Enough Is Enough: No More Slaughterhouses
Slaughterhouses across the country have been shutting down because of COVID-19—which is calling attention to the abuse and suffering usually found inside them: Pigs, cows, and chickens scream as they fight a violent, bloody death. But now, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order requiring slaughterhouses to operate and is trying to protect these deadly facilities from legal liability.
Slaughterhouse workers are often underprivileged people who are being taken advantage of, and the animals entering the facilities have it even worse. We need everyone to take action immediately, letting Trump know that the public wants him to reverse the executive order and keep slaughterhouses closed before even more people contract and spread COVID-19—and die.
Use the actions below to inspire others to join the revolt against speciesism.
Take Action Against the Reopening of Slaughterhouses
Action: Share this action alert on your Instagram story and put the link in your bio.
Pro tip: Remind everyone that the executive order is reversible, using these phrases to make your point:
• “Eat as if everyone’s life depends on it.”
• “This is what a slaughterhouse really looks like.”
• “Slaughterhouses are dirty, disgusting, bloody, and violent.”
• “A meat shortage is not a food shortage.”
Share Slaughterhouse Footage
Action: Blow the lid off the meat industry by sharing video clips of gut-wrenching scenes. Post footage from slaughterhouses on your Instagram story or whatever platform you prefer, and let everyone know that this is what goes on inside these places.
Set the footage to play automatically so that people don’t have to click any links or go to other pages. Just click these links to access the clips, save them to your phone, and post them on your social media:
Pro Tips:
• While most people don’t seek out this type of footage, they are often curious about it, will watch it, and are shocked by what they see.
• Add text over your video in order to frame the content, saying something like “Everyone’s talking about slaughterhouses—this is what they look like.”
Share Your Own Creations to Spread the Message Even Further
Action: Use compelling imagery to get your message noticed and to make the point that animal agriculture facilities are breeding grounds for disease. Take a photo of one of your feet “strung up” and share it along with the message that animals are hung upside down and killed in slaughterhouses.
Action: Put your skills to good use to let people know—”Tofu never caused a pandemic.” You could make and wear a costume like the one in the video below, choreograph a TikTok dance, create artwork, sing a song, or do anything else that you can come up with. Be creative!
Pro tip: Use descriptive language to paint a picture of the things that are done to animals in slaughterhouses—and don’t let the meat industry get away with using terms like “depopulate” and “euthanize” to describe destroying the millions of animals they can’t sell, as if these individuals were nothing more than a batch of toaster ovens being recalled.
Get People to Think More Critically About These Issues
Action: Caption your Instagram posts with slaughterhouse worker quotes about fully conscious animals screaming, struggling, and fighting for their lives. Here are some examples:
• “These hogs get up to the scalding tank, hit the water and start screaming and kicking. Sometimes they thrash so much they kick water out of the tank. … Sooner or later they drown. … I’m not sure if they burn to death before they drown, but it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing.”
—Slaughterhouse worker
• “When the cow’s guts fall onto the gut table, [we] rip the uterus open and pull these calves out. It’s nothing to have a live cow hanging up in front of you and see the calf inside kicking, trying to get out.”
—Slaughterhouse worker
• “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.
—Tyson slaughterhouse worker
• “If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you just shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward.”
—Slaughterhouse worker
• “A hog will freeze to a truck. They freeze to the steel railing. They’re still alive, and they’ll hook a cable on it and pull it out, maybe pull a leg off.”
—Slaughterhouse worker
Pro tip: The idea is to encourage people to learn the truth about the ways the meat industry dupes the public and let them know that we must all rise up together and fight this to stop extreme cruelty and exploitation as well as the next pandemic.
Action: Repost the actions you took wearing a mask and posing with “blood” on your hands, and point people to the petition link in your bio.
Action: Share this image on Instagram.
Pro tip: Point out that slaughterhouses can transition to producing exclusively vegan meats—many meat suppliers, such as Tyson, already sell them and have the necessary infrastructure in place.
Persuade Your Family and Community to Be a Part of the Solution
Action: Use at-home activism techniques to influence your family, such as putting compelling stickers on the meat and other animal-derived foods in your refrigerator. You can also create your own labels with messages such as “Your food had a face” or “He screamed.”
Action: Create warning labels for the animal-derived foods in your fridge in order to open a dialogue regarding reasons why it’s wrong to eat meat. The labels could say things like “Warning: This is a product of violence, racism, and cruelty” or “Warning: This product contains cholesterol and saturated fat and is the result of extreme suffering.”
Action: Encourage your parents to make their next grocery haul completely vegan and tell them about easy swaps for your family’s staples, such as Califia Farms Oatmilk, Gardein chick’n products, and Follow Your Heart dairy-free cheeses.
Action: Decorate masks or shirts with messages like “Shut down slaughterhouses,” wear them on walks and other times when you’re outside, and safely engage with people who have questions. You can use duct tape on your mask to make it stand out and increase your chances of having people ask you about it or notice it on social media.
Pictured from left to right, Madeline Castagna, an SOS hub organizer from Oceanside, New York, and her roommates and fellow hub members Olivia and Peter team up to sport three simple words that speak volumes.
Pro tip: Avoid guilt-trippy language, and instead, try to incite outrage toward the meat industry for its cruelty rather than toward activists for being the messengers about it—and empower people to change their minds and habits.
*****
The public has been brainwashed by the meat industry, lobbyists, and the government into thinking that it’s normal to breed animals only to kill them and eat their dead bodies—all while government officials, corporate execs, and big pharma profit at the expense of slaughterhouse workers, animals, and the public.
Slaughterhouses were already hell on Earth for the animals and workers in them. If the exponentially increased risk to slaughterhouse workers’ health caused by COVID-19 doesn’t change anything, what will? More than ever before, society is now seeing just how vicious and exploitative the meat industry is—and we need to make sure that its glaring example of greed isn’t lost on anyone. Satisfying human taste buds is not more important than protecting workers’ rights and saving animals’ lives. Let’s work together to shut slaughterhouses down once and for all.
Not a member of Students Opposing Speciesism yet? Join SOS as we rise up and demand empathy for everyone—regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or species!