Billions Of animals each year are killed for no reason than our habitual taste for flesh or desire for profit.
Neatly wrapped packages in the meat case at the grocery store contain the body parts of once living animals.
We have become the living graves of others, subjugating their most basic interests to our most trivial tastes.
It would have been great if it was just about different opinions, but there are real victims, millions, billions, Trillions Innocent VICTIMS!

“You move so fast you don’t have time to wait till a horse bleeds out. You skin him as he bleeds. Sometimes a horse’s nose is down in the blood, blowing bubbles, and he suffocates.”

“A lot of times the skinner finds a cow is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens,… the skinner shoves a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord.”

“To get done with them faster, we’d put eight or nine of them in the knocking box at a time… you start shooting, the calves are jumping ,they’re all piling up on top of each other. You don’t know which ones got shot and which didn’t… they’re hung anyway, and down the line they go, wriggling and yelling.”

These are not freak instances of atrocities chosen by people seeking to demonize a basically benign industry, but merely the everyday brutalities of a huge, amoral, technocratic machine which crushes non-human animals’ lives, in it needs for greater productivity – a specialized case of the world – wide human carnage created by global capitalism.

Need more proof?

"If a hog can't walk, they scoop the [expletive] up on a dead run with a Bobcat [small tractor]. ....Right in the air. If he stays in the bucket, he stays in. If he falls out, you run him over, or pin him up against the wall, finish busting the rest of his legs so he can't run any further. ...Hogs are stubborn. Beating them in the head seems to work the best. Piece of rebar [concrete reinforcement bar] about an inch across, you force a hog down the alley, have another guy standing there with a piece of rebar in his hand--" "Yeah, it's like playing baseball."

"Two pigs struggled so violently that they fell off their shackles and into the blood pit below. They were hung back up again covered in blood. We watched this happen to one of the stun operator’s 'girls' - she was clearly conscious as she fell and we were asked to stop filming. He laughed as he shackled her back up and joked, 'I’m gutted about that I am."

"One slaughterman jokingly put the nose and ears from a dead pig over his face and posed for a photograph. I wondered what 'pranks' took place when no one was watching.”

Animals in slaughterhouses can smell, hear, and often see the slaughter of those before them. As the animals struggle, the human workers, who are pressured to keep the lines moving quickly, often react with impatience towards the animals.

“It takes 25 minutes to turn a live steer into steak at the modern slaughterhouse where Ramon Moreno works….The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren't. ‘They blink. They make noises,’ he said softly. ‘The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.’ Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. ‘They die,’ said Moreno, ‘piece by piece.”

“cows being trampled and dragged, others are tortured with electric prods. One cow has fallen and workers stick an electric prod on its head, then place the prod down its mouth. Still other cows are hung on chains, fully conscious, blinking and kicking. The worker who shot the tape said one cow was already at a station where legs are removed. ‘It would be horrible if someone were to cut off your leg without anesthesia.”

"These hogs get up to the scalding tank, hit the water, and just start screaming and kicking. I'm not sure whether the hogs burn to death before drowning. The water is 140 degrees, not that hot. I don't believe the hogs go into shock, because it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing. I think they die slowly from drowning."

According to Steve Cockerham, a USDA inspector at Nebraska slaughterhouses, and former USDA veterinarian Lester Friedlander, some U.S. slaughterhouses routinely skin live cattle, immerse squealing pigs in scalding water, and abuse still-conscious animals in other ways to keep production lines moving quickly. The men stated that the federal law requiring slaughterhouses to kill animals humanely has been increasingly ignored as meat plants grow bigger. Cockerham said that he often saw plant workers cut the feet, ears, and udders off cattle that were conscious on the production line after stun guns failed to work properly. "They were still blinking and moving. It's a sickening thing to see."

In Slaughterhouse, an anonymous veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen: “Cattle dragged and choked…Knocking ‘em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be restunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They’re all the same. If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn’t mean anything.” Dave Carney, 1997 Chairman, National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, states, “These large slaughtering operations are primarily concerned with productivity and profit. They don’t care about the effects on the animals. It’s as if they’re not even killing animals. They’re “disassembling” them, processing raw materials in a manufacturing operation.”

"We've thumped as many as 120 pigs in one day. We just swing them, thump them, then toss them aside. Then, after you've thumped ten, twelve, fourteen of them, you take them to the chute room and stack them up for the dead truck. And if you go in the chute room and some are still alive, then you have to do this whole procedure all over again. There've been times I've walked in that room and pigs would be running around with an eyeball hanging down the side of their face, just bleeding like crazy, or their jaw would be broken. I've seen them with broken backs, where they've been knocked unconscious for a few minutes, but then they're trying to get up again. "Some of those guys thump them, then they just stand on top of their throats. Whether it's to keep them from moving or to suffocate them, they stand on top of their throats and wait til they die. They break their jaws and everything while they're doing it." "You can't really swing the bigger pigs. One time I walked in and the guys were using two by fours and hammers and gate rods and everything else to kill them pigs."

“When the pregnant sows are ready to give birth, they are moved from gestation crates into farrowing crates. "They beat the shit out of the sows to get them inside the crates because they don't want to go," said a female worker. "One guy smashed a sow's nose in so bad that she ended up dying of starvation. "We had one too with his nose smashed in," said another. "A 600 pound boar. Smashed him in there. He finally died."

"On the farm where I work," said a worker, "they drag live pigs who can't stand up any more out of the crate. They put a metal snare around her ear or front foot and they drag her the full length of the building. And these animals are just screaming in pain. They're dragging them across the concrete. It's ripping their skin. These metal snares are tearing up their ears...."

"When sows can't stand up anymore and we have to kill 'em to perform C-sections, we wait until within a week of farrowing and we kill her and cut her open, then we drag her outside to the Dumpster. We use a stun gun or we get a hammer and start beating the head. Until they die."

“Documents sows being beaten with gate rods and violated with canes, struck in the head with wrenches, sows being kicked, stomped on, and dragged down alleyways, having their throats slowly cut with a tiny scalpel while they were still fully conscious, sows being killed by having cinderblocks dropped on their heads, and sows being skinned alive and having their legs removed with a hack-saw while they were still fully conscious and moaning.”

"In the winter, some hogs come in all froze to the sides of the trucks. They tie a chain around them and jerk them off the walls of the truck, leave a chunk of hide and flesh behind. They might have a little bit of life left in them, but workers throw them on piles of dead ones. They'll die sooner or later because there's nothing left to them."

With fewer slaughterhouses killing a growing number of animals, slaughter "line speeds" have skyrocketed. Today, individual workers kill as many as 1,100 hogs per hour--that's one pig every three seconds. One plant I visited kills almost 150,000 hogs a week and had requested permission from regulators to increase that number to nearly 190,000.

Frustrated stunners, shacklers, and stickers were beating pigs with pipes, poking their eyes out, chasing them into the scalding tank alive, crushing their skulls. They stuck electric prods up animals' butts and in their eyes and held them there. They dragged disabled animals with meat hooks in their mouths and anuses until their intestines ripped out. When there was down time, workers half-stunned pigs with electricity to watch them flip up in the air. They allowed disabled animals to freeze to concrete floors, and then stay there for days; they chain-sawed hogs alive into pieces for rendering.

"Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around. It was just alive. I took a three foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. I'll bet there couldn't have been a two inch diameter piece of solid bone in his head. Basically, if you want to put it in laymen's terms, I crushed his skull."

"If you get a hog in the chute that refuses to move, you take a meat hook and clip it into his anus. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. Your dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams--thighs--completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove a meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward."

"The preferred method of handling a cripple is to beat him to death with a lead pipe before he gets into the chute. It's called 'piping'. All the drivers use pipes to kill hogs that can't go through the chutes. Or if a hog refuses to go into the chutes and is stopping production, you beat him to death."

"Hogs are stubborn. Beating them in the head seems to work about the best. Piece of rebar about an inch across, you force a hog down the alley, have another guy standing there with a piece of rebar in his hand. It's just like playing baseball. Just like somebody pitching something at you."

They told me that they routinely had to pound away at cows' and horses' heads with ineffective captive bolt guns in order to render the animals unconscious. Workers strangled cattle with cables when they were dragging them up to the stun area, they listened to bones cracking and necks popping when they dragged horses. They used saws or blow-torches to remove the legs of live cattle that were stuck in trucks, in chutes, and in the stun area. They drove over the legs and heads of disabled animals with tractors; they routinely skinned heads, bellies, sides and rumps, removed legs, ears, horns, and tails, and began eviscerating cattle that were alive. "When a cow arrives at the first hind-legger [who removes the legs], usually the legger tries to make a cut to start skinning out the leg. But it's hard to do that when the cow is kicking violently. A lot of times the leggers'll take their clippers and cut off the cow's leg right below the knee--the skinny part. The cow'll continue to kick, but it don't have that long of a reach."

"Outside of the weak ones, just about every cow I stunned had to be hit between three and five times just to get it to go down. There were plenty of times you'd have to make a big hole in their head, shooting them eight or nine times. And they'd still be alive. I remember one time I saw the other knocker at the plant shoot a bull twelve times, and still it wouldn't go down."

"Sometimes a steer would get its head stuck in the restrainer [the conveyance that cattle ride up to the stun operator in]. You couldn't stun it at that point, so you'd end up cutting its head off while the steer was still alive. Or, there've been a lot of cases where the beef almost falls through the restrainer, and it struggles and twists so bad that the restrainer wouldn't move. A lot of times what happens is we just chop the leg off. We do it with a saw."

"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."

"Cows that get hurt, they call them 'haulers'. You take an electric winch, latch it on to one of her legs--it's supposed to be a leg--and drag her all the way through he kill alley to the knocking box. You can always tell them because when they come out on the line, they're covered with cow shit from being drug through the kill alley. If you can't get her leg, it goes around her neck, and by the time she gets up here, she's almost dead. It's literally strangling her."

"I've seen beef still alive at the flankers, more often at the 'ears and horns'. That's a long way. I've seen them over where they take the hide off with the down-puller. I've heard them moo when people with air knives were trying to take the hide off. I think it's cruel for the animal to be dying little by little while everybody's doing their various jobs on it."

"The majority of the cows they hang up, the majority of them are still alive. They open them up. Skin them. They're still alive. They're skinned out. Their feet are cut off. They have their eyes wide open and they're crying. They're yelling, and you can see their eyes popping out."

"I've seen cattle dragged and choked, knocked four, five, ten times. I've found them alive clear over to the rump stand. Takes them about ten minutes to get to the rump stand. That's after they've been completely legged [had their legs removed] and run through an electrical shock system too [to facilitate bleeding]. They're up there sucking in air and bellowing. Their eyes bugging out."

"One day when I went out to the suspect pen, two employees were using metal pipes to club some hogs to death. There had to be twenty little hogs out there that they were going to give to the rendering company. And these two guys were out there beating them to death with clubs and having a good old time.

"I've seen them put twenty to twenty-five holes in a hog's head trying to knock her and she was still on her feet. Her head looked like Swiss cheese. Tough gal. Sometimes they'll use a twenty-two and shoot the hog through its eye. Or you might have to hit both eyes on the same hog."

"Sometimes cattle fall through the bottom of the restrainer and they're still alive. And the workers have to get them up anyway they can. So they wrap a chain around it, lift it up, bust something. If it's a leg, they'll break the leg. If it's the head, they'll break the neck. It usually breaks, whatever they hook on to. You can hear the bones cracking a lot of times."

"An employee recently told me about a cow who got her leg stuck when the floor of a truck collapsed. 'How'd you get her out alive?' I asked the guy. 'Oh,' he said, 'we just went underneath the truck and cut her leg off.' If somebody tells you this, you know there's a lot of things nobody's telling you."

"A steer was running up the alley way and got his leg between the boards and he couldn't get it out. They didn't want to lose any time killing cattle and he was blocking their path, so they just used a blow torch to burn his leg off while he was alive."

When the plant breaks down or when there are too many chickens on the kill schedule for the shift, they are left over for the next shift. For the night shift, this is not as bad in the summer time as it is in the winter, because the chickens are forced to sit out in the cages on the trucks. In the summer on day shift, though, when they leave birds, they sit from 3:30 p.m. until 9 p.m. under a tin shed roof with no water and no food. I have seen hundreds die of dehydration from this practice.

“I have witnessed a worker build dry ice bombs (made by putting dry ice and a small amount of water in a plastic Pepsi bottle and screwing the lid down tight) and putting it on the belt with live chickens during break time. This results in a high pressure explosion that rips the chickens' bodies apart and scatters them all over the room. This occurred numerous times, but the one I remember the most was one night last June when he made a small dry ice bomb by shoving a piece of dry ice up a live chicken's rectum, then plugging it with a wooden cork. It built up enough pressure inside the chicken to blow it apart.

I have also seen Aron Harris rip the heads, legs, and wings off of live chickens, or just stomp them to death on the floor because he was aggravated. This occurred on a regular basis for about the last year and a half that I worked there.

I have also seen George Watson, a forklift driver, run over the chickens on purpose, then laugh about it. These kinds of incidents were ongoing and repetitive--just a part of a regular night's work.”

"Sheep were being walked from the lairage into the stunning pen and the guy who actually stunned the sheep was quite young. When he stunned the first ewe, the stunning tongs were only held on for five seconds and he actually put the tongs on the cheek bone instead of behind the ears. The ewe fell to the ground and was shackled and all of this was done in sight of the other ewes. As the shackle hoisted her up, she began to kick out - she was clearly still conscious. She went through the rubbery doors to where the slaughterman was waiting to cut her throat.

"I walked from the stunning pens through to the cutting room or sticking room as they call it. Ewes were hanging up bleeding to death and the blood spurted everywhere. The sheep were struggling and writhing in pain and the smell was indescribable. Blood was splattered all up the slaughterman’s arm and he was laughing. I stayed and filmed for about an hour."

"The men were pushing, beating, kicking and using electric goads all the time. Almost no animal would walk into the stunning box by its own free will.

"Most animals get diarrhoea because they are so frightened, so they and the whole place are covered with shit.

"Many animals are bleeding and have open wounds and bruises. The slaughtermen bang the gates which fall down from above on the cattle’s back all the time. The place was terribly noisy.

"What I hated most of all was the slaughter of pregnant animals. There is no animal welfare for unborn ones at all. I have seen these creatures kick inside their dying mothers. They probably drown to death. When the maternal blood stops flowing they - as I believe - start breathing. Do we have to slaughter pregnant cows? Can’t we wait until their calves are born? This is unbelievably cruel.

"One time, I took my knife--it's sharp enough--and I sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of lunch meat. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand and I stuck the salt right up the hog's ass. The poor hog didn't know whether to shit or go blind.