ON PTSD AND BACON
Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat,
so that I may not cause one of them to fail.
- 1 Corinthians 8:13
so that I may not cause one of them to fail.
- 1 Corinthians 8:13
I recently saw a link to a February 2014 article in Texas Observer, titled, "PTSD In The Slaughterhouse." (I posted a link to it on the Dominion In The Image Of God Facebook page, so you may have seen it there.) This came shortly after I attended the Humane Society of the United States' annual conference, Taking Action For Animals (TAFA), and the two incidents together gave me much food for thought. The article is a short piece, and well worth clicking through to read, but here is what particularly caught my eye - and my heart:
Slaughterhouse employees are not only exposed to a battery of physical dangers on the cut floor, but the psychological weight of their work erodes their well being. As one former abattoir employee attests in the book Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry:
“The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time—that let’s [sic] you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them. … I can’t care.”
It will come as no surprise that the consequences of such emotional dissonance include domestic violence, social withdrawal, drug and alcohol abuse, and severe anxiety. As slaughterhouse workers are increasingly being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, researchers are finally starting to systematically explore the results of killing sentient animals for a living.
I've written before about the link between violence to animals and violence to humans. I've also written about how we are all connected, and there will be no peace, no shalom, for humans until there is shalom for the animals; that is, humans will never know peace until we recognize that we are called by God to care for the animals, not to exploit them.
This article caught my attention now in particular because of one of the speakers at TAFA, Timothy Pachirat, spoke of his experience, undertaken as part of his Ph.D. work, as a liver hanger, a cattle driver, and a quality control worker in an industrialized slaughterhouse. His book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, discusses "how routine, massive processes of violence against immigrant workers and animals are normalized in modern society." (The description is from the TAFA program materials.) In his talk, he addressed the design of the slaughterhouse, who sees and participates in what aspects of the slaughter and dismemberment process, and how that affects the experience of the worker on the floor. He pointed out that many slaughterhouse workers are undocumented workers, who have few options and little recourse when things become too much to bear. Who is treating them, I wonder, for PTSD?
Two of his points keep coming back to me: First, he talked about the popular idea that if we could see what happens in slaughterhouses, we would all be vegetarians. Not necessarily, he argued. He discussed what he called "the new carnism movement," in which people can be involved in various ways in meeting, naming, and sometimes killing the animals they will eat. (Think Mark Zuckerberg's famous pledge to eat only meat he had killed himself.) It is an increasingly popular way some choose to address the fact that we are culturally far removed from how our meat gets to our plates. Pachirat reminded us that visual familiarity with the bloody business of death can lead to desensitization as well as to reform. As animal advocates, we need to be mindful of our use of visuals. As a society, we must ask ourselves if this desensitization to the taking of life is a step forward.
Second, and this is the point that ties in with the article above, he talked about undercover investigations. He supports these investigations as a necessary means to get the word out to the general public about what is happening to the animals, but argues they often wind up penalizing only low level employees, without resulting in changes in the systems that foster abuse and without penalizing the higher level corporate officers and executives who create those systems. By way of example, he spoke of the recent investigations at Butterball, which resulted in criminal charges being filed against six employees and none against executives. The executives, of course, are not the ones on the videos kicking and stomping on animals and throwing them to the ground. The executives, however, are the ones who create the dehumanizing conditions that lead people to think that abuse is acceptable.
And this brings me to the point I want to make. Like Pachirat, I support these undercover investigations wholeheartedly, and I am grateful for those who have the courage and the heart to go undercover. Also like him, I support the charges against the individuals who perpetrate cruelty to animals. But, most importantly, I agree that that charging only those individuals will never result in the changes that need to be made in the factory farming and slaughter processes and such a response fails to recognize that in some ways these individuals are victims themselves.
While we must hold these individuals accountable for their brutality, we cannot be surprised that it happens. As long as humans are required to work in conditions in which animals are treated as objects, where constant suffering and misery is all around them, where pigs cry out in horror at the sight of a human being[1], and where the corporate culture requires everyone involved to think of animals as machines[2], we cannot be surprised that the workers who interact daily with these miserable animals become desensitized to their suffering. We cannot be surprised that they lash out at the animals. If they paid attention to the animals as creatures, they would go mad. As the worker quoted above explained, "I can't care."
While we must hold these individuals accountable for their brutality, we cannot be surprised that it happens. As long as humans are required to work in conditions in which animals are treated as objects, where constant suffering and misery is all around them, where pigs cry out in horror at the sight of a human being[1], and where the corporate culture requires everyone involved to think of animals as machines[2], we cannot be surprised that the workers who interact daily with these miserable animals become desensitized to their suffering. We cannot be surprised that they lash out at the animals. If they paid attention to the animals as creatures, they would go mad. As the worker quoted above explained, "I can't care."
We must work for systemic changes and we must look for ways to hold those who create the conditions that turn human beings into brutes accountable. If we, as Christians, are honest with ourselves, we know that that doesn't just mean the corporate executives and shareholders who profit from factory farming and industrialized slaughter, it means us, as well. To the extent we are buying from these companies, to the extent we are searching for bargains for meat and asking for "dollar value meals" or their equivalent, we are participating in this system. To the extent we continue to eat large quantities of meat (the average American eats 212 pounds of meat every year), we are requiring an industrial, high speed process to churn out an adequate supply to keep up with demand. We are supporting systems that lead not to mercy and compassion but to "domestic violence, social withdrawal, drug and
alcohol abuse, and severe anxiety" among humans as well as brutality against helpless animals.
In the quotation from 1 Corinthians that opens this article, Paul is admonishing the Corinthians to ground their actions in love. He is explaining that even if an action is permissible, it is not always appropriate. For Paul and the Corinthians, who could never have imagined factory farms or industrialized slaughter, the question was whether it was appropriate to eat meat sacrificed to idols, or whether to do so would suggest that those doing the eating were worshiping the idols, thus causing those "weaker in faith" to fail in their Christian faith. For us, today, one of the questions we must consider is whether we are acting in love when we support systems that require people not to care in order to survive. Even if eating meat is biblically permissible, are our food choices causing these workers to fail in their walk with Christ, if they are Christians, or in their simple humanity, if they are not? (This passage raises a number of other questions, as well, which I will address in a later post.) How would Paul advise us in these circumstances?
And so, as Christians, we must confront the implications of our financial support for an industry that brutalizes not only the animals caught within its cogs, but the humans who are likewise caught. Is our hamburger or bucket of wings - or even our precious bacon - worth this?
In the quotation from 1 Corinthians that opens this article, Paul is admonishing the Corinthians to ground their actions in love. He is explaining that even if an action is permissible, it is not always appropriate. For Paul and the Corinthians, who could never have imagined factory farms or industrialized slaughter, the question was whether it was appropriate to eat meat sacrificed to idols, or whether to do so would suggest that those doing the eating were worshiping the idols, thus causing those "weaker in faith" to fail in their Christian faith. For us, today, one of the questions we must consider is whether we are acting in love when we support systems that require people not to care in order to survive. Even if eating meat is biblically permissible, are our food choices causing these workers to fail in their walk with Christ, if they are Christians, or in their simple humanity, if they are not? (This passage raises a number of other questions, as well, which I will address in a later post.) How would Paul advise us in these circumstances?
And so, as Christians, we must confront the implications of our financial support for an industry that brutalizes not only the animals caught within its cogs, but the humans who are likewise caught. Is our hamburger or bucket of wings - or even our precious bacon - worth this?
Photo: Esther The Wonder Pig. The photo is from the I Love Farm Animals twitter feed(@LoveFarmAnimals). Esther's twitter handle is @EstherThePig. She has her own Facebook page, too.
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[1] See Mathew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and The Call to Mercy, p. 259: "I ask if I might step inside the hog parlor for a quick look, and opening the door I ignite a squealing panic that sweeps across the barn. They draw back as if I am a wolf. At least they try to draw back. There isn't room to draw back."
[2] Matthew Prescott, Food Policy Director for the Humane Society of the United States, explained in a recent article in the Washington Post: "'Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory,' recommended Hog Farm Management in 1976. Two years later, National Hog Farmer advised: 'The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.' . . . 'So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that are in the stalls producing piglets,' remarked the spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council in a 2012 National Journal interview. 'I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.'"
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[1] See Mathew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and The Call to Mercy, p. 259: "I ask if I might step inside the hog parlor for a quick look, and opening the door I ignite a squealing panic that sweeps across the barn. They draw back as if I am a wolf. At least they try to draw back. There isn't room to draw back."
[2] Matthew Prescott, Food Policy Director for the Humane Society of the United States, explained in a recent article in the Washington Post: "'Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory,' recommended Hog Farm Management in 1976. Two years later, National Hog Farmer advised: 'The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.' . . . 'So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that are in the stalls producing piglets,' remarked the spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council in a 2012 National Journal interview. 'I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.'"
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