“I no care about blood or anything. I see our animals away from this place, in fields. I think of them. Still, I know they must die… I only know one woman who stop working. They pay us good. She did not like it. Gone very quickly, three days. She told that the cow got in her… I work years, cut many, many cows. I no care. She said we were death. She said she went home, the animal comes home with her… Showers with strong soap need to clean off, but she said the animal soaked into her skin.”

Death wears white, but the irony is lost on the cattle. Highly skilled men and women, working as employed soldiers fully clad in the color of innocence, arrive for duty at dawn. Cotton shirts and pants, hard hats, synthetic aprons that hang nearly to the floor covering rubber boots – the combination of all light, white.

“Welcome.”

The slaughterhouse is death’s home, dressed in the same weathered grey of the overcast skies, and emerges as a ramshackle hospital where the Joker might find his face. Tiled walls stand scratched and broken, strengthened and framed by a sandy mortar of faded charcoal. The initial impression of sterility surrounding the slaughterhouse, the whiteness, lingers only for a moment each morning.

The killing begins at just past 6AM. The white disappears from memory.  The walls and the entirety of the previously spotless uniforms lose any notion of sanitation, becoming a monochromatic Pollack print once the blood begins to splatter.

Everyday is the same.”

Wednesday starts like Tuesday did before it. Tuesday like Monday, Monday like the Friday prior and so on and so forth. It’s been happening for years, before any of these men or women worked here, before any of them were alive. Anyone who wants to can come in and be a witness anytime, but no one ever does. This is a day like any other.  It happens to be a Wednesday.

The scent of fresh meat mixes with the ripe taste of rural existence and marinates on the senses. Located only 15 miles north of Novo Hamburgo (the leather capital of Brazil), the slaughterhouse seems much father away, resting in some forgotten nook where time no longer exists. Time, though, is of the essence here. Over 300 cattle are on the schedule for slaughter.

It will take nearly six hours to work through that many animals, merely another day at a house that witnesses the deaths of nearly 25,000 animals a year. This figure places the house as an average sized slaughter business in southern Brazil, netting a gross of 5 million reais per year (almost $2,750,000). Other houses in the region slaughter as many as 60,000 head of cattle per year.

“This is our life, southern Brazil’s life.”

            In monetary terms, the slaughter industry plays a small, but important role in the overall leather industry of southern Brazil, which incorporates the process finally ending with a pair of shoes or a leather jacket. To say this region, or maybe even this country would stumble if you removed this industry is the gravest understatement.  The welling economy would lose its source, dropping off the international map, as shoes would disappear from shelves without their spring – the cattle.

“Here they come.”

Dawn finds the young cattle, none older than 3 years, lining up and funneling toward the nondescript house. Several inches of standing water fill the bottom of the last two holding cells, which are two of five sections that narrow as the animals approach the building. A nest of irrigation pipes supply the water, which quietly rains down from overhead sprinklers.  The gentle animals retract from the initial wetness as they inch their way toward the apparently uninviting final pen.

Water has tremendous conductivity. So does the long metal pole, which connects to a metal wire by yet again another metal wire. A small surge of electricity shocks the animals forward, forcing those unwilling into the next holding pen, into their last conscious moment.

The final stall is a rectangular cell. Two sides iron, one with a sliding metal door that locks down loudly from above after an animal enters, and one a faux wall that can collapse into the greater building. The other two sides are concrete, painted in a pale sky-blue that draws attention, especially on this rainy day. A square, eroding hole exists in the short end of the blue wall, allowing for one last vision for the animals. 

“They almost never see the man with the pistol.” 

That is what the other workers called him. He is a man, and he does hold a pistol, but this is not death, not yet. The large metallic pistol, really an air gun, resembles a home-made squirt gun more than a implement of destruction. The gun connects to a generator by a long blue hose. A metal piston, cylindrical in shape with a diameter of roughly half an inch, jumps from the barrel onto the top of the skull. Most of the time, one shot does the trick, dropping the large cows instantly… most of the time. With some, maybe one in ten animals, it takes two, sometimes more shots to quell the cattle. 

Pinched in the final cell, the cattle rear, buck and release a throaty scowl that seems to come from deep within their lungs. They jump and flinch, squirming away from the approaching man and gun on the very rare chance they see it coming. There is nowhere to go. The shot comes at the animals from above, making a noise that any youngster would recognize from his air rifle, if but a decibel or two louder. Sometimes, a taller cow lifts its front legs over the walls of the pen, nearly boosting itself free.  Even more uncommon, the workers muse in circus amazement, the animal makes it free, only to be placed back in the long line to try it again.

“They’re not too bright.”

            The steel piston breaks the skin atop the head of the animal. The wound sprays just a bit of blood, an epic sprinkle foreshadowing the downpour to come. The animal falls. The man with the pistol pulls a heavy lever, converting the shared wall of the final cell that runs along the side of the slaughterhouse into a slide that sends the animal into the interior of the building. Another pull of the lever and the slide reverts to its former form, ready for the next applicant.

Inside the slaughterhouse, the visual stimulation overrides any other thought.  Death is all around, and a quiet respect seems due. For more than five hours, nary a voice speaks over the harsh, sharp sound of metal striking metal or the hard buzz of the large bone saws. One minute it feels like a mortuary, the next a bustling factory, depending on the aperture of your thought.

“No rust.”

Slightly sporadic, scattered in a meandering pattern throughout the main room, stainless steel platforms rise to uneven heights, the tallest nearly seven feet from the cold concrete floors. Awash with water, blood and entrails, the floor provides a slippery surface for shoes.  Workers quickly skate from place to place, completing their tasks with surprising speed.

The sound of a cow awakening from its concussed state rings out through the building as a loud echo. The living, whirring foghorn with a hectic, exasperated tone dominates all other noise.  Not one worker flinches or lifts his head to acknowledge the horrid sound. A sledgehammer corrects the mishap with a few plunging shots to the head.  The stubborn few that wake will not again.

Thick chain wraps around the right hind leg. An electronic winch lifts the unconscious animals six feet above the floor.  The animals’ bodies twitch uncontrollably from the nervous impulses lost in the battle for life that any creature goes through. Transferred from the chain to thick metal hooks hanging from a roller that sits in a track, the cattle are ready to begin their minutes-long meandering journey to the opposite side of the slaughterhouse where the freezers wait. 

“Here, they die.”

            A knife wielded with acute accuracy slices the animal’s chest in a singular plunging motion. Striking a main artery surrounding the heart, the cattle lose their lives in an unknowing instant, spilling more than 95 percent of their blood in less then five minutes. Drains on the slaughterhouse floor collect and relay the blood, destined for use as a dog food supplement, through pipes leading to another room in the highly dissected structure of the building.

“After dead, it all go quickly.” 

Like criminals stripping an automobile, workers dismantle the body, sending every piece in a different direction, each used for some purpose. Nothing is wasted. Everything is used, sold for profit. This is a business, and the faster they finish, the higher the profit margins. The skill, though, of the workers is precise and astounding, but still, very fast.

A worker cuts off the hooves above the ankles and pushes them through a window to an adjacent room. Future hairbrushes. They cut the hairy tail from the rump.  Padding in mattresses. The tail follows the hooves through the window, as will the skin, the raw leather before cleaning and tanning allows for polish. Several workers take turns loosening hind sections of the hide, first by blade and hand, and then machine. Under the power of more heavy chains and another electric winch, the skin peels off the body of the animal as if wax paper from a cup cake.  This leaves the animals dangling naked of dress. Certain muscles still have the tendency to twitch and pulsate, lending a shutter of vibration to the animal’s torso.

“You must be strong.”

The torso sways and clatters across the overhead track system, requiring all the strength one can muster to stop it.  This looks easy though for a noticeably stronger worker. Holding a large knife dwarfed only by his smile, he removes the head of the animal and transfers it to yet another room where employed scavengers remove the cultural delicacies of the brain and tongue. The beheading is routine as the rest of the operation. Simple decapitation. The eyes, though, still firmly in place, stare out as if trying to say more.

“Sometimes it feels like the first time, again.”

With the head detached, each subsequent action carries memory farther away from the animal and closer to the supermarket. Another worker, at yet another post, splits the chest of the cow, emptying all its contests onto a large metal table, a lasagna dish with legs. A smaller assembly line of men separates the organs into crates and buckets, carried to more employees waiting in back rooms. Mostly women congregate in these back rooms like cooks, sifting through organs, washing and cleaning. And the carcass moves on, a meaty skeleton, sputtering its way over the pulley track to the final station. “Click-clack, click-clack, tick, tick, tick…..

......rbrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.” The saw is massive and sounds like the Jaws of Life working their way through the crumpled metal of a wrecked car. During the short spurts that the saw runs, it overwhelms any other noise. It slices the cow into two separate, yet equal halves. The animal is gone, and from here on out, the scene just as easily could be seen through the front window at Fudrucker’s. Several workers trim the giant slabs of beef, sprucing up the product by eliminating the last bits of fatty tissue. An inspector, paid and provided by the government, meticulously scours the product for the slightest signs of sickness. If the meat passes, it receives a stamp, relating its owner and its quality.  The delegated few roll off to the side abandoned.

A fine mist saturates the entire slaughterhouse, in part because of the humid morning, but it becomes as thick as coastal fog near the freezers, whose open doors allow for the mixing of atmospheres. Powerful hoses wash the hanging slabs of all excess bodily fluids. The air fills the lungs like the meaty smoke from a grill. The two immense freezers, as big as the entire main room, hold the merchandise of almost 300 cattle, now broken down to 600 slabs of meat weighing in at over 150,000 kilos (330,690 pounds), a patterned maze of flesh and bone.

“Lots of food, good money,” or was it “good food, lots of money?” His words blur behind his satisfied smile and the last image of the slaughterhouse.

“Tasty, yes?”

Death is now a pitch-man?  He sets down his knife and picks up a smile. Our once shy patron warms up in the light of his pride for the final product.

“Waiting for truck. They all will be gone. Need space for tomorrow.”