The slaughter house is the limbo between life and death within the commercial animal kingdom, the final destination of an animal before it is killed and shipped off in many different directions from packaged meats with a supermarket destination to pharmaceutical facilities and animal food manufacturers.
The meat industry is an extremely efficient one with animals in and out of big abattoir very quickly; there are approximately 150 Slaughter houses in the UK with thousands of workers, however recent reports have stated that a growing number of these workers are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder .
It may seem logical that people that are surrounded by death all day, every day would eventually succumb to the emotional turmoil and stress of having to kill for a living, seeing the live animals coming in knowing that the worker will personally be ending its life but not being about to care.
Slaughter house workers are increasingly reporting symptoms of PTSD including extreme anxiety, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and social withdrawal. Nearly 10 percent of Americas Slaughter houses are in Texas, criminologists at the University of Windsor in Canada, reported in a study that there is a strong relationship between the location of a large slaughterhouse and high crime rates in American communities.
The nature of this article is not to pass judgement on meat eaters or of the industry as a whole but simply to draw attention to vast number of jobs and every day activities that so many of the working population are involved in that could be inducing mental health issues with no mention of support or emotional training.
