Slaughter house
A BRIEF HISTORY AND SURVEY OF AMERICAN SLAUGHTERHOUSES
In Upton Sinclair’s best-selling novel The Jungle (1906), Sinclair exposes the unsanitary conditions, working practices, and animal handling in the Chicago stockyards at the start of the 20th century (“A Jungle”). Since then, slaughterhouses in the United States have come a long way--yet serious concerns still remain, especially for the people who inhabit these facilities.
Chicago continued to be America’s meat processing capital until the 1950s, when slaughterhouses were relocated to rural communities to reduce production costs. This move from urban metropolises to small towns was made possible by improvements in refrigeration and the increased popularity of boxed beef. Now, animals could be raised near slaughterhouses in feedlots and the meat could be shipped around the country in refrigerated lorries (“A Jungle”).
Refrigerated meat trucks. From Global Cold Chain News.
Since the end of the 20th century, slaughterhouse companies have been consolidating and amassing more corporate power. The majority of beef in the United States comes from four producers: Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), ConAgra, Excel and Beef America (Fitzgerald 61). The trend towards fewer and larger slaughterhouse facilities in small towns has resulted in a myriad of negative consequences for their communities. Research led by anthropologist Donald Stull and geographer Michael Broadway has shown ten likely impacts of slaughterhouses moving into an area, including increases in:
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the number of minority workers
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low-paying jobs
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offensive odors
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demand for low-cost housing
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strains on local infrastructure
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crime
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persons utilizing social services
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the homeless population
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health care strains
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linguistic and cultural differences (Fitzgerald 63)
In addition, the injury and illness rate for the eighty-thousand slaughterhouse workers in America has remained quite high. In 1999, the reported rate was 26.7 injuries/illnesses per 100 full-time workers, which is “three times the average for industries manufacturing other commodities.” In 2008, the rate lowered to 10.3 injuries/illnesses per 100 full-time workers, still placing slaughterhouses as one of the most dangerous places of employment in the U.S. (Fitzgerald 64).
The nature of the work in slaughterhouses lends itself to high levels of injuries and illnesses. For instance, workers use sharp knives in the dismembering or processing of the animals. However, the high rate of injuries is also impacted by inadequate training. When animals are improperly stunned and regain consciousness, they pose a risk to the workers. In terms of illnesses, the repetitive movements required in an assembly line can lead to muscle strain and cumulative trauma disorder, such as carpal tunnel syndrome (Fitzgerald 64).
While there has been little scientific research done to examine the mental well-being of slaughterhouse workers, various personal accounts repeatedly show signs of a type of post-traumatic stress disorder called perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS). Unlike other forms of traumatic stress disorders in which sufferers have been victims in a traumatic situation, sufferers of PITS are the cause of another being’s trauma. Fear and anger coupled with guilt and shame lead to a number of symptoms similar to those who are recipients of trauma: substance abuse, anxiety issues, depression, and dissociation from reality (Lebwohl).
A former abattoir worker touches on their experience with psychological dissociation in the book Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry:
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—that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around 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 to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them. … I can’t care.
Throughout the history of slaughterhouse reform, animal welfare has taken a seat behind sanitary concerns and human safety. In 1996, the United States Department of Agriculture found that “only three in ten slaughterhouses were able to stun 95% of their cattle with a single shot” (“A Jungle”). Faced with opposition from activists and the general public in 1999, McDonald’s started to monitor the animal welfare at its meat suppliers (“A Jungle”). Other corporations and fast-food chains slowly began to follow McDonald’s example.
Worker uses stun gun on cattle. From Temple Grandin.
Equipment designer Temple Grandin emphasizes the importance of training to the treatment of animals before slaughter:
I used to believe that there was an engineering solution to all of the animal handling and stunning problems. [...] I quickly learned that well-designed equipment makes it easier to handle and stun animals with a minimum of excitement and distress, but it is useless unless it is operated correctly. [...] Both good equipment and good management are required to keep welfare at an acceptable level. Too often people will buy the new facility but may not provide enough management supervision to use it properly. (Grandin)
Slaughterhouses also made simple changes to minimize distractions that cause animals to refuse to move. Some of the most common ways to improve animal movement were:
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install a lamp on the entrance to a race, or a single-file chute
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move ceiling lamps to eliminate sparkling reflections
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muffle air hissing
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install shields and solid sides on races to prevent animals from seeing moving people up ahead
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eliminate air drafts that blow in the faces of approaching animals (Grandin)
One major remaining problem is that not all plants are in a program of yearly audits. In some of these unaudited plants, serious animal abuse has been reported (Grandin).
Grandin's curved races de-stress the cattle on their way to slaughter. From Framer's Weekly.
A TOUR
An excerpt from “A Jungle No More”, an article by The Economist:
Cargill’s Fort Morgan plant, one of America’s biggest slaughterhouses, uses equipment Temple Grandin designed. She took The Economist on a tour.
The Fort Morgan plant employs 2,100 people and slaughters 4,600 cows every day. It produces 2.5m[illion] pounds of finished beef daily, enough to feed one burger to everyone in New Jersey, says Allen Boelter, the manager of the plant. The tour starts backwards, where the beef is vacuum-sealed, put into boxes and loaded into enormous refrigerated lorries. Hygiene is a constant worry: the plant has two eight-hour shifts for slaughtering and one five-hour shift at the end of the day when the entire place is cleaned and disinfected.
Whereas sophisticated machinery takes care of many of the tasks in the packing and boxing part of the plant, workers in hard hats and overalls (with warm clothes underneath as the temperature is close to freezing) do most of the tasks in the slaughter area. They remove the animal’s hide, take out its internal organs, and tie off its rectum and oesophagus. The removal of the stomach and intestines is an especially important job, as one wrong cut can result in the contents of the intestines spilling on the carcass, which spoils the meat. As a last step the entire carcass is cleaned and hung in the misleadingly named “hot box” (which is even colder than the slaughter hall), where it is chilled for three days before it is cut into bits and pieces. All this is hard and bloody physical work that involves the handling of knives which are continually sharpened. Some employees wear coats made of chain mail to protect themselves from the blades.
After a tour of the “disassembly line” comes the part of the slaughterhouse that was improved by Ms Grandin’s designs. A gently curving, high-walled ramp, where cattle walk in single-file, leads into the restraining box. When they emerge from the restrainer they are killed, instantly, as a bolt powered by compressed air shoots through the brain. They flop onto a conveyor belt, a chain is looped around one leg, and the huge animal is lifted to hang upside-down, still kicking reflexively.
The curved chute with the high walls, Ms Grandin explains, prevents animals from seeing what is around them or glimpsing what lies at the end of their walk. Moreover it plays to their natural tendency to circle and return where they came from. A light is installed in the restraining box because cattle don’t like to walk into the dark. Non-slip flooring is provided inside and on the entrance ramp, as animals panic when they lose their footing. Most important, Ms Grandin says, is that there should be no distractions, in particular no high-pitched voices or shouting or unfamiliar items which could unsettle the cattle. Apart from causing unnecessary fear and anxiety in the animals, an increase in adrenaline just before slaughter will make their meat tough.
During the visit several of the cows are agitated and “vocalise”, jargon for mooing or bellowing. One even tries to jump out of the box just before it is stunned. This bothers Ms Grandin. After visiting the pens, where cattle gather for several hours after they arrive by lorry to calm them before they are slaughtered, she stops to listen for a while in front of the building with the curved chute. No sound emerges.
Do cattle know they are walking to their deaths? Ms Grandin thinks they do not. They behave in exactly the same way when they walk up the curved chute to get vaccinated. Some get agitated, but most just trot through. In her view, properly performed slaughter is less cruel than a more natural death at the jaws of wolves.
The tour ends in the control room, an innovation also advocated by Ms Grandin, where an employee monitors a real-time video feed of what is going on at the plant. A company unconnected to Cargill watches the footage. The professor is pleased to see that the stunning of the cattle proceeds calmly on screen, seemingly without the animal feeling any fear or premonition—just as it should be.
JOURNEY OF BEEF COWS
MODERN RUSSIAN SLAUGHTERHOUSE
 When working at peak capacity, Miratorg's plant can process 1,100 steers a day. Currently, it operates at 30 percent capacity. |  A veterinarian inspects each steer, carefully tracking each animal’s number in order to maintain sanitary standards. |  Water-cooled saws have been used in slaughterhouses for decades. The water particles make the air feel humid and smell of a freshly-dressed animal. |
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 On the processing line, each worker has the task of making one cut. They add up to make a fully harvested beef steer. In this room, workers convert sides of beef into quarters. |  Dozens of meat cutters work to reduce the quarters into their primal cuts of beef. |