Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight

Yale Agrarian Studies Series

by Timothy Pachirat

This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant’s point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate. Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view. With much to say about issues ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare, Every Twelve Seconds  is an important and disturbing work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals, Politics, Anthropology, Food, Philosophy, Ethnography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 8, 2011

About the author

While the discipline of political science is my formal institutional home, I subscribe to an expansive definition of politics as the study of how power is understood, exercised, and contested across time and space (and acknowledge the words in that definition as concepts themselves in need of query). My work listens for and wants conversation with the rivers and tributaries that flow through and across political science, sociology, anthropology, history, geography, law, philosophy, literature, and poetry.

Source: https://polsci.umass.edu/people/timot...

Reviews

[Peacegal · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been quite a while since Gail Eisnitz ventured into the jungle of the meatpacking industry for her book Slaughterhouse, and in this world of massive meat recalls and ag–gag laws, it’s clearly once again time for someone to take a critical eye to the places where live animals are turned into tomorrow’s dinner.

Pachirat obtained employment at an enormous beef slaughterhouse in order to write this book, a time-tested reporting tactic which may be on thin ice if the ag-gag bills continue their march across America’s Big Ag states. As the author explains:

The [ag-gag] bill specifically criminalizes unauthorized physical access to industrialized slaughterhouses, unauthorized visual, audio, and print documentation of what takes place in slaughterhouses, and possession and distribution of those unauthorized records regardless of who originally produced them.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the meat industry’s response to a deluge of embarrassing videos has not been, “Wow, we really need to clean things up in our industry,” but rather, “Do not look.” After all, as the author documents, there’s plenty wrong with modern meat production.

Slaughter is not only hidden physically, but also by the ways industry communicates with the public. It seems as if agribusiness has taken a page from sport hunters when it comes to terminology, albeit not a very successful one:

[M]eat-industry and animal-science textbooks train graduates to refer to killing as “harvesting” and to the kill floor itself as a “harvesting department.” This Orwellian attempt at re-education does not seem to have succeeded, however, and the dysphemistic kill floor remains the official and unofficial name…

Pachirat gives us an unprecedented look into the design of a modern slaughterhouse. His book includes incredibly detailed diagrams, as well as explanations of each worker’s action down the line. Quite a bit goes into turning a large mammal into anonymous shrink-wrapped parts.

The living creature, the animal that is herded off a truck and into the production sequence of the kill floor, in contrast, arrives in varied shapes and sizes, each distinct, each unique.

Only the “breed stamp,” placed upon each cow’s muscle, gives us a clue to the former owner of the body-- A for Angus, H for Hereford, and C for a mix between the two breeds. I imagine this is important for restaurants that want to trumpet that they serve “real Angus burgers”—not that that probably matters to most people anyway. Dairy Holsteins’ flesh is apparently so low-grade it doesn’t even merit a stamp.

Oh, and what of all of those grocery-store brands of dog and cat food that entice pet owners with pictures of steaks on grills? Hardly. The slaughterhouse has a “pet food” room, in which all day lungs, windpipes, kidneys, and rejected livers slide down a tube marked “not for human consumption.”

Some positions at the slaughterhouse are even more…unusual. A medical lab employee sits at another downspout and waits for calf fetuses to drop onto his desk. There he hangs up the tiny creature and bleeds it dry to collect blood for medical research.

But isn’t slaughter these days humane? Omnivores everywhere are reassured by celebrity animal welfare consultant/abattoir designer Temple Grandin and “audits” that fast food chains promise after PETA campaigns against them.

First off, there is the obvious problem that inspectors cannot be everywhere at once.

A supervisor must walk down the line to see what is happening at the other end of the kill floor. Workers communicate by whistles, facial expressions, and hand signals when a supervisor or inspector is on the way.

There are times when cattle survive the knocker’s bolt and run around the kill floor in a panic.

This happens often enough that special metal corral gates have been built between the knocking box and the indexer stand…to keep the escaped cow from running out onto other parts of the kill floor.

There are even times when cattle are improperly stunned, and are still conscious during shackle-and-hoist, bleeding, and limb removal.

Because these workers stand on a platform elevated ten feet above the kill floor, the head of the cow is invisible to them, and they are unaware that they are cutting into a sentient animal.

Perhaps the area in which animal welfare reforms have supposedly made the biggest changes are in the handling of the cattle in the pens and chutes directly leading to slaughter. If we believe the meat industry, the electric prod has been all but decommissioned in favor of flags, plastic paddles, and creative walkway design.

When the author takes his second job at the slaughterhouse, driving cattle up chutes and into the knock box, he discovers a different reality.

Camilo hands me an electric shocker and emphasizes that I should not use it when a USDA inspector is present. … [B]oth Gilberto and Camilo use the electric cattle prods extensively, sometimes sticking them under the animals’ tails and into their anuses. The cattle jump and kick when shocked in this way, and many also bellow sharply. Gilberto uses the prod in almost rote fashion, shocking practically every animal …

Pachirat is loathe to use the shocker in the manner his coworkers do, and attempts to rely on some of the more humane implements instead to keep the cows moving.

[I am] using the plastic paddles to move the cattle. Both Gilberto and Fernando soon start yelling at me to use the electric prod. It is not just a matter of keeping the line tight, of making sure that there is little or no space between the animals, but also of keeping the line moving as quickly as possible … Without the electric prods, the momentum of the line of animals is sufficient to move the cattle…into the knocking box, but not at the pace that the chute workers want. When shocked, the animals jump into the box, moving the line more quickly and reducing the probability of an animal’s balking and holding the up the line behind it.

Pachirat at one point quarrels with his coworker of his excessive use of the prod:

“Why?” I yell back. “What’s the point of shocking them? They’re all moving through the line anyway.”
“The point is pain and torture,” Fernando retorts, laughing. “Now do your motherf***ing job and keep this line tight!”

A more articulate employee explains,

“[Y]ou wanna know why I use this? He shoves the tip of the electric prod across the chute in my direction. “I use this because I like to have my work. And if we don’t keep these cows moving through, they’re gonna call us up to the office and we’re gonna get fired.”

The author concludes,

The point of using the prod is not “pain and torture,” in Fernando’s mocking words, but rather avoiding conflicts with coworkers and supervisors …

So, no matter how many pretty phrases like “stairway to heaven” or industry assurances of kinder, gentler animal handling are tossed around—the fact remains that cattle simply cannot be herded into slaughter in a humane fashion when the line speed is required to move at a breakneck pace. It’s the same thing with factory farming—as long as Americans are eating ten billion animals per year, they can’t possibly be raised in natural, humane conditions.

Pachirat decides to try his hand at the most infamous job in the plant—that of the knocker, the person who uses a captive-bolt pistol to blast holes in the skulls of live cattle entering the knock box. After shooting three cows, his coworkers encourage him to stop.

“No, you don’t want to do that [knock cattle]. I don’t want to do that. Nobody wants to do that. You’ll have bad dreams.” This is the same man who told me that the point of using electric prods was “pain and torture.”
…
When I tell Tyler I shot three 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.”

Wow.

At the end of Pachirat’s stint as a cattle driver, he witnesses a particularly disturbing situation in which a cow collapses on her way up the chute, blocking the pathway of the other animals and halting the line. When the downed cow fails to rouse at electric shocks,

With electric prods Gilberto and Fernando push the remaining cattle over the downed cow, and they stomp on its neck and underbelly trying to escape the electric shock.

Richard, another worker on the scene, expresses dismay, protesting that this behavior isn’t right. He is immediately threatened by another worker to keep his mouth shut. As far as we understand, the employees are not punished for their cruelty toward the disabled animal.

Pachirat’s third and final job at the abattoir is a supervisory position. During the interview, the company higher-up mentions his commitment to good animal welfare practices.

“Oh yeah,” Roger says quickly, “we send our kids to Kansas City for classes on animal handling all the time. There’s this lady named Temple Grandin who runs those classes and she really gets your attention when she starts talking about cattle.”

As a supervisor, Pachirat has numerous jobs, including visually inspecting carcasses for contamination as they whiz by at a fast clip.

[A]lthough the media hypes “mad cow disease, it is E. coli transmitted through feces that is much more likely to cause food poisoning. Unfortunately, fecal material is the hardest contaminant to spot and identify. … Acknowledging the impossibility of keeping to the official standards, red-hat supervisors almost universally under-enforce implement sanitation.

He is told by fellow supervisor Jill that condemning meat is both expensive and undesirable:

“You’ve been here long enough to know by now what this job is all about. We have to try to pass the product no matter what, and to beat the inspectors to the punch whenever there is a problem.”

Pachirat also got to participate in animal welfare monitoring. He explains how it works:

[Quality controllers] conduct a weekly internal audit of the treatment of the animals … [M]eat purchasers in turn use the certifications to reassure their customers that their meat is humanely handled and slaughtered.

Employees are also well aware of the game, which appears to be a variation of “hear no evil, see no evil”:

[Workers] immediately modify their use of the electric prod whenever a QC or a USDA inspector enters the chute area. Nonetheless, even with this adjusted behavior, the actual number of shocks delivered ranges from ten to twenty per hundred cows. As with all other written documentation, however, the QC is expected to record results that fall within the “acceptable” range specified on the form.

It’s the same, too, when it comes to the kill floor:

While performing this audit, I observe that some cattle need to be shot as many as four times. Far more common, however, is a shot that glances off the cow’s head or does not penetrate deeply enough, requiring a second shot in order to knock the cow unconscious.

Incompetent employee Jill rears her head again when it comes to animal handling:

Jill and I took turns performing the animal-handling audit, and it was not long before I noticed that Jill’s forms for the week were filled out before she went to the chutes and knocking box to observe the cattle. When I asked her about this, her response was, “Nobody looks at these forms anyway, and we have to record what is acceptable whether it actually is or not, so why does it matter? Besides, it makes me sad to go out there and watch them get killed.”

As with every other aspect of the meat industry—from how animals are farmed to the end product itself—the name of the game is forget reality and believe the most agreeable story, whether or not it has any basis in truth.

“One of our cows that’s supposed to die right now gave birth in the pens to a calf, and the USDA won’t let us have the cow until the afterbirth passes, so I’m just letting you know the cow won’t come in to die when it’s supposed to die.” … As it turns out, the cow is last “to come in to die,” number 2,452 slaughtered that day. There is no mention over the radio of the fate of its newborn calf, at most a momentary nuisance within a process that views cattle as the raw material inputs required to produce a desired output. The potentially powerful juxtaposition of a birth taking place in the midst of the work of killing is transformed into a technical dispute with the USDA …

Hungry?

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Twelve Seconds will be of interest to anyone concerned about food safety, the exploitation of workers in modern industrialized society, and the abuse and mistreatment of animals.

Every Twelve Seconds is a first-hand account of the gruesome operations of an Omaha slaughterhouse. The author, Timothy Pachirat, is a professor in the Department of Politics at The New School University, and he obtained an entry level position at the slaughterhouse in order to see and document exactly how cattle are killed and processed. He worked in several different areas and was able to see the entire scope of the operation in the five and a half months that he worked at the abattoir.

As a vegan, I am predisposed to be sympathetic to Pachirat’s project, but were I someone who eats meat, I have no doubt that I would still be horrified by what is revealed in the pages of Every Twelve Seconds.

First, if you eat meat, you should definitely cook it at as a high a temperature as possible to kill the bacteria that are present. There is no question that most of the meat that is eaten is tainted with fecal matter and other contaminants, which explains why we often see outbreaks of E. coli-based food poisoning.

Additionally, your meat comes at a high cost to the workers who produce it. As the title of the book indicates, the slaughterhouse where Pachirat works kills a cow every twelve seconds. Speed, rather than quality, is the primary driving force in the slaughterhouse: the longer it takes to process a cow, the more hours that the company must pay the workers, and the more hours that the workers work, the less profit the company makes.

With speed being of primary importance, USDA inspectors are viewed as the enemy. The management and all the workers, whose jobs depend upon pleasing their managers, do whatever they can to deceive the inspectors and to skirt, as much as possible, the food safety regulations, which invariably slow the production line, that the USDA inspectors are trying to enforce.

The workers themselves are almost exclusively immigrants or the very poor and uneducated. They work grueling hours, often 10 or more hours a day, six days a week, and their pay is usually barely above minimum wage. Their jobs are highly dangerous because they are working with knives, implements, and machines for deconstructing the bodies of cows into meat: cuts (including loss of fingers) and crushing wounds and repetitive motion injuries are a constant hazard. The slaughterhouse itself assaults the senses with a stench that even soaks into the workers themselves to the extent that they can’t even wash it off. The workers are constantly scrutinized by supervisors and managers and can be fired on a whim for minor infractions or for being too slow or even for taking unapproved bathroom breaks. It is extraordinarily stressful work, both physically and psychologically. Due to these working conditions, the turnover rate is astronomical, nearing 100% per year for most slaughterhouses.

At one point in the book, Pachirat describes the plight of the knocker: the knocker uses a captive-bolt stun gun to render the cows unconscious; he places the gun against the forehead of a cow, which is often thrashing its head wildly in terror, and shoots the bolt into the cow’s forehead to knock it out. Often, it takes more than one shot to knock out the cow because it won’t hold still. Most of the workers in the slaughterhouse believe that the knocker’s job is the worst possible job. The knockers often suffer nightmares and need psychiatric help due to the effects of their job. One of Pachirat’s co-workers succinctly describes the problem with the knocker’s job when Pachirat inquires what’s wrong with the job: “Because, man, that’s killing; that shit will fuck you up for real.”

Of course, there is also the problem of animal abuse: cows often are not properly stunned and so can move down the production line while still conscious: in this conscious condition, they will have their carotid arteries and jugular veins slashed, but before they bleed out and die and while still conscious, they will have their tails and rear right leg cut off. Now, this isn’t the norm: most cows are stunned before the processing begins, but there are still a number of cows who do slip through to the production line without being knocked out. There is also a problem when a cow falls in the chutes that lead to the kill area: many times, the workers will not try to help the cow up but will instead let it be trampled by the other cows that are being forced through the chutes with electrical prods. When the workers do try to help a downed cow, they can be unbelievably cruel: Pachirat relates one instance in which a nose clamp is put into a cow’s nostrils, and the workers pull so hard that they rip through the cow’s nose. For the animals, their deaths are fraught with terror and horrific abuse: death in an abattoir is anything but a good death.

Pachirat argues that the problem with the slaughterhouse is that it is completely hidden from public view: the vast majority of the public has no idea what goes into the production of meat in terms of how unsafe it really is, in terms of how it exploits the workers, and in terms of how the animals are abused. Pachirat is hopeful that, if the true nature of the slaughterhouse were known, conditions could be improved, but he is also realistic enough to know that, even if the things he exposes in this book were to become common knowledge, the public might very well find some way to sequester this knowledge, to block it out, so that they could eat their meat in peace and with a clear conscience.

I do not see how anyone provided with the information that Pachirat documents in this book could continue to eat meat with a clear conscience. This is a book that should unsettle meat eaters; it should disturb them deeply; and if their consciences and sense of compassion—both for the workers and the animals—serve as their guides in any moral way, then what is revealed in this book should spur them to re-think whether their decision to eat meat is really ethical.

[Melissa Harlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some of us, upon reading the synopsis of this book I’m sure the question arises, why read it? If you don’t want to know the truth, don’t read it. If you want to remain blissfully unaware of where some of your food comes from, definitely Do. Not. Read. It. It is horrific, and should make you think twice before you go through the drive-thru and absentmindedly get yourself or your kids a burger. It's an excellent, well-written account of the actual slaughterhouse where the author Timothy Pachirat worked undercover. It is not sensationalized, just factual, and the facts show that there is no need to try and sensationalize the truth. This is not happy fiction, but stark and brutal reality and it more than earns the 5 star rating I am giving it.

[Shawndra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could probably write a whole 'nother book detailing my thoughts on this book. Instead I'll just keep it succinct.

Yes there are big problems with industrialized ANYTHING and big corporate EVERYTHING. However that people choose to focus on sensationalistist topics without looking at the whole picture really grinds my gears. At least Tim makes his thesis and point very clear from the begining and anyone intelligent, educated, and able to clearly evaluate academic arguments can easily see it. That said, anytime someone digresses into discussions of utopias they lose me. I'm sorry, I know its a divine image, but utopia doesn't work in the harsh realities of living and dying in this world as any of the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum can attest.

Here's my beef (har har), not all meat is a product of the godawful CAFO and industrialized slaughter sytems. I think this need to be presented more in all these texts being written on the horrors of our food industry. And this glaring eye needs directed toward single crop plant farming and GMO modified plant crops very badly as well.

I have helped work at skinning out, gutting, and butchering food animals since I was a small child. My family hunts for food and we very small scale ranch sheep and cattle. I know what it smells like if you accidentally perforate the gall bladder while gutting an animal (awful) and frankly his description of the bovine heart as sinewy I didn't feel was all that accurate. Maybe those CAFO cattle have icky hearts, but the beef hearts we raised and I feed to my dogs as one part of their diet are some very fine meat that honestly looks pretty tasty when I'm cutting it up into meal size portions to freeze. I know how difficult liver blood is to wash off your hands compared to other blood, how green tripe smells, what a bad liver feels like when you sink your fingers into it by accident, and lastly how much more humane a skilled bullet to the head (or heart as often deer and elk are taken) than wholesale factory slaughter is. I don't think people have the courage to acknowledge and thank the animal that feeds them and frankly its a bit pathetic how far removed modern city life is from real self sufficient life on the land. People's entire lives are as regimented and unreal as the ugly factories that supply their neatly packaged supplies for living out those lives. We all use parts of that big ugly system, but luckily some of us can experience and appreciate having real food and I feel very lucky for that. I can sure tell you though that what we raise and live off of doesn't taste anything like that awful crap they sell in grocery stores.

And Tim's description of pearly white carcases... ugh boy is that a delightful snapshot of the unnaturally fattened factory farmed beef! As well as the fact that they only recognize Angus and Hereford breeds, when some of the most popular (and frankly better, just not politically popular through propaganda like purebred Angus... and every cattle rancher knows how few cattle being slaughtered are actually purebred angus... doesn't have to be purebred to be solid black!) and widespread breeds and strategic cross-breeds of cattle are not even mentioned... such as Simmetal, etc. Not that it matters, once its hung in those long lines its just beef and they can slap whatever label they want on it. Nice thought isn't it?

I'm going to shut up now because like I said this isn't even the tip of the iceberg on the analysis in my head on this book. I really enjoyed this book, except for the unrealistic utopia rant at the end. Kinda like the socialist rant at the end of The Jungle, which even Upton Sinclair himself later said was silly and he had used because he wasn't sure how to end the book.

[Emma Wiles · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to be convinced of the value of qualitative social science research, look no further than this incredible ethnography of a slaughterhouse and it's workers. This book is ostensibly about a meatpacking plant but really it's about the people who work there, and how and why they are able to do the horrifying-from-our-perspective work they do. It is about who really kills the cows, the worker who puts the gun to their heads, the workers who only ever see cow livers, the workers who only ever see spreadsheets, or the people who benefit from their killing (meat eaters.) (**Spoiler Alert: It’s nuanced!!**)

Pachirat has no ulterior motives, he isn't trying to turn the reader vegetarian, he doesn't try to expose the slaughterhouse, and he has no judgement for the people who work there. What he does expose is the way which people with power put themselves at maximal distance from the realities of what is done for them to benefit (for meat eaters to eat meat, or for the executives to make big $$) such that people without options have to do the dirty work. But this is not one of those books-that-should-have-been-a-TEDtalk. It is not simply a story.

This is an incredibly powerful work, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

No more meat from the USA

[Jeffrey Spitz Cohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Every 12 Seconds” is a damning depiction of the dynamics in a typical cattle slaughterhouse, where management, labor and USDA inspectors operate in a state of perpetual conflict and cross-purposes.

Pachirat, who was undercover in the slaughterhouse for several months, demonstrates how plant managers routinely falsify documents to hide violations of food-safety and animal-welfare standards, while line workers routinely ignore sanitation and hygiene rules.

What makes this book so powerful and so authoritative is that it is written from an academic, somewhat detached perspective. Pachirat is not an animal-rights activist; he's a political science professor.

And rest assured that the operators of the unidentified slaughterhouse in this book are not "bad apples," relative to their competitors in the meat industry. The particular slaughterhouse described in this book was hailed by the USDA as one of the best in the country. Makes you shudder to think what is happening in less-acclaimed slaughterhouses.

The only thing I would change is the bloody image on the book’s cover, which seems calculated to ensure that as few people as possible will pick up a copy of this otherwise excellent book.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I appreciated about this book the most was that it brought to the discussion table the HUMAN oppression that coincides with animal oppression in slaughterhouses. Disturbing, graphic and very efficient at portraying the monotony and numbness of slaughterhouse work, Pachirat also talks about the little rebellions, communities and friendships that form working under such horrific conditions.
I thought the idea of a lottery system that would have every person that participates in this system (if you don't buy meat from a local farmer or raise it yourself you participate!) ACTUALLY participate - i.e. everyone takes a turn as the knocker (the one who kills the cow) was brilliant. By keeping slaughterhouses and the workers hidden behind bland buildings and embedded in rural landscapes or less densely populated we participate in the 'cover-up' that is going on.

[Vaughn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads incredibly well - often find myself wishing I could write like this. Story is engaging. Read in one sitting, but not before a large meal at a steakhouse. Well reported and great voice. Ends in solid political theory.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

We read this for Animal Biocapital! And then when it was over and I had only read some sections, and I kept it beside my bed and read it every night before slept until I finished it. This is one of the best food books I have read. Pachirat is really good at telling you what you need to know, but making this information-gathering and dissemination seem flawless and without moral judgement. He trusts the readers to come to their own judgements about the knocking line or the lactic acid concentration. It's an incredible expose without the tinge of the ~2011 food expose that was really big after Food Inc. This is just Pachirat telling you about the incredible specificities of his undercover operation, and he does it very successfully.

[Charrlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly well-written and researched, 'Every Twelve Seconds' sketches the politics of sight in the industrialized meat industry. The book explains how killing and kill-ability is made possible (keep the line moving and tight), AND at the same time offers a very reflective account of the labourers' struggles which is missing in many works of environmental anthropology.

I didn't find the main argument, that sequestration can co-exist with visibility, necessarily the most interesting narrative arc that could've been drawn out of this excellent ethnography.

[liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 !!!

I’ve NEVER read a book like this before.

it is so incredibly grim and detailed, but in an absolutely fascinating yet horrifying way. my GOD. It actually made me need to physically put the book down for periods because of the descriptions. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. It consumed all thoughts!

I don’t know if I could say it’s a book for everyone, I believe it is not. But it is one I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Next time you’re walking around, think about what you see and what you don’t. What about the world right now is hidden right in front of you?

[Samyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very grim look at the life of a slaughterhouse worker, & the deplorable conditions that humans and animals are subjected to in an intensive, mass-produced meat industry

[Martin Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This immensely informative and wonderfully written book is part sociological analysis of the physical, class, racial, and power structures that define the modern-day slaughterhouse and part memoir of the author's six months working in a Omaha slaughterhouse, as both worker and "management." Pachirat (whom I know socially) is a conscientious and meticulous recorder of what he sees and experiences, and I found his station-by-station description of what it takes to turn a living, breathing being into two slabs of eviscerated carcass revelatory. Pachirat documents the extraordinary amount of elaborate machinery involved in the disassembly line and describes the many skills required of the 121 different stations in precise and clinical detail. I was left in no doubt that the slaughterhouse management took their tasks seriously (even if self-protectively) and that workers labored mightily (even if all of them would have preferred to do anything else but the work in front of them).

Indeed, after reading this book I find myself awed by the sophistication of a system that can kill 2,400 cattle in a day, and separate each carcass from its liver, hooves, head, viscera, hair, hide, and even eyeballs. Like a Frederick Wiseman documentary of an institution going about its ordinary day, there's something admirably efficient and professional about it all: the exercise of human ingenuity satisfying a demonstrable demand. On the other hand, as Pachirat demonstrates vividly, the means of doing this remain as ugly, demoralizing, and dehumanizing as they were when Upton Sinclair wrote THE JUNGLE over a century ago. Feces, urine, ingesta (straw), intestines, vomit, and blood swamp the killing and evisceration areas. Few want to be the "knocker" (who stuns the animal before her or his throat is cut) because the job is so psychologically disturbing. For all the attempts to sanitize it (in every sense of the word) slaughterhouse work is the dirty, smelly, ugly reality behind our willfully thoughtless wish for cheap, packaged meat.

Pachirat is refreshingly non-judgmental about those he works with, all of whom are doing an unpleasant job for little money. He's refreshingly honest about the compromise between hygiene (safety) and line speed (business) that workers and management make all the time. And he offers compassionate insight into how the monotonous, mind-numbing work necessitates an armored humor and self-protectiveness that, along with a fear of deportation for undocumented workers, discourage whistleblowing or conscientious objection.

Pachirat refuses either to avoid his and our complicity or to demonize the workers, and artfully places his journey at the center of the narrative without self-aggrandizement or claims to the moral high ground. Like Gail Eisnitz's SLAUGHTERHOUSE, Pachirat captures the psychological horrors faced in the abattoir by literally putting himself on the line to write about what those who through force of circumstance experience hour after hour, day after day. A tour-de-force of reportage and sociological analysis, EVERY TWELVE SECONDS is essential reading for all those who eat meat and all those who campaign to bring the horror this book documents to an end.

[owlette · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book feeling it was a solid 5 out of 5, but as I started writing this review, I began to notice some weaknesses in his argument. This annoyingly lengthy review is divided into three sections:
- 1. "The art of ethnography" which is just my raving about Pachirat's field work and writing;
- 2. "Are we not entertained?" wherein I discuss Pachirat's politics of sight;
- 3. "Guilt and shame" where I make it all about me by raising how Pachirat missed the opportunity to guilt-trip me into becoming vegan.

## 1) The art of ethnography

First, the details. While working undercover, Pachirat drew a floor diagram spanning two pages laying out the kill floor. This map marks the position of floor workers and supervisors. Across the map snaking are operation line carrying parts of the carcasses. Supplied in the appendices are descriptions of these floor jobs, from "1. Cattle Driver" to "121. Nonproduction Sanitation and Laundry Staff," and various usage of body parts, including "fetal blood and serum," which the author happened to observe the extraction of and describes like a scene from horror novel on page 79. Apparently these auxiliary products keep slaughterhouses afloat these days. (Would have loved a reference cited for this last point, Tim.)

Second, the book has some dramatic moments that I've rarely seen in academic books.
For example, when Pachirat writes his name on the job application, he is fearful of looking overqualified: "I print using sprawling capital letters, afraid that my writing, my spelling, my syntax--something, anything--will betray me (90)." He feels conflicted between getting his leg through the door (after all, he has a dissertation to do) and taking a job away from others who might have more urgent needs for that job. Later when he sits for an interview for a quality control position, he catches himself talking too much. The tension is palpable:

There's a silence in the room. I am on dangerous ground, but the conversation is intoxicating. It is more than just the desire to impress them so that I can get the job. After working in the complete silence of the cooler, I have an uncontrollable urge to show the management that we are not just stupid, mindless machines turning our gears day after day, to show them that we too have thoughts and feelings (171).

Honestly, these intense moments read like a thriller, except that it's a book published by a university press. Nevertheless, he's unable to open up about everything in the book. I did not expect my heart to be broken by this footnote to Chapter 4: "The role of family in fieldwork, particularly in the kind of fieldwork that I conducted, is one that I regretfully leave aside in this book."

## 2) Are we not entertained?

The book starts with a story about six cattle escaping a slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska, only to be shot by the police. What puzzles Pachirat is how the quality control worker interviewed for the news story declaims her horror at the police's action while failing to register the killing they see and partake in every day at a similar level. He frames this as an instance of cognitive dissonance: Why do they see the shooting as killing but not their jobs in the slaughterhouse?

The rest of the book is about how cognitive dissonance can come from a state of immersion in the sight of killing and access to total visibility. Pachirat achieves a state of total visibility when he moves up the ranks to become a quality control (QC) inspector. The QC has virtually free range over the whole floor due to the demands of his job, giving him that state of total visibility. But Pachirat interprets that his work as QC was subverted by power politics that often came in the way of his work of quality control.

Moreover, the QC is doomed even if they try to do their job in earnest. One of the weekly job duties of quality control is to monitor whether the animals are being slaughtered humanely by going through a checklist of animal-handling audits. Not only are these audits marketing ploys but they still objectify the animals:

The result of the audit is to transform a physical confrontation with the killing of live creatures into a technical process with precise measurements of when the procedure counts as humane and ethical and when it does not. The inspector is looking directly at the animals; he or she is listening to their voices, but they are seen and heard only as criteria within a technical process, as data point.

That sustained exposure is no guarantee for seeing repugnant acts is evidenced by the news story that opens chapter 1 and by the subsequent chapters narrating Pachirat's undercover experience. The animal rights activist who document slaughterhouse operations would claim that horror and disgust elicited through exposure will mobilize public opinion. But Pachirat argues that these emotive responses are contingent on context:

The very question 'For who could stand the sight?' becomes historically intelligible only in the context of a 'reign of opinion' dependent for its existence on the continued operation of distance and concealment, the continued hiding from sight of what is classified and repugnant (252).

In a different society where animals are killed in plain sight, horror may not be the expected response (cf. the excerpts from Elias (2000) The Civilizing Process and Tuan (1984) Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets on pp. 249-251). Pachirat even speculates that a society that bans animal killing might still hide a black market that provides illegal meat and even kills for illegal sport. (Psst, this is exactly what happens in Beastars, Vol. 1.)

## 3) Guilt and shame

Radicalization is not the book's explicit aim.

Even though Pachirat never mentions the word vegan or vegetarian--he explicitly states on page 1 that the book will not directly engage in the discourse of animal right and welfare--it's clear where his sympathy lies. Which is why I couldn't help but notice that among the emotions that politics of sight tries to elicit in their exposé campaign, he doesn't include guilt or shame.

Instead, the emotive responses he lists are pity, horror, disgust, and shock. And yes, these are emotions one might feel watching footages captured by animal rights activists. But the list is not exhaustive because none of these categories is interchangeable with guilt or shame (which are also two different things). [**] And surely, these footages, if they are meant to be tools of normative reflection, are intended to arouse feelings of guilt and/or shame, i.e. moral discomfort with ourselves.

By omitting to mention these two feelings, he avoids engaging in the (im)morality of meat consumption. Even in the three-paragraph passage where he talks about his argument with his friend over the moral responsibility of consumers over the killing of animals, he drops the argument by making this sloppy statement: "[p]erhaps there are at least some who would be willing to ... accept moral responsibility for the killing as a condition of benefiting from it, as long as they could continue to be shielded from any direct contact with or experience with it (161)."
That doesn't sound like taking moral responsibility: you can't have your cake and eat it too!

I think he avoids taking on this angle because he's a social scientist, not a moral philosopher.
This is particularly clear when notes quite cynically that we've cheated our way through history by putting a lid on the ugly, the odious, and the repugnant instead of becoming better people qualitatively: "[w]hat are referred to as development and progress relies on the distancing and concealment of morally and physically repugnant practices rather than their elimination or transformation (11)." Even when he thinks of political transformation, he's mostly concerned of its fallibility because the kind of society brought about by politics of society is, for better or for worse, a tyranny of opinion.

Concerned with the subjecting power of a generalized gaze, some will dismiss the ideal, like vision itself, as a trap. Others, placing their faith in a weight of opinion and the immutable timelessness of pity, will energetically advance the project of bringing every dark thing to light, demolishing every distance between what is seen and what is hidden (254).

I'm kind of disappointed, but in a gleeful way, because it feels like he's letting me off the hook. Harnessing his firsthand experience, he could have developed a normative theory that puts me into a deep sense of shame more powerfully than Peter Singer ever could.

But I don't have a Ph.D. in political science or philosophy, so what the hell do I know?🤷‍♀️ I'm kind of disappointed in myself for not being more affected. I think I wanted to be persuaded, guilt-tripped and shamed. But none of those feelings happened, or if they did, they went away very quickly because I went on a date to Gyukaku two days later. At least the meat didn't taste all that good because I suspect Gyukaku is skimping.



---------------------------

[*]: Although of slightly different cadence, this experience of "not seeing" while in the state of whole immersion, reminds me of Carol Cohn's 1984 essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals."

[**] I define guilt as a sense of feeling generated by reflecting on one's moral transgression and shame as a sense of feeling generated by perceiving others' judgement of your action or behavior. It's possible to feel shamed without guilt and guilty without feeling shamed.

[JSter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, that was an intense, fascinating read! Timothy Pachirat is a Yale-educated PhD and Poli-Sci professor at UMass. As part of his research on violence and power, he rolled up his sleeves and performed grueling work at an Omaha slaughterhouse for 5+ months. He (quite objectively) shows what it is like to work in various stages of the slaughter process, and sheds light on the real people who show up to do this work in an industry with a 100%+ turnover rate (***the majority are immigrants and refugees).

This book takes you into the daily operations and layout of a modern-day slaughterhouse from the perspective of an entry-level worker/quality control manager. Pachirat then takes a look at how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in contemporary society, and how these factors are at work even within the confines of the slaughterhouse structure/hierarchy.

Pachirat also sheds light on some food safety issues which should concern anyone who eats factory-processed (read: most) meat--his accounts are very much in line with recent GAO reports and USDA violations/recalls. His descriptions of the treatment of cattle before they are stunned--or after they are improperly stunned--gives the reader an idea of just how the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act is being violated and not being enforced.

This book will make you think, and has been referred to as a modern-day version of Sinclair's "The Jungle."

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book surprisingly good. It's a very readable account of one person's employment in a cattle slaughterhouse for several months. The author, Timothy Pachirat, got the job specifically so he could then write about the experience and tell the readers what it was like. He's been very successsful. But this book is more than just a witness report. It also raises questions about why we slaughter animals for food and even more, it reminds us that most of us, even those who eat meat and work in slaughterhouses or make money from them are not interested in having the world see exactly what happens in a slaughterhouse. That's why Iowa has a state law making it a felony for anyone to gain access to a slaughterhouse, without permission, for the purpose of recording of photographing what happens there and then publicizing it. Mr Pachirat provides some insoights to human naure in this excellent report.

[Saph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, very readable, absorbing personal account of Pachirat's experience, documenting the conditions and the lived reality for both human workers and non-human victims in the slaughterhouse. His perspective is written both with a novelesque personal flair and the objectivity and detail of a researcher, which makes for a book that is both gripping and intellectually stimulating.
It is also a fascinating work of political theory. Pachirat really teases apart how the sequestering of knowledge enables us to engage in incredible acts of individual and collective violence, and his analysis of how concepts like distance, concealment, surveillance, etc. play into the power dynamics within industries like meat and dairy production are applicable beyond even animal rights. I would certainly recommend this to anyone interested in animal rights, and also to anyone doing any work against violent practices that are made impersonal or otherwise isolated from mainstream society.

[cantread26 · Rating 5 out of 5]

clearly & explicitly demonstrates how industrialized slaughter came to be so obscured from the public's vision. I'm very impressed by pachirat's methodology & his commitment to bringing the horrors that are usually hidden to light. I honestly don't understand how anyone with the proper means could ever eat meat after reading this. unapologetically forces you to see what you are supporting if you choose to consume such products. HIGHLY important read.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disturbing but engaging read, I recommend this book to everyone who eats meat, especially beef. An intimate look inside the workings of an industrial cattle slaughterhouse, Pachirat relates the politics of sight inherent in sequestering the work of killing animals to other ways in which dirty, demeaning work is hidden from those who benefit from it.

[Summer]

Wow... I have just finished this book and can not recommend it enough. While leaning towards the subject of politics, I think its underlying economic arguments has significance as well in the way that it relates to labor division, specialization, the supply chain, and the challenges of regulation when government mandated USDA quality control and humane standards stand in direct challenge to the realities and requirements of routinized production.

Pachirat's method of detailing his narrative of lived experiences inside an industrialized slaughter house is poetic, eloquent, and profoundly moving. I have read and re-read both his introduction and conclusions after finishing the book and am still unpacking his argument that surveillance and sequestration can, and often do, operate symbiotically within society. Through this relationship they reinforce, rather than subvert, domination, distance, and concealment in order to keep hidden that which society deems repugnant.

Violent and repugnant labor is made possible through distance by outsourcing our "dirty" work to those in society who have the least economic opportunity due to distances created by language, gender, race, nationality, and class. Pachirat mirrors this outsourcing of "dirty work" in slaughterhouses outwards to capital punishment and even voluntary armies.

The distance and malveillance that separates workers in the slaughterhouse, both from themselves and from society at large, makes it possible for those directly involved in the killing at every level of production to outsource true responsibility to the "knocker," the 1 out of 120 workers in the supply chain who administers the final blow of the air gun that renders the animals dead. Pachirat wonders what it might mean if those involved in the killing at every level, all the way down to the consumer, were able to share in the experience of being the 1 out of 120, accepting their own experience and guilt in the process:

"I am now more inclined to think that it is the preoccupation with moral responsibility itself that serves as a deflection. In the words of philosopher John Lachs, 'The responsibility for an act can be passed on, but its experience cannot.' I'm keenly interested in asking what it might mean for those who benefit from physically and morally dirty work not only to assume some share of responsibility for it but also to directly experience it. What might it mean, in other words, to collapse some of the mechanisms of physical, social, and linguistic distances that separate our 'normal' lives from the violence and exploitation required to sustain and reproduce them?"

[Stella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredible ethnography about a slaughterhouse and its workers. Aside from the fact that Pachirat's writing was precise and engaging, it was also an overall stellar example of qualitative social science research. This book isn't meant to turn anyone vegetarian or vegan, it doesn't call out the slaughterhouse or place blame on any particular person involved in the process of industrialized slaughter. Rather, it provides a nuanced analysis of how power and its absence affect individual workers, as well as how physical walls, division of labor and mutual surveillance serve to neutralize and monotonize the work inside a meatpacking plant. Seeing as Pachirat occupied three different positions throughout the span of six months, he is able to employ different viewpoints that emphasize nuance over clear-cut arguments. As someone who is usually focused on animals, it was particularly interesting to read detailed accounts of the challenges that humans working in these jobs are forced to deal with, whether that be physical or psychological.

Overall this was a brilliant book, and while it might be hard to read for someone who is squeamish, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

"You may find the descriptions in the pages ahead both physically and morally repugnant. Recognize, however, that 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." p.18

[Edmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Twelve Seconds is a semi-personal account by Pachirat to document the way sight is used to control some of the aspects of our lives, especially in the case of industrialised slaughter. He goes undercover to work in a slaughterhouse made for an interesting read as it brought to life a more emotive and human account of the goings-on within these places of killing.

His going undercover to work as different roles within the slaughterhouse brought about insights where previously there were none, with the documentation of not only the processes and relationships that lie within the walls of the slaughterhouse, but also the personal aspects of the emotional and physical toll this industry has on the participants. He melds the anecdotal accounts with the academic ideas into one exceptional read that tells us the way the world is structured around these sightlines and the obstacles that prevent them.

Ancillary to the arguments he put forward is a more-than-superficial understanding of the processes that lie within the slaughterhouse. The book includes diagrams and detailed descriptions of each role that turns the cow into its constituent parts which are then packaged and sold. These satisfy a technical curiosity of just how these disassembly lines work in practice.

I think that Pachirat managed to accomplish what he set out to do, and have arrived at some somewhat surprising conclusions. His lucid and deliberate writing style was easy to digest even when the things he was describing was hard to stomach. Overall, it was an exceptional read that had an interesting premise that was executed well.

[Zachtookthem · Rating 2 out of 5]

An incredible work packaged in plastic. Pachirat frontloads with political analysis, diagrams, and an extensive physical and functional breakdown of the slaughterhouse. This information, collected covertly and not without sacrifice, was churned at once into cat food. I wish it had been woven into Pachirat's account of working undercover. His painstaking attention detail thrives best in the first-person: garish lights and chunks of fat and tongues dragging and catching on conveyor belts. The body and idea of the cow is broken down, bit by bit, by different hands in different rooms. Cattle are rushed along ruthlessly - workers, numbed by mindless monotony - health regulations danced around in a game of deception.

Still, it took me months to shave off the story's thick skin and dig into the nightmare meat at its center.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I liked about this book is that it isn’t about animal rights (at least not directly) and isn’t about labour politics (at least not directly) but is focussed on a specific project of its own. What Pachirat is focussed on is a ‘politics of sight’: the twisty and spectacular (sometimes literally) ways slaughter is concealed from slaughterhouse workers as well as those who consume the meat. Massacring animals at a rate of one per twelve seconds is horror. This book does an excellent job of unpacking how the operations of the slaughterhouse help us (worker or consumer) live with that horror.

The other thing I liked about this book - and what in fact first drew me in - is Pachirat’s transparent account. As a good ethnographer does, he explains his deception; the complicated and uncomfortable ethics behind ultimately making the decision to work undercover. Pachirat’s sensitive approach is something that you’ll rarely find in journalist undercover projects and his openness and vulnerability is refreshing.

[Adit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best kind of non-fiction book there is. The author uses both his academic background and his experience working in a slaughterhouse to highlight, in my reading, three things: how animals are treated, how workers are treated, and how a deliberate concealment of the work of industrial killing makes us all complicit in the degradation and alienation involved.

If you're interested in the philosophy/anthropology part, read the first and last chapters. If you're interested in a visceral walkthrough of the actual work inside a slaughterhouse, read everything in between. Ideally, read the whole thing.

The author takes on a huge challenge and executes it perfectly in demonstrating how often authority uses "concealment" to its advantage. This is a phenomenal book.

[cafebedouin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended. Describes in detail the operation of an industrialized slaughterhouse, from the front office to the delivery of cattle and back again. While it is clear the process is inhumane and unsanitary, the working conditions of the employees are the focus. Even if the ethics of killing animals for food is not an issue for you, a system that has one person kill 2,500 cattle, every work day, in order to put meat on your plate has qualities reminiscent of the hypothetical posed in Le Guin’s, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Horrifying, but a book everyone that buys and eats meat in cellophane packaging should read.

[Brynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

~ Let us now imagine, as an alternative, a world in which distance and concealment failed to operate, in which walls and checkpoints did not block sight...perhaps the citizen would have to leave the seminar room discussions of immigration and spend the day laboring beside undocumented workers planting flowers on the manicured campus lawn...buying a pair of jeans would require the purchaser to touch the hands that sewed the seams...and to eat meat would be to know the killers, the killing, and the animals themselves. ~

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Often reading this I was made to think of Temple Grandin and the extraordinary degree of understanding that was necessary for her to design the widely praised cattle driving method. It was designed to ensure maximum calm and comfort in the moments before their death. This book asked me to consider the question, is our own consumption and the pathways of production and delivery which allow us to consume such, not designed in a similar way. Are we not, broadly speaking, pacified in a way similar to the livestock we consume by the same forces?

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

An academic’s compelling, upsetting account of working undercover at a cattle slaughterhouse in Omaha for several months. He is particularly interested in questions of surveillance and what is hidden from the public eye. What will stick with me most, however, are his descriptions of doing the work itself, whether the mind-numbing boredom of pinning livers on a cart or the horror of ushering live, struggling cattle to their doom. These chapters in particular should be required reading for all who still consume the slaughterhouse’s products.