In The Dying Trade, a forthcoming documentary film about slaughterhouse workers, a man named Tom describes a moment during his career that still haunts him many years later: the time he skinned a cow alive while she was giving birth.
Tom worked at slaughterhouses across Europe from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, and one of his jobs on the production line was to remove the skin from animals after they had been hung up, stunned unconscious, and bled out. That’s how it’s supposed to work in theory.
But slaughterhouses operate at a rapid, hectic pace, with animals sometimes stunned improperly and butchered while still alive and conscious. If a cow remained conscious once they got to Tom — as was the case with this cow in particular, whose calf was partially hanging out of her birth canal — he was unable to stop the line to ensure they were properly killed. So, as the cow kicked at him, mid-birth, he had no choice but to skin her alive. The calf didn’t survive.
“It takes 25 seconds,“ to skin them, he said in The Dying Trade, “but it stays with you for the rest of your life.”
Tom, who calls himself a “devout animal lover,” said that it’s “very difficult watching animals being killed.” But the job desensitizes you: “You become a robot.” Other slaughterhouse workers have made similar remarks.
To cope, Tom spent most of his slaughterhouse career as a functioning alcoholic, drinking as soon as he got off work until he went to bed. He took magic mushrooms on weekends to escape. He also dissociated at work, spending much of his time on the production line “thinking I was on holiday…I would dream I was in Spain somewhere — just anywhere but what I was doing.” Now, he said, he lives like a hermit and still dreams about slaughterhouses six to seven nights a week. He also has violent thoughts of hurting people, which he had never had prior to working in meat processing.
“I suffer with PITS as a result,” Tom said, referring to perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a subcategory of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in which the cause of the trauma is being a perpetrator of violence — in this case, slaughtering animals for food — rather than being a victim of it.
Physical injury rates are high in slaughterhouses, making it one of the more dangerous occupations. But much less is known about the mental and emotional toll of slaughterhouse work. Psychology researchers have difficulty accessing slaughterhouse worker populations, and so we’re left with a handful of small studies. As a result, it’s unknown exactly what share of the world’s millions of slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD or other mental health conditions.
But what’s certain is that many do — surveys of slaughterhouse workers show high rates of anxiety and depression, and many have shared stories of mental health struggles with researchers and journalists. The problem is likely to worsen in the years ahead, as more and more slaughterhouses are built around the world to satisfy increasing meat consumption.
Two years ago, the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics even devoted an entire issue to the meat industry’s effects on societal health, including its impact on workers. One article by social psychologist Rachel MacNair, who coined the term PITS, put the psychological toll of slaughterhouse work — and society’s complicity in the problem — in blunt terms: “Public demand for meat creates ongoing, present, and future exposure to trauma and continual retraumatization.”
What we know about the psychological toll of slaughterhouse work
The concept of PTSD stems from studies of combat veterans, research that accelerated in the post-Vietnam War era in the US. It was officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental health condition in 1980.
But it took time for psychologists to recognize that being the one who perpetrates violence — as opposed to experiencing or witnessing it — can also be highly traumatic, or even more so.
In a 1998 study, MacNair told me, she observed that Vietnam War veterans who directly killed people had higher trauma scores than those who only witnessed killing. In 2002, she published the first book on the issue — Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing — which went beyond war and into other arenas of violence, including policing, death penalty executions, torture, homicide, and slaughterhouse work. The idea has since expanded how psychologists think about traumatization from violence.
Slaughterhouse work can also deeply impact those who don’t directly kill animals but still play a critical role in meat production, like David Magna, a former slaughterhouse inspector for the Canadian government.
For six years, Magna worked at a major chicken plant, where one of his jobs entailed standing behind employees on the slaughter line — which operated at the breakneck speed of 180 birds per minute — to check for signs of disease and other issues. He also inspected crates of chickens as they were unloaded to be slaughtered; sometimes, hundreds would arrive dead from exposure to extreme heat or cold during transportation from the factory farm.
After six years at the chicken slaughterhouse, Magna developed severe respiratory problems, requiring him to take time off (it’s not uncommon for poultry workers to complain about the toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals used in slaughterhouses).
Over the next decade, Magna went on to work as an inspector at other plants along with a desk job in which he reviewed animal welfare violation reports, including a number of disturbing cases. In one, a farmer branded some of his pigs a dozen or so times each with a hot iron all over their bodies, but was only penalized with a fine and was allowed to continue to raise animals for meat. In another case, a truckload of pigs froze to death after a driver fell asleep. One report involved a pregnant dairy cow who gave birth on a slaughterhouse-bound truck. Because the trailer was so crowded, the calf’s head was smashed in by other cows.
“I’m a shell of what I was when I walked in that [first] day,” Magna told me. Throughout his career, he’d try to improve conditions, but the deck was stacked against him: regulations are weak, violators face little to no penalties, and higher-ups often didn’t take his concerns seriously.
Like Tom, the slaughterhouse worker in Europe, Magna drank excessively to cope. He also had dreams in which he was a chicken packed in a crate and then slaughtered. His mother, who had briefly worked on the slaughter line, had similar dreams.
Objects like a plate of meat or a truck can trigger flashbacks for Magna. He’s dealt with suicidal ideation, and a few years ago, he was diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder.
Gathering broader data on the experiences of people who work in slaughterhouses has proven difficult, but there is some. A few years ago, a literature review by psychologists Jessica Slade and Emma Alleyne at the University of Kent found slaughterhouse workers have higher rates of anxiety and depression, and a higher propensity for physical aggression. A small study of slaughterhouse workers in South Africa found that each had recurring nightmares, like Tom and David, and some workers have reported high rates of alcoholism in the workplace.
But there’s been no large-scale study investigating PTSD rates among slaughterhouse workers, and there’s a good reason why: It would be hard to conduct such a study without cooperation from meat companies. And many slaughterhouse workers are undocumented immigrants who might be reluctant to share their stories, even if they were anonymous.
“This system oppresses everyone”
Some people who live near factory farms, which produce vast amounts of animal manure that pollutes the air and water, call their communities “sacrifice zones” for the meat and agricultural industries. In low-income and disproportionately immigrant communities, the meat industry has found its sacrifice populations — people with few economic opportunities who must kill animals for hours on end and suffer whatever physical or psychological trauma may come.
“It is unnatural and inhumane for someone to kill for hours every day,” Susana Chavez, a former slaughterhouse worker in Mexico, wrote in a 2022 op-ed.
And as MacNair has noted, our high demand for cheap meat creates ever more trauma — trauma that is outsourced to these sacrifice populations.
And killing isn’t the only potential source of trauma. Employees can also experience physical or sexual violence from colleagues, something some women in slaughterhouses have reported, and experience or witness severe accidents among other workers. In The Dying Trade, Tom recalled a time when a coworker got stuck in a machine and was essentially cut in half: “I can still hear him screaming.”
Magna, along with many other former meat industry workers (including Chavez), has since become vegan — and an animal rights activist.
Activism “has given me a new lease on life,” he said. “I’m fortunate; I got out of this system. For whatever reason, I’m here today doing this, and I think of the people that aren’t so lucky.” He mentioned a former coworker, Maria, who had to get carpal tunnel surgery like many other slaughterhouse workers, due to intense wrist pain from making repetitive cuts to animal carcasses. When Magna asked her why she’s still working at the plant, she told him that because she doesn’t speak English, she doesn’t have many options. She said she has to continue on to provide for her kids — that her own life doesn’t matter.
“This system,” Magna said, “oppresses everyone.”
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