Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers

At 4 am one morning in October of final yr, animal rights activist Raven Deerbrook sat on a mattress in an inexpensive resort in East Los Angeles, taking a look at a reside video feed on her cellphone. She’d barely slept that night time, waking each hour or two to verify that the feed was transmitting from three pinhole infrared cameras she’d hidden in the Farmer John meatpacking plant 20 miles away. The facility, positioned in the LA suburb of Vernon, is owned by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world. She waited, each anticipating and dreading what her cameras have been about to disclose.

A day earlier, Deerbrook had snuck into the slaughterhouse with a faux uniform and badge and climbed 26 toes underground right into a “stunning chamber”—primarily a three-story-deep elevator shaft designed to be full of carbon dioxide. Here, pigs in cages are lowered into the shaft’s invisible swimming pool of suffocating, heavier-than-air CO₂, the place the animals asphyxiate over a matter of minutes earlier than being dumped out of the chamber onto a conveyor belt, hung up, drained of blood, and butchered.

Deerbrook had hidden one digital camera pointed at that chamber from the plant’s wall. She’d mounted two extra with microphones on the car-sized cages inside. When she’d tried to descend additional down the shaft’s ladder, a burning “air hunger” from residual CO₂ in the chamber had pressured her to climb out once more, gasping for breath, unable to plant her remaining cameras.

Safely again in her resort room throughout the metropolis, Deerbrook hoped to report the slaughterhouse gasoline chamber, in and out, for the first time in a US meat plant. In doing so, she aimed to disprove claims from the pork business and the gasoline chamber producer that this kind of suffocation represents a humane—even “painless”—type of killing.

At 5:25 am, as the plant’s operations started for the morning, she noticed the first half-dozen pigs herded into the chamber. Deerbrook’s first ideas have been a combination of pleasure and sensible anxieties: Were the digital camera angles proper? Was the body charge excessive sufficient?

Then the gentle in the video started to dim as the cage lowered into the carbon dioxide beneath. As Deerbrook watched, the pigs started to squeal and thrash violently round in the cage, struggling to flee and convulsing for practically a minute earlier than lastly laying nonetheless. “Pigs are very human-like in their screaming. And I wasn’t expecting to see them suffer for so long,” she says. “I knew it was going to be bad. But I wasn’t really prepared for the screaming.”

Deerbrook, nonetheless in her pajamas, sat on the resort mattress, observing her cellphone display screen in horror. The pictures and audio that she recorded would hang-out her nightmares for months to come back. “The only silver lining was the fact that I was able to download the footage,” she says. “Because once I started getting those first video clips, I knew: At least this is going to be documented.”