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Stephen McFadden

Sides of beef await cutting at the Washington Beef slaughterhouse in Toppenish, Yakima County.

Stephen McFadden

Sides of beef await cutting at the Washington Beef slaughterhouse in Toppenish, Yakima County.

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The cow steps forward on the cement. She is black, an Angus heifer, and weighs around 1,300 pounds. She's wedged in a chute against a steel plate. A couple dozen more cows are behind her, all of them headed for the knocking box. There, she and the others will be killed and begin a transformation into something fit for a dinner plate.

She's not struggling or agitated or mooing. The plate lifts, and she walks forward. The steel closes behind her. She stands there at the bottom of the box. No alarm registers on her face or in her body. Above her, a man known as a knocker reaches for an oblong metal device attached to the ceiling. It is called a captive bolt gun, and this is what the knocker will use to kill the cow.

"I want you to count," Gary Hyatt says to me. He's the manager of the processing division—OK, slaughter operations—at Washington Beef in Toppenish, Yakima County. "Count how long it takes till the cow is down."

The knocker centers the gun over the heifer's crown. She looks to her left. You feel a slight twinge at this moment. You know what comes next. Pfffffffft goes the pneumatic gun.

She hits the deck before my mouth can begin to form "one," quicker than you can snap your fingers. The cow is flipped out of the box onto an adjoining floor. She lies on her side. Her legs stick out, straight and motionless, and blood runs from the hole in her forehead and out her nostrils. A man attaches shackles to her rear legs, and she is hoisted into the air. Her tongue flops out of her mouth.

I couldn't be more pleased. I am a meat-eater who, for years, has seen the PETA videos of slaughterhouses where the killing verges on torture and has felt somehow implicated. This isn't that torture. The cows come to their deaths too calmly to call it that.

But for several million American vegans and vegetarians, it does not matter how humane a place like Washington Beef is at killing. To them, killing living creatures for food is wrong—it's murder, it's torture. Ipso facto and prima facie. For many, going vegetarian, vegan in particular, is the appropriate response. It beckons as a way to a purer, more compassionate life defined by a purely secular expression—the menus of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Over the past 15 years, such reasoning has attracted so many adherents that an estimated 5 percent of the American adult population is either strict vegetarian or vegan. The phenomenon principally exists in coastal urban areas. But across the country, vegans and "vegs," as they are known, have had a direct and powerful influence on what the rest of Americans eat and how they think about food.

LIKE OTHERS ALERT TO INTELLECTUAL and philosophical shifts, I've done a lot of thinking and reading. I've read Peter Singer. Over the years, I've interviewed and casually chatted with scores of vegetarians and vegans about why they do what they do. Almost always, it comes down to a core disgust with how farm animals are raised and slaughtered, that the animals are too thinking and feeling to be treated that way.

Rachel Bjork road a bicycle 3,600 miles to protest the treatment of KFC–bound chickens.

As a result, I've flirted with veganism twice. I've also tried vegetarianism. Each time, I returned to meat and dairy. What's more, I have my doubts about endowing each cow or chicken with so much intelligence and feeling that we need to develop a social compact that translates into not eating meat. But I am equally troubled by factory farming. Maybe those PETA videos are right.

Rachel Bjork, a vegan who does outreach and education for Seattle's Northwest Animal Rights Network (NARN), says the videos are right. She tells me that cows are alive the length of the slaughter line. And she just doesn't understand people like me—people who know the whys of veganism and vegetarianism yet continue to eat of the cow. I, too, am getting tired of the cognitive dissonance of it all. Can meat-eating be ethical?

For Bjork, these are her salad days. Mad cow is in the air. When Bjork and other NARN members hand out "Go Vegan" flyers on Seattle's sidewalks, about 50 percent of passersby take the literature. A year ago, their hit rate would have been closer to 20 percent. If all those people read those flyers very closely and put vegans and vegs in their proper social context, they will realize that vegans and vegetarians are meat-eaters' best friends.

We kill animals all the time. We've done it for many thousands of years. The slaughter of animals—whether through the hunt or the family farm—has long been intertwined with being human. The West wasn't won on a diet of tofu and sprouts. Slaughter has played a key role in human rituals for centuries. In the Odyssey, whenever anything good happened to Odysseus, he'd sacrifice a jet-black sheep to the gods. A Thanksgiving turkey fulfills largely the same purpose these days.