I took him into a meeting room to calm him down - and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes. Even worse than pregnant cows, though, were the young calves we sometimes had to kill. Many of its members, it says, "are at the forefront of abattoir design with facilities designed to house the animals and help them move around the site with ease and without any pain, distress or suffering".
At the height of the BSE and bovine tuberculosis crises in the s, large groups of animals had to be slaughtered. I worked at the slaughterhouse after , so well after the BSE crisis, but if an animal tested positive for TB they would still bring whole families in to be culled - bulls, heifers and calves.
I remember one day in particular, when I'd been there for about a year or so, when we had to slaughter five calves at the same time. We tried to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so small and bony that they could easily skip out and trot around, slightly wobbly on their newly born legs.
They sniffed us, like puppies, because they were young and curious. Some of the boys and I stroked them, and they suckled our fingers.
When the time came to kill them, it was tough, both emotionally and physically. Slaughterhouses are designed for slaughtering really large animals, so the stun boxes are normally just about the right size to hold a cow that weighs about a tonne. When we put the first calf in, it only came about a quarter of a way up the box, if that. We put all five calves in at once. Then we killed them. Afterwards, looking at the dead animals on the ground, the slaughterers were visibly upset.
I rarely saw them so vulnerable. Emotions in the abattoir tended to be bottled up. Nobody talked about their feelings; there was an overwhelming sense that you weren't allowed to show weakness.
Plus, there were a lot of workers who wouldn't have been able to talk about their feelings to the rest of us even if they'd wanted to. Many were migrant workers, predominantly from Eastern Europe, whose English wasn't good enough for them to seek help if they were struggling.
A lot of the men I was working with were also moonlighting elsewhere - they'd finish their 10 or 11 hours at the abattoir before going on to another job - and exhaustion often took its toll. Some developed alcohol problems, often coming into work smelling strongly of drink. Others became addicted to energy drinks, and more than one had a heart attack.
These drinks were then removed from the abattoir vending machines, but people would still bring them in from home and drink them secretly in their cars. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something.
Just be professional, do it, then switch off - and then, when we've finished work, go home and be a normal person. It's not for everybody.
I know a couple of butchers that would not walk inside this abattoir; the thought of taking something's life, they find that difficult to accept, or witness.
Abattoir work has been linked to multiple mental health problems - one researcher uses the term "Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Syndrome" to refer to symptoms of PTSD suffered by slaughterhouse workers.
I personally suffered from depression, a condition exacerbated by the long hours, the relentless work, and being surrounded by death. After a while, I started feeling suicidal.
It's unclear whether slaughterhouse work causes these problems, or whether the job attracts people with pre-existing conditions. But either way, it's an incredibly isolating job, and it's hard to seek help. When I'd tell people what I did for work, I'd either be met with absolute revulsion, or a curious, jokey fascination. Either way, I could never open up to people about the effect it was having on me.
Instead I sometimes joked along with them, telling gory tales about skinning a cow or handling its innards. But mostly I just kept quiet. She could relate to cows and, she said, think like them. In her book Animals in Translation , Grandin explains that going through life as an autistic person — feeling anxious and threatened by unfamiliar surroundings — is not unlike what cows feel when passing through handling facilities.
She found that cattle were being stressed-out unnecessarily by their handlers. Cattle were slipping and falling and getting hurt. Then in , ground beef served at Jack in the Box killed four children in an E. Today, Dr. Grandin is a best-selling author, and her Animal Welfare Audit is the standard in the industry. Half of the cattle in the United States and Canada are now handled by equipment Grandin designed. No more than 1 percent falling. No more than 3 percent mooing. No more than 25 percent being hit with an electric prod.
Still, she stresses, without constant management and supervision, people backslide. New Yorkers, she explains, are the people least likely to understand what really happens on your farm. In other words, Grandin is describing my general type — suburban raised, urban dwelling, mechanically unskilled — rather pointedly. Now for full disclosure: I am far from dispassionate toward cows. When I was 23, I spent a few days on a free-range organic farm in Australia, at which point I resolved to someday buy a cow and name her Jenny.
At the end of a mile, five-hour drive from San Francisco and at the very end of a long gravel road, I said a polite hello to the cows that stood silently welcoming us to Prather Ranch. Early the next snowy morning, we enter a compact room in the Prather slaughterhouse. All the available space is taken up by one hanging cow being sliced, another hanging cow being skinned and a third, just-stunned cow hanging and being cut open while 5 gallons of blood gush from its body a few feet away from me.
Moments ago, we heard this very cow mooing from the knock box on the other side of the wall. Grandin — whom the Rickerts have met, and who sits on the Scientific Committee behind the nonprofit Certified Humane label — considers this a sign of distress. Mary says that Grandin once told her Prather cows might moo because they smell blood and get hip to the scheme.
The next cow, the cow I watch die, is quiet. It is black. It comes casually down a walkway. Scott Towne, the guy in charge of the killing, hits it with a CASH Knocker, a blank shell shooting from a metal apparatus at the end of the long, wooden-handled device and into the front of the head above the eyes, denting the skull but not penetrating its brain, rendering the animal insensible.
Its neck is lax and its mouth open, easy as a child asleep at the dinner table, or a businessman asleep on a plane. Whether or not farmers should torture animals, or keep them in disgusting and overcrowded and shit-filled conditions, or murder them slowly, are not even questions.
For those who kill animals for a living, making peace with those imperfections is a daily affair. He says that that can happen anywhere, even when a small farm hires him to kill one cow in a field. At Prather, it happens about twice each slaughter day. Because its skull is too old, too thick for a stunner, Towne has to use a 9 mm instead.
But what about death is humane? Three weeks after my visit to Prather, I see a burger made with their beef on a menu. It turns a mirror on the people who consume them. Along with production line speeds, the centralization of slaughter and processing facilities is a major culprit in contamination outbreaks. Meat processed in one facility may end up in supermarkets or restaurants all over the country, making it difficult to trace the origin of the outbreak, and even harder to contain.
The HACCP system, introduced in , modernized meat inspection and introduced testing for some bacteria that make people sick. It was a major advance; but critics, including internal government oversight agencies, point to significant shortcomings.
Audits of the system by the Office of the Inspector General and Government Accountability Office have repeatedly shown that meatpacking plants fail to properly identify potential hazards including commonly tested pathogens like shiga-toxin producing E. HACCP also impacts worker safety. A USDA rule, Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection , finalized in , had initially proposed an increase in production line speed from to birds per minute.
The increase was rejected in the final rule, but there has been no subsequent rulemaking by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA to further protect meat or poultry workers. Although consumer demand for local, sustainably-produced meats is growing, satisfying this demand is no easy task, in large part because decades of consolidation has wiped out the infrastructure needed to produce and market meat products from small farms.
Small slaughter and processing operations have been closing across the country, because of industry consolidation, low profit margins, the complexities of federal regulation and the challenges of disposing of slaughter byproducts. Between and , the number of slaughterhouses in the US declined by 15 percent. Many small farmers point to processing costs as one of their biggest expenses.
Fortunately, there are many sustainable farmers and ranchers throughout the US that care about where their animals are processed — and in some areas, independent slaughterhouses and butchering facilities are slowly re-opening, including mobile slaughterhouses.
The most successful of these efforts include an independent middleman or aggregator, who negotiates the relationship between farmer and buyer a store, restaurant or institution and coordinates the slaughter, processing and delivery of the meat. The aggregator usually has a recognizable brand under which meat from all its farmers is sold.
What Is Meatpacking? Read More. Labor and Workers in the Food System. Animal Welfare in Food Production.
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