cross-posted at Taking Place

I may not like a lot of PETA’s policies, but they can be damn good at investigative reporting. This past July, PETA met with ConAgra CEO Mike Walter. At the meeting, Walter assured PETA that no abuse was going on inside the company’s turkey slaughterhouses. As we all know, you have to take everything a CEO says with a grain of salt, and that is just what PETA did.

Immediately preceeding the meeting, PETA placed an insider (known as a “salt” among unions) in one of ConAgra’s Arkansas plants. The 40 days of investigation produced some very damning video evidence. The footage showed, among other things:

• Workers slamming live birds against shackles, metal trailers, and handrails with such force that one turkey’s spine popped out.
• Workers routinely kicking live birds and often used them as punching bags.
• One employee stomping on a bird’s head until her skull exploded.
• Another employee assaulting a hanging turkey by inserting his finger into her cloaca (vagina).

PETA took the video footage to the Franklin County, AK prosecutor and it looks as though something will happen in retribution. If i were to bet, i’d say the company will probably fire the offending employees, decry them as atrocious anomolies, and go about their business. But i don’t buy into the idea that the problem is with some messed-up workers. The problem is much bigger, more systematic.

I’m driven to ask, why is slaughtering an animal not enough? Why is it necessary to humiliate, sexually assault, and torture the animals before killing them? Well, i won’t get in to all the explanations that have been put forth, but it can be boiled down to power politics. Power politics can play out in nasty ways. Those with power-over use it to abuse, repress, and oppress those whom they hold power over. Those who are denied power in one aspect of their life will often take it out on those over whom they hold power in another aspect of their life. Its a learned behavior pattern that is institutionalized.

Institutions, like everything else, are interconnected. Not just through business deals, but through the practices that reinforce power structures. Carol Adams illustrates the power of absent referents in phrases like “chick”, “grade A piece of ass”, “piece of meat”, and others when referring to wimmin. Those referents go back to what has been documented inside this ConAgra plant (among others).

I’d like to get audio recordings from inside the slaughterhouses as these turkeys were being beaten and sexually assaulted. I’m willing to bet the gendered terminology was in no shortage. Its no coincidence that wimmin are systematically beaten and raped outside the slaughterhouse, while non-humyn animals (most often female) suffer the same fate inside the jungle walls. Wimmin, as well as people of color of all genders, are referred to as non-humyn animals as a way to set up and justify their systematic abuse. We have a simple word for it - dehumanization, which basically means to strip someone of their humyn status and treat them as we treat non-humyn animals. But in order for this campaign to be successful, non-humyn animals must be set up as justifiably abuseable lesser-thans.

As i see it, these referents feed off each other. A womyn is raped and called a bitch (a female dog), a pig, or a piece of meat because these animals are lesser-than and therefore acceptable abused. And then a turkey is raped because she has a vagina and is therefore deserving of abuse. To argue for a root cause is ridiculous because the problem is the whole problem and must be faced as a whole. But if we want to see an end to abuse inside slaughterhouses we must not focus on further punishing workers. Instead, we must address the greater problems found in power politics that create destructive and abusive hierarchies.

For more information about the turkey abuses, check out ButterballCruelty.com