the comedic slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouses fascinate me. That’s where you can see human nature stripped of all nicety, naked and as it truly is. Imagine the predatory animal elevated to industrial proportions, hundreds of millions of victims run through the death machine every year without any trace of mercy or sympathy. I often fantasize about working on the floor at a slaughterhouse, just for that ultimate reality-check about the mysterious faceless meat substances I like to eat every day. But it wouldn’t be worth the price. Working there would be a miserable and perhaps even dehumanizing experience. It might cause me the sort of terminal brain-rot the other workers have. I used to live next to a poultry plant, and let me tell you: the half-human cretins that worked there should have been sterilized and strictly bared from entering the city limits.
If you look into the procedures of slaughterhouses you’ll find a picture so depressing and horrible that it’s hard to understand how anyone can work there and maintain any sort of basic human decency. There’s no shortage of video evidence of workers doing the strangest things to animals on the way to slaughter. I’ve seen film of people using live chickens as footballs, a baby pig stomped to death on a concrete floor, and perhaps weirdest of all, a worker using turkey’s as living punching bags as they filed past on a conveyor belt just before being stunned and killed. I’m sure that in this dehumanized piece of shit’s mind it was funny, but to my naive eyes it looked pretty god damned depraved. Here’s this guy dishing out the final fucking insult to some pathetic helpless animals just before they’re shocked unconscious and run over the edge of a saw blade. The animal’s entire existence from birth to death in a tiny wire cage involves more suffering than any normal person can fully understand, and then there’s this guy boxing with them while they hanging upside down. I’d like to see him thrown in the meat grinder. And he’s only one of many. I’m sure that a lot of people that work in these conditions are basically numb to the sight of suffering. They would have to be. Their desensitization reduces a real living thing to a crude material commodity, and they treat it accordingly. There are dozens of videos like this one and no one really seems to care about it. You can look and see. All the horrors are documented. Cows are cut up alive, pigs are drowned in boiling water, things are dragged to slaughter when they can’t walk, dying animals get the shit kicked out of them for being in the way, etc. It’s a bad trip. The most disturbing thing about all this though is the people doing it. To them it’s a joke. The fact that people can get used to that sort of action suggests something pretty damning about our ilk, those clever human monsters that subjugated the other species and confined them to short and terrible lives in what’s really just a meat factory.
Is it acceptable? I can’t come to a conclusion on that. But one thing’s certain: even human beings are not exempt form this sort of fate. In this universe everything’s got to eat… and ultimately be eaten.

February 25, 2009 / Denver CO