The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Dilemma of Work / 175
Factory farms, like slaughterhouses, are brutal places, concentration
camps for animals, in which all manner of atrocities are inflicted on the
defenseless inmates. The conditions in these places bring out the worst
in people. Undercover video footage shows that workers routinely terrorize
animals with kicks, shocks, shouts, stabs, clubbings, and draggings.
They have been documented playing sadistic games like forcing
dry ice into the rectums of live chickens to make the birds explode,
drop-kicking them like footballs, blowing them up with firecrackers, or
squeezing birds with such force they spray feces over other birds. 15
People who are not naturally sadistic may become that way, and people
who have been abused as children and perversely enjoy causing pain to
others may well be attracted to working in slaughterhouses and factory
farms, where there is an unending flow of defenseless victims they can
torture, beat, and abuse. For example, some slaughterhouse and stockyard
workers use extremely painful electric prods to keep disabled or
downed cows, pigs, and sheep moving into the disassembly line. Being
touched by an electric prod is not like getting a mildly disturbing shock.
The animals experience thousands of powerful volts of pure pain, more
comparable to being stabbed with a knife. Workers have been seen and
even videotaped sticking these prods into animals’ mouths and anuses,
and stabbing animals with knives in their anuses and eyes. On pig factory
farms, it is standard practice to weed out pigs whose size and
weight are below the standards that make it profitable to continue feeding
them. Workers kill these animals on the spot using a method known
in the industry as “PACing.” PAC stands for “Pound Against
Concrete”; the workers grab the pigs by their hind feet and slam them
on the floor.
In Slaughterhouse, Gail Eisnitz relates dozens of recorded conversations
with signed affidavits from slaughterhouse workers describing the
routine cruelties they perform when forced by high line speeds to
“process” animals still conscious and active after they’ve passed the
stunner. According to one sticker,
Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you
aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at