Suffering in Solidarity
The relationship between humankind and animal is a grim enterprise and as most attempt to remove themselves as far as possible from the horrors necessary to commodify an animal into a hamburger, we often fail to flip the misery coin over to see the human side. A forgotten class of laborers work tirelessly, at the expense of their bodies, across all agriculture sectors to provide the world with sustenance. The fruits of their labour served up without any gratitude or any understanding of who these people are. Yet, animal agriculture is a unique form of brutality not seen anywhere else. While reform and being a conscientious consumer can curb the exploitative practices in plant agriculture, the endeavor known as animal agriculture is synonymous with suffering. The perpetual victimization in slaughterhouses illuminates the true nature of human dominance over the world as animals in their last moments of life are subjected to a final act of brutality. Despite their demise, their trauma does not merely die with them. It is passed onto the disregarded workers forced into the role of victimizer, as it nestles firmly in their minds, their homes, and their communities as a damning demonstration of the bond between these victims.
This suffering in solidarity begins with what can only be called the road to hell as animals are transported sometimes thousands of miles. For some, their lives are merely collateral damage as the harsh conditions of the journey takes their lives long before their murders can ever be justified by your palette pleasure. Traveling in extreme heat combined with poor ventilation can lead to issues with animal’s overheating as well as suffocation. Cooler temperatures make the journey no less dangerous as the frigid elements have been known to lead to the painfully slow process of freezing to death for many animals. Although exposure to the harsh elements is not the greatest threat to these beings.
Stress alone from the exploitative expedition is the leading cause of fatalities. Approximately 47% of all deaths of birds during transport are due to cardiac failure and heart attacks with high levels of stress hormones present in their bodies. The primary attributor here is the trauma experienced from the moment these animals are forced into overcrowded spaces where they must stand for hours on end all while being denied food and water, in some cases for up to 36 hours. Stressed animals, unfamiliar with one another, have been known to become aggressive towards each other which leads to bodily harm. More injuries are inevitable as drivers faced with demanding travel schedules must operate at high speeds while navigating poor road conditions which results in animals being slammed against walls or their crates causing internal hemorrhaging and broken bones. The trauma is easily quantified to a horrific sum of torture that includes 427,000 pigs being disable a year by the time they reach their destination or the rapid weight loss experience by stressed sheep who are denied food over prolonged periods of time.
For those animals who do not perish on the road, their last moments are no less brutal. These factories of fast-paced carnage and their assembly lines of annihilation are in every corner of the globe with 2500 slaughterhouses throughout America that accounts for almost 3 billion land animals being put through the horrific process of being commodified for carnist pleasure. Animals are abused as they frantically and fearfully wait their last breath all while being tortured with stun guns and cattle prods or they are simply dragged across the kill floor when they do not march quick enough to their own death. Animals are sometimes gassed or boiled alive but the quickest way to extinguish an innocent life is by slitting their throat. A process known as “bleeding out” that causes immense suffering for being as they’re still beating heart circulates their blood through the body and out their jugular.
Many consumers are convinced they come from a more civilized world as they pull the “wool of humane slaughter” over their consumeristic eyes to shield themselves from the horrors of animal agriculture. With most laws existing as a feeble attempt to comfort our consumerism than actually ensuring the welfare of animals as these protections go largely unenforced. But what would expect from an industry whose survival hinges on the volumized violence to maintain slimmest of profit margins. “Humane practice” includes stunning an animal to render them unconscious by shooting the animal in the forehead with a captive bolt gun or by way of electrocution. Stunning is largely ineffective and many times animals are fully aware of the pain of having their throats slit. Upon their death, the bodies are dismembered into easy to digest meals for your mind as you are as far removed from the horrors perpetrated onto these innocent beings. As a society, we’re trained to view farm animals as products. Objects, designed for one purpose. Workers in the slaughterhouses don’t just take a peek behind the curtain that society has shrouded over the production line between farm and plate, they live there. Even after they’ve hung up their bolt gun for the day. It goes home with them, stays with them.
It’s easy to view slaughterhouse workers as cruel and barbaric. Taking a sick pleasure from enacting the level of brutality we’re all aware of onto innocent animals. While these perverse individuals absolutely exist within the walls of slaughterhouses, many of these workers feel trapped. While this industry used to be considered a good job, automation has eliminated the need for highly skilled workers.The industry has completely moved away from unions for what they consider a disposable workforce. In today’s job environment, slaughterhouse employees are looked d upon as a ‘low skilled’ occupation. Thus resulting in low wages, with the dagger of Hecate dangling precariously overhead as you can easily be replaced by one of the many unemployed, working age souls who society views as low skilled and therefore, low valued. Just as dispensable as the animals that needlessly lost their lives between those walls. Many workers are stuck in this life. Many are unable to fill out a job application form by themselves, rendering their prospects of getting work elsewhere, in their eyes, almost impossible. They are valued by their families, however, their families are reliant on their wage being brought in for a roof over their heads and food on the table each day. The pressure coming from each side of their life. The already crushing weight gained more and more pressure with each deadbolt shot, and each life lost.
Modern slaughterhouse, manual labor is required in several steps of the process. Workers are usually trained in one specific area whether it is slitting an animal’s throat to bleed them out or making a series of cuts into the flesh to separate fat, muscle and bone. Line speed is a key contributor to injury due to long hours of repetitive motions over an 8 hour day working on the line or the chain as it referred to by the workers. To maintain the high volumes of output, mandatory overtime is enforced, leaving workers exhausted and prone to making mistakes that will lead to injury. Combined tired works with the fast paced environment that does not even provide them with time to sharpen their knives, making it more difficult to make cuts and thus making chronic pain in the wrist, arms, shoulders and backs more prevalent. Repetitive stress injuries are the most common in this line of work but a majority of this injuries go unreported as workers are fearful of their job and their supervisor are more than willing to use intimidation tactics to receive incentives for minimizing worker compensation claims. The protections from these workers are few and far between much like those animals that they are charged with murdering as OSHA recently modified their injury report to omit the category for repetitive stress. All through, the pain goes beyond the body as it finds it way into these worker’s psyche fester with repetitive violence they must inflict day after day.
Imagine being 16 years old as you’re welcomed into hell for 8 hours a day. You walk into the break room and are greeted by a wall of silence. The only audible sounds are the chewing of food and the slurps of coffee. You scan the table to see if there is a place for you to fit in, to hide while you choke down your lunch and observe the faces of those workers who have arrived before you. The deep set eyes, the pale demeanor and the gaze of frustration and longing that your 16 year old mind is completely naive too. Finally an opening at the table, the edge, enough room for you and all the untold opportunity still in front of you. You take the seat next to a man who chances for change have all but dwindle away as respectfully ask if the seat is taken. He pays you no mind but instead he peers up at the large wall clock, sighs, his shoulders sloping even more so than they already were, and heads back to his job, leaving nothing but a faint smell of day old whiskey and cheap cigarettes. His lunch break starts 20 minutes before your’s, and you will replay this scene over and over again each day. Different faces each time, different day old spirits stinging your nostrils each time and never a word spoken between you. Each time, you sat up down, they stood up, shoulders slumped and back they went to the kill floor. This is how a lot of workers spent their 30 minute break, in silence and fighting a hangover.
If you ever find yourself behind the curtain of a slaughterhouse, you will be hard pressed to find a single person who looked happy to be there. The mandated 30 minutes of levity weren’t for relaxing, they were spent contemplating the countless lives lost and making sure that every second of this break counted. The time doesn’t stretch far when you have to walk 10 minutes to the locker room, get changed out of your blood soaked overalls, go outside for a couple of quick smokes then get to the staff canteen to inhale your coffee, and maybe a sandwich, in the hopes it would bestow the energy to carry them through the next 4 hours of their life, before making the 10 minute journey back to the kill floor. Bathroom breaks are a scarcity, too as you must seek permission to excuse yourself akin to a toddler in preschool. If you are lucky enough to be granted one, barely going three minutes will have your supervisor sending out a search party while they wait to verbally berate you for your audacity of having a functioning bladder. You aren’t anymore a sentient being in those walls than the animas but merely just another means to an end. The common decency so many of us take for granted, removed. Ritual humiliation being commonplace, too. If you were worried about the safety aspect of the job and raised these concerns, it was nothing more than self-deprecation as it led to supervisors enacting the same learned behaviors they either witnessed, or were subjected to: by labelling you a ‘pussy’, because hell is a fraternity, and what kind of fraternity isn’t rife with misogyny and bravado.
Your humanity and kindness is stripped away for the promise of the much needed wage at the end of the month. Problem is, that humans aren’t built in such a way where we can switch off our emotions and values. We can push these down, but they’ll tend to resurface, usually in the form of mental health issues. Be it depression, addiction, PTSD or a cruel combination of them all. Ed Van Winkle famously said at the Tyson Foods Annual Shareholder Meeting in 2006, “The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. 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 can’t care.” A damning indictment of the industry as a whole.
PTSD is a direct response to trauma, either through being a direct victim of, or witnessing, something so horrible, that it stains their soul. The latter is life for a slaughterhouse worker but it’s not confined to one instance as it’s continuous, and there’s no levity from it. If they take an unsanctioned break, to gather their wits, or to even contemplate on their actions it’s surely a case of disciplinary action for that worker. One many cannot afford when they have to put their survival of their family above their own mental health. There is a clear link between working in slaughterhouses and traumatic disorders such as PTSD and PITS (Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress). Rachel M. McNair, in 2002, described PITS in her work “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing” as a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that appears “from situations that would be traumatic if someone were a victim, but situations for which the person in question was a casual participant,” where the sufferer has those PTSD symptoms due to the traumatic situation being created by them. McNair goes on to postulate that PITS can lead to anxiety, panic, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, increased paranoia, a sense of disintegration, dissociation and amnesia. These are part of the “psychological consequences” of killing, and slaughterhouse workers are just as vulnerable to this psychological turmoil as combat veterans and executioners charged with the task of taking human lives.
Take a man by the name of Vigil Butler, a former poultry plant worker lamented “Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. It’s just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behavior. You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands. You are a killer.” In describing the mental anguish he and his colleagues were faced with, Butler recalls a horror story about “the guy they hauled off to the mental hospital that kept having nightmares the chickens were after him” before admitting that he too, shared these same dreams. After Vigil's descent into hell in 1997, he escaped in 2002 only to become an outspoken anti- slaughter activist. Setting up a sanctuary for rescued animals with his partner where he worked until his passing in 2006. Vigil isn’t alone in his apparent 180 degree turn from slaughterhouse worker to activist. Many workers manage to escape the shackles and join the fight for animal welfare, and indeed, animal liberation.
Animal welfare laws and provision for workers’ rights in the animal agriculture industry share the disheartening similarity of being overwhelmingly inadequate at providing any form of actual security for those they are intended to protect. The animals seen by many to beneath human superiority while a forgotten class of workers, mostly undocumented, supplies all of us with food, vegan or carnist alike. Yet, the cost of animal agriculture is a double edged sword that slices the throats of animals as it slices away the emotional stability of these workers. To eat the flesh of animals is a blatant disregard of the trauma and oppression inflicted on your behalf. By going vegan, you are not only standing for the liberation of animals but the liberation of the most disenfranchised workers across the globe.