In The Dying Trade, a forthcoming documentary film about slaughterhouse workers, a man named Tom describes a moment during his career that still haunts him many years later: the time he skinned a cow alive while she was giving birth.

Tom worked at slaughterhouses across Europe from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, and one of his jobs on the production line was to remove the skin from animals after they had been hung up, stunned unconscious, and bled out. That’s how it’s supposed to work in theory.

But slaughterhouses operate at a rapid, hectic pace, with animals sometimes stunned improperly and butchered while still alive and conscious. If a cow remained conscious once they got to Tom — as was the case with this cow in particular, whose calf was partially hanging out of her birth canal — he was unable to stop the line to ensure they were properly killed. So, as the cow kicked at him, mid-birth, he had no choice but to skin her alive. The calf didn’t survive.

“It takes 25 seconds,“ to skin them, he said in The Dying Trade, “but it stays with you for the rest of your life.”

Tom, who calls himself a “devout animal lover,” said that it’s “very difficult watching animals being killed.” But the job desensitizes you: “You become a robot.” Other slaughterhouse workers have made similar remarks.

To cope, Tom spent most of his slaughterhouse career as a functioning alcoholic, drinking as soon as he got off work until he went to bed. He took magic mushrooms on weekends to escape. He also dissociated at work, spending much of his time on the production line “thinking I was on holiday…I would dream I was in Spain somewhere — just anywhere but what I was doing.” Now, he said, he lives like a hermit and still dreams about slaughterhouses six to seven nights a week. He also has violent thoughts of hurting people, which he had never had prior to working in meat processing.

“I suffer with PITS as a result,” Tom said, referring to perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a subcategory of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in which the cause of the trauma is being a perpetrator of violence — in this case, slaughtering animals for food — rather than being a victim of it.

Physical injury rates are high in slaughterhouses, making it one of the more dangerous occupations. But much less is known about the mental and emotional toll of slaughterhouse work. Psychology researchers have difficulty accessing slaughterhouse worker populations, and so we’re left with a handful of small studies. As a result, it’s unknown exactly what share of the world’s millions of slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD or other mental health conditions.

But........

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