I had wondered about the psychological effects of working in an abattoir. An article in
The Conversation confirms a suspicion that it is not great for mental health:
The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers
view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.
There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.
Another study
noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and
psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....
Surprisingly, Flinders University research
has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for
aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male
colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need
for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender
differences.
The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who
wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes
the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around
killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the
end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced,
shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once
again, finally coming to a close.
Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:
Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you
aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at
me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but
that’s not enough. It has to suffer.
2 comments:
Yeah you are right. There has to be a better way. If we had small towns surrounded by small permaculture farms a less appalling form of culling might be achievable. Its really not okay if people are getting angry and making the animals suffer. Horrific. This would be happening every day. Its bad enough that the animals are ripped from a reasonably good life and bundled onto trucks. We have to do better.
Mass production is totally necessary for manufacturing. But for killing animals? Terrible stuff really. We ought to be working on some transition to a better way.
But to simply deny people meat or to make it more expensive, at this stage this amounts to forced devolution on the human population. What I think we have imposed upon much of our aboriginal population. For now the emphasis has to be on making the animal happier and healthier during its brief life. We also need them for the soil development.
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