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At 4 am one morning in October of final yr, animal rights activist Raven Deerbrook sat on a mattress in an affordable lodge in East Los Angeles, a dwell video feed on her telephone. She’d barely slept that evening, waking each hour or two to examine that the feed was transmitting from three pinhole infrared cameras she’d hidden within the Farmer John meatpacking plant 20 miles away. The facility was positioned within the LA suburb of Vernon and owned by Smithfield Foods, the most important pork producer on the earth. She waited, each anticipating and dreading what her cameras had been about to disclose.
A day earlier, Deerbrook had snuck into the slaughterhouse with a pretend uniform and badge and climbed 26 toes underground right into a “stunning chamber”—basically a three-story-deep elevator shaft designed to be crammed with carbon dioxide. Here, pigs in cages are lowered into the shaft’s invisible swimming pool of suffocating, heavier-than-air CO2, the place the animals asphyxiate over a matter of minutes earlier than being dumped out of the chamber onto a conveyor belt, hung up, drained of blood, and butchered.
Deerbrook had hidden one digital camera pointed at that chamber from the plant’s wall. She’d mounted two extra with microphones on the car-sized cages inside. When she’d tried to descend additional down the shaft’s ladder, a burning “air hunger” from residual CO2 within the chamber had compelled her to climb out once more, gasping for breath, unable to plant her remaining cameras.
Safely again in her lodge room throughout the town, Deerbrook hoped to file the slaughterhouse gasoline chamber, inside and outside, for the primary time in a US meat plant. In doing so, she aimed to disprove claims from the pork business and the gasoline chamber producer that this type of suffocation represents a humane—even “painless”—type of killing.
At 5:25 am, because the plant’s operations started for the morning, she noticed the primary half-dozen pigs herded into the chamber. Deerbrook’s first ideas had been a mixture of pleasure and sensible anxieties: Were the digital camera angles proper? Was the body fee excessive sufficient?
Then the sunshine within the video started to dim because the cage lowered into the carbon dioxide beneath. As Deerbrook watched, the pigs started to squeal and thrash violently round within the cage, struggling to flee and convulsing for almost a minute earlier than lastly laying nonetheless. “Pigs are very human-like in their screaming. And I wasn’t expecting to see them suffer for so long,” she says. “I knew it was going to be bad. But I wasn’t really prepared for the screaming.”
Deerbrook, nonetheless in her pajamas, sat within the lodge mattress, gazing her telephone display in horror. The photos and audio that she recorded would hang-out her nightmares for months to return. “The only silver lining was the fact that I was able to download the footage,” she says. “Because once I started getting those first video clips, I knew: At least this is going to be documented.”
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