Each year billions of animals are bred to a life of suffering for no reason other than humans’ selfish pleasure and the desire for profit.
It is very popular in the animal rights movement to say that the neatly wrapped packages of meat at the grocery store, successfully hide the suffering of each and every one of the hundreds of billions of sentients, that are born into this world each year.
Let’s break the walls of the slaughterhouses:

Chickens

“They are scalded alive, the chickens flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank.”

“I have seen workers rip the heads, legs, and wings off of live chickens, or just stomp them to death on the floor because they were aggravated. This occurred on a regular basis for about the last year and a half that I worked there. I have also seen a forklift driver, run over the chickens on purpose and then laugh about it. These kinds of incidents were ongoing and repetitive - just a part of a regular night's work.”

“I have witnessed a worker build dry ice bombs (made by putting dry ice and a small amount of water in a plastic Pepsi bottle and screwing the lid down tight) and putting it on the belt with live chickens during break time. This results in a high pressure explosion that rips the chickens' bodies apart and scatters them all over the room. This occurred numerous times, but the one I remember the most was one night last June when he made a small dry ice bomb by shoving a piece of dry ice up a live chicken's rectum, then plugging it with a wooden cork. It built up enough pressure inside the chicken to blow it apart.”

Pigs

“In the winter, some hogs come in all froze to the sides of the trucks. They tie a chain around them and jerk them off the walls of the truck, leave a chunk of hide and flesh behind. They might have a little bit of life left in them, but workers throw them on piles of dead ones. They'll die sooner or later because there's nothing left to them.”

“I've seen them put twenty to twenty-five holes in a hog's head trying to knock her and she was still on her feet. Her head looked like Swiss cheese. Tough gal. Sometimes they'll use a twenty-two and shoot the hog through its eye. Or you might have to hit both eyes on the same hog.”

“After a while you become desensitized. And as far as animals go, they're a lower life-form. They're maybe one step above a maggot. When you got a live, conscious hog, you not only kill it, you want to make it hurt. You go in hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Take out an eyeball, split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit with me. It would be looking up at me and I would just take my knife and--eerk--take its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream.”

“These hogs get up to the scalding tank, hit the water, and just start screaming and kicking. I'm not sure whether the hogs burn to death before drowning. The water is 140 degrees, not that hot. I don't believe the hogs go into shock, because it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing. I think they die slowly from drowning.”

Cows

“It takes 25 minutes to turn a live steer into a steak at the modern slaughterhouse. The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got into the slaughterhouse. But too often they weren't. They blink. They make noises. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around. On bad days, dozens of animals reached my station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. They die piece by piece.”

“I've seen cattle dragged and choked, knocked four, five, ten times. I've found them alive clear over to the rump stand. Takes them about ten minutes to get to the rump stand. That's after they've been completely legged [had their legs removed] and run through an electrical shock system too [to facilitate bleeding]. They're up there sucking in air and bellowing. Their eyes bugging out.”

“A steer was running up the alley way and got his leg between the boards and he couldn't get it out. They didn't want to lose any time killing cattle and he was blocking their path, so they just used a blow torch to burn his leg off while he was alive.”

“Outside of the weak ones, just about every cow I stunned had to be hit between three and five times just to get it to go down. There were plenty of times you'd have to make a big hole in their head, shooting them eight or nine times. And they'd still be alive. I remember one time I saw the other knocker at the plant shoot a bull twelve times, and still it wouldn't go down.”

Sheeps

“When he stunned the first ewe, the stunning tongs were only held on for five seconds and he actually put the tongs on the cheek bone instead of behind the ears. The ewe fell to the ground and was shackled and all of this was done in sight of the other ewes. As the shackle hoisted her up, she began to kick out - she was clearly still conscious. She went through the rubbery doors to where the slaughterman was waiting to cut her throat.”

“A flock of sheep was slaughtered by dragging the animals by their hind legs to a drain, using their back legs to flip them onto the ground, and crudely slitting their throats in full view of the remaining sheep. The sheep were piled together over a drain to bleed out and die. The sheep who had not yet had their throats slit were so terrified by what was happening around them that they tried to huddle with their dying flockmates, and the very last sheep to be slaughtered climbed onto the thrashing pile before a worker kicked him in the face to drive him toward the drain to be killed.”

Horses

“You move so fast you don’t have time to wait till a horse bleeds out. You skin him as he bleeds. Sometimes a horse’s nose is down in the blood, blowing bubbles, and he suffocates.”

“Two egregious acts of cruelty took place right in front of me", said an eyewitness, "Running across the floor of the barn was a grate-covered drain about three feet deep. A section of the grate was missing in one of the stalls through which horses were being forced. Because they were crammed into a space and panicking, each horse fell into the open hole, unable to get out since the floor was wet and slippery. Workers continued to beat the horses until they were able to throw their bodies out of this hole. Due to the overcrowding and panic, a large male got his leg hooked over one of the upper rails. Again, workers proceeded to beat him continually until the horse lunged forward gouging his leg open on the solid metal fence, which force his leg free of the rail.”

Fishes

Last but not least are fishes, sentient beings who are so disregarded that their murder methods are not even specified and regulated. Humans can murder them in any way they wish.”

A widely used slaughter method in the trout industry, for example, includes the suffocation of fishes in air or on ice. The cooling effect of the ice prolongs the time it takes for the fishes to become unconscious. The fishes are able to feel what is happening to them almost 15 minutes after being taken out of the water.

Another slaughter method often used for salmon and trout is the use of carbon dioxide stunning. The bath of carbon dioxide saturated water causes the fishes to writhe in the killing container. They stop moving after 30 seconds, but do not lose consciousness for 4-9 minutes. Salmon usually have their gills cut after stunning and are left to bleed to death. Carbon dioxide causes immobility long before unconsciousness, so the fishes remain conscious but unable to move as they bleed to death.

Nowadays, more and more humans in more and more places are exposed to more and more violence from factory farms by activists who confront them with the facts. But the reaction of most is not disgust but indifference. Most don’t want to watch violence towards animals, but to keep enjoying its products.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, almost everyone would look away or simply get used to it.

It takes much more than making the walls of slaughterhouses transparent. Many humans would find it hard to watch violence towards animals, but it is much harder for them to change their habits. The myths, norms, the cultural symbolism that meat represents, the history, availability, convenience, and flavor are way stronger. The images are enough to cause a feeling of repugnance but not enough to cause a change.

Breaking the walls of slaughterhouses doesn’t work.

Many Activists rather think that humans are blissfully ignorant since then they can hope to change their violent ways by informing them about animal exploitation. Of course humans don’t know exactly what’s going on in factory farms, but what they do know is more than enough to immediately stop directly participating in it. The problem is not that humans don’t know what’s going on, the problem is that they don’t care.

It is extremely speciesist to suggest waiting for humans to change, as it implies that humans are worth all of animals’ suffering. More than 150 billions of sentients every single year mustn’t suffer from birth to death so that less than 8 billion humans would enjoy for a moment.

Stop hoping that one day all the humans in this world would stop their violent ways, and start acting so one day there would be no humans in this world.