Reports from the Slaughterhouse

Americans love inexpensive meat. Many think it would be a terrible fate to be deprived of cheap diner bacon and drive-through burgers. For over a century the meat industry has catered to and cultivated this taste, mass-producing beef, pork, and chicken in ways that permit efficiencies of scale—but necessitate inhumane treatment of the animals. These creatures are warehoused like objects and herded along fear-ridden assembly lines to certain death.

The meat industry has great power in American politics and even has a voice in the confirmation of cabinet-level officials involved in regulation.¹ Factory farming is expanding, increasingly squeezing out small family farms, where animals may actually be able to move around a little and enjoy the short lives they are allowed. And laws protecting animals from cruel treatment routinely exclude the animals people like to eat.

The Animal Welfare Act (1966), for instance, carefully defines “humane treatment” for each species but utterly exempts the food industry from all regulation; similarly, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) omits all birds that people eat. Recent federal legislation on animal cruelty has been limited to extreme cases unconnected with eating. The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act (2019) focuses on prohibiting the production of “crush” videos—pornographic films showing small animals being stomped to death, typically by a woman’s high-heeled shoe—but lists as exceptions to the law’s anticruelty measures: normal veterinary or husbandry practices, hunting, trapping, fishing, predator or pest control, and medical or scientific research. The Help Extract Animals from Red Tape (HEART) Act, introduced in the House in 2021, protects animals seized in federal cases involving dogfighting and helps find them adoptive homes. Needless to say, this law is in tune with common American sentiments, which cherish dogs while ignoring pigs, cows, and chickens.

The fact that Kamala Harris has a 100 percent voting score from the Humane Society’s lobbying affiliate is less impressive than it might seem: no laws that challenge the meat industry have come to a vote in the Senate. (Some state laws do better, as we shall see.)

Europe has been able to regulate the meat industry in a way that seems impossible in the United States, at least at the federal level. The European Convention for the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes, enacted in 1976, contains a wide array of protections for farm animals and sets up a monitoring system. The Convention is further supplemented by species-specific recommendations, such as mandating pens that are spacious enough for pigs to stand up, lie down, and socialize. Pigs must also have enough hay, straw, and other materials to permit them to engage in their natural “investigation and manipulation” activities. A directive for calves recognizes that they are social animals; it requires group housing for those above eight weeks old. Chickens are also given reasonably robust protections.

Of course cost is a factor in Europe, too, but Europe found that reasonable, humane regulation is compatible with affordable prices. So have a number of states. We should remember the days when businesses insisted that the most inhumane treatment of human workers was necessary for affordability, and we must have the same skepticism we did then.

Harris has raised the health benefits of consuming less red meat and has even mentioned the bad effects of methane produced by cows on climate change, and she has been repeatedly attacked by Donald Trump for allegedly planning to “outlaw red meat.” But Harris (who once worked at McDonald’s) has also insisted on her own love of inexpensive meat, saying in 2019, “Just to be very honest with you: I love cheeseburgers from time to time. Right? I mean, I just do.” She has not mentioned, to my knowledge, the cruel treatment of animals involved in getting those burgers to our tables. (In this country, Cory Booker is the only vegan who has run for president—though Bill Clinton and Al Gore adopted a vegan diet after their years in office. To my mind he deserves praise for giving up his chance at the presidency for this issue.)

What are those cruelties? Let’s begin with pigs. Sows, during pregnancy, are typically confined in “gestation crates,” narrow metal boxes just the size of the pig’s body, with no room to lie down or turn around. They are deprived of all society and forced to defecate into “sewage lagoons” below their crates—although pigs, normally clean animals, prefer to defecate far from where they live and eat. The cover of Matthew Scully’s book Fear Factories is a terrifying photo of rows upon rows of these crates, stretching beyond the far horizon. These pigs are treated not as sentient beings but as mere “production units.” (Chickens endure similar motionless confinement.)

Then there is the process of slaughter. Both cows and pigs are herded along a mechanized production line on the way to extinction. They see their end and shriek in terror. As Scully describes the killing floor of one pork production plant he visited:

The vast plant floors—scene of some 1,300 kills every hour, if you can picture that pace—must be constantly washed clean of waste, because in terror so many of the pigs lose control of their bowels.

After the death blow they are quickly disassembled into parts, so that the end product looks nothing at all like an animal: a sanitized, neatly wrapped meat package.

These facts are knowable. Indeed, many have been out there at least since 1906, when Upton Sinclair—who observed the Chicago stockyards by wandering around the plant dressed like a worker with a dinner pail, and armed with a few simple lies—wrote in The Jungle:

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights!

…Each one of these hogs was a separate creature…. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity…. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to [the process]—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.

American readers, however, took away from Sinclair’s passionate plea only what suited their convenience. Focusing on the threats to human health and safety that The Jungle revealed, with its account of filthy conditions in the rat-infested factories, they clamored for new laws to protect themselves. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were both passed immediately. But no laws came for the animals. The public prefers not to hear those inconvenient squeals.

The industry has moved the stockyards from busy city centers to less populous areas (Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas are tops in cattle slaughter, Iowa in hog farming). Behind anonymous walls, the abattoir seems like any normal business—but for the smell, which permeates everything.

Americans either have forgotten what Sinclair reported or believe that abuses have been eliminated in today’s bureaucratized, sterilized, and hyperefficient factories. But new reminders could change attitudes.

Local newspapers are often valiant muckrakers: my Chicago Tribune ran an eloquent series on hog farms in 1997, discussing not only animal treatment but also the pollution of local waterways and the damage to residential quality of life from the stench of the industry. State laws are where the action is, and states can also influence the behavior of other states, whether by example or by restrictions on what can be sold in that state. Gestation crates have been banned in nine states, and California has also banned the sale of pork produced elsewhere under conditions that do not comply with its state law. (A similar law bans the sale of eggs not produced under humane conditions.) Although challenged by the meat industry as an unlawful burden on interstate commerce, the California law was recently upheld in a 5–4 decision by the US Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (2023).

Matthew Scully was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He was thus eagerly invited to witness horrible things. (Being a conservative hardly entails indifference to animal suffering, but many of his fellow Republicans seem to think it does.) In his 2002 book Dominion, a powerful argument for the better treatment of animals, he describes a truly shocking event put on by the Safari Club International, an organization that many rich Republicans have joined. A paying guest, Scully learned of a custom in which wild animals from Africa were brought to an enclosed corral in the US, where they could be “hunted” and shot at close range by rich people who wanted to play “big game hunter.”

He was also granted a tour of a Smithfield pork production plant in North Carolina, which plays a major part in his new book. Scully tells me that he was working on the 2000 Bush campaign when he called the head of PR at Smithfield and asked whether he could look at some farms. Scully said he was interested in doing a story on “the challenges of modern meat production,” and mentioned that he often wrote for the National Review; apparently this swayed the official, who presumably thought that magazine was one-sidedly pro-business. His host was dead wrong. Scully’s descriptions of the animal suffering he witnessed powerfully echo Sinclair.

Fear Factories is a collection of short articles published in a variety of newspapers and journals between 1993 and 2023. Scully’s focus is the factory meat industry, though he also discusses other abuses, such as the clubbing of baby seals, the poaching of elephants for ivory, and the mistreatment of animals in the fur industry. He tracks developments all over the US, writing in support of a 2002 Florida referendum that would make the gestation crate illegal and mandate sufficient space for the pig to turn around (it passed and remains law), and on behalf of a New Jersey effort to forbid the confinement of veal calves (the meat is prized for its tenderness, which movement would apparently ruin by building muscle). That law failed to pass in 2002, but a similar law, extended to include a ban on pig gestation crates, passed in 2023 and was signed by Governor Phil Murphy. Scully pursues these stories with dogged persistence, factual incisiveness, and stylistic eloquence.

Scully also reviews books by both supporters of animal welfare and their antagonists. (To be transparent: near the end of Fear Factories is a short, favorable review of my 2023 book Justice for Animals.) Many of the articles appeared in local newspapers in the states at issue, a few in national publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. By far the most frequent home for Scully’s trenchant and no-holds-barred work, however, has been the National Review, a journal I blush to say I had dismissed as biased.

Scully has a sharp ear for the euphemisms used by the industry to conceal the fact that a sentient being is suffering: pigs are said to be “grown” as if they were nonsentient plants. They are counted as “production units.” Gestation crates are described as “housing arrangements.” Instead of killing, there is talk of the “introduction of unconsciousness.” Even the names of the plants—Sunnyland, Happy Valley—obscure the grim reality of what transpires there.

The plain meaning of words is negated. Take a proposed 2015 Arizona law that defines “animal” thus: “‘Animal’ means a mammal, bird, reptile, or amphibian. Animal does not include livestock as defined in section 3-1201 or poultry as defined in section 3-2151.” After a vigorous set of protests in the press, this industry-protective law was passed by the state legislature but eventually vetoed by Republican governor Doug Ducey, to whom Scully wrote a letter arguing against the bill.

Throughout the book, Scully shows his keen eye for hypocrisy, repeatedly reminding readers that pigs are comparable to dogs in intelligence and complex capacities—and yet many Americans who cherish their canine companions seem able to extinguish their consciences when bacon is in question. He concludes:

The abuses we see and despise are no worse than the institutional ones we don’t see and yet support. The creatures we exploit are essentially the equals of the ones we name, know, or admire from afar.

Good journalism assails that moral blindness. Enough of it, one hopes, can produce change.

Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds is another sort of pro-animal journalism: an exemplary, book-length investigation of a single industrial facility. In 2004 Pachirat, who today teaches in the political science department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, got a job at an unnamed cattle processing plant in Nebraska. He worked there for five months and saw that up to 2,500 cattle were killed per day.

Pachirat begins with an acknowledgment of the animals he had a hand in killing. He did not disclose his elite educational background when he applied for the position, but the application never asked about schooling, only about experience with cattle—which he had acquired on an Oregon ranch during a stint as an exchange student from Thailand. It appears that he must have used his real name and social security number, since the plant was very worried about hiring undocumented immigrants. Pachirat’s citizenship credentials were unimpeachable, and unlike many applicants he spoke fluent English.

He gets along well with his fellow workers, most of them also people of color, and is eager to help (for example, by carpooling). During his time at the plant, he is promoted twice: from hanging animals’ livers in a cooler to a job on the killing line (disassembling the carcasses at top speed), and then to the position of “quality control inspector.” Here he is given full range of the floor and assigned to checking safety standards so the plant will pass muster with the watchful inspectors from the Department of Agriculture.

From the point of view of Sinclair’s readers, today’s plants are vastly better than the old Chicago stockyards, where rats ran everywhere. In Pachirat’s plant, USDA inspectors are omnipresent, and the rules protecting safety are sensible, if onerous.² Pachirat does find some corner cutting that violates the strictest rules, especially the rule that if a tiny part of a large sample has a trace of contamination (say, a hair, or a tiny amount of fecal material), the entire sample must be thrown out. Such (good) rules entail much waste, so they are not always perfectly obeyed. A contemporary meat eater should beware. Pachirat was urged by a USDA inspector to become a whistleblower on these safety issues but refused: his personal ethical commitment was never to identify the specific plant or people.

Pachirat’s larger goal is to describe the work of killing in all of its gruesome detail, and to show his readers that this has been systematically hidden by the industry. Right at the start he warns the reader of the risk of avoidance even in their act of reading:

This reaction of disgust, this impulse to thumb through the pages so as to locate, separate, and segregate the sterile abstract arguments from the flat, ugly, day-in, day-out minutiae of the work of killing, is the same impulse that isolates the slaughterhouse from society as a whole, and, indeed, that sequesters and neutralizes the work of killing even for those who work within the slaughterhouse itself.

What Pachirat calls a “politics of sight” is a careful effort, in the design of the entire system, not only to hide the act of killing and its victims from the public but also to make sure that workers themselves cannot observe the entire process and never come in contact with a whole steer—described by Pachirat as “magnificent, awe-inspiring,” each one different from every other—whom they might pity. One mechanism serving this end is a meticulous division of labor. Each worker does one small task—say, extracting the liver from the carcass and hanging it in the cooler—never seeing the overall progress of a live and whole animal toward death, dismemberment, and commodification. Indeed the system fosters a collective self-deception that only the “knocker,” the one who delivers the bolt to the brain that terminates conscious life, is a real killer, and the other workers express aversion to that task, saying that those people are burdened with psychological trauma. In this way they remove themselves from responsibility.

The other insulating mechanism of the factory, Pachirat writes, is speed:

At the rate of one cow, steer, or heifer slaughtered every twelve seconds per nine-hour working day, the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory, blur.

There’s no time to look for a whole creature, no time to ponder the meaning of things. Plus, the laborers at the plant urgently need the hourly wages and are not eager for trouble.

Undercover journalism of Sinclair’s and Pachirat’s sort—and even of Scully’s semiundercover sort—is essential to give the public an accurate picture of the industry. But it also raises complex ethical and legal issues. The meat industry does not want the public to read about or see such pictures of their operations, which might awaken pity and disgust. It has therefore worked tirelessly to pass what are known as “ag-gag” laws, which expressly forbid undercover reporting.

Six states—Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, and Iowa—now have such laws. In nineteen, including my own state of Illinois, such legislation has been defeated. In twenty-five states, the laws once existed but have been struck down as unconstitutional, usually on free speech grounds, sometimes under the free speech provisions of the state’s constitution, sometimes under the US Constitution. In North Carolina, home of the Smithfield plant that Scully visited, a coalition of public interest groups secured the invalidation of an ag-gag law in 2023 when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that undercover investigations and reporting are newsgathering activities protected by the First Amendment, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the industry.

Given the ongoing litigation, there is an urgent need for thorough and precise analysis on the question of undercover investigations and what US courts should think about them. To be persuasive, the analysis cannot be limited to this one issue but should survey the entire field.

Fortunately, that is what Alan Chen and Justin Marceau have given us with Truth and Transparency. Their book is highly technical, aimed more at lawyers than at the general public, but its overall arguments are of great general interest. It will be the definitive work on this subject for some time and a powerful resource for lawyers attempting to make progress on the factory meat issue. I hope Truth and Transparency might even help persuade a future Supreme Court to go beyond simply not overturning a pro-animal judgment, and to say clearly that investigations of urgent public importance are protected by the First Amendment, even if they involve some deception. Indeed the Court has come close to saying this already.

Chen and Marceau embark with a history of undercover investigations in the US, beginning with the intrepid Nellie Bly, who investigated conditions in a mental hospital by posing as a patient. Her exposé of deplorable conditions, published in 1887, began a new species of reporting. (Bly carefully protected herself by meeting first with a local prosecutor to make sure she had immunity from any prosecution.) Then came Sinclair, Ida M. Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, Jacob Riis’s photo reports of housing for the poor, and a variety of investigative articles by Lincoln Steffens and Rheta Childe Dorr. Chen and Marceau find a lull in such investigations between the Progressive Era and the 1970s, but then the famous work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (who may have used some deception in communicating with sources) inspired many others.

Some cases involve very simple deception, such as civil rights testers who concealed their true identities and purposes when seeking housing or other services. Similarly, union “salts” are union members who disguised that fact to gain employment with nonunion employers for the purpose of labor organizing. Some deceptions are extremely complex: in 1977 reporters for the Chicago Sun-Times and local reformers opened and operated a business, the Mirage Tavern, to gain information on Chicago corruption. And although all these types of deception are generally recognized as valuable, there are others that are more unsavory, such as FBI infiltration of student leftist groups.

Such undercover investigations have many critics, including journalists themselves, as a fascinating chapter on journalistic ethics shows. And in recent years there have been more and more attempts to limit and even criminalize the types of affirmative deception often used to gain access to property and information. Ag-gag laws are one example. Another is the legal strategy of Planned Parenthood, which has successfully lobbied for state laws criminalizing undercover recording of confidential communications with medical providers and the dissemination of such recordings. Chen and Marceau demonstrate how unlikely it is that one simple rule will give us the guidance we need. So: When are such investigations a good thing? And when should they be protected by the First Amendment?

Chen and Marceau are utilitarians in the style of John Stuart Mill. That is, their decisive ethical test is the overall public benefit, not as a maximization of pleasure, in the style of Jeremy Bentham, but as a balance of many diverse goods. This means that they include the distinctive values of personal privacy and of property rights. Still, they do agree with Mill in seeing a free speech principle as ultimately motivated and justified by the public benefit of the free flow of information. They argue that there are strong reasons to protect undercover investigation “as a critical piece of our speech and information infrastructure” and that there should be at least “a qualified privilege to engage in the conduct necessary to carry them out successfully.”

Such an ethical argument hardly settles the legal and constitutional issue, so that is the next task to which they turn. In the past, Supreme Court precedents would have made it challenging to show that the First Amendment protects the sort of deceptive speech necessary to gain information through an undercover investigation. A recent case, however, has changed the legal situation. In United States v. Alvarez (2012) the US Supreme Court declared the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which criminalized lying about one’s military medals, unconstitutional on free speech grounds—thus protecting at least some lying. The case is complex and more than a little murky, but the authors conclude that there is now

a limited privilege to engage in false statements of fact to gain access to private property as well as a right to engage in nonconsensual video recording on the property of others, so long as both activities are directed toward investigating and disclosing matters of broad public concern.

Chen and Marceau take seriously the issue of trespass, but they find solid case law holding that there is no true trespass if there is no invasion of (as Judge Richard Posner put it) “the specific interests that the tort of trespass seeks to protect.” In other words, to return to the case of factory farming (which is one of the authors’ concerns), photographing or narrating what is actually going on in an agricultural facility is quite different from stealing a trade secret, whose entire value consists in its secrecy. The industry may not want the public to focus on the animals and what they suffer, but that is hardly a trade secret. It is a matter of great public concern, and an investigation can make an important contribution to public debate.

These three books give one hope that the US may one day cease to be a shameful zone of cruelty in a world that has increasingly awakened to the sufferings of pigs and cattle, those noble and versatile animals. And if people must eat their burgers, meat grown from stem cells—marketed in Singapore already and debuting here once the FDA process is complete—will soon be ready to assuage their hunger, though production will need to be scaled up to make it available at reasonable cost. Meat without suffering—what a day that will be.