On Medical Mysteries and Feeling Like an Alien

In "A Medical Mystery Unfolds in Minnesota," in today's New York Times, Denise Grady reports that 12 slaughterhouse workers at Quality Pork Processors in Austin, Minnesota have become ill with a mysterious disorder that causes damage to their nerves.

Let's deconstruct:

• Here's why I feel like an alien: The slaughterhouse in question kills and butchers 19,000 hogs a day. Nineteen thousand hogs are brutally killed each day, and the story is about 12 people who have become ill, most of whom have recovered, and some of whom returned to work. Nineteen thousand hogs a day. And there's not a shred of concern for them.
  
• Those humans afflicted all worked at at or near the "head table," where they were involved in "blowing brains," which is exactly what it sounds like:

"As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

The brains were pooled, poured into 10-pound containers and shipped to be sold as food — mostly in China and Korea, where cooks stir-fry them, but also in some parts of the American South, where people like them scrambled up with eggs."

• One woman who fell ill and whose job was "backing heads," which is the scraping of the meat from between the vertebrae, was constantly covered in brains, so the origin of the illness is definitely hog brains. Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield hopes to find the cause of the illnesses and calls the situation "[A] great detective story." How exciting! I love a good mystery!
  

When I look at the photo above, which has the caption: "Pigs at another company's plant," I am nauseated and distressed. What if they were dogs? Why is it that we can slaughter 19,000 hogs in one day, at just one plant, and the reporter doesn't find anything wrong with that? What has become of our sense of right and wrong when the story is about the 12 people, most of whom have recovered and none of whom had their brains blown out, rather than about what we do as a matter of course to sentient beings? Why isn't the story about the "distinctive scent" of the plant that makes it "easy to find from just about anywhere in town?" Do you think that stench is harmless? And why do we think we wouldn't have problems (other than the obvious karmic ones) when we blow animals to smithereens?

When I look at the hogs above, the mantra vegan education rings hollow. We have so much more to do than that. We have to change the way our entire society views sentient beings. Any ideas about how we can expedite the education of the masses? Billions of hogs just like those looking at you in the photo above are counting on us to turn this machine around. For them, "sorry, but not during our lifetime" doesn't help.   

Comments

[Dan Cudahy]

It is alienating - to say the least - to be sane and see our treatment of pigs (and billions of other nonhuman beings) as insane in a world that is insane and sees this treatment as sane.

About the lameness of “vegan education” in the face of such barbarism, I don’t have any suggestions fit for print. It seems the only thing humans understand is violence, violence, violence. I’ve argued in the past that violence doesn’t work, but I’m starting to develop apathy toward violence as a method of effecting change that will probably lead me to future silence about it. One can make a strong argument that peaceful education doesn’t work any better than violence, so who cares? Why argue for nonviolence with a species that has insisted on violence from its beginnings?

I would like to know: if we don’t care about 19,000 pigs per day (about 5.3 million annually), why we should care at all about 12 humans, whether or not those humans lived or died, or whether or not they had brain damage from breathing in pig brains?

[Ari Moore]

Awesome post. Thanks for this.

[Christopher]

I looked at the NYT photo of the Quality Pork facility, and while it looks to be a large facility, it's not THAT large.

Yet they are able to kill 19,000 a day.

If they run 24 hours a day, then that's equivalent to one sentient being snuffed out in fear and confusion every 4.5 seconds.

With 1300 workers, that means a kill rate of 14.5 sentient beings per person per day. (I know that the rate is exponentially higher in terms of the specific workers actually doing the slaughtering.)

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the huge numbers - 10 billion, 25 billion, etc.). After a certain number of zeroes, those huge numbers become almost metaphorical in terms of one's ability to really grasp them.

But in reading this story about a mystery neurological disease, I was struck by how small, relative to the numbers, Quality Pork's plant appears.

A relatively small number of humans can accomplish a lot in a single day -- in this case a terrible lot -- but this fact of humanity's great destructive/creative potential is the double-edged sword we should not forget.

Humans -- the extremely violent creatures we are -- created this system.

There must be a way humans can uncreate it, to evolve to a different food system.

Vegan education may in itself be a seemingly hopeless cause in our lifetime, but maybe it's the only path to an eventual peace between homo sapiens and our fellow earthlings.

Maybe the "critical mass" of awakened people isn't as high as we think it is. Maybe it's not THAT far away from being realized. Who knows? Maybe the tipping point is a relatively small percentage of the world's population. We just need to keep pushing to find out where that tipping point lies.

We may feel like aliens right now, but we can be hopeful, humble before the nature of the challenge -- humility is good for keeping egos lean and agile -- and strong in our sense of purpose and our community with not just other vegans, but all sentient beings.