Chapter Text
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
It is easier if I record live and can therefore ask any clarifying questions. You are still welcome to make a written statement if you prefer, or in addition. I certainly don't want to limit the amount of information coming into the Institute.
[ARCHIVIST CHUCKLES; THERE IS A LONG SILENCE]
ROSA
Yes. My name is Rosa Gutierrez, I heard about you online. You take statements from people who encountered the supernatural?
ARCHIVIST
...You could call it that. You had an encounter, I assume.
ROSA
Yes. Do I just...start?
ARCHIVIST
Ah, one moment. Statement of Rosa Gutierrez regarding some encounters whilst working at a commercial slaughterhouse in Arkansas. Statement taken direct from subject 24th November, 2016. Statement begins.
ROSA
I worked for a major meat production company. It wasn't my dream job, but there's not a lot of options in Arkansas for a high school dropout, so when I heard about the position, I applied. Imagine my surprise when they called me back. My slaughterhouse has expanded a lot since I was hired, so even though when I was brought on board they just did poultry, they now do meat, poultry, and others. All sorts. But at the time I was trained on chickens, and that's where the worst of it happened.
I didn't grow up on a farm, like a lot of my coworkers did. They all have stories about watching Da kill a hen for dinner, or going out shooting with their friends. I grew up in a single-wide trailer with my parents and four siblings. We had a dog and he ate store brand kibble. That was my animal experience until I was twenty-two. Technically I'm a high school dropout because I never bothered to get a GED, but it's more that I flunked so many classes they wouldn't let me graduate. So I just left. Got a job at a warehouse moving boxes on third shift. It messed up my sleep schedule, but it paid well and all they wanted was a body that could work hard and fast between ten pm and six am. I’d been there there four years when I heard about a job at a slaughterhouse. The pay was almost double, and they'd let you substitute years worked for academic qualifications. I applied, of course, but didn't realize how much it would matter, the not knowing about animals.
My boss ended up wanting me for three reasons: I'm a US citizen, I speak both English and Spanish, and he knew I could deal with the weight and the noise. The other workers are split between Mexicans here on an expired visa and rednecks who never decided to get out of town. Boss doesn't turn anyone over when ICE comes sniffing around, but he likes to use me as an example. His resident Hispanic citizen. Hoping, probably, that the officers assume all the other Mexicans are citizens too.
But that's not what you wanted from me.
I killed thousands of chickens. Regulations change just about every year, but now the standard is electric waterbaths. It's a little more complicated than most. We get the chickens in on trucks, each one packed full of crates with as many as will fit. It stinks of crap and the moment the light hits them, they all wake up and start screaming. First thing was to unload the crates. Then the next job, which was my job most days, is to pick up a chicken by its neck, swing it upside down, and attach its ankles to the shackles on the conveyor belt. As the belt rolls along, the chicken is pulled deeper into the slaughterhouse. Eventually it reaches the water, which is electrified. When its head enters the water, it gets an electric shock and passes out. At the end of the bath is another worker with a knife.
You learn pretty fast that even though it's supposed to be all humane, and chickens are stupid and don't know what's coming, that's not really true. The trucks come in at all hours so sometimes it's 3 am and mistakes are made. Once someone dropped a crate and hens scattered everywhere. But that's rare. More often it's just before shift end and the guys are screwing about with how many times they can spin the chickens before attaching them to the shackles. Stuff like that. I hadn't been working there a month the first time it happened. One of the others, I don't remember his name, grabbed his hen, took her ankles, and swung her around.
I've never felt so dizzy as then. Like all my blood went to my head and then, I dunno, swirled around until I had to sit down, right there on the floor. The guys gave me crap about it, being one of the only women on the floor, wanting to know if I was okay, if I was too soft hearted for the job. I wasn't, though. I've swung a chicken myself, after one of the bastards bit me. But just for a moment, I felt like the chicken.
I didn't realize it then, of course. But that was the first time.
I sat in the break room for a bit, and when I went back out I was fine. I had to work twice as hard for a while to get them all to shut up, and I wrote it off as just a weird coincidence. It's easy, you know, to dismiss things like that. Tell yourself that a dizzy spell has no connection to the cruelty going on around you. Just ignore it. We forget, a lot, that chickens have the same capacity for pain as we do. Even though they can't talk like us or make things like us, I can't imagine you'd like it if someone picked you up by the ankles and swung you around.
I didn’t really believe it though, that chickens feel just like we do, until the next time. See, if the head goes into the water first, the electricity makes a circle and zap, lights out. But if a wing touches, the bird jerks and breaks the circle. And then it's just like sticking your finger into an outlet. I grabbed this chicken and usually they're all sleepy from the truck, but this one was fighting. I got it attached to the shackles somehow, but regulations were that I should've held it back until it was calmer. I didn't. We each had a quota to make and I didn't want to fall behind. So I hooked it up, let it go, and its wing went straight into the water.
I don't know that I thought they could feel pain until that moment. It jerked back and shook—and then the pain hit me. Like I'd stuck my finger in the water, which is a mistake you only make once. Just this white flash against my finger, and I was on the floor again and every muscle in my back hurt.
It was July. July 23rd, 2012, and about 80 degrees inside, so everyone thought I'd got heatstroke. They made me go into the break room and drink iced tea. I knew it wasn't heatstroke though, but I just sat there and took it. Heatstroke was easier to explain. Later, I decided it must've been heatstroke combined with a bad fall. It just didn't make sense otherwise. I mean, what else could have happened? I now have a psychic connection to chickens? My aunt is big into that sort of thing, but I'm not. So instead I just tried to forget about it.
I couldn't—can't—explain the next one. Broilers are your basic meat chicken, and they've been bred to grow fast. They're killed before maturity, most times, because at maturity they've got too much meat on them to move. The value of a chicken is based on how long it takes to get to sellable weight, about eight pounds. Shorter is better, so now we've got chickens who double their weight in a week and are sold at 7 weeks. But that comes with a price to the chicken, a price we don't care about. Almost none of the broilers can run properly, and I've heard that the broiler-breeders, their parents, are kept constantly starved, because if they ate all they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to move. And this is, you know, just how it is! Chicken is the most popular meat in the US, did you know that?
Broilers are all supposed to be the same weight when they come in, which usually means they're the same age. Mistakes happen, though. I grabbed a chicken from the crate and it—it was too big. Almost turkey sized, which I knew because I'd worked at the plant through fall by this point. As I picked it up and twisted my wrist to hang it by the ankles, it screamed. Like a full, human, horror movie scream. I dropped it—I mean, what would you do? Of course I dropped it. It hit the ground and that's when I got a good look at it. It's not unusual for chickens to come in already partially plucked—they're nasty, they peck each other all the time—but this one was completely bald. And the more I looked, the more it seemed like it had too many muscles. I'd heard about a mutation for double muscle, but this was more than that. Its wings didn't fold back, but were forced forward like arms. It couldn't walk. Just sat there, tipped forward on its chest because of all the meat, and screamed.
I grabbed it and dashed its head against a wall. We all stared at it until the manager yelled at us for delaying. Then I dumped it in the biohazard bag. I don't know what happened to it after that. I don't know what explanation the manager came up with, and I don't know where it came from. Here's what I do know: The company dreams of a chicken with that much meat on it. And I never, ever want to hear a sound like that again.
That wasn't my last incident with chickens. That happened a month later. We mostly processed human-grade meat, but sometimes we did pet food. Most of those chickens were laying hens, for eggs, and they were a lot older than the broiler chickens. Chickens can live to seven or eight, but they stop producing so many eggs at about two, so that's when the farms send them off to the slaughterhouse. Also they're kept in these cages—which I've never seen, but somehow touching the hens gave me nightmares about them all the same—packed together like sardines, except we have the courtesy to kill the sardines first. And hens are prickly about their personal space, so they peck each other if they don't get it. But hens that are trying to heal from wounds aren't laying so many eggs, so...The farms cut their beaks off. According to them, there’s no need to use any sort of painkiller, so they don’t. Their tongues stick straight up and they make the weirdest noises.
We were getting a crate of layers off the truck when one of them managed to get out. Again, it's rare, but it does happen, and it's more common in the layers than the broilers just because of their weight. She fell, and I could hear the crack when her keelbone hit the floor. But she got up, and... And it wasn't just her keelbone. It was her legs too, every time she took a step. There was this constant crackling noise as her bones fractured into millions of tiny pieces. And then she began to scream...
That time they had the USDA inspector take a look. He grabbed the hen and the weirdest expression went over his face. Then he dropped her again and began scratching his arm, over and over. We didn't know what to do, everyone just stood there, until he drew blood. Then James—James Arnold—pulled his hand away from his arm and got him to stop. But by that point someone else had grabbed the hen—Alejandro Rodriguez—and almost as quickly dropped her as his fingers...splintered.
There was more, but I don't remember. The hen ran straight for me at the last, I picked her up—because that's what you do, in a slaughterhouse if an animal escapes—and I...
ARCHIVIST
You do need to say it, I'm afraid.
ROSA
They called it a workplace accident. Covered all of my medical bills. And everyone on the floor got paid time off and free therapy, God knows we needed it. But I...
I don't have a nose. Not a natural one anymore. Somehow, that hen took off my nose and part of my upper jaw. Just like...just like debeaking.
[SOUNDS OF HEAVY BREATHING]
ARCHIVIST
Statement—
ROSA
No, there's more. It's okay.
I was off work for nine months but then. I had to go back. Even the therapist agreed, it would be good for me to get back to work and to work there. But they transferred me to cattle. It's different from chickens. For one thing, you don't use a waterbath. Cattle get the captive bolt gun and then a knife to the chest. Also you don't grab cattle. Maybe that's obvious. I'd never met a cow before so it wasn't, really. They come off the truck into these metal corridors, called chutes, that are so narrow they have to walk single file to the captive bolt gun. But cattle are stupid and slow and balk at everything, so my job was to walk on the catwalks above them and goad them along.
I should...I shouldn't say that, really. I don't think they're stupid anymore. But I did think that. And I did use an electric cattle prod. We were encouraged to process the cattle as fast as we could—if we ran out of cattle, we got an extra break—so I'd prod any who had stopped for a moment.
After the chickens, I was pretty jumpy anyway, so it took me a while to realize something else was happening. I would step out into the sun and have to freeze for a minute to let my eyes adjust—and not, don't say that's normal. My friends tried that and then they saw it happen, and it takes a minute. I can't see anything for a minute after moving from dark to light or back again. Which was odd, but sometimes things happen, you know? And after everything else it was just, well, one more thing. So I didn't think anything of it until we got a new USDA inspector, one who had just gotten her degree. She pulled me over at lunch one day and said, exact words, "You should give the cattle more time to start moving after they enter the building. It takes their eyes much longer to adjust than ours."
I blew her off, but it stuck with me. Their eyes take more time to adjust. I should wait until they adjust. And a week later, Carlos hit me with the cattle prod—in jest—when I had just stepped outside and was waiting until I could see again. I got it then. Somehow, and it was exactly like with the chickens, I had eyes like a cow. I took longer, after that, to start using the prod when the cattle arrived.
If it had just been that...I don't know. It was scary, don't get me wrong, but it was almost...useful. I started trying to understand how the cattle thought, if they do such a thing, and found some papers and books on it. There's a lot out there if you just start looking. Some of the others gave me crap about it, but since it didn't increase injuries, management didn't care. It meant I and whoever I was with took longer, but over time I found others who agreed with me and we got scheduled together a lot.
But it wasn't just that. I...They're not afraid of dying. But they are afraid of the sound of the metal chutes. They're not afraid of blood, but they'll refuse to move because someone left a jacket on the gate. They make friends. They have favorite people. They like to taste everything, just to see, even if they don't actually like to eat all that many things. I knew what the cows were feeling, and why, and even when it made me a better worker, it was... They are so scared. Not of the gun, God no. But of the chutes, of the strange people and the pain they can't predict, of the way they're being separated from their friends, of the weird lighting and odd shapes. That's what scares a cow.
I had to quit.
It got worse towards the end. I couldn't tell if it was the cow or me going into the squeeze box. Once somehow I ended up with the captive bolt gun pointed at my head. No one had an explanation for that. I stopped talking. Then there was...I uh, I got confused, I was on the captive bolt gun and I shot the chute so the cows all tried to bolt. The last incident was, well.
We got dairy cows in, sometimes. They were too old to give milk, so they’d been sent off to slaughter. A high yield dairy cow expends more calories in milk than she can possibly take in in fodder, but if she’s too fat when she gives birth the calf will get stuck. The result is by the time the milk dries up, dairy cows are horrifyingly skinny. At some point, the farmers aren’t getting enough out of them to make the feed worth it, and rather than feed them up on grass for a couple months before selling them on, they just send them straight to slaughter.
So we got in this load of cows, and every one of them had her hips jutting out and I could count the ribs. It’s horrible, really, what people will do in order to scrape a few extra pennies. I’d seen enough by then that I didn’t rush them. They weren’t familiar with the chutes and didn’t like the noise the floor made when they stepped along it, but they did move in steadily. This lot was coming in before lunch, so I was hungry anyway but it was worse than normal. I just put it down to the time of month and made sure the cows were following each other closely—once one gets out of sight, it can be hard to persuade the others to catch up. By the time we started processing the cows, I was starving. Not just hungry, but practically faint. I kept working though. You get used to a lot, in a slaughterhouse.
Eventually my partner that shift, Enrique Martinez, told me to go take a few. I asked why, and he said I looked like hell. I went off to the bathroom to run water over my face. Sometimes that helped when I was feeling lightheaded. I tripped and fell going in—just a normal accident, caught my shoe on the sill. But once I was down I couldn’t stand up. My legs were trembling and any time I tried to put weight on them, they shook so hard I fell back down.
No one else was in the bathroom at that point, so I took a risk and looked down my shirt. Here’s a secret about breasts: While your breasts might be larger than your friend’s at the same weight, when you gain or lose weight, your breasts gain and lose too. So it was pretty shocking to see them still the same size, but my stomach concave. My pants felt loose and that made sense now, because the only thing keeping them on was the drawstring. Otherwise my hips stuck out—just like the cows’—and I could guess that the reason I couldn’t stand was the muscle was gone from my legs.
It didn’t...it didn’t get better lying there. I hoped it would, that distance from the cows would help, but it didn’t. Eventually I had to call for help. It was another of those unexplained mysteries and was written up as another workplace accident, details confidential. I resigned on the spot. Two horrifying, body altering events was too many—one probably was, but I hadn’t learned in time.
I had to go to the regional hospital for refeeding. They thought I was anorexic, and I didn’t correct them. If anyone wondered why anorexia was covered under workman’s comp, they didn’t ask me. I have a new job now, compliance with the USDA, and that's okay. Pays enough for me to go on vacation here, at any rate, and once I was here I thought I should make a statement.
And I—humans argue a lot, you know, about whether cows are afraid of dying. They're not. I can say that now. But they are afraid, horribly afraid, of us. The most valuable tool to us is their fear of you. Even without knowing what we've done to them, or understanding that they're not meant to grow that fast, or caring at all about death—we’re still a cow's worst nightmare. It's not the dying. And it's not even that we eat them, except that the only difference between eating beef and eating humans is public opinion. They don't...they know that they could be happy. I know that I could be happy. And they're not, because it's too expensive. They don't understand that. They just want a little more than what we give them, and we refuse. Not for their benefit, but our own.
Doesn't that make us the villain?
[PAUSE]
ARCHIVIST
Statement...ends.
ROSA
I'll go then.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental. Well. I am...limited in what research can be done, except to verify that there was an incident at the named abattoir in a small town in Arkansas in 2012 which resulted in all employees present receiving over a month of sick leave, and that Rosa Gutierrez did work there at that time. That certainly had some similarities to previous statements, particularly David Laylow's. Both worked in an abattoir, both had...unusual encounters on the killing floor. But where David Laylow's was with another human, Rosa Gutierrez seemed to meet something entirely different. Or would that be multiple somethings? At any rate, I am somewhat more inclined to take her statement at face value than I was initially with David Laylow. There seem to be a number of statements involving meat and it would be rash to discard them without further investigation.
End supplemental.
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