slaughterhouse rules...,

TheAtlantic | The Yale Agrarian Studies completist is always an easy person to buy for, but his smile may slip a notch when he unwraps Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. As if the title weren’t off-putting enough, the cover photograph shows a faceless man in full-body rubber apron and rubber boots, the whole getup spattered with fresh blood. Is that an elastic band on the slick red floor, or a tapeworm? Mercifully, the book deals only in small part with the actual killing of animals, being a firsthand account of various kinds of slaughterhouse work. Liver hanger, cattle driver, quality-control worker: in five months undercover, Timothy Pachirat did it all.

The comprehensiveness of his experience makes Every Twelve Seconds especially valuable, considering the meat industry’s campaign to stamp out precisely this sort of research. Iowa and Utah have already passed laws making it a crime to gain employment at a slaughterhouse for the purpose of documenting abuses and code violations; similar “ag gag” bills have been proposed in other states. It is easy to imagine the uproar that would ensue if the restaurant industry, which is a model of hygiene in comparison, were to demand comparable protection from whistle-blowers. When it comes to the meat supply, however, America appears none too troubled by the prospect of its blindfolding; the nation would rather take its chances with E. coli than risk channel-surfing into a slaughterhouse. Though “foodie” writers occasionally show interest in the act of slaughter, they prefer to witness it outdoors, on some idyllic farm, the better to stylize it into a time-hallowed, mutually respectful communing of man and beast. Readers are left to infer that their local meat factory is merely maximizing the number of communings per minute; the media fuss over Temple Grandin, a purportedly cow-loving consultant to Big Beef, has an obvious role to play here. But all this wishful thinking fails at the slaughterhouse door. Barring recourse to the inducements the animals get, it would be hard to coax average Americans inside even for a minute. As George Bataille once wrote, in a remark that leads off Pachirat’s first chapter: “The slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a boat carrying cholera.”

 

And it always has been. We are sometimes told that urbanization has made us all squeamish about something people used to regard with a manly, no-nonsense spirit. The opposite is closer to the truth. As the great psychoanalyst Otto Rank pointed out, cave paintings and ancient myths indicate that primitive man—with whom our so-called hunters love to claim kinship—felt worse about killing animals than killing his own kind. (We find a similar attitude among the rugged Cossacks in Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don: “You should not kill an animal unless it is necessary, but destroy man!”) If our ancestors had had—as we now do—full awareness of animals’ sentience, and the wherewithal to live without red meat, and the knowledge that red meat is harmful in even the smallest quantities, would they have gone on eating it? We will never know the answer. What is certain is that long traditions of stigmatizing the slaughtering class started fading only after the factory farm made slaughter invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable to everyone outside that class. Of course, everyone has a pretty good idea what goes on, so that parents whose child wanted to be a cow-killer when he grew up (as opposed to, say, a soldier) would probably get him psychological counseling, but the bulk of mankind now has the luxury of forgetting how meat is made.

The most interesting aspect of Pachirat’s book is its discovery that our slaughterhouse workers are themselves deeply uneasy about the cruelty they are forced to inflict. This runs counter to the PR line according to which everything runs wonderfully humanely except when some psychopath slips into the system. Evidently there is no uncruel way to kill a large and terrified animal every 12 seconds, the pace now set by industry greed. Just moving the cattle along the chutes leaves employees feeling shaken and ashamed.