Endangering Life: Working at a Slaughterhouse   
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The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals.

Conscientious viewers, this is Stop Animal Cruelty on Supreme Master Television. This week in the first of a two-part series on abattoir employees, we’ll look closely at the slaughterhouse, one of the most dangerous workplaces on Earth, and examine how meat consumption means our fellow human beings laboring at these sites are subjected daily to extremely traumatic experiences that damage their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being.

In 1906, meat sales in the US dropped by 50% after publication of “The Jungle” by journalist Upton Sinclair. The novel, which depicts the shocking labor conditions of the era’s slaughtering and meat processing industries, led then US President Theodore Roosevelt to institute a series of industry-wide legislative reforms.

Over a century has passed since the release of Sinclair’s book and US citizens are now eating more meat per person than they were 100 years ago. The gruesome picture painted in “The Jungle” has been mostly forgotten, and the chilling story behind the pallid flesh wrapped in plastic at supermarkets remains largely a mystery to the public.

In 1997, the meat industry’s dark secrets were again unveiled by another American author, Gail A. Eisnitz, chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association. In her award-winning book “Slaughterhouse,” Ms. Eisnitz describes the horrendous treatment of animals, the disease-ridden products and the appallingly filthy, dangerous work environment of the industry’s mass-killing facilities.

Her report is based on interviews with a large number of former slaughterhouse workers, whose experience in such workplaces amounts to more than two-million hours. More and more former meat industry employees are coming forward to testify as to what’s really happening behind the concrete walls of these places of death.

For example, the late Virgil Butler, who worked at a large US poultry slaughterhouse, quit and became a vegan advocate for animal and human rights, publicly exposing the obscene conditions of these murder houses where workers have to butcher as many as 80,000 chickens in an eight-hour shift.

I was born in a small rural community and grew up in small rural community in Southern Ozarks in northwestern Arkansas. I started catching chickens when I was fourteen years old. I caught chickens all the way through my high school years.

Over the decades, the meat industry in the US and elsewhere has consolidated and been in pursuit of ever higher profits. The result is extreme animal abuse and worker injuries being the norm as an utterly disgusting product contaminated with feces, pus, pathogens, chemicals, and drugs is mass produced.

They work day in and day out, shackling animals, sending them to their deaths and slitting their throats. It’s a violent place to work and is not only physically dangerous and demanding but it’s also emotionally damaging for the workers themselves.

So we see that slaughterhouses are not only one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation to work at, but many of the people that are working there suffer themselves from having to witness so much cruelty and violence on a regular basis.

Injuries and illness are so numerous that it would be hard for me to describe them all. I have arthritis in my hip my knee, my wrist, my knuckles, my elbows, my shoulders, and that’s not at all uncommon.

Mr. Butler’s account does not describe an isolated case. In the Human Rights Watch report, “Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in US Meat and Poultry Plants,” almost all the slaughterhouse workers interviewed suffered severe injuries “reflected in their scars, swellings, rashes, amputations, blindness, or other afflictions.”

In the book “Slaughterhouse,” Ed Van Winkle, a former abattoir employee recalls the following regarding a large scar on his neck:
“I got cut across my jugular. I was scared, scared to death. Stitches go with the territory in a packing house. I can live with stitches. I can live with getting cut once in a while. What I can’t live with is cutting my own throat.”

According to the US Department of Labor, one out of every three slaughterhouse workers is plagued with work-related injuries or ailments. The actual rate is believed to be even higher, because the workers are afraid of losing their jobs if they report their cases. And even if they do, their claims are largely dismissed by management in order to reduce insurance costs.

One major factor in the high incidence of slaughterhouse injuries is fast line speed. Each year, 60-billion animals are slaughtered worldwide for meat. In the US alone, 270 chickens are massacred every second. To kill the innocent at such a pace, workers are required to slaughter more and more animals in less and less time.

In large facilities, a sickening 400 cows, 1,100 pigs or 8,400 chickens are killed every hour. To achieve these levels of death, workers have to cut a staggering number of animals each minute on lines that never slow down.

As recorded in a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, a worker from a North Carolina, USA pig slaughterhouse states,
“The line is so fast, there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself.”

And a former slaughterhouse nurse commented, “I could always tell the line speed by the number of people with lacerations coming into my office.”

After these messages, Stop Animal Cruelty will continue with more on the profoundly dangerous working conditions in slaughterhouses. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

You’re watching Stop Animal Cruelty on Supreme Master Television. Our topic today is the brutal working environment of slaughterhouses. As the line speed becomes faster and faster in abattoirs, the animals are often inadequately stunned or bled before being passed on to the next station.

To keep the line moving, the employees are forced to handle or cut on fully conscious animals thrashing about for their lives. Many worker injuries are caused by jerking cows or pigs hung by their hind legs, bleeding from cut throats, vomiting, urinating and defecating out of extreme pain and fear.

In the case of poultry, the amperage of electrical stunners is simply not set high enough to knock the animals unconscious, but just enough to loosen the muscles that hold their feathers in place. The savage goal is to let the feathers fall off easily without bursting the blood vessels, which creates the “undesirable” color of blood in the meat. The fully conscious birds thus kick, bite or scratch the workers who hang them on the moving racks until their throats are slashed by motorized blades.

We had 92,000, 92,000 chickens to run in eight hours. Well, here we are, we started out, at probably a half-hour into the shift, the machine broke down, the killing machine broke down.

Well, instead of stopping the plant, doing the maintenance, putting the machine back online they sent two guys in there to drag the machine out and a guy standing there with the knife Aaron Harris had to kill for the rest of the night without the benefit of the machine, which is try to kill a hundred-and- eighty-six chickens a minute without missing any.

It’s not uncommon for a line worker to repeat the same action every other second, whether it’s hoisting live animals or cutting carcasses. Due to the highly repetitive nature of the job, stress injuries afflict slaughterhouse employees.

A former poultry worker relates, “I hung the live birds on the line. Grab, reach, jerk, lift. Without stopping for hours every day … after a time, you see what happens. Your arms stick out and your hands are frozen. Look at me now. I’m twenty-two years old, and I feel like an old man.”

Serious injuries also arise from workers slipping on concrete floors awash with blood, urine, vomit and other body fluids. One slaughterhouse employee recalls, “I slipped on remnants on the floor. I hurt my back, my hips and my leg. … I could hardly walk. The company doctor told me I was Okay and to go back to work. But I couldn’t stand the pain. I went out on sick leave. The company fired me for missing time.”

The equipment and workspace of a slaughterhouse are coated with animal blood, remnants of body parts, pus and even tape worms. After one investigation, Joe Fahey a former food processing representative of a union called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said, “People were crying, talking about being covered in diarrhea the entire shift because the supervisor wouldn’t let them go to the bathroom.”

Contaminants such as the pathogens from sick animals are deadly. Livestock sold to slaughterhouses often carry oozing wounds, pneumonia and cancers. Disease agents such as bacteria or viruses can be transmitted to the employees through animal feces, vomit, blood, direct contact or polluted air.

A study conducted by Professor Ellen Kovner Silbergeld, Ph.D. of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA revealed that 50% of poultry workers are infected with the bacteria Campylobacter jejuni, which is the second leading cause of gastrointestinal disease in the US. This is not the end of the story.

Because of the massive overuse of antibiotics such as penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed, some animal-borne bacteria are antibiotic-resistant super-germs, like Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus or MRSA which render traditional medicines useless. These deadly pathogens can be passed on to workers’ family members and further into the community.

Slaughterhouse environments are full of allergy-causing agents, which can lead to flare-ups, asthma and even death. In an interview with Human Rights Watch, one slaughterhouse employee said,
“I am sick at work with a cold and breathing problems … I have red rashes on my arms and hands, and the skin between my fingers is dry and cracked. I think I have an allergic reaction to hogs. But I’m afraid to say anything about this because I’m afraid they will fire me.”

Driven by greed to maximize profits, slaughterhouse owners use poisonous chemicals such as carbon monoxide to make their meat products look fresh and ammonia to kill the millions of microbes in meat. Exposure to these substances poses a major health threat to workers, as numerous incidences of ammonia leaks have been reported in meat packing plants.

One such incident occurred in August 2010 at a chicken-freezing plant in Theodore, Alabama, USA, leaving 130 workers requiring treatment and seven under intensive care.

Because of meat consumption, abattoir workers toil in hazardous, violent environments, and their deep suffering, as well as that of the gentle animals that are mass murdered, are imprinted on every package of meat sold in the market. May the day soon come when we all adopt the organic vegan diet so the killing finally ends and our fellow brethren no longer work under these horrific conditions for the sake of meat on our plates!

Concerned viewers, please join us next week on Stop Animal Cruelty for the conclusion of our two-part series on the slaughterhouse workplace. Thank you for watching our program today. Enlightening Entertainment is up next after Noteworthy News. May we have compassionate hearts and love all beings on our planet.
The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals.

Compassionate viewers, this is the Stop Animal Cruelty program on Supreme Master Television. Last week we presented the first in a two-part series on the extremely hazardous workplace conditions found in slaughterhouses. Today we’ll present the second half of the series, focusing on the even more traumatic mental and emotional toll taken on slaughterhouse employees and the people around them.

Participating daily in violence and destruction would desensitize any person. Former pig abattoir worker Ed Van Winkle, an interviewee for Gail Eisnitz’s book “Slaughterhouse,” recalled,
“You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad-looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. 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.”

Tommy Vladak, another slaughterhouse employee interviewed for the book stated,
“When you’re standing there night after night, digging that knife into those hogs, and they’re fighting you, kicking at you, squealing, trying to bite you …. And then it gets to a point where you’re at a daydream stage. Where you can think about everything else and still do your job. You become emotionally dead.”

These people that work in these facilities oftentimes become desensitized to what’s taking place there, because they have to, for the sake of their job, participate in this abuse and as a result oftentimes take out their anger and frustration on these animals.

Virgil Butler, a former chicken abattoir worker who became a vegan, regularly witnessed absolutely horrific scenes at the facility where he was employed.

I saw people rip the heads from them (chickens), throw them on the floor and stomp on them, and rip them in half. Pull their heads off and put them onto their finger and go around like this…

Loss of empathy not only causes brutal and savage behavior toward animals, but also fosters a violent mentality toward other people. Mr. Van Winkle related to Ms. Eisnitz how the job fundamentally changed him as a person:

“Sometimes I looked at people that way too. I’ve had ideas of hanging my foreman upside down on the line and sticking him. I remember going into the office and telling the personnel man that I have no problem pulling the trigger on a person – if you get in my face I’ll blow you away.”

“Every sticker I know carries a gun, and every one of them would shoot you. Most stickers I know have been arrested for assault. A lot of them have problems with alcohol. They have to drink; they have no other way of dealing with killing live, kicking animals all day long. If you stop and think about it, you’re killing several thousand beings a day.

It happened every single night, every single night that I worked there for years and years, and in more than one plant. We saw fights at the back dock on a regular basis.

The psychological impact for people who work in an industry that requires them to exist in a death-saturated environment, day in and day out, in the killing fields is tremendous. Slaughterhouse workers have high rates of developing addiction. Violent behavior is not uncommon toward the animals and toward other humans.

It really kind of begs the question of what kind of industry requires people to develop anti-social behaviors, violent behaviors as a norm. Witnessing violence traumatizes people, whether that’s violence toward humans or violence toward animals.

After studying more than 500 federal and regional crime reports from the USA, criminologist Dr. Amy Fitzgerald found a direct correlation between the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community and the incidence of murder, rape and other aggressive crimes. In December 2007, former Canadian pig farmer Robert Pickton was sentenced to life in prison without parole for 25 years for killing 26 women.

Studies also show that abattoir workers have higher rates of domestic violence. Even in less abusive relationships, family functions are severely impaired. Mr. Vladak disclosed the following to Ms. Eisnitz:

“The worst part, even worse than my accident, was what happened to my family life… I’d blow up at the drop of a hat, come home every night and find something to complain about, take my frustrations from work out on my family.

Mentally stressed slaughterhouse employees often indulge in alcoholism and other forms of addiction. Ed Van Winkle was no different.

“A lot of the guys … just drink and drug their problems away. Some of them end up abusing their spouses because they can’t get rid of the feelings. They leave work with this attitude and they go down to the bar to forget. Only problem is, even if you try to drink those feelings away, they’re still there when you sober up.”

“I’ve taken out my job pressure and frustration on the animals, on my wife – who I almost lost – and on myself, with heavy drinking. I actually thought I was going crazy at one point. I’d hit the bar after work every day, pound down four or five beers, come home and just sit and stare off into space through three or four more.”

Stop Animal Cruelty will return after this brief message. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

You’re watching Stop Animal Cruelty on Supreme Master Television. Due to the gristly working conditions they endure, abattoir employees often suffer from injury, sickness, alcoholism, and a high rate of violent crime. The meat industry has long been known for having low employee retention.

Nobody is going to stay in that plant that long, even maintenance personnel because they get paid so little. So you have a lot of people coming and going, coming and going, so they don’t waste a lot of time training people. They have what they called a training program.

I was considered a trainer; the trainers job wasn’t to teach the new hire how to work, how to do the job, it wasn’t to teach them how to do it more humanely. It was to catch what he missed until he managed to either get it right or they fired him, one or the other.

Slaughterhouse workers are constantly at risk of losing their jobs, and so are afraid to express their opinions or even talk about their injuries or ailments.

The supervisors are telling them straight up “This plant has to run, these chickens have to be run. You can either do it, or we’ll find somebody else that will, and you can go back to the line and bust your hump.”

As soon as you become no longer useful, they get rid of you. If you go to the doctor and you complain too much, they’re going to drug test you, knowing that you are going to fail, because if you manage to work there any time at all, you’re going to do it by doing drugs, absolutely. That’s the only way you can keep up, night after night after night.

If they have a person that they want to get rid of, but they want them to quit, so they don’t have to pay unemployment or at least don’t have to pay it as soon, they will do things to force that person to quit.

They take the urine analysis, and they use that selectively; as long as you’re not causing them to spend any money, they are not going to mess with you. They use it as a tool to get rid of those in the plant that they don’t want. Or in the case of somebody that is injured, that is going to need a lot of doctor’s care, they’ll do it to get rid of somebody so that they don’t have to pay that. “Well this person was using drugs on the job, therefore we don’t have to pay.”

Abattoirs in the US often hire undocumented immigrants, because they are more likely to endure the low pay and not complain about their suffering as they are afraid of being reported to the authorities and face deportation. One of the largest meat- production companies in North America was indicted for 36 cases of human trafficking in 2001 alone.

Use of child labor is also associated with the meat industry. During a 2008 raid of a slaughterhouse in Iowa, USA, officials detained 388 immigrant workers, among whom were 26 minors hired from Mexico and Guatemala. Investigators found that these teenagers had to work up to 90 hours a week handling power saws and sharp knives in an environment rampant with highly toxic chemicals.

Many female immigrants become victims of assault and abuse while working at these types of facilities. Again, out of fear of deportation, incidents are not reported to the police. Despite the meat industry’s notorious record with respect to injury, infectious diseases, violent crime, labor and human rights issues, the gruesome practice of producing meat continues.

Cheaply priced and aggressively marketed as “essential” for people’s health, the cleanly wrapped corpses which are sold in markets hardly reflect the torturous agony of countless animals and abattoir workers. Calculated moves are made to minimize public knowledge about what really happens behind the concrete walls of slaughterhouses.

The people that work in those places, most of them are very uneducated, some of them can’t even read a comic book without some help.

They also have a lot of Hispanic people that can’t speak English. So you’ve got a bunch of people here that really couldn’t possibly hope to get a really good job. They (the industry) pick rural communities for that reason.

The meat industry systematically exploits its voiceless line workers for profit, and each hamburger or chicken patty produced is loaded with the blood, suffering and anguish of both innocent animals and our fellow human beings. By not consuming meat and other animal products, we can eliminate the extreme cruelty imposed on our fellow brothers and sisters around the world and on our animal friends.

On the way home one night, me and Laura were driving along and we were talking about the chicken plant, and I had taken her in and showed her what the hanging room looked like that night and she was appalled and I realized for the first time in my life that I was actually ashamed of the way I made my living.

I turned vegetarian and I realized that chickens weren’t the only animals that suffered because of this factory farming thing. I realized it was spread across the entire animal spectrum, so I decided just to quit eating all meat and I feel better because of it.

Virgil Butler, the courageous former abattoir worker turned animal advocate, passed away in 2006, however, his work exposing slaughterhouse practices and the rampant violence occurring in these workplaces still remains of great importance. May his soul rest peacefully in Heaven. We also respectfully salute Ms. Gail Eisnitz and others for showing how abattoirs destroy communities. Blessed be your noble endeavors to remind our fellow humans to always choose a compassionate, animal-free way of life!

Merciful viewers, thank you for being with us today on Stop Animal Cruelty on Supreme Master Television. Enlightening Entertainment is next after Noteworthy News. May humankind soon create a peaceful world through love for all animals.


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