Taking Action for Animals 2014

As part of his Ph.D. dissertation research at Yale University, Timothy Pachirat worked undercover for nearly six months on the kill floor of an industrialized cattle slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska. In his book Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, Timothy draws on his experience working as a liver hanger, a cattle driver and a quality control worker to explore how routine, massive processes of violence against immigrant workers and animals are normalized in modern society. Timothy’s talk today, far from being a “shock and awe” exposé (no graphic images will be shown!), carefully analyzes the divisions of space and labor on the slaughterhouse kill floor in order to raise provocative questions about the relationship between transparency and social and political transformation, all of which will be of interest to anyone fighting to change the world for animals.