I've been extremely busy since the publication of Slaughterhouse in 1997. Since the book's publication, my interviews have run on over 1,000 radio stations across the United States. Newspaper stories have reported the atrocities not only throughout the United States, but also in India, Australia, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, and other countries around the world.
Working with the Humane Farming Association (HFA), I proceeded to document more violations at slaughterhouses. One in particular, an IBP, Inc. plant in southeast Washington State-today owned by Tyson Fresh Meats-was the source of a massive investigation in early 2000. There, I worked with more than two dozen Latino employees, among the most courageous people I've ever known. They all signed sworn affidavits describing how, for decades, they had been forced to skin and dismember hundreds of thousands of fully conscious, live cows at the beef plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world. The line speed at their plant had almost tripled in twenty years. "Workers open the hide on the legs, the stomach, the neck; they cut off the feet while the cow is breathing. It makes noise. It's looking around," said one worker. "Cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. I've been up to the side-puller where they are alive. All the hide is stripped out down to the neck there," said another.
"Their eyes look like they are popping out. I feel bad that I have to do my job on them," explained a third.
"Sometimes they go pretty far. Sometimes they have all the skin out and they're all peeled. Sometimes you can tell they're alive because when you look at their eyes, you can see the tears of a cow. And their eyes are moving and everything. But mainly they just make a lot of noise and are trying to kick," described another.
"I've seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive. If I see a live animal, I cannot stop the line. Because the supervisor has told us that you have to work on a cow that's alive."
One brave worker shot hidden camera videotape inside the operation. Here are some of the violations of state and federal laws that were caught on tape:
• Struggling cows were hoisted upside down and butchered-while still alive.
• Cows were repeatedly hit with ineffective stunning devices.
• Cows were trampled as workers forced other cows to run over them in the kill alley.
• A disabled cow was chained at the neck and dragged from the kill alley into the knocking box.
• A cow was tormented and repeatedly electric prod. Workers were shown shoving the electric prod into the cow's mouth in order to keep the production line moving swiftly.
HFA conducted a press conference and ran full-page ads in Seattle newspapers, and a Seattle television station exposed the violations by running twenty-five segments on the story.
As a direct result of our action and the public outcry generated by the widespread media coverage, the governor of Washington initiated a investigation. As the NBC news affiliate in San Francisco reported while covering the story, "This is the first time in U.S. history that a governor anywhere has called for a full-scale investigation of slaughterhouse practices."
Adding additional weight to our effort was the fact that the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, representing more than 7,000 USDA meat inspectors, joined with HFA in seeking charges against IBP. Never before had federal meat inspectors joined with an animal protection organization in calling for a criminal investigation of a slaughterhouse.
This sent a powerful message to the public, media, and lawmakers. The USDA's own inspectors were publicly announcing that they were unable to enforce the Humane Slaughter Act-and they were calling for state government to step in and enforce the state's humane slaughter laws!
Law enforcement authorities concluded publicly that criminal activity had occurred at the plant. In the words of the prosecutor, "It's pretty clear from the videotape and the interviews done by the State Patrol that there was criminal activity [at IBP]." Still, he refused to file charges against the slaughterhouse, instead blaming the very workers who had reported the violations in their affidavits in the first place! In short, the situation at IBP is not only a case study in the institutionalized abuse of animals, it is also a study in just how far some state officials are willing to go in order to avoid prosecuting the world's largest meat company.
Despite the state's refusal to prosecute IBP, I worked with NBC's "Dateline" on the IBP story for fourteen long months. "Dateline" correspondent Lea Thompson traveled to Washington State and conducted an unprecedented interview with a dozen of the slaughterhouse workers who all admitted on camera to skinning and dismembering cows alive for years. Then the executive producer of "Dateline" decided the story was "too disgusting" and refused to air the report.
The case did, however, open the door for even greater exposure of offenses at this slaughterhouse and others across the United States.
Congressional Response to Slaughterhouse Expose
For several years, I had been trying to convince a Washington Post investigative reporter to write a feature on slaughterhouse cruelty, and this was the case that sparked his interest. We provided that reporter with evidence from IBP, along with numerous documents and witnesses from other slaughterhouses across the United States. The Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the world, published a remarkable story, running three photos from our IBP hiddencamera footage on the front page of the newspaper, exposing industry-wide atrocities. The title of the article, quoting one of the slaughterhouse workers, was "They Die Piece by Piece." Washington Post editors had been nervous about running the story but were astonished by the public's response. Thousands of readers wrote to the Post to express outrage, horror, and most of all, gratitude that the Post had run the story. The feature ended up being one of the highest readership response pieces in the history of the Washington Post.
Washington Post readers-including the highest-ranking members of Congress-learned of the enormous suffering endured by animals in U.S. slaughterhouses. The Post's frontpage expose represented yet another link in a chain of events that led to unparalleled public and legislative attention.
The article quoted plant workers who described, as they had in their affidavits, that animals were fully conscious while being skinned and dismembered. Even the Post's own analysis revealed that animals at slaughterhouses across the country were being skinned and butchered while still fully conscious. Members of Congress were aghast and immediately introduced resolutions calling on the USDA to fully enforce the Humane Slaughter Act. Following HFA's success in gaining congressional resolutions, we filed a formal petition with the USDA. HFA was joined by several other animal protection groups along with the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals in submitting the petition.
We announced our petition during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where I introduced to the news media USDA inspectors who stepped forward to blow the whistle on their own agency. The meat inspectors openly stated that due to faster production speeds and industry deregulation, they did not enforce the Humane Slaughter Act. They said that animals in U.S. slaughterhouses are routinely beaten, skinned, dismembered, and scalded while fully conscious. Along with our petition, we provided a mountain of evidence, including worker affidavits and videotapes, to the USDA and generated even more media attention. We made a simple request: that the USDA station inspectors in those areas of the plants where they could observe live animals being handled and slaughtered. Then, in a one-two punch, HFA followed up with a full-page ad in the New York Times.
As a result, and in yet another remarkable sign of just how far we have come, shortly after HFA filed its petition and published its full-page ad in the New York Times, the Burger King Corporation followed by filing a petition of its own-one which publicly denounced the USDA for its failure to enforce the HSA. While few believe that Burger King was motivated by a sincere concern about animal suffering, we were gratified that fast-food chains were publicly repositioning themselves. After all, Burger King, McDonald's, and other fast-food companies were vulnerable because they had long been purchasing meat from the notorious IBP corporation. To head off a public relations disaster, the fast-food chains wanted people to believe that they, too, were outraged by the animal torture HFA had exposed in the national news media.
Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) at the time was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and today remains one of the Senate's most powerful and influential members. After reading about our investigative findings in the Washington Post, Senator Byrd was moved to make an impassioned speech on the Senate floor.
"Federal law is being ignored," he said. "Animal cruelty abounds. It is infuriating. The barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated.... Such insensitivity is insidious and dangerous. Life must be dealt with humanely in a civilized society."
His speech was heralded by activists across the nation as a watershed event in the history of animal protection.
Then, acting on his concerns, Senator Byrd secured additional funding intended to be used to enforce the Humane Slaughter Act.
"USDA has the authority to reduce the disgusting cruelty about which I have spoken," said Senator Byrd. "With this provision, they will know that the U.S. Congress expects them to."
In addition to Senator Byrd's appropriation, in 2003, members of Congress directed the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the USDA's enforcement of the HSA.
GAO Discloses More Atrocities
While we've made astounding progress in educating both the public and Congress about slaughterhouse violations, the 2004 findings of that GAO report, in addition to our own investigations, demonstrate that there has been little change within the USDA. In fact, with the implementation of HACCP (see page 283), the USDA used the new industry-based inspection system to permit plants to erect walls that literally sealed off slaughter areas from other parts of the plants, thus further impeding inspector oversight. At the IBP plant we investigated, an internal USDA document revealed that, due to the construction of one such wall, inspection personnel visited the slaughter area on a monthly basis-or once every 50,000 cows!
Beholden to the meat industry, the USDA did not use Senator Byrd's original funding to station inspectors where they could observe live animals being handled and slaughtered. Instead, the department hired seventeen veterinarians, which it called District Veterinary Medical Specialists (DVMSs), who were stationed in field offices where they had no direct oversight over slaughter practices. While they may travel to slaughterhouses periodically, these DVMSs encounter the same impediments-workers using handheld radios, code words, and whistles to alert employees that USDA personnel are entering the vicinity-that in-plant veterinarians and inspectors do in observing true slaughter conditions. Amazingly, the GAO report concluded that as of May 2003, nearly a year and a half after the DVMSs were hired, the seventeen DVMSs had only made visits to 63 percent of the plants they were supposed to monitor.
Senator Byrd was unrelenting in his commitment to this issue as he appropriated even more funding for enforcement of the HSA. By 2005, Congress had provided the USDA with more than $11 million to enforce the Humane Slaughter Act. The money, according to assurances from the secretary of agriculture to Senator Byrd, was to be used to hire no fewer than fifty new inspectors for the sole purpose of enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act. To date, the USDA's promises have proved empty. Apparently not a penny of that money has been used to hire even one in-plant inspector to enforce the Humane Slaughter Act. The fact is, the USDA had no intention of devoting any of these resources to hiring inspectors dedicated exclusively to HSA compliance. Instead, the money is being divvied up among inspectors who make wholly unproductive spot checks to slaughter areas. To date, there remains no continuous on-site oversight of humane handling and slaughter activities at the nation's nine hundred federally inspected slaughterhouses. The GAO report, issued in January 2004, further revealed that the department's lack of enforcement had resulted in the cruel slaughter of "hundreds of thousands of animals" in violation of the law each year. The most common violation, reported the GAO, "was the ineffective stunning of animals, in many cases resulting in a conscious animal reaching slaughter." The GAO also revealed that USDA officials attempted to mischaracterize these violations as minor infractions!
My predictions about Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) came true. HACCP, as readers will recall, required companies to create their own food-safety plans by identifying and monitoring the major points of potential contamination in the production process (establishing "critical control points"). A limited amount of microbial testing would be conducted by the plants themselves and by the USDA. HACCP transferred many meat inspection duties to plant workers and in large part relegated federal inspectors to overseeing corporate paperwork.
In short, HACCP set the stage for additional outbreaks of food-borne illness. Since writing Slaughterhouse, the filth and contamination that has flourished under HACCP has resulted in ongoing outbreaks of food-borne illness and subsequent meat and poultry recalls larger than had ever been encountered in history. We've seen recalls of twenty-five million pounds of ground beef, twenty-seven million pounds of turkey and chicken, and a staggering thirty-five million pounds of hot dogs from plants that had long histories of USDA violations. An inspector who attempted to blow the whistle at one of these plants reported seeing "Live flies and cockroaches in processing departments during operations, dead flies observed on exposed product, repeated condensation dripping on product, dried meat particles from previous days' operation, algae growth on walls and ceilings, rusty equipment, and foreign matter in raw materials." Deaths, miscarriages, or illnesses from E.coli 0157:H7 and listeria monocytogenes-a particularly virulent pathogen that kills one in five of its victimshave been associated with all of these recalls. Inspectors at other plants discovered meat contaminated with ten-inch-long fecal smears, rust, black oil, green hydraulic fluid, pus, blood and ingesta, condensation dripping from rusted beams, and metal shavings-all ignored by plant employees. Equipment was covered with feces, hair, rust, blood, bile, fat, liver and stomach contents from the previous day's operation, and metal shavings. According to an inspector, employees at one plant were working in an area where the drain was stopped up. "The contamination they were working in was slightly deeper than their ankles. This contamination consisted of blood, approximately eight tails, approximately twenty snouts, hide pieces, stomach contents and approximately one hundred portions of the ears."
U.S. Supreme Court Sides with HFA
On a very positive note, legal action by HFA successfully challenged what would-if left unchallenged-have become the third-largest hog factory farm in the world. For several years, HFA has been embroiled in a major battle to stop a massive hog factory from locating on Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota. This effort became the centerpiece of HFA's overall campaign against hog factories in the United States. As a result, the public and the courts have become much more aware of the cruelty and environmental hazards associated with hog factories.
With an increasing level of public awareness, agribusiness has sought out locations where it can sidestep state environmental laws and community opposition. Agribusiness is attracted to Native American land for these reasons. And that's apparently why Sun Prairie, a large agribusiness company headquartered in North Dakota, decided to build a massive hog factory complex on the remote Rosebud tribal lands.
The hog complex on Rosebud lands was scheduled to produce a staggering 859,000 hogs a year. The proposal called for another 25,000 breeding sows to be locked in small metal crates.
Despite the fact that the factory farm was to generate more than three times the manure and urine produced by the entire human population of South Dakota, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) signed off on the project without ever requiring the Environmental Impact Statement mandated by federal law. HFA's first legal victory forced the BIA to concede that it had approved the project illegally. It revoked the lease for Sun Prairie until adequate environmental reviews were conducted. That brought the project to an immediate halt.
Stunned by this setback, the company filed suit against the BIA in federal court in South Dakota. The company won that round and ultimately prevented the BIA from enforcing environmental laws and interfering with the progress of an operation already under construction.
HFA then appealed the South Dakota court's ruling in federal circuit court and the decision was reversed. That resulted in HFA's second legal victory against this massive hog factory. And this set the stage for the legal showdown that has since resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court siding with HFA and handing the Sun Prairie operation a major defeat.
In the meantime, we stepped up our efforts and gathered additional evidence of criminal animal cruelty taking place within the two sites that Sun Prairie had already constructed and were operating prior to the court rulings. Inside, we documented that overcrowding, neglect, and stressful living conditions had resulted in rampant cannibalism among the pigs. Pigs were being eaten alive by pen mates, their only remains being skin and bones. Workers referred to the remains of these pigs as "rugs." "When you pick up that rug, all you've got is just the skin, the hooves, and the head. And the bones too. The bones may be laying around," described a worker.
Animals were housed in filthy, maggot-infested, diseaseridden conditions. "Shit clogs" in waste pits cause feces, urine, and water to back up into pens with pigs.
Sick and injured pigs were routinely dragged into narrow alleyways between pens where they were provided no food or water and were left to die slowly of disease, starvation, and dehydration. "How long will these sick and injured pigs lie there without food and water?" we asked. "A week. Depends on how long it takes them to die. Two weeks," said a worker. Those pigs that were "euthanized" were frequently beaten to death with hammers and gate rods. "I've seen people just take a straight hammer and start wailing on them.
I've seen pigs with their whole head crushed in get thrown into the dead box and three days later they will still be breathing," said one worker. "Or you stand on their neck. The way to do it now, we take the water hose and stick it down their throat and blow them up, and their butt-holes pop out. We just drown them to death." Thousands of piglets whose legs became trapped between floor slats were simply abandoned to die of starvation or dehydration. Weanling piglets that got too close to heat lamps were left to burn to death. "We call them `baby back ribs' and `crispy critters,"' the workers told us.
We submitted hours of graphic videotape depicting the violations, along with eight hundred pages of worker testimony, to South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long, petitioning him to criminally prosecute Sun Prairie management at this facility. "The fact that pigs have been allowed to die of starvation and dehydration, have resorted to cannibalism, and must slosh around in their own wastes is evidence of systematic cruelty," we reported to the media, providing graphic photos and a copy of our petition to the New York Times and local news outlets. Despite a scathing expose in the New York Times and additional coverage in South Dakota newspapers, Attorney General Long staunchly defended the factory hog corporation and declined to prosecute. We continued to pressure Attorney General Long to file charges against the facility. Although the pro-industry attorney general has thus far failed to file appropriate charges against Sun Prairie, we were nonetheless successful in creating a legal and political environment which made it virtually impossible for Sun Prairie to continue with its development plans.
Between the court rulings and HFA's recent exposes, Sun Prairie has been forced to formally withdraw its plans to operate all but two of the thirteen sites that had been planned for construction on Rosebud Sioux tribal lands! This is an enormous victory, but we are committed to shutting down the two facilities that remain in operation-and by the end of 2005, HFA had filed suit again in federal court to close those facilities down.
Pig-Breeding Facility Shut Down
Once we began making national news exposing the horrific conditions inside the Sun Prairie hog factory, we captured the attention of employees at other factory hog farms. After witnessing HFA's success, workers at other facilities began coming forward to report horror stories of their own. That's exactly what led us to the HKY hog factory farm in northeastern Nebraska.
We obtained hours of videotape, hundreds of video stills, as well as statements from HKY workers and an expert opinion from a large-animal veterinarian all revealing systematic violations of Nebraska animal cruelty laws at HKY. The evidence documented a pervasive pattern of unconscionable abuse affecting thousands of animals. In addition, there existed a potential threat to public health because pigs from this filthy, disease-ridden operation were being sold to none other than John Morrell and Company. HFA found emaciated sows housed in nineteen-inch-wide crates. Not only were the cages so narrow that the animals could never walk or turn around, but the sows were covered with massive open sores from constant contact with the metal bars. Downed sows that were no longer able to stand were left lying inside crates to die slowly of infection, starvation, and dehydration. "Some of them have problems with their feet. Most of them that die-we took out two the other day-their whole hooves were missing," said a worker. "I don't know if they were caught under something. They had no hooves. The whole thing was gone. Some of them lay in those crates so long their legs rot off. It's just a real atrocity how many sows die in that place."
Newborn piglets that had fallen through holes in the floor to the waste pit below were struggling to stay afloat in feces and urine. "There were like twenty of them down there," reported another worker. "Once they fall in there, some of them were so far in the soup that you could just see bubbles coming up through the manure. And I seen bubbles coming up and I knew something was in there. I could barely just see this one's snout crack through the manure, and I snared him. He did not survive." Next to them were piglets that had already drowned in the liquefied waste.
Among other conditions HFA documented were:
• Pigs suffering from skin infections, swollen joints, respiratory ailments, emaciation, abscesses, hernias, and, in some cases, masses protruding from their abdomens and hindquarters as large as basketballs.
• Overcrowded and stressful living conditions resulting in cannibalism.
• Newborn piglets housed in unsafe enclosures where they became trapped and strangled in faulty gates.
• Pigs forced to live in their own wastes, often encrusted with excrement. Filthy, fly- and maggot-infested conditions, with feces piled a foot high in some pens housing pigs.
We submitted extensive videotaped documentation to the Nebraska Attorney General and to the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune ran a brilliant expose, with compelling photographs depicting the wretched conditions we'd documented. Faced with possible criminal charges from state authorities, and with growing national news coverage, officials at HKY were ultimately forced to completely shut down their infamous pig-breeding facility!
The USDA Declares Rabbits to Be Poultry
As recently as summer 2005, another example of the USDA's flagrant disdain for enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act became apparent when we learned that rabbits were being misclassified so the USDA would not have to provide them any protections under the Humane Slaughter Act. Species that the USDA deems to be "poultry" (including the nine billion chickens and turkeys slaughtered each year) are excluded from the Humane Slaughter Act. Astonishingly, the USDA has arbitrarily decided to classify rabbits as "poultry."
This has resulted in nothing short of torture at the slaugh terhouse. Our investigation revealed that for some rabbits, this means having their throats sliced open while they are fully conscious and struggling. For others, it means having their necks broken or being struck in the head with a metal pipe or a piece of wood.
According to the USDA meat inspectors, some rabbits are fully conscious as they have meat hooks jabbed through their legs. Workers hang them up by "running a meat hook through the rabbit's leg muscle and sometimes into bone."
Once they are hung upside down, the rabbits have their heads sawed off as they cry out in pain. According to inspectors, workers "use a dull knife and have to keep using it over and over to decapitate the rabbit. The workers were having to try three or four times to remove the rabbit's head. There were occasions where the knife slipped and the rabbit's ears were cut off."
"A worker had numerous scratches and bite marks from the rabbits struggling to survive as he was killing them," the inspectors told us. "The rabbits will cry almost like an infant with loud shrieking noises."
Outraged by what they saw, USDA inspectors contacted their supervisors. They were told that no action would be taken to stop these atrocities "because rabbits are classified as poultry by [the] USDA and are therefore excluded from Humane Slaughter Act enforcement."
HFA ran a full-page advertisement exposing these atrocities in the New York Times. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture was deluged by letters, faxes, and e-mails from outraged readers urging him to take immediate action to stop the brutality that his own inspectors were witnessing. In January 2006, HFA filed a lawsuit against the USDA in an effort to secure coverage for rabbits under the HSA.
A Final Word to My Readers
After over two decades of exposing the violations taking place inside slaughterhouses, as well as on factory farms, we at HFA can clearly see that these issues are now on the national radar screen. Members of Congress, not to mention thousands of people who never saw past the cellophane packages in supermarket meat cases, are now being confronted with what sentient animals go through prior to arriving on America's dinner plates.
So when network television executives claim that people don't want to know about these issues, that viewers will quickly change the channel, we can now say, "Give the public the credit it is due!" Americans do care deeply about these issues, and if you give them an opportunity to care, they will show you.
I have seen it in the public's response to the press conferences we've conducted, the advertisements we've run, the television coverage of the IBP case. I hear the reaction from callers when I conduct radio interviews, and I know of the unprecedented readership response generated by the Washington Post expose. I have received thousands of letters from readers expressing gratitude for writing Slaughterhouse.
By Gail A. Eisnitz in "Slaughterhouse" (The shocking story of greed, neglect, and inhumane treatment inside the U.S. meat industriy), published 2007 by Prometheus Books, New York. excerpts Afterwords p.172-184. Adapted and illustrated (from pics from the book) to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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