True Worth

Henry only weighed a couple of pounds when he was born. His soft pink skin didn’t offer much protection from the cold steel floor, so he spent all of his time huddled with his seven brothers and sisters when he wasn’t nursing. His brother Frankie was weaker than the rest, however, and didn’t get much to eat. What he did eat seemed to go right through him as diarrhea. Without the strength to stay in the huddle as it periodically moved, Frankie laid by himself on the merciless floor, and by the second day a man came along and picked him up. But he wasn’t there to help Frankie, instead the man swung Frankie violently and smashed his little head into the hard floor before throwing him on the dead pile; stiff with traumatic brain injury seizure and bleeding from his nose.

The next day of what would be a hellish life Henry was awakened by a man picking him up, along with the rest of his siblings, and taking them to another pen. In that other pen Henry heard one of his sisters start squealing, and everybody started moving around looking for momma; not knowing what to do. Then one of Henry’s brothers started squealing, then another, then a man grabbed Henry and held him against the floor.

Henry was squealing too, hoping someone would get that cruel, vicious man off of him. But the man put a couple of fingers in Henry’s open mouth and held it that way while he inserted some pliers and snipped the ends off Henry’s eye teeth. “Help! Help!” Henry screamed, as the man continued by cutting notches in his ears before flipping him around and cutting off his tail too. Ow! that hurt! Little Henry really went to squalling then and kept it up after the man dabbed some iodine on his ears and tail and let go of him, and he ran around swinging his little bloody tail stub in agitation.

About a week later two men moved Henry and his brothers to a different pen. They had only been inside a few minutes, meeting their new penmates, when the horror began. By that time the little pigs were leery of men and they all ran into a corner, trying to escape. But there wasn’t anywhere to run, and the men closed in and grabbed one while everybody else ran to the opposite corner. Henry’s heart was racing from the thought of being trapped in the pen with those bullies, recalling what savage brutes they are.

Then one of his brothers tore into a blood-curdling scream, the loudest Henry had ever heard, and Henry’s heart about leapt out of his throat. It sounded like they were killing him for sure. On and on he screamed for what might have been a minute but seemed like an eternity. Then they let him go and he was still screaming. He ran over to the rest of the group and forced his way into the middle, with his stubby tail swinging frantically and still screaming. Right behind him was one of the abusers, and another of Henry's brothers wasn’t lucky enough to get away. And when they cut into him, he was also screaming to the top of his lungs.

Henry was panicking. He was devastated for his brother, and scared to death. He looked about for some way out of there; any way out. But all he saw was steel pipe fencing. He was hopeful someone would hear the screams and come to help, but the gigantic maze of pens was a constant mad-house; somebody was always screaming in there. And he was in a little pig's hell. Over and over the men caught someone, tortured him and then came after another. Henry was pretty smart, he figured out that if he just stayed back by the fence, all the other pigs would shield him from the men and he wouldn’t get caught. Round and round they went. The boys that had already been hurt felt lucky to get away with their lives and were terrified they would get caught again.

Henry was doing a fine job of staying away from the henchmen. Round and round he ran. Until … Wham! a man with a cane-size stick clobbered Henry across the bridge of the nose. To Henry it felt like his head had been knocked off, or at least that his nose was laying on the ground. It must have knocked the sense right out of him, because he just sat there with his eyes closed and head twitching to one side, feeling like his nose was broke.

When Henry got his wits back about him he was penned to the ground again, this time with the cane man sitting on top of him holding his back legs up off the ground. The man was hurting Henry’s back and it felt like it might break. But then came an unimaginable pain that shot through Henry like a bullet. Henry was being castrated! He screamed with all his might. Right then and there one of those butchers was cutting into Henry’s scrotum with a knife, and it was slicing right into one of his testicles! The barbarian squeezed Henry’s sac and a bloody ball popped out, split wide open like a swollen bean, with blood just pouring out. That mad savage grabbed the cleaved, bleeding testicle and ripped it right out of Henry. And Henry felt like his whole insides were being ripped out. Then the barbarian squeezed his scrotum again and grabbed the other testicle and ripped it out too. Oh! it hurt! It hurt like fire; pain like Henry had never imagined!

All the rest of the day Henry and the other boys hurt. They felt sick to their stomachs and their backsides throbbed with pain at the same time. And Henry’s nose hurt from being hit with the stick. It was a hideous experience none of them would ever forget. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last brutality they would have to endure, or the last accidental hellish suffering. Little Lenny even had the bad fortune of falling through a hole in the floor. When his front foot hit the hole he fell head first through the floor, and as his back feet caught the floor on the way through he flipped over and landed on his back. Splat! he hit and sank into a sloppy, soupy mix of urine and feces. Lenny righted himself and got his head above the putrid excrement, covered nose-to-tail in that nasty sewage.

Lenny tried to find his way out of the pit, but there was no way out! All he could do was call for help. But nobody could hear him amid the constant cacophony of hundreds, or even thousands of other victims of that concentration camp. The other pigs couldn’t help him, and the camp henchmen weren’t about to rescue him from the crap trap even if they did hear him. All day and all night Lenny stood down there calling for help. He grew more and more exhausted, and the cries became more faint. Many times exhaustion got the better of him and his head drooped down into the poop. Shit was caked all over his face, it nearly had his eyes matted shut, and it made his head that much heavier.

The longer he went the more his neck hurt with bitter agony of holding his heavy head out of the slop to breathe. With every passing minute it became harder and harder to keep the encrusted slits where his eyes should have been open, and more excrement rained down on top of him. For a while staying upright was annoying and difficult, but as the hours passed it went from challenging, to unbearably painful, and finally to impossible. Lenny just couldn’t hold his head up forever. His neck muscles burned and he moved around to stay awake. His muscles cramped, and later still they tremored, and toward the end he lost control between spasms like seizures and his head repeatedly fell into the soup of urine and feces. Exhaustion robbed him of his strength and mental acuity. Lenny sank lower and lower, and trying to stay awake and standing was a long, drawn-out hell that few can even imagine. He was tired like no one could know, but to get even a moment’s relief asleep was to die.

He held on. He struggled to stay alive; terrified, with every long moment sheer agony of exhaustion and burning muscles. He held on while it was light and dark, he held on as people passed overhead and then went home to their soft, warm beds. He held on until there was no more power to fight. At the end he couldn’t struggle any more. As hard as it had been to will his self awake for so long and hold his head up when it hurt like hell, he just didn’t have anything left. He found the impetus for a few more desperate, frantic jerks as his head was going under, and he managed to prolong the suffering with a few more gasps of air. But in the end he went under and hadn’t the strength to come back up, even as he sucked acidic urine and scours into his lungs and coughed and breathed some more in and coughed and breathed some more in and coughed and kicked and fought death another half minute. And even after his heart and breathing stopped, every now and again his body mustered the energy for another gasp. And nobody heard his cries, and nobody cared about the hell he went through all by his little lonesome.

Generally, life in that enclosed, sprawling hell-hole of a hog farm was miserable. The air was so nasty it was hard to breathe and constantly aggravated the eyes. The floor was so hard and slick with urine and feces that it was difficult to stand up and not at all comfortable to lay on. Henry’s joints were swollen from living every moment on hard, cold concrete and steel. And the darkness, and constant squealing and yammering was simply maddening. At the farm where Henry lived, his mom, and the other mothers were kept in cruel little gestation and farrowing crates too small to turn around in. They couldn't walk in the grass, they couldn’t even walk at all in their coffins of steel and concrete. They couldn't see the sky, or sunlight, they couldn't lay down in comfort, or even see their own tails; and they would never escape, until it was their turn to suffer the hell of transport to the slaughterhouse to be electrocuted; or worse.

The feeder pigs like Henry were bound for slaughter before they were a year old. And not surprisingly, the farm hands are brutal, taking out their unchecked aggression on the innocent victims. Obviously, the pigs are scared and confused and don’t know which way they’re supposed to be going. They’re beaten, poked and prodded with electric rods down corridors and onto trucks. Some are crippled in the process of being beaten and trampled; others are crippled by other accidents and disease. And hog farmers have different ways of treating pigs that can’t walk.

First, they’ll do everything they can to get them to walk. They beat and whip the crippled pigs and hold electric prods against their skin or stick them in their butts, ears, mouths and eyes. If the pigs are unable to walk even under torture, then they have to be dragged out. At Henry’s farm, there wasn’t room to get a front-end loader in between the pens in the barn, so downed pigs were dragged out by hand. Sometimes they were beaten to death with pipes and hammers before being dragged out. Others just had a rope thrown around them and were dragged outside to wait until a butcher arrived to haul them off.

It was the cold of winter when Henry was loaded onto the truck bound for the slaughterhouse. Henry and the other pigs weren’t used to exercise or strenuous activity, they had never stepped foot on the ground, yet they were shocked and beaten until the truck was practically bursting at the seams. The last to be loaded were driven forward until the pigs in front were buried under a wave of thrashing pigs. One of those buried was squished so hard her intestines were forced out her butt, in an all too frequent occurrence known as rectal prolapse. She did, however, manage to get up, while another pig that couldn’t get out from under the pile of frantic flesh died of suffocation.

For those unfortunate pigs pushed up against the outside walls of the trailer, it was a bitterly long ride in the freezing wind. By the time the truck arrived at the slaughterhouse, a few were actually frozen to the walls. There they remained, stuck, after the others had gone down the chute to a holding pen. A little warm water would have unstuck them slick as a whistle. But the truck driver came in yelling and kicking, and the pigs started squealing and struggling. When kicking didn’t get the pigs unstuck, the truck driver went to his toolbox and came back with a pry bar.

“I oughta knock you stupid ******’s in the head!” he threatened. And then he went to jamming the prybar in between the pigs and the walls. Sometimes the bar hit the wall, sometimes it hit the pigs. They screamed in agony as he thrust the pointed bar into their flesh, and he wailed even harder. “Get off there you dumbass hog!” he yelled as he pried against the wall. Twice he managed to rip the half-frozen flesh and pull pigs away, leaving hunks of skin and fat stuck against the side of the trailer.

Inside the slaughterhouse, the night shift was getting tired, but the line was still running at full speed. The holding pen and kill room workers were very abusive, and were it possible to be scared to death, they would have been, but they weren’t that lucky. Henry’s brother Dale was getting really nervous, the smell of blood and strange sounds made him too scared to go in the kill room. A holding pen worker jabbed his electric prod onto Dale to get him up the lead chute. Dale went up screaming and fidgeting. “This ought to liven things up in here a little boys,” the stunner said with a smirk as he gave Dale a half-powered shot of stun from the electrocution paddles.

That only stunned young Dale for a few seconds, and he started kicking and screaming when the shackler was trying to get him hoisted. He jerked himself free and ‘plop’ landed on the kill room floor. That was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Little Dale was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The kill room floor was a bad place to be. One of the shacklers swung wildly at Dale with a lead pipe. Dale tried to get out of the way, but Whack! the pipe hit him on the nose, breaking it badly. Blood came pouring out of Dale’s disfigured nose and he took off running … right into a wall. And the killer with the lead pipe was still swinging away. Wham! Wham! Wham! Dale was spinning as the blows crashed into his head and shoulders. By the time he went down he had blood streaming from one ear and a crushed eye socket. His legs stuck out straight as pegs as the bludgeoning continued on the ground.

“Don’t finish him!” the stunner yelled. But it was too late, Dale was dead. “I wanted to have a little fun with him.”

The stunner wanted to send Dale down the line alive. At least Dale was finally dead, they couldn’t hurt him anymore. But poor Henry was up next at the stunner’s station. The electric shock hit him like an invisible hammer slamming repeatedly, 60 times a second, all the way through his body; leaving him paralyzed. By the time Henry could move again he was hanging upside down on the bleed line, just about to be sliced by the sticker! At the last second he kicked and swung wildly, trying to get off the line; almost kicking the sticker.

“Just do your ******* job!” the sticker yelled at the stunner, as Henry passed on by; twisting and running in mid-air, working to free his legs from the painful restraints and get off the conveyor of death. But the line kept moving, hauling him toward a fate worse than death; a torture that would make anyone beg for death. From the time he was a cute-as-a-button baby all Henry ever wanted was the simplest of pleasures: the love of his mother, some wide open room to run, warm sunshine and soft grass under his feet. But all he ever got was contempt and abuse; and now he was headed toward the scald tank!! – a huge vat of almost boiling water that loosened the hair from pigs’ skin. And all of Henry’s thrashing wasn’t keeping him from it: closer and closer the line carried him to the scald tank, and fight as he might, there was absolutely nothing Henry could do to stop this hell. And then that sweet, innocent baby hit that boiling water! Face first he went into the pool of scalding water. The pain was unlike anything one lives to tell about. Poor Henry; never hurt a soul; and there he was being boiled alive and drowned at the same time.

He was instantly ablaze! The pain was so intense it at once flooded his mind and his whole being. Scalding hot water filled his veins, permeated his bones, and ran through his mind like a train of liquid fire; his whole insides were burning like his blistering skin. He screamed and splashed uncontrollably. Scalding water was all Henry knew. Whatever happened before, whatever memories he had, were all gone now. Mind and body were searing liquid. It was all around him, it burned his eyes and ears, his nose and belly, his throat and lungs. There’s no words to describe the complete, total, overwhelming and excruciating pain. For more than a minute he thrashed in absolute, horrendous agony. For more than a minute; a lifetime when being boiled; he knew nothing but the most intense, unimaginable pain.

One …

two …

three … the seconds passed like days. Gentle, lovable Henry tried with everything he had, hanging upside down in a lake of fire, and feeling utter pain with every nerve in his body, but there was nothing he could do. Oh! the assault was relentless. On and on the searing, burning, boiling pain consumed him. You cannot comprehend the extreme agony.

Insidious cruelty bubbled his skin, cooked his insides, and disintegrated his lungs… until finally, after what seemed an eternity, death overcame him like a match finally consumed by fire.

Like Dale and Lenny, nobody was there to help Henry when he needed it the most. He never had a friend that could help, nobody cared about him, nobody even tried to help, people laughed and mocked his absolute misery. Nobody but his doomed family even knew him. But the suffering he endured wasn’t isolated. Every day nice boys and girls like Henry are brutalized in unspeakable acts of cruelty. People kill many times more animals for food each year in the United States alone than there are people in the whole world.

And to add insult to unimaginable injury, much of that “food” is wasted. How many animals are killed just because people don’t eat what’s on their plates? How many animals are brutally killed just to be discarded by restaurants, cafeterias and kitchens as leftovers? And how many more are killed in “safety recalls?” Killing the best of our distant relatives, the innocent earthlings, only to throw them in the trash and bury them in landfills is especially unacceptable today, when there are so many delicious meat alternatives.

And so, the question is simple, what is your role in all this greed and misery? Will you continue murdering the innocents?

The great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was one luminary in a dark world. “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men,” he lamented. Centuries later, Albert Schweitzer professed that “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”

Killing is not a pretty business. But it is a business. It’s an ugly, bloody mess repeated many millions of times a day around the world. And the procedures of the bloody business of slaughter are driven by greed, and that greed is satisfied by profit. The faster the death lines run, the more money operators make; and the higher the “processing” throughput, the higher the profit. In their continual war with animals, slaughterhouse operators see concern for animal pain and suffering as personal assaults. They could choose controlled atmosphere killing, where animals just go to sleep and don’t wake up. They could make humane handling and slaughter a top priority. But they choose not to, money is their only real priority. They choose to wallow in an orgy of blood to turn a little extra profit.

No business operates perfectly. In most businesses, error results in poor service, product defects, and loss of quality. But in the slaughter business, error results in automatic throat slitters cutting chicken legs and conscious chickens going into scald tanks; and cows being hit multiple times with captive bolt guns to incapacitate them, with some going through alive, having their hooves cut off and being skinned while still conscious. Horses suffocate in blood collection pits. Animals on transport trucks freeze to death in the winter and die of heat exhaustion in the summer. An estimated 420,000 pigs are crippled, and 170,000 die during transport in the U.S. every year. Still, that’s just a small fraction of the millions of chickens and turkeys crippled and killed during transport every year.

One reason animal “production” and slaughter is so horribly cruel is because it’s nasty, underpaid work. While corporate managers and stockholders earn millions of dollars per year, the loathsome degenerates performing the critical job of killing billions of animals are paid little more than minimum wage. Many slaughterhouse employees are illegal immigrants because slaughterhouses don’t pay enough money to interest most American workers. The result is animal slaughter being carried out by the dregs of society, like the animal testing industry. The most critical aspect of slaughter, the actual killing performed by kill room workers, is staffed by the lowest of employees. The reasons are simple: no decent person wants to kill animals for a living, only the cruel and unintelligent would want to do that; so the people working kill rooms are either monsters that like to kill or people that don’t want to be there. Either way, the ugly, critical task of killing billions of animals is left to barbarians.

Many times unreasonable production policies and poorly designed or maintained equipment that causes live animals to be cut and skinned alive, but in too many cases the torture is intentional. The first heinous abuses perpetrated on animals when they reach the slaughterhouse are performed by truck drivers that try to jerk the heads off chickens and turkeys, cripple larger animals with clubs, and even run over some downers or escapees. Many of them think it’s funny to shock the pigs and cattle so much with hot shots that they’re too wild for the stunners to work with, which leads to missed kills and more live dissections.

It’s not unusual for chickens and turkeys to get their heads and feet stuck in cages, and when that happens frenzied workers break their legs and necks by yanking them out of the cages. Shackling lines move so fast workers have to hustle to keep the line full. The poorly paid workers grab birds by whatever they can get a hold of and hang them by their feet on the line. The combination of low wages, difficult work, and a very limited hiring pool, leads to high levels of frustration in excitable employees. Shacklers swing birds like baseball bats and slam them against walls, cages and equipment; they kick and stomp chickens and turkeys; pull handfuls of feathers from shackled birds; and even try to tear them in half by their legs. One shackler bragged of “popping” turkeys by stomping them so hard their guts exploded out their butts. Other workers show off by intentionally sending chickens to the scald tank alive.

It’s all a big joke to some slaughterhouse workers. In groundbreaking investigative work Gail Eisnitz revealed some very disturbing behavior and rampant slaughter industry cruelty in the book Slaughterhouse. Many workers complained that they couldn’t stop the line for live animals, and production speeds were too fast for workers to kill all the animals before they had their feet cut off, were skinned, or drowned in the scald tank. One veteran worker reported dragging pigs that wouldn’t or couldn’t move with a meat hook in their “bungholes,” and how, as a result, he’d seen thighs and intestines ripped out. Another worker reported how sickening it was to see conscious hogs blowing bubbles in the blood collection tank.

But many workers show no remorse for their heinous acts of barbarity and even brag about their cruelty. To understand how people can behave in manners about to be described, one must understand the low worth and intelligence of such violators and the environment they’re operating in. They live and work in a culture that denies or disregards the suffering of our fellow earthlings. One man reported working with a guy who chased hogs into the scalding tank. Another worker showed a morbid immaturity by taking pride in having a reputation for sucking on eyeballs. Giving such people weapons and total control over defenseless animals is just inviting malicious violence.

A sticker, one of the men responsible for cutting the throats of pigs to “bleed them out,” was quoted as saying: “… A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and – eerk – cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream.”

He went on to say: “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 bologna. 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 …”

Another worker from a pork processing plant admitted: “Sometimes, when the chain stops for a little while and we have time to screw around with the hog, we’ll half stun it. It’ll start freaking out, going crazy. It’ll be sitting there yelping.”

Any good person would wonder what kind of evil motivates people to cause such atrocious harm. And one of the workers interviewed for Slaughterhouse summed it up rather succinctly, showing what little consideration people have for terrible suffering of their own doing by explaining: “Because it’s something to do. Like when our utility guy takes the ol’ bar and beats the hell out of the hogs in the catch pen. That’s kind of fun. I do it too.”

The slaughterhouse is a brutal end to some miserable lives. Animals killed for a plate have already been branded, de-horned, castrated, debeaked, de-combed, ear notched, tail docked, and otherwise painfully injured on the farm. Some sheep have the skin cut off their rear ends to prevent botfly infestation, and they’re only susceptible to botfly infestation in the first place because they’ve been bred to have extra wrinkly skin to hold more wool. And a lot of farm animals never even make it to slaughter. Broiler chickens and turkeys live in large sheds that often contain thousands of birds. Because health conditions are so poor, the mortality rate is very high. The common method of dealing with sick chickens and turkeys is to club them to death, or even stomp them, or slam them against something, or grab them by the head and swing them around until their necks break or their heads pop off.

Male chicks born on egg farms are often thrown into plastic bags to suffocate or ground up for pet food. In some operations, mating roosters kept with hens have sticks inserted into their nostrils to prevent them from eating out of the hens’ food trough. When the females are old enough to lay eggs, they’re placed in tiny wire cages too small to stand up in, where they’ll spend the rest of their lives, or at least until they’re shipped to slaughter, in a dark room reeking of ammonia. Because the hens are so crowded in the wire cages, their feet actually grow around the wire in many instances.

And always beware the unscrupulous advertisers, keeping in mind the tremendous difference between eggs from “free range” hens and those from “cage free” hens that are crowded by the thousands in filthy sheds similar to “broiler” chickens. And wouldn’t it be nice if dairy cattle in California were actually happy as the dairy industry so deceptively claims, instead of having their babies murdered and being artificially milked until their production falls off and they’re too sent to slaughter. The biggest con of all may be those lies about milk and meat products being essential to healthy bodies. Any fool need only look at an elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, race horse or rabbit to realize that eating t