If a pig came and nuzzled you like a puppy, would you be able to kill it just moments later?

This is one of the scenarios faced by slaughterhouse workers on a daily basis. They see animals that are, in many ways, no different to those we welcome into our homes as family members.

They then have to kill them. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of them a day.

The psychological toll this takes on a person cannot be underestimated. Slaughterhouse work has been linked to a variety of disorders, including PTSD and the lesser-known PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress). It has also been connected to an increase in crime rates, including higher incidents of domestic abuse, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.




And as the already huge demand for meat goes up, so too does the number of animals employees are required to kill on a daily basis.

Yet among the general population, surprisingly little is known about the price these often low-wage workers pay so that others can enjoy meat in relative oblivion.

Dr Chi-Chi Obuaya, a consultant psychiatrist at Nightingale mental health hospital in London, told Metro.co.uk that we tend to think of PTSD as arising from a specific traumatic incident, usually among people who have had something inflicted upon them. As perpetrators of the violence, however, slaughterhouse workers experience something quite different.

‘We normally think about PTSD and trauma responses where someone has either been the victim, or they’ve witnessed something,’ he explained. ‘So someone who’s been subjected to torture, somebody whose life has been threatened or has been in an area of conflict, and it’s arising in that situation. Another group would be people who’ve witnessed very traumatic things.’

The carcasses of slaughtered buffaloes hang from an overhead conveyor belt in a storage unit at an abattoir operated by Allana Group in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh (Picture: Getty Images)

For slaughterhouse workers, the trauma isn’t confined to one incident. Slaughterers will kill hundreds of animals every day – and they are the perpetrators.

Dr Obuaya likened the work to child soldiers, forced into a conflict situation in which they have to commit horrific acts of violence. Another analogous situation he described was that of a bus driver, who has to witness people taking their own lives in front of their vehicle – ‘even though they’re not perpetrators, they’re witnesses to it’.

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‘Clearly, this sort of [slaughterhouse] work is pretty brutal, and therefore there are two ways of looking at it,’ he said. ‘We normally think about PTSD in relation to very discrete episodes of trauma. So there will be an event which has occurred on a particular day, and there’s the onset of symptoms following that, such as nightmares and flashbacks, which arise in the weeks and months following a trauma. So that’s how we tend to diagnose [PTSD] using our diagnostic manuals.

‘One of the things that is less well understood – and this is where this group, slaughterhouse workers, falls into – is repetitive trauma, and how that’s conceptualised. The understanding in psychiatric literature is still fairly limited, because we tend to model it around very discrete episodes.



‘So I would look at other groups for comparison – so someone who’s been entrapped and held captive against their will, may or may not be subjected to specific incidents of a life-threatening nature, but over a period of time there’s that repetitive trauma. I don’t want to use the word “low-grade” – it’s not quite as dramatic, but it’s very pervasive. This kind of work falls into that category.’

Workers each have to kill hundreds, sometimes thousands of animals a day (Picture: Getty Images)

Although limited, the studies that are out there have found a very clear link between working in slaughterhouses and traumatic disorders – including the less well-known PITS.

Rachel M. Macnair, a sociologist and psychologist, describes the disorder in her 2002 work Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing as a form of PTSD that arises ‘from situations that would be traumatic if someone were a victim, but situations for which the person in question was a causal participant’ – that is, where the sufferer has those symptoms because he or she created the traumatic situation. According to Macnair, PITS can lead to anxiety, panic, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, increased paranoia, a sense of disintegration, dissociation and amnesia. These, she writes, are part of the ‘psychological consequences’ of killing.

Macnair was mainly talking about PITS in relation to executioners, combat veterans, and Nazis in World War II – although she does say that slaughterhouse workers are another section of society that is likely to be vulnerable.

Danish Crown Slaughterhouse, Horsens, Denmark (Picture: REX/Shutterstock)

Dr Obuaya agreed, adding: ‘There is almost a variation of PTSD which we refer to as complex PTSD, and it was described more in survivors of childhood abuse – physical, psychological, emotional – where there’s a repetitive trauma. It’s a little bit different to PTSD. With PTSD, you have a cluster of symptoms: reliving the event, avoiding reminders of the event, and what we call hyper-vigilance – so a feeling that one needs to be on one’s guard, and the autonomic nervous system goes into overdrive, so it causes autonomic hyper-arousal.


‘Whereas with complex PTSD there may or may not be some of those “reliving” experiences, and there’s a sort of self-loathing that tends to emerge – a very strong dislike of oneself, and loss of one’s identity. That’s what one would see in this particular group, where the repetitive nature of the exposure to the trauma as a perpetrator then leads to this breakdown in the individual’s identity. Now, it’s not fully recognised in the diagnostic manuals, but it is something that we refer to in clinical practice, and there are treatments that can be geared towards that.’

He added: ‘I guess anyone that’s experiencing mental health difficulties, there will tend to be a tendency to look at what their personality was like pretty morbidly, so someone becomes very depressed, one can usually distinguish between a period when they might have been very outgoing and gregarious, and then they become very withdrawn. There’s that change in their personality both subjectively in how they would describe it, and also for people close to them who have known them for a long period of time, objectively there’s also a change – so it may come across as irritability, distrust, anger directed both towards themselves and other people. So there’s a change in the personality that’s sometimes difficult to fully articulate. But there’s an understanding that something has shifted.’

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Former slaughterhouse workers who have since spoken out about their time in the industry have described feeling this change within them, and experiencing PTSD symptoms for years afterwards.


One hog sticker, Ed Van Winkle, was quoted in the minutes of Tyson Foods Annual Shareholder Meeting in 2006 describing the work the dissociation slaughterers had to force upon themselves. He worked at Morrell slaughterhouse in Sioux City, in the US state of Iowa.

‘The worst thing, worse than the physical danger [of on-the-job accidents] is the emotional toll,’ Winkle said. ‘Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them – beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.’

‘Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy’ (Picture: Getty Images)

Another such man was Virgil Butler, who worked in a poultry plant in the US, run by the American firm Tyson, from 1997 until 2002. After leaving, he worked as an anti-slaughter activist, working to set up a sanctuary for rescued animals with his partner Laura Alexander.

‘The sheer amount of killing and blood can really get to you after a while,’ he wrote on his blog The Cyberactivist in 2003. ‘Especially if you can’t just shut down all emotion and turn into a robot zombie of death. You feel like part of a big death machine. [You’re] pretty much treated that way as well.

‘Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. It’s just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behaviour. You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands (75,000 to 90,000 a night). You are a killer.’

Describing the isolation he and his colleagues faced, Butler wrote about ‘the guy they hauled off to the mental hospital that kept having nightmares that chickens were after him’, before adding: ‘I’ve had those, too.’

But tragically, people end up trapped in this line of work. Butler explained in a speech, ‘Inside Tyson’s Hell’, how most of his colleagues were illiterate, unable even to fill in the job application forms by themselves. Their prospects of getting work elsewhere were next to nothing.

Stuck in such a life, Butler described how it would make them ‘more prone to violence’, and ‘much more likely to physically attack whatever or whoever you are mad at’ – and described in detail some of the ‘games’ workers would play with the carcasses of dead animals.

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In one such game, slaughterers would apparently rip the heads off live chickens, place the heads on their fingers and use them as puppets. In another, they would start so-called ‘shit fights’, where they would squeeze a live chicken so violently that its faeces would squirt out onto another person.

‘Many people who do this commit violent acts,’ he wrote. ‘They commit crimes. People who already are criminals tend to gravitate towards this job. You can’t have a strong conscience and kill living creatures night after night.

‘You feel isolated from society, not a part of it. Alone. You know you are different from most people. They don’t have visions of horrible death in their heads. They have not seen what you have seen. And they don’t want to. They don’t even want to hear about it.’

Butler tragically passed away in his sleep just a few years later, in December 2006.