Halloween, terror & our food.
The scariest horror story is reality for animals in our food system.
As Halloween comes again this year we look forward to all things that frighten us and give us an adrenaline rush of fear: zombie costumes, horror movies, fake blood and guts, blood dripping knives, axes, chain saws, violence. We like to pretend to do things that we would never dream of acting out in real life. Yet, every day, we subject billions of animals to the very things that terrify us the most every time we sit down to eat their flesh, milk, and eggs.
The hatch on a dump truck at the slaughterhouse drips blood | Animal Sentience Project
Eventually, all animals trapped in our violent food system end up at the scariest place on earth: the slaughterhouse. They are regularly subjected to the very things that our nightmares are made of. From conception, to the time they are killed, most live a life filled with dread and fear. To them, we are the terrifying monsters that we feature in our own horror movies.
Hooks still dangle from the ceiling of a now closed pig slaughterhouse that killed 6,000 pigs daily for over 80 years | Animal Sentience Project
Inside of a pig slaughterhouse
One of the scariest movies ever made depicted a madman chasing and cutting up innocent human victims with saws, hanging their body on hooks, throwing their body parts in the freezer.
The idea of someone doing this to us is terrifying and yet we pay for someone to do this very thing to innocent animals every time we sit down to eat their flesh, milk, and eggs.
Incinerators, still filled with ash, line a building adjacent to the slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
Pigs were forced into into dark gondolas that lowered them deep below the ground level into C02 gas that burned their lungs and suffocated them. An excruciating and terrifying experience. Their screams for help, when still functioning, could be heard from the street. Yet, people seemed oblivious to it.
The door to the gas chamber had the word Hell inscribed on it. Millions of terrified souls were forced through these doors. | Animal Sentience Project
Looking down inside the gas chamber at least 8 gondolas deep. | Animal Sentience Project
C02 gas warning for workers | Animal Sentience Project
Holding pens, only feet away from the gas chamber, held thousands of aware and intelligent pigs who were forced to listen to the screams those being gassed before them.
Dark, concrete holding pens held thousands of terrified pigs each day | Animal Sentience Project
All holding pen doors are scratched from those who tried to escape | Animal Sentience Project
Spouts hang from the ceiling to shower pigs before entering the gas chamber | Animal Sentience Project
Mocking the victims | Animal Sentience Project
A chain runs along the ceiling that pulled bodies through the building | Animal Sentience Project
Mounds of rubber flaps that were used to remove hair from the pigs | Animal Sentience Project
Wages of the killers (a sticker is a kinder word for throat-slitter) | Animal Sentience Project
Outside of a cow slaughterhouse
Cows are known for their strong sense of smell and can detect danger up to 10 kilometers away. Imagine their terror as they near the slaughterhouse, the smell of blood and death as heavy as the dark energy that accompanies it.
Terrified mother from dairy at the slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
The terror in their eyes is evident. They panic and try to escape the metal walls that hold them captive but there is no escape. The slaughterhouse workers show no empathy toward these terrified sentient beings as they prod them into the windowless kill factory. They merely look right through them as though they are inanimate objects. After they enter the slaughterhouse and the door is closed, the only sound that is heard is that of the machines that cut them into pieces and spit them out in boxes at the other end.
Bodies of gentle beings who were violently killed in a halal slaughterhouse hang from hooks in a refrigerated truck. | Animal Sentience Project
A skinned cow’s head lies on the sidewalk outside of a slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
A trail of blood leads to the slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
Overflowing body parts of just killed cows fall out of a conveyor belt into a dump truck at the slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
I’m holding what’s left of a beautiful being at the slaughterhouse | Animal Sentience Project
Violence. Fear. Apathy. Blood and gore. Tools to kill.
Aren’t these the things that we fear most and what we base our scariest Halloween horror movies on? Yet, every day we willingly inflict this terrifying reality on billions of farmed animals around the world. Animal agriculture hides this horror from the public behind windowless walls and ag-gag laws because they know that if we saw the reality, we would stop supporting them.
Animal agriculture is a real-life horror movie. The scariest ever made.
The good news is that we have the power to end this nightmare we’ve created for our fellow animals, starting right now, by simply changing what you put on your plate at each meal. Learn how here.