Article begins
We could hear pigs crying, but the ten-foot wall topped with electrified barbed wire made it impossible to see what was happening. Working together, a few of us stacked up large rocks to stand on, giving ourselves an elevated view. Yelling and cracking whips, workers were herding hundreds of pigs from a corral into a single-file line entering a slaughterhouse. Matías pointed over to the left. A mixture of blood, feces, and water was gushing out of a tube and into a lagoon. I could barely hear him as he whispered, “This is worse than a nightmare.”
During my fieldwork in Santiago, Chile, I worked with activists who challenged the model of industrial food production. These groups gathered outside slaughterhouses, located in the periphery of the city, to document and bear witness to the deaths of factory-farmed animals and, when possible, rescue any who escaped. At risk of being run over, activists would stand in front of transport trucks and refuse to move to give others extra time to record injured animals. Videos of chickens, for example, with bloodied legs or broken wings were posted on the group’s social media pages to encourage a transition to a plant-based diet.
After waiting for hours in front of another slaughterhouse, a truck transporting horses finally arrived. The driver stopped as he saw our protest signs and explained, “I don’t like this either, but it’s work. I have a son.” He gave us permission to scale the sides of the large truck and videotape the condition of the animals inside. They were crammed in so tight and facing different directions, making it difficult to get an accurate count. Several activists broke down in tears as the horses struggled to move. Their deaths were imminent and there was nothing that could be done, in that moment, to stop it. An organizer of the group reiterated the importance of our presence. “We do this so when you’re having conversations with people you can tell them what you witnessed. That it’s not just happening in a faraway place, but it’s happening here in Chile as well,” she said.
In our conversations, Chilean animal rights activists often emphasized that during vegan outreach events, people would routinely dismiss their message, claiming that any picture or video of factory farms or industrial slaughter was taken in the United States. But, as Alex Blanchette writes, “A little-known fact about the rise of these so-called ‘(U.S.) American’ factory farms is that they are part of a transnational account largely inspired by the success” of AgroSuper, a Chilean pork operation, in the 1990s.
Activists knew they needed their own documentation. In 2012, they began by recording pigs inside an AgroSuper factory farm. For the next project, one activist went undercover and secretly recorded footage of dairy farms that was then released in the exposé Huérfanos de la leche: la industria de los lácteos en Chile (Orphans of Milk: The Dairy Industry in Chile).
By using the slaughterhouse as a fieldsite, anthropologists have shown that the logic of industrial slaughter is concealment. Suffering becomes illegible to the consumer once the animal’s body is commodified, continuing the process obscuring industrial life and death. These activists believe that videos made during slaughterhouse vigils have the potential to reveal the violence the meat industry wants to hide. Witnessing becomes “a political act that resists the erasure of individual animals.”
María Elena García asks “Can ethnography capture, or offer a means of listening to, the voices of dying (nonhuman) animals?” As a vegan antispeciesist ethnographer, my fieldwork has reinforced a commitment to listening to the voices of factory-farmed animals and recognizing the ways they resist until their last moments. By broadening discussions of oppression and resistance, new forms of solidarities emerge between humans and animals that disrupt both power and property relations and can spark a larger political transformation.
Ariana Gunderson is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.