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- The animals most commonly slaughtered for food are cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, goats (for chevron), chickens, turkeys, and ducks.
- In the United States, around ten billion animals are slaughtered every year in 5,700 slaughterhouses
and processing plants employing 527,000 workers.
- In 2007, 28.1 billion pounds of beef were consumed in the U.S. alone.
- Investigations by animal welfare and animal rights groups have indicated that a proportion of these animals are being skinned or gutted while apparently still alive and conscious.
- The animals are driven for
hundreds of miles to slaughterhouses in conditions that often result in crush injuries
and death.
- Slaughterhouses have existed as long as there have been settlements too large for individuals to raise their own meat.
- Early maps of London show numerous stockyards in the border of the city, where slaughter occurred in the ‘open
air’. A term for an open-air slaughterhouse is a shambles. There are streets named "The Shambles" in some English towns which got their name from having been the site on which butchers
killed and prepared animals for consumption.
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