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What It's Really Like to Work in an Abattoir

We hide animal tongues in our friend's lunch and de-plug pig hair from broken machines.
Hannah Ewens
London, GB
Foto via Pixabay-brugeren Jai79

(Top photo by Jai79, via Pixabay)

An account from 36-year-old Brad, as told to Hannah Ewens. 

Just like a hospital has a distinctive smell, abattoirs smell like warm blood. There's iron in the air all the time – even over the bleach you can still smell it.

You hear stories of people throwing up on their first day or freaking out and leaving straight away. But most know what they're getting into. These are rough jobs, so while they're all good, honest lads who work in abattoirs, they kill things for a living. You have to have a bit of a different mindset for it. I grew up in the Lake District so I was hunting my whole life and used to have my own farm where I'd butcher my own animals. It's an early start – 4:30AM – and an early finish – 2PM – and that suits me.

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There are always two parts inside an abattoir: a clean side and a dirty side. Animals have to go through the dirty side first before you go into where it's going to be prepared for human consumption. The dirty side is where all the guts and the hair and the skin's removed. It's a proper production line, really.

First they get electric shocks. Cows used to be done with a bolt gun. It was basically like the end of a shotgun barrel and you'd put that on the forehead of the cow and then hit the top of it with a hammer and it would send a bolt slowly into its brain. Obviously they could see it happening and were scared shitless. It was quite horrible 20 years ago, but regulations in place at work now make it a lot better. You've got to keep an animal de-stressed, because there's nothing worse than a stressed animal before it's slaughtered. You ruin the meat, so it's worth nothing anyway. Now, they use the electrocution method, which is a lot more humane.

"When you'd fix the pig dehairer, because of all the fats, oils and bits of pig on it, as soon as you started welding something it'd turn into basically smelling like a rotten bacon sandwich."

Then you slit and bleed them – it usually takes four or five hours to bleed a cow or a pig, or something of that size. Then you've got all of this dirty stuff to do, which is quite a nasty process. You have to take all their innards out and throw it together as contaminated waste. So you have barrels of guts basically just hanging around. Next is the processing: de-skin, de-furring. Dice them up and bag them up. If they weren't doing human food – say, cat or dog food – then all the regulations change; everything speeds up and you could get away with a lot more.

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A lot of what I was doing was machinery repairs, which was gruesome. Some were huge band saws, which could cut a whole cow in half easily. I had to fix the pig dehairer often. Once the pig had been bled it was put into this cylinder-shaped machine that looked like the inside of a cheese grater but not quite as sharp. The pig was spun in it to take the fine hair off. So you'd have a pig that was bouncing around in this cylinder three to four feet in the air, as it was going round and obviously that's a lot of weight coming down, so it used to break quite regularly. When you'd fix it, because of all the fats and the oils and bits of pig that were on it, as soon as you started welding something and putting heat into it it'd turn into basically smelling like a rotten bacon sandwich. It was quite grim. Almost enough to put you off – but not quite!

"Like any office there's banter and practical jokes. It's quite regular that someone will open their lunch box and find a cow's tongue in there or something."

To be fair, the hygiene side of it is phenomenal. You literally can't get away with anything. Abattoirs are inspected so regularly it's mental. Most people don't realise you spend a lot of your day cleaning.

It all sounds awful, but like any office there's banter and practical jokes. It's quite regular that someone will open their lunch box and find a cow's tongue in there or something.

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The darkest time was during the foot-and-mouth crisis in the early 2000s. So many lads lost their jobs, but lots of us were paid a ridiculously huge amount of money to go to the farms and help kill all the animals. You'd be killing 300 to 400 cows a day, for weeks. I was a loader, so I'd load bodies onto the fire, which is the only way you could kill the disease. There were just piles and piles of burning bodies, big black acidic smoke and the smell of barbecue in the air. You had to keep going over to make sure the bodies were still burning. Most people couldn't cut it, crying, and had to leave.

That was when the bolt guns started coming out again because you just couldn't do it any other way – at its height there were up to 50 new cases a day. Cows aren't stupid; they could hear the bangs going off, probably thinking, 'All my mates go through that curtain and then the bangs go off.' Some animals were deep into the foot-and-mouth symptoms. It attacks the nervous system, and the back legs are usually first to go, so they can hardly walk and are falling over. You had to almost pick them up to take them to get killed.

"We saved thousands of British farms but it was not the nicest situation for man or beast. I wouldn't want to live through it again."

There was a human side to it, too, dealing with the farmers affected and their families. They were losing their entire stock of animals, literally going bankrupt overnight. I was going back round to my farm very worried about whether I had it on me – what if I am carrying it home, bringing it into my area?

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We saved thousands of British farms, but it wasn't the nicest situation for man or beast. It was a very hard time because you never really see death on that sort of scale, even if you're at an abattoir every single day. I wouldn't want to live through it again.

But honestly? I find the whole process of the job quite a rewarding thing. You go out, you kill an animal, you butcher it, you eat it. It's not got all the chemicals and preservatives. The biggest problem is that people don't know where their food is from; they don't think about the process. Food is all too easy. None of them really know that milk and meat comes from a cow. They don't think of me, they don't think of my job in there.

@hannahrosewens

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