Not too long ago, it was also the nation’s leading egg producer, though it recently slipped to fifth place. The state still has twenty million laying hens in cages, producing an astounding five billion eggs a year. (Recently Iowa, Ohio, and a couple of other midwestern corn-growing states have surpassed California in egg production. Corn and other crops used as animal feed are heavy, whereas eggs are light and easier to ship than corn. Thus, egg production is shifting to areas where chicken feed requires less cost in transport.)
The Inland Empire still houses much of California’s egg and dairy industries, including an egg factory farm in Riverside County that confines eight million birds. Within this same community, however, suburban sprawl and family-oriented neighborhoods are beginning to overtake the old agricultural landmarks. Egg farms sit alongside prefabricated housing tracts, slaughterhouses alongside shopping malls, dairy farms alongside office park complexes. In most regions, there is a separation between the agricultural economy and bedroom communities, but here they sit together uneasily.
On the ride with Maggie, I was the designated driver so that she could take notes. I gave her an overview of HSUS and our mission, as well as the contours of the debate over Prop. 2, as we passed through Pomona and the rest of eastern Los Angeles County. It was about an hour’s drive to our first stop—the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company in Chino, which straddles the border between San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
We pulled up to the plant from the south and parked on a side street just behind the building. I had talked to the press many times about what went on here, but this would be my first visit to the scene. It is a workmanlike facility—a standard-issue aluminum and concrete factory, with air vents, pipes, and air circulation fixtures protruding from box structures. The main building looked to be about three stories tall, but smaller, ramshackle buildings were connected to it. There were parking areas, and holding areas for the animals, with overhanging structures, pens, and chutes—together covering much of a city block.
Hallmark looks like a cow in a pig herd, oddly out of place, as though dropped from above into a modern business district. There is an open field across the street on the north side of the building, but the south face has a modern office complex bumping right up against it. There is a busy thoroughfare on the west end, on a neatly paved road with the yellow stripes freshly painted. Across the street from this slaughter plant are more office complexes. What did the accountants, businesspeople, and other office workers think of their unsightly neighbor? As they settled into their cubicles and sipped their morning coffee, did they somehow block out the cries and bellows of the cows, or had they just become accustomed to it?
Prop. 2 wasn’t about slaughter practices, but it did in a sense begin here, with reports of scenes that unfolded at the Hallmark/Westland plant every day. The plant remained a backstory to Prop. 2, and lest anyone forget, we kept reminding voters about the connections throughout the campaign for reform.
In the fall of 2007, HSUS sent a seasoned investigator to apply for a job at an egg production facility in the Inland Empire, to get an inside view of what was happening there and to capture it on film. This was a relatively new strategy for us—an employment-based investigation deploying an undercover operative for weeks or months at a factory farm or slaughter plant. Through the eyes and camera of that one person, people across the state and nation could see for themselves what was done to animals in industrial agriculture and who was doing it.
Our undercover guy didn’t get off to a great start. He applied for jobs at a number of egg facilities but had no luck in getting hired. On one of his drives through the area, however, he saw the Hallmark plant. He decided to put in for the job, while waiting for any opening at an egg facility. It was purely opportunistic and not based on knowledge of questionable practices at the plant; in fact, we’d never even heard of this place before. It was a default option, but he took it because he knew the work might turn up something valuable. If it didn’t seem like the right fit, he’d abandon the effort and resume his original search for work behind the lines at a battery cage facility.
Hallmark, it turned out, wanted him right away. This wasn’t entirely surprising since many slaughter plants have up to a 100 percent annual turnover rate in personnel. From year to year, there’s typically an entirely new crew of workers because the labor is so demoralizing and dangerous. Imagine killing and dismembering animals for every hour of every workday. Not much to look forward to in the morning, nor much to feel good about in the evening.
Slaughterhouse workers wield sharp tools all day long. The floors are slippery with blood. Large animal carcasses pass by swiftly on a mechanized pulley system, and the plants have continued to increase line speeds, placing ever greater strain on the workers. Accidents are common, and some workers develop carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitive cutting. It is very tough, physically demanding, low-paying, deeply dispiriting work, and it’s nobody’s idea of a dream job.
Hallmark specialized in the slaughter of older, “spent” dairy cows, and was known in the industry as a “cull cow” slaughter plant. Through selective breeding, we’ve engineered Holsteins to produce enormous volumes of milk. But they can only endure this level of production for about three years, and when they are used up and no longer commercially productive, they are hauled to places like Hallmark.
Upton Sinclair wrote a hundred years ago that the meat industry uses everything but the squeal of the pig. That’s true today for virtually all farm animals. There are no retirement homes for spent cows, and the dairy farmer can make additional revenue by selling cows for ground beef, rather than paying to dispose of the animals himself. In all, 17 percent of U.S.-produced beef comes from spent dairy cows.
The cows coming from the factory dairies often look emaciated—the result of years of being treated as nothing more than milk-producing machines. The average cow produces more than twenty thousand pounds of milk a year—five times more than cows of past generations. More than 90 percent of America’s dairy herds are afflicted with mastitis, an inflammation of the udder, which in the modern cow is large and freakish-looking, often hanging so low that it drags along the ground. Many also have foot rot from standing all day in their own manure.
OUR MAN AT HALLMARK was a tall, lanky, dark-haired fellow who went by the name “Adam.” After being hired at Hallmark, he was assigned the job of off-loading the cows upon arrival, sorting them into various pens, and then sending them single file up a chute into the “knock box”—the term at the plant for the slaughter area—where another group of workers took over. No HSUS investigators are allowed to harm animals, so his assignment was consistent with our policies.
On his very first day, Adam spotted problems at Hallmark. The cows looked very sickly and were typically lame. The animal handlers were shocking the cows with electric prods, or hot shots, to keep them moving toward the knock box. (Though not strictly forbidding the practice, federal regulations require that electric shocks be used as little as possible.) Adam said the cows’ eyes would roll back in their heads in response to the pain inflicted by the electrical charges. He decided to stay on the job and documented all that he could.
At times, he had a clear view of the slaughter process. In the knock box, one worker would shoot the cow in the head with a captive-bolt gun—a device that looks like a large handgun and discharges a thick metal bolt. The gun is aimed at the cranial area, and the bolt is designed to penetrate the skull, stunning the animal and rendering her unconscious. Once an animal is stunned and then hung up by a rear leg, another worker slits her throat to kill her. She is then attached to a mechanical pulley system on a rail, which moves her body past various workers, who are each tasked with removing a specific body part until nothing is left. It has the efficiency of an assembly line, but is in fact the opposite—a disassembly line.
Adam worked ten hours a day, five or six days a week, and got paid a little more than the minimum wage. He was the only non-Latino among h
alf a dozen or so workers who did animal handling and slaughter. That was no surprise, since plants throughout the country now use almost exclusively immigrant labor. During the last years of the Bush administration—and with the public clamoring for action on illegal immigration—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided several major slaughter plants, arresting hundreds of undocumented workers. That was just a glimpse of an industry that now relies on the most desperate and easily exploited workers, people without options or legal standing to complain about what they are forced to see and do.
Adam had to report to work at 6:30 A.M., well before the office buildings next door opened for business. In the early hours of the day, the plant’s workers would slaughter about 350 cows. Hallmark’s daily total was about 500 cows, or just over 2,500 a week—making it a small slaughter plant by federal standards, but a relatively large one among cull-cow plants. By contrast, Smithfield Foods runs a pig-processing plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, that slaughters 32,000 pigs a day and employs 4,650 workers.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarian was assigned to the Hallmark plant to enforce the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act—his job was to inspect each cow and ensure humane handling and slaughter procedures were observed. This, though, was not your standard veterinary examination. He didn’t bend down on one knee and take a look at each animal and evaluate her condition. There just wasn’t time for that, given that there were hundreds of cows. At HSUS, we had been working for years to get more money appropriated for the inspections program, and we had been steadily building support for it. Still, the funding was far from enough to enforce the humane laws that are supposed to protect the 33 million cows and 113 million pigs sent to slaughter annually, along with millions of goats, sheep, and other mammals. And the USDA doesn’t apply the humane slaughter laws to poultry, even though birds are more than 95 percent of all animals slaughtered (about 9 billion chickens and 250 million turkeys are killed each year).
Adam and the other workers would herd dozens of cows past the government inspector, and as long as the vet didn’t see anything unusual in the animals’ gaits, he’d clear the entire group for slaughter. If he saw an animal clearly unable to stand, he was supposed to “condemn” that animal and not let her into the slaughter area. After he completed his morning inspection at 6:30 A.M., he’d leave the unloading area and holding pens to perform other duties. The unsupervised plant workers would then start slaughtering the cows, one by one. Like clockwork, around 12:30 P.M., the vet would come back and approve another 150 or so for slaughter. The vet admitted to federal investigators that he took “shortcuts” during these inspections to save time.
Before work each morning, Adam strapped a miniature video camera to himself, the device hidden beneath his clothes. Because the camera was so small, the battery life was very limited and he could record only about an hour of footage per day. At night, he’d head back to his motel, undress, unstrap the camera, and then do his best to scrub the filth of Hallmark off his body. His evening routine was to make notes, catalogue the tape, recharge the batteries, insert a new tape, and get ready for the next day.
At work, Adam generally kept to himself, and he couldn’t converse much with the other workers since he didn’t speak Spanish. They had no idea he was a vegan, and that the “meat” in his sandwich was actually a soy riblet he’d bring to work every day. Every week or two, he checked in with us so we would know he was okay and to update us on the investigation. He didn’t have time to review his tapes in any detail; he was just amassing as much evidence as he could. He had to perform his animal-handling job well enough to prevent undue scrutiny, and to make sure he didn’t get fired—all of which limited his opportunities for filming.
Along with the federal veterinarian, USDA had four other inspectors at Hallmark stationed inside the plant where the meat was processed. Their primary charge was food safety. They would test carcasses for salmonella, E. coli, and other pathogens, and certify that the meat was fit for human consumption.
The USDA presence at slaughter plants had always been weighted toward the food safety functions, with inspectors focused on postmortem examinations. The animal handling and antemortem inspections seemed like a nuisance to the department, and this lack of commitment showed. When President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act in 1958, he remarked to a group of congressmen, “If I relied on my mail, I would think that the country is concerned only about humane slaughter.” Unfortunately, the USDA never quite got the memo, and its oversight has been poor, or, in the case of birds, nonexistent.
In 1997, Gail Eisnitz, an animal-welfare investigator, wrote a book called Slaughterhouse about the USDA’s failures to enforce the law. More recently, a number of press exposés at slaughter plants have revealed federal workers either not paying attention to the fate of the animals or simply ignoring abuses in plain view. In almost every investigation conducted by animal-welfare groups, serious problems have been uncovered. Together, these random samplings and federal audits paint a picture of chronic deficiencies in the inspections program—a systematic failure to enforce the law.
In 2001, the Washington Post reported on problems in slaughterhouse enforcement, with an award-winning article recounting the observations of line worker Ramon Moreno, who was assigned the task of cutting the hocks off carcasses as they sped past him at a rate of 309 an hour at a beef plant in Pasco, Washington. He told the Post’s Joby Warrick that even though a person in the line ahead of him was assigned the task of cutting off parts of the body, the animals were sometimes alive when they got to him. “They blink. They make noises. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.” They die, he said, “piece by piece.”
At Hallmark, according to Adam, the vet appeared in the live-animal area at the plant at the same time every day. He made no unannounced visits, and he had been inspecting this plant for more than a decade, so his routine was well known to the plant’s management. When he arrived, slaughterhouse workers were usually on their best behavior, according to Adam. And they had little to worry about from the other USDA inspectors inside the plant, because they never ventured outside to make spot checks on the animals, though they did sometimes oversee what happened in the knock box.
In 2005, an outside USDA veterinarian visited Hallmark to perform a humane handling verification review and he documented a failure to provide animals with water, excessive use of hot shots to herd the animals, and improper stunning. These are all “egregious violations” by USDA’s own standard, but the vet issued only a “noncompliance report”—the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Beyond those infractions, there were no blemishes on the company’s record as far as the government was concerned. In that same year of 2005, the USDA had named Hallmark/Westland its “Supplier of the Year” for the National School Lunch Program. And, in addition to the USDA inspections, the plant’s management hired auditors to inspect their animal-handling operations. In fact, according to Hallmark’s president, in 2007—the year we conducted our investigation—there had been seventeen third-party audits, and every one of them resulted in the highest marks for the plant.
If you relied upon the accounts of the USDA and the private auditors, and took the word of the plant’s management, this was a model facility. But our man Adam had a quite different experience, and his camera showed what all those audits and prizes were really worth. He recorded dozens of cows unable to walk and being tormented by workers forcing them to stand. These were so-called downer cows—they were down on the ground and couldn’t get up on their own because of broken limbs, lameness, and other debilitating conditions. They had arrived in the trucks already down, gone down in the pens, or broken down on the way to the knock box. In each case, slaughter workers employed an arsenal of tools to compel them to stand. If they were down in the pens, just before the USDA man took his post, workers knew just when to harass them so they’d be on their feet to make it by the inspector.
Adam said the worst case he saw
was a cow who went down in the truck and couldn’t stand. Workers attached one end of a chain to her leg and the other end to a Bobcat tractor. It took thirty to forty-five minutes for them to drag her out of the truck and toward the slaughter area, and she was bellowing most of the time. “It got to the point where the animal quit struggling and bellowing. There was just silence. She just gave up,” Adam told us.
The pen manager simply refused to permit any cow to be treated as a downer. He instructed pen workers to force every animal to stand, claiming that every time one was condemned as nonambulatory, the plant lost money. Workers used hot shots on the cows’ genitals and eyes. They rammed downed cows and pushed them with the blades of a forklift. Adam even recorded them placing high-pressure water hoses in cows’ mouths to simulate a water-boarding effect. The point was to cause the animals so much distress that they used their little remaining strength to rise and flee from their abusers—which again was enough to get past inspection.
The Hypocrisy of “Happy Cows”
KATHY MILANI, WHO AT the time was our chief of investigations, said it was urgent that I see the footage Adam had sent. She and her deputy sat me down for a screening, where Michael Markarian, our chief operating officer, joined us. Whether it is a tape of animal fights, puppy mills, seal clubbing, or any other form of abuse, I always come to these rollouts of investigative footage with a mix of anticipation and dread. Of course, I don’t want to see animals suffering in any way, and it is infuriating to watch. But after a while you learn to steel yourself, and I figured if men and women like Adam had the guts to see it in person, then my colleagues and I could watch every frame and hatch a plan to do something about it.
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