In the belly of the beast

[douglas9]

Sarah – let’s call her that for this story, though it’s neither the name her parents gave her nor the one she currently uses undercover – is a tall, fair woman in her midtwenties who’s pretty in a stock, anonymous way, as if she’d purposely scrubbed her face and frame of distinguishing characteristics. Like anyone who’s spent much time working farms, she’s functionally built through the thighs and trunk, herding pregnant hogs who weigh triple what she does into chutes to birth their litters and hefting buckets of dead piglets down quarter-mile alleys to where they’re later processed. It’s backbreaking labor, nine-hour days in stifling barns in Wyoming, and no training could prepare her for the sensory assault of 10,000 pigs in close quarters: the stench of their shit, piled three feet high in the slanted trenches below; the blood on sows’ snouts cut by cages so tight they can’t turn around or lie sideways; the racking cries of broken-legged pigs, hauled into alleys by dead-eyed workers and left there to die of exposure. It’s the worst job she or anyone else has had, but Sarah isn’t grousing about the conditions. She’s too busy waging war on the hogs’ behalf.

http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/belly-beast-meat-factory-farms-animal-activists

[Mortos]

1. Unbelievable cruelty and greed

It makes me sick to think of the food I put in my body coming from places like this...and it does.

[handmade34]

2. "It makes me sick.."

that is literal for many… best not to eat it

[BelgianMadCow]

3. I bookmarked it, and was gonna post in GD for exposure

but found it here with a search.

I still eat meat. I doubt I can continue, should I have the stomach to watch and read this in its entirety.

[Enthusiast]

4. All in the interest of maximizing profit.

When corporations maximize profits it is at the expense of all of us. Pure greed.