The Meatgrinder.

 Keith Tester (1997: 88) asserts that due to their strategies of war, the North American army in Vietnam became ‘little more than a giant killing machine’.  If one were to claim that, in many senses, a modern-day slaughterhouse is nothing less than this, a killing machine, critical responses stating that the two case are ‘entirely separate’ could well be expected, just as analogies between nonhuman slaughter and genocide are often heavily criticised. 

Yet, the US army in Vietnam had a specific organised strategy to encourage the killing of more enemy soldiers than could be replaced from North Vietnam.  This strategy was known as ‘the meatgrinder’ and, according to the Pentagon Papers of 1971, it was the idea of General Westmoreland.  Tester explains that, ‘The goal of the meatgrinder was the maximisation of the body count of the number of Vietcong killed during a mission’ (1997: 88).  As a calculated ‘index of success’, practical rewards and powerful incentives such as increased leave became attached to the increasingly brutal practice of ‘meatgrinding’, resulting in large numbers of Vietnamese civilians being deliberately counted as enemy soldiers to increase kill statistics.  In language reminiscent of that in Gail Eisnitz’s ethnographic investigation of slaughterhouses in the USA, Westmoreland’s ‘meatgrinder strategy’ became involved in calculating its ‘kills’, ‘the production of corpses’, ‘body counts’ and ‘kill rates’. 

In 1987, Colonel David H. Hackworth co-wrote a book about his wartime experiences.  The most decorated officer in the US army at the time of his retirement in 1971, Hackworth candidly described battle as being like ‘working in a slaughterhouse’.  Again analogous with sections of Eisnitz’s account of nonhuman slaughter regimes, Hackworth states: ‘At first the blood, the gore, gets to you.  But after a while you don’t see it, you don’t smell it, you don’t feel it’ (quoted in Joanna Bourke 1999: 355).  Similarly, in a book written much earlier in 1943, soldier Richard Tregaskis said there is eventually ‘no horror’ in seeing death.  Whereas the first corpse may be shocking, the rest becomes mere ‘repetition’ (1999: 355). 

An element present even in such repetitious killing is the understanding that it could be ‘you’ rather than ‘them’ to be killed.  It is perhaps not immediately obvious that an extremely similar cognisance is also present in animal slaughterhouses.  For example, according to Eisnitz’s interviewees, processing speed means that many nonhuman animals on slaughter lines are frequently not stunned adequately - or not rendered unconscious at all due to error or sloppy practice - and this leaves them terrified.  Many animals are often in pain from repeated attempts to stun them, they thrash about as they hang by their legs on a moving shackle line as they are propelled toward ‘operatives’ whose job is to kill them (by ‘bleeding them out’) with a knife.  They then move on to other workers who must cut various body parts off or remove skin. 

In these chaotic circumstances injuries to the human operatives, some serious and even life-threatening, may occur.  Slaughter staff are constantly wary of the dangers around them and often have weapons, such as baseball bats, to hand in case the larger animals fall from the slaughter line.  As a consequence of all of this, as with many soldiers, a defensive ‘get them before they get us’ mentality can emerge. 

As Bourke shows in the detail of human warfare, it appears to be the case that, when any form of killing becomes regarded as routine activity, the act itself can become almost forgotten.  In such circumstances, other objectives, such as simply ‘getting the job done quickly’, may emerge as the chief priority.  For example, a slaughterer called Tice told Eisnitz that what ‘pisses [him] off’ were cases in which animals would not ‘accept’ that they were ‘due’ to be killed.  Tice believes a pig should accept that ‘it is in the stick pit’ and ‘you are going to kill it’ (quoted in Eisnitz 1997: 93, emphasis in original). 

Without such ‘co-operative acceptance’ - or in actual nonhuman escape attempts judged to break the routine and thereby threaten throughput and thus wages - individual pigs may be regarded simply as ‘troublemakers’ (for resisting their own deaths) and may be severely punished for it. 

Tice, whose job was to ‘stick’ pigs says he once was left with a ‘live hog’ running around his work area because she had fallen off the shackle line.  As one of these uncooperative ‘troublemakers’, thus an ‘enemy’ of smooth operational efficiency, the unfortunate pig, like all enemies in the battlefield, found herself due no sympathy: ‘It would be just looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and -errk- cut its eye out while it was just sitting there.  And this hog would just scream’.  He goes on:

One time I took my knife - it’s sharp enough - and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of bologna.  The hog went crazy for a few seconds.  Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid.  So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose.  Now the hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place.  I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand - I was wearing rubber gloves - and I stuck the salt right up the hog’s ass.  The poor hog didn’t know whether to shit or go blind (1997: 93).

Several studies, in disciplines such as sociology, history and psychology, have attempted to make estimations of the ‘brutalisation’ effect of involvement in harm causing.  For example, in the sociology of crime, many studies have investigated whether the experience of military service revealed itself at some later point in, say, crime or suicide statistics (see Bourke 1999: 356-59, 495).  Similarly, there has been a good deal of recent research conducted to evaluate the assumed causal link between nonhuman abuse and the later abuse of human beings.  To some extent, these latter endeavours are based on the Kantian notion of ‘indirect duties’; that is, that there should be a prohibition against overt cruelty to animals due to its effect on the people doing it and on human society in general. 

Thus Kant said: ‘He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealing with men’.  On the other hand, ‘tender feelings towards dumb animals develop humane feelings towards mankind’ (Immanuel Kant, quoted in Tom Regan 2001: 12). Interestingly, it may be argued that one of the main justifications for institutionalised animal welfarism is based on such an idea.  After all, animal welfarism does not prevent the human instrumental use of other animals.  Neither does it necessarily save nonhuman lives.  Yet it does apparently serve to convince whole populations that such exploitation can be seen as entirely justified, largely unproblematic and effectively policed and regulated.