By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Nebraska News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Livestock auctions exist all across North America. They serve as a stop between the farms where animals are born, and the farms where they will be "fattened" or "finished;" the stop between life and death, where animals are sold to be slaughtered. In these fast-paced spaces, animals are pushed through like products - prodded, chased, tossed and dragged - by people paid to get the job done, quickly.
Between late 2022 and early 2024, footage was gathered from over a dozen of these auctions, from across 10 U.S. states by Pete Paxton (Sentient has agreed to use an alias), an undercover investigator with the group Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development, or SEED.
For a recent story for Vox Media, I was tasked with watching this footage, which shows terrified, confused and exhausted animals being handled harshly, or outright abused. Some animals are shown with injuries, while others have already died at auction.
The footage also shows workers with seemingly no regard for the animals' suffering. Some lash out at the animals in frustration, while others laugh at animals in pain.
"Hundreds or even thousands of animals are sold at auctions within hours," Paxton writes on SEED's website, "and workers must keep up the pace to move scared, exhausted, sick and injured animals in and out of pens. Workers experience dehydration, hunger and exhaustion as a result, which often leads to impatience and subsequent abuse."
Writing the Vox story was difficult. The 20-minute compilation of secretly filmed clips initially took me a week to get through; I could only watch for a few minutes at a time before the discomfort became unbearable. But then, over time, something interesting happened: watching the footage became easier for me. And Paxton understands, firsthand, why.
Desensitization and Animal Abuse
Working on the story over a few months, I had to go back to the footage over and over again. As I did, the images and sounds that had once made me gasp and cover my eyes became less horrific. Over time, they even became bearable. I had become desensitized to the animals' pain and fear, a phenomenon common among those who work in animal farming spaces like auctions.
Dr. Philip Tedeschi, a clinical professor at the University of Denver, and an expert in the human-animal connection, explains that for people working in animal farming spaces, empathy can become incompatible with the job, "inefficient" and "inconvenient."
"One of the things we know about studying empathy is that the presence of empathy can be an inhibitor to engaging in the behavior itself," he explains. "If you're required to engage in forcing animals through a meat processing plant, or expected to stick to a very strict timeline," like at auctions or on an assembly line, "you can't afford to be gentle or kind or humane. Then one of the things that's inefficient or incompatible is to have empathy for those individual animals." Emotionally distancing from animals can aid these workers in getting through the work day.
Paxton admits that the work he does as an undercover investigator is "pretty fucking difficult."
"I've had ex-military and ex-law enforcement reach out to me, and they're like, 'I don't know how you do that, because, man, I would lose my shit.'" But Paxton knows he's there to complete an important task, and that allows him to compartmentalize his feelings. "I tell investigators when I train them, 'It's way easier than you think to get used to the abuse, because when you see it there's two things going on in your head: one is, 'Oh, shit, an animal is being abused,' and then the other thing in your head is, 'I have to document that and not get caught.'"
For Paxton, overriding his concerns about the animal abuse he witnesses is an important part of his job as an investigator. For the people who work at animal auctions, Paxton believes desensitization operates much the same way. Abuse of animals at auctions becomes normalized, Paxton reports, as workers are pressured by management to move animals in and out - fast.
The harsh environment forces workers - ranging from inexperienced teens to long-time workers - to handle animals roughly to keep up with the demanding work. They also learn abusive behaviors from each other.
The Mental Health Impact of Working in Animal Agriculture
As part of his investigation, Paxton kept video footage and written records of certain people he met while working at the auctions. On SEED's website, he describes some of these workers as "good people" who "do bad things."
For example, in one small rural town, Paxton met 17-year-old "Audrey." Exhausted and under pressure, she mimicked abusive actions she witnessed from co-workers, reflecting learned behaviors. "As the workday dragged on, her frustrations led her to drag baby lambs and goats by their legs in fits of anger, mirroring the abusive actions she saw around her," Paxton writes. He also recalls "Stewart," a hardworking 20-year-old, dragging goats and jabbing calves with his keys, seeing cruelty as necessary for the job, "a means to an end."
Similar working conditions have also been documented in slaughterhouses, where both workers and animals are known to suffer. Slaughterhouse workers have for decades been documented engaging in extreme cruelty beyond basic animal handling.
For example, a 2018 investigation by Animal Aid uncovered UK slaughterhouse workers beating cows with pipes, while encouraging others to join in. In 2022, Animal Equality documented workers in Brazil kicking, beating and dragging cows by ropes, and twisting their tails to force movement.
Research has shown that the slaughterhouse environment, and the nature of slaughterhouse work itself, can and does have notable psychological impacts on workers. For example, slaughterhouse workers are four times more likely to be clinically depressed than the general public, according to a 2015 study. Higher rates of anxiety, psychosis and serious psychological distress are also found among those working in slaughterhouses, compared to the population at large.
As Dr. Kendra Coulter, now coordinator of Huron University's Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program, told Sentient in 2020: in slaughterhouses, both workers and animals are commodified, "animals literally so." But both are ultimately seen as disposable.
Cultural Impact on Animal Treatment
Upbringing and culture can also play a key role in one's ability to turn off empathy for farm animals. As Tedeschi explained to Sentient on the topic of rodeos, if a person is brought up since childhood to believe that something is "culturally defined as a deserving activity," it becomes normalized.
We see this in rodeo activities geared specifically toward children, such as "pig scrambles" and "mutton busting," where children will ride sheep or other animals, "or engage in wrestling an animal or controlling them in some form," Tedeschi says, "And then getting a lot of attention for that. This is early shaping of those behaviors." Organizations like 4H and Future Farmers of America similarly serve to socialize children to emotionally distance themselves from the animals they are tasked to care for, before selling them to be slaughtered.
Paxton notes that the people he met while working at livestock auctions come from this same wider community. "They're the same people," he says. "They fucking love rodeos." This also includes the police and inspectors on site. "If you're a cop and you're in a rural area, you probably have cows, you've probably kicked them," he says. "Your parents have kicked them, and you're not going to bring charges against a fucking kid or elderly person who does the same thing."
"It's cowboy culture," Renee King-Sonnen, a former cattle rancher turned animal sanctuary operator, told Vox. Cowboy culture involves the normalization of inhumane treatment of animals at auctions, she adds. The drive to belong to that culture is what drives that shared behavior.
"People that are part of this community or this culture feel a solidarity with each other," explains Dr. Rebekah Humphreys, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wales, and an expert in animal ethics. In the case of spaces where animals are farmed, slaughtered, tested on, etc., "the mistreatment of animals," she says, is "reinscribed and perpetuated through cultures. And then anyone that is outside of that norm is criticized as being overly sentimental or anthropomorphic."
Paxton believes that most people working at auctions don't believe they're doing anything wrong when they mistreat animals. "For many of them, it is the right thing, pulling a screaming goat by the ear," he says. "This animal just needs to move, [and] everyone's always done it that way. Does that make me an asshole?" he asks, putting himself in the position of the workers. "Or wouldn't I really be an asshole if I said, 'Everyone stop the entire auction?' If I had to assuage this animal's feelings and recognize this animal as an individual?"
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, both Tedeschi and Humphreys agree that the commodification of farm animals as property, legally and morally, allows places like animal auctions to exist, and for farm animals to be othered so severely. "The industrialization and commodification of [farm animals] has turned them into objects to the extent that we are really quite distanced from them," says Humphreys.
And that distance, Tedeschi believes, prohibits humans from thinking of these animals with more ethical consideration. "We're not likely to see people do a deeper kind of moral investigation into how we interact with other animals, as long as we view them as having the same legal position as the toaster on our counter."
For people like Paxton and me, who exist outside that cowboy culture but are tasked with investigating it, the ability to compartmentalize - to distance ourselves from the natural empathy we feel for animals, in order to get the job done - also reveals just how easily desensitization can happen.
This is in part what allows Paxton to see those who abuse animals at auctions as otherwise good people. "I'm not really scared of these people," he says. "I didn't find them to be violent or terrifying people. They're fucking nice people," he says. As long as you're not a cow.
Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.
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