Side, it has not killed you. Or me. I had a Tesco Value bolognese within the last month and for the price, it was pretty good. So it was horse? So what?

We are to believe that this meat is tainted. That it is evil. So the Daily Pretend puts up a story about a Romanian abattoir  to shock us with its ‘Saw’ despicability.

You know what I noticed about it? I noticed the staff’s non-contaminating clothing  and most of all I noticed something from a microbiologist point of view.

I noticed that it is extremely clean. It’s better than some of ours.

I would have no trouble eating meat from there. They will not accept meat from horses treated with horrible drugs, any more than our abattoirs would accept animals full of antibiotics.

Coming soon: laws and restrictions and taxes on food.  Based in, as always, lies.

Resistance is futile. You will  be denormalised.

I already have been.