Behind the sanitized world of fast-food, everyday grocery shopping and culinary delights—all meant to satiate to our basic pleasures and needs—is an extraordinarily vast realm of brutality as normal and routine as our mealtime habits. I am referring, of course, to the often ignored truth of slaughterhouses: that billions of animals raised and slaughtered every year for food are forced to endure unimaginable suffering. What society does to produce food is obviously bad for other animals. What is less obvious, however, is the lesser-known fact that slaughterhouses are also bad for the hundreds of thousands of employees who work in them—for very low wages, with little job security (most are “at-will” employees) and in highly dangerous conditions.
Regarding the physical dangers, employees constantly incur injuries (such as carpal tunnel syndrome, white finger and tendonitis) because of the high speed at which they are forced to kill and process animals, sometimes making cuts on a continuous production line as frequently as every 12 seconds. The combination of rapid repetitive motions, tiring work, sharp knives, and long hours easily makes this line of work one of the most dangerous jobs in America. From the previous hyperlink,
The golden rule in meatpacking plants is “The Chain Will Not Stop.” USDA inspectors can shut down the line to ensure food safety, but the meatpacking firms do everything possible to keep it moving at top speed. Nothing stands in the way of production, not mechanical failures, breakdowns, accidents. Forklifts crash, saws overheat, workers drop knives, workers get cut, workers collapse and lie unconscious on the floor, as dripping carcasses sway past them, and the chain keeps going.
Even more alarming, probably, is the disturbing psychological costs to employees who must directly observe, and participate in, the thousands of gruesome animal deaths every week—as detailed in this paper by Jennifer Dillard. I believe the best way to describe these costs is the loss of humanity, or the loss of compassionate concern for sentient, sensitive creatures. Consider the following account by a former hog slaughterhouse worker:
The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care…Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them—beat them to death with a pipe. I didn’t care.
Unlike the general public, the misery of animals is a constant, undeniable reality for slaughterhouse employees; they know, for instance, that chickens are conscious when slaughtered by throat-cutting machines, scalded alive in boiling water, and have had their heads ripped off by those instructed to do so. Abnormal cruelty in the everyday world is not only the norm in slaughterhouses, but expected and demandedby the nature of the animal agriculture industry, with the result that natural instincts to empathize with the pain and death of animals are suppressed (if not violated). One resulting consequence is a form of psychological damage known as Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), a type of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by being an active participant in “creating the traumatic situation.” Its symptoms include: “drug and alcohol abuse, anxiety, panic, depression, increased paranoia, a sense of disintegration, [and] dissociation or amnesia.”
Moreover, institutionalized animal cruelty not only directly harms slaughterhouse workers, it harms (and is likely to harm) non-workers as well; as one journal recently found, the desensitization of suffering is causally linked to a higher propensity for committing violent crimes, particularly domestic abuse. “[I]t had been established that the more positive a person’s attitude to animals, the lower their aggression levels, and that the reverse is also true – if you’re cruel to animals, you’re more likely to be violent to humans.” (Hence even on Kant’s view of animals, according to which they lack intrinsic value and therefore humans owe them no direct duties, this empirical fact would obligate practical vegetarianism, if not veganism).
These less-understood realities of animal oppression, in addition to raising troubling questions about our relationships to other animals, thus raise troubling questions about our relationships to other humans. When (and if) the general public is able to seriously acknowledge them, how will we react? How should we?
————-
Related links.
[1] For a highly extensive, personal account of the damaging psychological effects of slaughterhouse work, see this blog by the late Virgil Butler, a Tyson slaughterhouse worker turned animal rights activist.
[2] Another review of Timothy Pachirat’s book, “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of ....” See also James McWilliams’ interview with Pachirat here.
This essay, and more of Spencer's work, is also available on the Animal Blawg site HERE
