200 Pages

Slaughterhouse is a book that holds back very little. Once you get over the shock of the first 100 pages and start taking in all the continuing gore and disturbing aspects of this book, though, you begin to notice a few patterns.

The first is that whether the slaughterhouse is killing sheep, horses, cows, pigs, etc. does not matter. They all have the same likelihood of letting the animals be conscious when they are killed because of one reason... The speed the workers do their job at. Everyday the workers' main goal is to get through as many animals as possible; which means always, no matter what, keep. production. moving.

This adrenaline pumping desire for speed is caused by a second pattern that I have noticed. All the owners and managers of these slaughterhouses care about is getting as many animals cut up in order to get as much money as they can, no matter the cost to their workers or the actual animals.

Money is very important to these people. A side fact that I noted from this book is that workers even sell meat on the streets to restaurants and other places sometimes. This fact was told by a former worker, Steve Parrish, who was in jail when Eisnitz interviewed him. He had worked at a horse slaughterhouse and let it slip that they would sell horse meat on the streets disguised as beef. Or, even worse, the places knew it was horse meat and gave it to their customers as some other meat. But I digress. 

My main point was that management would purposely turn down the power of the head knocker, which is supposed to knock the animals unconscious. They push their workers to speed up knocking speed to get more animals through, which also leaves more room for error in knocking them out. Then they change nothing about this system, even after it proves to leave their workers injured and the animals abused; by iron rods, boiling water, hooks in the mouth, freezing temperatures, etc. Even worse, the workers are too afraid to speak out to authorities once they realize their bosses are not willing to listen, because those same bosses make it very clear that their jobs can be easily replaced.  

A final pattern linked to the speed of line production, which one would think would concern the people who run these slaughterhouses, is food contamination. The author of this book, Gail Eisnitz, writes that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) approximately 40,000 cases of E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning occur every year. Many animals are not properly checked before they are sent through the line of production just because more animals = more money, no matter what condition they are in. We all know by now, though, that usually that condition is "awake".