Bearing Witness: We Will Not Forget You

Image courtesy Guelph Pig Save.

"Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory."

- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

Bearing witness is the act of seeing something, and then going on to provide evidence for - or memories of - what you saw. It can be a tremendously difficult act, especially when you are witnessing something that involves the suffering of human beings or animals. 

This morning I went with my companion to bear witness at a slaughterhouse. Conestoga Meat Packers in nearby Woolwich, Ontario, is - in its own words - "a processor of premium quality, fresh pork." The company, tucked away in the midst of endless cornfields, with farms as neighbours, provides many jobs in this area, and they have a well-deserved reputation for treating pigs as humanely as a slaughterhouse possibly can. 

These are not the violent, animal-beating thugs you see in shocking undercover exposés of slaughterhouses. By all accounts, the men and women who work at Conestoga are conscientious and caring workers, who move the pigs through as quickly and efficiently as possible, and stun the animals with the inhalation of CO₂ before the killing actually occurs.

The process is professional and quick and by the book. It is safe to say that this is how the very best slaughterhouses in North America operate.

Even when slaughterhouses adhere to the strictest of regulations, as this one does, they are factories of death. Make no mistake about it: There is no such thing as "humane slaughter." I experienced the deeper meaning of this profound truth this morning, when I joined my comrades in bearing witness.

My companion and I arrived early in the morning, before 7 a.m. We were the first witnesses there. We found ourselves in the middle of Ontario farm country. We parked on a side road, hidden in a sea of corn stalks, and walked up the road a little ways to get to the production facility. 

We reached the tall chain link fence surrounding the complex and the pair of entrances where the trucks came through. Signs warned that security cameras watched the area around the gates. When we got there, workers were busily emptying a truck and pig squeals rang out across the otherwise serene farmland.

Since my companion planned to write about the morning event for the newspaper where she works, she went off to find for the organizers. I stayed by the entrance and listened to the cries of the animals and the loud, metallic thumping of pig feet thundering on the floor of the vented livestock trailer. 

The sadness I felt standing alone at that gate, listening to those shrieks of terror, proved almost more than I could bear. Yet I remained there, determined to hear it, absorb it, and feel it as deeply as I could.

The activists from Guelph Pig Save soon arrived. They broke out the signs. "We Deserve Respect" (above a pig's picture), "I Am Someone" (same), "We Love You & We're Sorry," "Respect All Life," and "Pigs Are Friends - Pigs Are NOT Food." Eventually, we were joined by the tireless and heroic Anita Krajnc of Toronto Pig Save, who has always been a huge source of inspiration for me. Our numbers would soon grow to just over twenty. 

Before I go any further, let me say that the men and women who came out to bear witness this morning are some of the finest, most courageous, sincere and dedicated people I've ever had the good fortune of meeting. Many are young. They believe in what they're doing right down to the bottom of their hearts and the marrow of their bones. They are all, to a person, humble and regard each another as kindred spirits in the struggle to end the madness that happens inside of these slaughterhouse walls. 

I greeted organizers with warm handshakes. Normally, I am shy and tend to be aloof in social settings. In the presence of these saintly folks, however, I found myself opening up, talking, sharing. Men and women who were veterans of these morning gatherings still got choked up and teary eyed. 

"You have to let yourself feel it," one of the organizers told me. "Never stop feeling it, never stop taking it all in. Always let it make you sad. Don't try to get past the pain or the sorrow. If that's what you're feeling, you're feeling the right thing." 

Truck backing into Conestoga Meat Packers.

Sometime around quarter past seven, we heard the roar of a diesel engine. Another truck arrived, hauling a massive cargo of squealing, stressed-out passengers on their final trip. As it moved past me, so close I could touch it, I saw their eyes and snouts and trembling bodies. Right as the truck passed me, a little frog jumped around the grass. As luck would have it, the frog - like me - occupied a place on the food chain that meant she would be spared from mass murder today. 

Some of the organizers sprinted and kept pace with the truck as it headed toward the second entrance. They took pictures and poured water into the trailer's oval and rectangular openings. 

What I'll remember the most is the smell of the trailer going past me. It gave off the mixed scents of life, of living, breathing beings - their bodies, their feces and all of the odors made more pronounced by the body heat in that small, cramped space.

Once inside the parking lot, the truck looped around so it could back up to the loading bay. In order to do this, it had to pull a ways out of the first entrance, where I stood with several Guelph Pig Save witnesses. The big rig chugged right past me and hissed to a halt, bringing me face to face with the passengers inside. I reached out and petted their fur, touched their snouts, looked into frightened eyes, and apologized for the monstrous crime being committed by my species.

Grinding gears, the truck hissed again, its engine revved and it backed up to the pigs' final destination. It stopped at the loading dock and the driver killed the engine. After that, everything was quiet for a while. Eventually, those painful squeals resumed, along with the sound of countless feet thumping on the floor of that giant wheeled box and the ramp leading into the slaughterhouse.

The shrieks, the cries, each lacerating the heart and the soul, screaming and wailing in a way that made you realize they knew what dark fate awaited them. This was their final walk into the labyrinth of death. I curled my fingers around the chain link fence and listened to the shrill screeches. 

By this time, past 7:30, the sun bathes the farmland in a golden hue, and the soft, cool wind fans the corn stalks. And you notice something. The screaming has stopped. All you really hear at this point is the humming and hissing of machines. The pigs have gone silent, except for the occasional distant squeal that somehow penetrates that fortress wall.

The activists are here for each other every bit as much as they're here for the pigs. We talk. We exchange email addresses. We plan future events. A police car arrives and parks nearby for a while. The black and white circles, cruises past us, and stays put down the road, by a stop sign, watching our movements.

We hate to leave. Somehow, leaving feels like we're betraying those innocent beings that met their end here. But we have to go. We have no choice. We've got lives to live, jobs to go to, family and friends to see, appointments to meet. 

Car doors slam. Tires kick up dust. Soon, the gates where all of these wonderful, spirited men and women gathered fall silent once again, until the day shift personnel at Conestoga head for home.

Leaving the scene around 9 a.m., my companion and I held hands on the way to our car. We talked about what we've seen. The experience deepens our love for each other, watching something so unspeakably tragic together. We've both borne witness on that morning, and bearing witness with someone you love pulls you that much closer to her or him. We will never forget what we saw on the morning of August 7, 2013, for as long as we live. 

After I dropped her off at her house, I drove to my appointments at the university. I tried but could not take my mind off of those pigs. Oddly, as I drove, I began to think of the Hubble Telescope and the stunning images of space that it has given us.

 Believe it or not, the Hubble is connected to the pigs, as all things in the universe are connected to one another.

Since NASA first launched the powerful, state-of-the-art telescope into space in 1990, the Hubble has taught us how vast, how spectacular, how endless our universe is, through the vivid and breathtaking images of stars and nebulae and planets and other galaxies it has sent back.

It also reminds us of how tiny each one of us is in the ultimate scheme of it all.

Those pictures of distant celestial bodies, light years away, drive home an important point. Most of the universe is a cold and lifeless place. Our planet is one of the few tiny specks in the vastness where life has taken hold, multiplied, proliferated, changed, over billions of years.

There is something deeply mysterious about life, and that great mystery begins at conception. Human beings have a gestation period of 266 days, or 38 weeks. For pigs, being in the womb lasts 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days. In a cold and indifferent universe, each life ought to matter, and each human being and each pig should be born into a world full of care and kindness.

Instead, so many human beings are born into circumstances of indifference or violence, while pigs are systematically bred for slaughter. In an endless universe where we inhabit one of the precious few life-filled specks (the only one that scientists know of), shouldn't all sentient beings be regarded as precious?

Is it really worth committing murder, ending a life that is not ours to destroy, to consume bacon for breakfast, or pulled pork sandwiches for lunch, or ham for dinner? Bear in mind, the eating of pig flesh - or any other food made of animals - can be measured in minutes and brings only temporary satisfaction to the eater.

Are we going to be a species that continues to exercise such brute force to satisfy our basest of impulses?

Or are we going to evolve to the next stage of our development, cast off the consumption of animals forever, and live by a different, more meaningful set of ethics?

This morning, each of the men and women bearing witness at Conestoga Meat Packers provided a meaningful alternative to the way things are now. Each became, in his or her own way, a warm ray of light in the frigid vastness of space.

In the final analysis, we are all heading to the same place as those pigs. Do we as a species want to mark our fleeting existence by violently ending the lives of sentient beings lower on the food chain? Do we want to be the reason why those trucks pass through those gates full of terrified living beings, only to exit those same gates void of life?

Or do we wish to evolve into a more enlightened species that instinctively preserves life in a vast and cold and indifferent universe?

The decision is ours. Alas, we don't have long to make it.

Guelph Pig Save witnesses at the gate of Conestoga Meat Packers, August 7, 2013.

Should be Mandatory Viewing: Bearing Witness by Toronto Cow Save

This is heartbreaking video shot by the wonderful activists in Toronto who organized Toronto Pig Save. It should be mandatory viewing. Thank you to the brave and inspiring Anita Krajnc for bringing it to my attention. Bless you Anita and all the activists with Toronto Cow Save!

Please watch it. It does not show gore, only terrified cows on their way to death. 

And please, please, please - if you haven't already, please go Vegan!

If you already have, right on! You're a kindred spirit.

Great People Fighting the Good Fight

I've made plugs for Toronto Pig Save before. This is a wonderful group of people, based in Toronto, nonviolently bearing witness and resisting the slaughter of these innocent animals.

Have a look at this video. It's a wonderful interview with TPS founder Anita Krajnc. Anita has been a huge inspiration in this region to other animal rights activists. Her eloquence, her persistence, her passion for the cause of teaching people about the barbaric practice of slaughtering pigs, makes her one of the most effective spokespeople of a movement I've seen in a long time.

This is a small movement, but it's growing. TPS now has 427 supporters on Facebook. They're fighting the noblest of noble battles. They deserve support, and for those who are thinking about starting a similar movement in their own community, the example of TPS is worth examining.

Check out Anita in this video and I'm sure you'll agree: This isn't just a Good Fight. It's a Great Fight.

Mandatory Viewing: Another Video from Toronto Pig Save

The heroic men and women of Toronto Pig Save are fighting a noble battle against the slaughter of pigs at Quality Meat Packers and other slaughterhouses in the Toronto area.

Please watch this video to understand what they're up against. Pigs across North America are being transported in packed trucks in record high temperatures, spending their final moments in agony before they're murdered so human beings can devour their flesh. For those of you who do not follow temperatures in celsius, 38 degrees equals about 101 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the temperature on Thursday when these poor beings were crammed into a transport truck and taken to the last place they will ever be alive.

"There is a crime that goes beyond denunciation," John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath. He could have been describing this scene.

Toronto Pig Save is helping to create glass walls, and, in the process, tearing down the walls of denial. A lot of people will go out of their way not to watch these videos - not to gaze into the abyss and view the horror and suffering firsthand - because they want their ham or their bacon or their pork. But we need to keep battering away at these walls.

Hit, hit, hit, hit these walls, like waves crashing on the shore. Tear them down brick by brick. Demolish them until there is nothing left standing.

Because, take my word for it my friends, this ghastly scene is not confined to Toronto. It has taken place in city after city, country after county, and this "damned human race" (now quoting Mark Twain) has so much blood on its hands. The blood of innocents.

The only way to stop this madness is for everybody to go vegan. That may seem like a pipe dream. But when the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) started his newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and called for the immediate emancipation of his enslaved brothers and sisters and an end to chattel slavery, that was the ultimate pipe dream. Slavery had the government on its side. It had the courts on its side. It had the forces of coercion and the power of wealth on its side. And, yet, thirty-five years after Garrison published the first Liberator and 1,820 issues later, the institution of slavery crumbled into the garbage heap of history.

The mass murder of animals will one day be added to that same wretched garbage heap.

Mobilizing to Help the Pigs: In Praise of Toronto Pig Rescue

Across North America, livestock are being transported to killing factories in sweltering heat. It is bad enough that they are being slaughtered in such huge numbers, but to have to be squeezed into truck trailers by the dozens and dozens, with barely enough room to move, while the heat pounds down on them, is unthinkable.

Yesterday alone, here in southwestern Ontario, temperatures hit 38 Celsius (about 101 Fahrenheit). Factor in what they call the Humidex - an index used by Canadian meteorologists to figure out what the temperature really feels like to people once humidity is factored in - and you reach temperatures that feel like about 43 Celsius/110 Fahrenheit.

A few days ago, I blogged about Quality Meat Packers, a killing factory in Toronto where up to 6,000 pigs are processed every day.

What I failed to say is that small numbers of Torontonians are mobilizing. People in the region have formed a group called Toronto Pig Save. So far, they've launched letter writing campaigns to public officials and key political figures, picketed at various slaughterhouses, taken videos and photographs of distressed pigs, and attempted to speak to workers at these facilities in an effort to start a dialogue about what's going on. Their efforts have drawn media attention to the suffering of the animals.

Most of these activists are committed vegans who understand that winning new converts takes time and lots of hard work.

Yet when you begin to think of the suffering that so many animals are enduring on a daily basis, in what essentially amounts to assembly line murder, you get that sick sense of restlessness, that stabbing feeling that maybe small pockets of sane, reasonable, rational human beings aren't sufficient to counteract disturbing patterns of human destructiveness.

But the wonderful folks at Toronto Pig Save (see their fantastic Website here) are trying. They're part of a larger vegan and animal rights community in the city - and indeed, the region - working to open people's eyes to the suffering. That community has grown over the years. New people are waking up all the time. They are opening their eyes. They're starting to realize that reclaiming our humanity involves embracing nonviolence and compassion, and veganism is the ultimate expression of those values.

Those poor pigs are still out there in the sweltering sun, suffering, with no sweat glands, no means to cool down, knowing nothing but agony in their final days. But like the abolitionists of the 19th Century, who faced overwhelming odds in their efforts to undermine slavery, decent committed people are not giving up on them.

Postscript: To speak out against this madness, I wrote the following letter to The Globe and Mail, Canada's version of The New York Times. I don't know if they'll print it. If it doesn't appear shortly, I'll give The National Post a try.

Dear Editor,

Right now, as most of us struggle to stay cool, a tragedy is unfolding in our midst. Each day in this sweltering heat, truckloads pigs are left outside in the sun next to Quality Meat Packers Limited on Tecumseh Street in Toronto. The pigs squeal in agony, packed into nightmarish, oven-like conditions. Dazed, overheated, their snouts bleed from pressing against the walls of the truck trailers. They have no sweat glands, so their internal body temperature spikes. All the while, the heat blazes down on them relentlessly, making the final moments of their short lives unbearable. Efforts by concerned citizens to bring relief to the pigs are met with resistance by plant managers.

Six thousand pigs a day are processed at Quality Meat Packers. They know nothing but misery before their lives are cut short to fill our plates with meat we do not need to consume in order to survive. Sadly, Quality Meat Packers is not unique. This deplorable treatment is standard operating procedure for pork producers. “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” said Mahatma Gandhi. Ask yourself if this is the kind of Canada you want.

Andrew Hunt