The resolute vegetarian

December 26, 2012 by Lisa Hoashi 4 Comments

Any reservations I had about declaring that I was becoming a vegetarian disappeared when I received an email several days later from my brother-in-law. My blog post was a coincidence, he wrote, and perhaps a call for him to change his own eating habits, as he had also just read The Atlantic’s review of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, a book by his college friend Timothy Pachirat.

The review immediately sucked me in. Pachirat managed to gain employment in a slaughterhouse in Nebraska to research his book. He kept the job for five months. This was despite the industry’s increasing attempts to prevent any such access to potential whistle-blowers.

Pachirat’s book gives an account of today’s slaughterhouse, and chronicles his various jobs as liver hanger, cattle driver, and quality-control worker.

“The most interesting aspect of Pachirat’s book,” writes reviewer B.R. Meyers, “is its discovery that our slaughterhouse workers are themselves deeply uneasy of the cruelty they are forced to inflict. This runs counter to the PR line according to which everything runs humanely except when some psychopath slips into the system. Evidently there is no uncruel way to kill a large and terrified animal every 12 seconds, the pace now set by industry greed. Just moving the cattle along the chutes leaves employees feeling shaken and ashamed.”

Every 12 seconds. Even in today’s slaughterhouse, killing is an uncontrollable and disturbing act. Where Pachirat worked, there were 800 employees and all the killing was done by one unfortunate person. The “knocker” fires a bolt into an animal’s skull, every 12 seconds.

Pachirat tries out the job of “knocker” himself, to the alarm of his fellow workers:

When I tell Tyler I shot the animals with the knocking gun the day before, he urges me to stop. “Man, that will mess you up. Knockers have to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever they’re called every three months.’”

“Really, why?”

“Because, man, that’s killing,” he says; “that shit will fuck you up for real.”

Killing is never truly mechanized and clean, Pachirat explains in another The Atlantic interview, because nothing can entirely erase the fact that these animals remain “individuals with personality.”

He cites the chapter of his book called “Killing at Close Range,” which describes his work in the chutes. “I write: Some poke their noses up over the chute wall to sniff at our arms or stomachs. I can run a bare hand over their smooth, wet noses, a millisecond of charged, unmediated physical contact. At close range, even caked in feces and vomit, the creatures are magnificent, awe-inspiring. Some are muscular and powerful, their horns sharp and strong. Others are soft and velvety, their coats sleek and sensuous. Thick eyelashes are raised to reveal eyeballs with whites visible beneath darkly colored irises.”

“As a society,” Pachirat goes on to say in the interview, “we do everything within our power to erase the animality we share with the tens of billions of creatures we raise and slaughter under such horrible circumstances. But even in the chutes leading to the place where they will be shot one by one between the eyes, that connection can return in the form of a moo, a bellow, a fleeting moment of interspecies eye contact and recognition.”

My resolve to eat vegetarian, in the cases where I cannot do my own slaughtering, hardened after I read Pachirat’s story. He entirely justified my reasoning that there can be no way to eat supermarket meat in this country without being a part of a highly concealed system that brutally mistreats animals.

It’s only been two weeks since I’ve given up meat. It’s been interesting. I’m still working on a succinct answer to people’s first question: “Why?” I generally tell people that slaughtering an animal in my wilderness class made an impression on me; I realized that there simply couldn’t be a way to humanely kill animals in an industrial slaughterhouse.

I’m still turning over in my mind the fact that of all the good reasons that I became so adamant about becoming a vegetarian was not for the health benefits or the environmental ones, even though both of these would be compelling to me. Instead, it has been about compassion. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Our Trackers class took the month off in December; we’ll reconvene in January with animal tracking, hunting and trapping.