Kill the Beast

May 15, 2010 10:13 AM

Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime. A study shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases.
posted by binturong (71 comments total)

correlation != causation.
posted by empath at 10:17 AM on May 15, 2010

How do slaughterhouse workers compare to workers in any other filthy, dangerous, low-paying job in in creasing crime?
posted by dilettante at 10:19 AM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Or in increasing crime, if numbers for creasing and other criminal origami aren't available.
posted by dilettante at 10:20 AM on May 15, 2010 [20 favorites]

correlation != causation.
True, but it seems like the author of the study has controlled for a number of possible factors:
She controlled for factors such as the influx of new residents when slaughterhouses open, high numbers of young men — even the number of immigrants.

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors.

Nor can the violence be blamed on factory work itself. Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down.
posted by peacheater at 10:22 AM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting, so interesting. I've always thought that there was a direct link between the way we remove non-human animals from moral consideration and the removal of other humans from moral consideration.

This is easily seen in historical examples where projects of colonialism or genocide used the idea of the victims as 'animals' to justify murder or oppression.
posted by jardinier at 10:23 AM on May 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

Did she control for the fact that you don't usually find slaughterhouses on the high street and slaughterhouse workers living in penthouses? They're usually in bad neighborhoods, where, you know, crime happens?
posted by Punkey at 10:30 AM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Dangerous and repetitive != smelly.

There are plenty of light industrial jobs out there that are dangerous and repetitive but you would never know were there if you weren't paying attention. I'd be interested in seeing how this compared with industries which no one who wasn't a little bit desperate would choose to live near due to the stench. Assembling sreen doors from extruded aluminum stock does not fall into that catagory.

Also, the phrase "work that did not involve killing animals" makes me question whether she started out trying to disprove the null hypothysis, or the other way around. It is not the same thing.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 10:31 AM on May 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

1) People with less to lose have fewer reasons to avoid criminal conduct and/or less ability to avoid living in areas concentrated with other people who have less to lose.

2) There's some overlap between "people with less to lose" and "people seeking slaughterhouse jobs."
posted by applemeat at 10:32 AM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Did she control for the fact that you don't usually find slaughterhouses on the high street and slaughterhouse workers living in penthouses? They're usually in bad neighborhoods, where, you know, crime happens?
Yes, she actually found a rise in crime when slaughterhouses entered a neighborhood, that did not disappear even when she controlled for the influx of immigrants and more young men in the population. That is, she's comparing the same neighborhood, before and after a slaughterhouse is built, controlling for changes in the neighborhood's population brought about by the demand for new labor. And as posted above, there was an increase in crime compared to other industries that might attract a similar pool of labor.
posted by peacheater at 10:35 AM on May 15, 2010 [6 favorites]

> They're usually in bad neighborhoods, where, you know, crime happens?

Not always!
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:38 AM on May 15, 2010

I don't think most slaughterhouses are "in bad neighborhoods." The big ones are all out in the country. Which makes me wonder about crime stats in small towns...are these meat factories she is studying, like most of them, out in the styx (sorry, sticks)? If so, crime rates would probably differ from those where most people live: in the cities and suburbs.
posted by kozad at 10:40 AM on May 15, 2010

I'd be interested in seeing how this compared with industries which no one who wasn't a little bit desperate would choose to live near due to the stench.

"Canadian slaughterhouses were left out of the report, and Fitzgerald says she wants to do a similar study here in the future. In Toronto, where abattoirs have been nestled in quiet areas such as the Junction (before it burned down in 2006) and King Street West, the violence seems hard to spot.

Residents of the pretty, tree-lined Garrison Creek neighbourhood say the only time they notice Toronto Abattoirs Ltd. and Quality Meat Packers Ltd. factory at the bottom of Tecumseth St. is on warmer days, when a putrid scent wafts over the patios and the nearby baseball field.

“On good days it’s like a farm,” says Antonio Ferreira, a 15-year resident of a red-brick highrise at King St. W. and Niagara St. “On a bad day it’s like a rotting carcass.” He couldn’t recall any violent incidents at or near the abattoir, however."
posted by rtha at 10:40 AM on May 15, 2010

There's a lot of data missing in the article. For instance, how do you actually control for the effects of an influx of immigrants/factory workers? Do you compare it to a neighbouring community which had an increase of 175 immigrants, but no slaughterhouses? It would be interesting to know.

Also, according to the article the introduction of a slaughterhouse increases arrests by 2.24. Is that a big number? How many arrests are there typically? If it's 10, that's a big deal, if it's 1000 this is article is crap. But we don't know.
posted by reformedjerk at 10:58 AM on May 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

It doesn't really matter if there is a link. I bet robots will be doing the dirty work within ten years.
posted by digsrus at 11:00 AM on May 15, 2010

I cannot imagine that someone who has the ability to rip thousands of animals throats out is all that kind, gentle and law abiding of a person. There are exceptions, perhaps, but it takes a certain kind of special to kill over and over again, sometimes mindlessly. You can't deny that puts an impression on the human mind. It gets you desensitized to gore, no doubt. Someone who's less sensitive to gore is less empathic to the pain gore causes.
posted by Malice at 11:01 AM on May 15, 2010 [5 favorites]

This seems pretty ... dumb.

Since she apparently controlled for all these other factors, why didn't she just go to as many crime reports as possible, to see if the perpetrators of these violent crimes were actually (and disproportionately) slaughterhouse workers?

Because if they weren't (and I highly suspect that's the case), then any suggestions of "animal cruelty" "desensitizing" people to violence against other humans (as suggested by the tags and implied by the article) are asinine. Unless we're meant to believe that people who don't actually do any slaughtering can be desensitized simply by having a slaughterhouse in their vicinity.
posted by Amanojaku at 11:02 AM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

True, but it seems like the author of the study has controlled for a number of possible factors:

Don't worry about it; a study of any sort which is posted to metafilter, regardless of quality, is inevitably met by "correlation != causation" within the first 10 comments.
posted by Justinian at 11:03 AM on May 15, 2010 [23 favorites]

Could there be a crime-wise correlation between "going postal" (killing mail employees) and "going abatoir" (killing livestock)? Just wondering if post offices are mainly located near slaughterhouses. Are postal workers livestock?
posted by drogien at 11:03 AM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Don't worry about it; a study of any sort which is posted to metafilter, regardless of quality, is inevitably met by "correlation != causation" within the first 10 comments.

correlation != causation
posted by vorpal bunny at 11:07 AM on May 15, 2010 [32 favorites]

digsrus: It doesn't really matter if there is a link. I bet robots will be doing the dirty work within ten years.

Hopefully in ten years no one will be doing any 'dirty work.'
posted by jardinier at 11:13 AM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

It sounds like an interesting paper. Here's the link to the gated version.

http://oae.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/158

Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates

An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From "The Jungle" Into the Surrounding Community

Amy J. Fitzgerald
University of Windsor

Linda Kalof

Michigan State University

Thomas Dietz

Michigan State University

More than 100 years after Upton Sinclair denounced the massive slaughterhouse complex in Chicago as a "jungle," qualitative case study research has documented numerous negative effects of slaughterhouses on workers and communities. Of the social problems observed in these communities, the increases in crime have been particularly dramatic. These increases have been theorized as being linked to the demographic characteristics of the workers, social disorganization in the communities, and increased unemployment rates. But these explanations have not been empirically tested, and no research has addressed the possibility of a link between the increased crime rates and the violent work that takes place in the meatpacking industry. This study uses panel analysis of 1994-2002 data on nonmetropolitan counties in states with "rightto-work" laws (a total of 581 counties) to analyze the effect of slaughterhouses on the surrounding communities using both ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression. The findings indicate that slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries. This suggests the existence of a "Sinclair effect" unique to the violent workplace of the slaughterhouse, a factor that has not previously been examined in the sociology of violence.
posted by scunning at 11:23 AM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

Since she apparently controlled for all these other factors, why didn't she just go to as many crime reports as possible, to see if the perpetrators of these violent crimes were actually (and disproportionately) slaughterhouse workers?

Because then she couldn't apply for another grant and make another entry on her CV.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:23 AM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's a reason that the killing of animals has historically been surrounded with ritual and superstition -- everything from Kosher butchery to the movie-Indian whispering his thanks to the Buffalo he's just killed. There's a reason why animal sacrifice is part of nearly every religion, including some forms of Christianity (Armenian). Humans instinctively understand the enormity of taking another life, even animal life, and recognize the power of animal slaughter to coarsen spirit and moral fiber. Ritual is an attempt to mitigate this coarsening effect to keep it from escaping from the shambles and infecting the culture at large. The rise of factory-style slaughter has inured our whole civilization to mass killing of animals and humans and spiritually enabled the prosecution of the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and world wars I & II, each of which surpassed the previous war in it acceptance of mass murder of humans -- and not incidentally, horses -- as a feature of conflict among nations. The same America that dumps millions of animal corpses into its fast food meat grinder is not at all shocked by the slaughter it has accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan, as its bone-gnawing president makes jokes about siccing a Predator -- a weapon that he as Commander in Chief has already used to slaughter innocent civilians since taking office -- on his daughter's date, ha ha. As Obama slowly masticates dead meat at a state dinner, smiling with amusement at his own witticism, his victims like rotting in the sun overseas, where they are slowly pulled to pieces by carrion birds. We are humans. We don't NEED to kill animals to survive or even live long healthy lives. In killing animals we kill the better part of ourselves, and pay the price in the form of wars, crime, obesity and poor health.
posted by Faze at 11:26 AM on May 15, 2010 [16 favorites]

You know who else was a vegetarian?

"Bone-gnawing president." Sheesh.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:35 AM on May 15, 2010 [10 favorites]

i dunno, these nice folks moved into my neighborhood and just opened a cool bbq joint...they're great neighbors!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:37 AM on May 15, 2010

I think your extrapolation is a bit overwrought Faze, and I say that as a 90% vegetarian and someone who studies warfare with an eye towards it (as we know it now) being primarily a social construct and not innate. I loath to do this to a thread, but... "you know who else was a strict vegetarian?"

I can totally get behind claims of factory style meat processing being bad for community and individual mental health, but the notion that meat eating is the root cause for violence and all that is bad in the world.
posted by edgeways at 11:37 AM on May 15, 2010 [5 favorites]

er... add

is a bit far-fetched

to the end, kinda petered out there,
posted by edgeways at 11:38 AM on May 15, 2010

Thanks Faze :-)
posted by Lleyam at 11:53 AM on May 15, 2010

It doesn't really matter if there is a link. I bet robots will be doing the dirty work within ten years.

I, for one, dread the upsurge in robot crime.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:54 AM on May 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

There's no better way to turn people into statistical science experts than to hand them a conclusion they disagree with.
posted by DU at 11:55 AM on May 15, 2010 [27 favorites]

In college I made a documentary about a local slaughterhouse. The people who worked there were very weird. They were literally draping the skins of pigs over themselves and throwing cow eyeballs at each other and all kinds of crazy stuff. On camera. At some point, for these guys at least, I think the thing in their brain that was supposed to tell them they were doing something fucked up actually first went through some process of desensitization, then it warped even further until the only way they could deal with it was to turn it all into something comical.

Of course, they could have just been assholes.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:00 PM on May 15, 2010 [10 favorites]

Did they control for the massive influx of meth into these communities over the same period? It seems to me that if you did a similar study on many urban areas from 1980-1990 you might conclude that 80s music or brightly colored clothing was linked to a huge upswing in crime.
posted by fshgrl at 12:01 PM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

I wonder if there is a link between those who torture for the government and violent crime.
posted by millardsarpy at 12:01 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Bone-gnawing president." Sheesh.

Hey now, the bones Obama gnaws on are a serious news story.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:10 PM on May 15, 2010

I think you'd see that if she controlled for the presence of slaughterhouses that the level of violent crime would be equivalent.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:11 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's no better way to turn people into statistical science experts than to hand them a conclusion they disagree with.

Kind of like how people throw skepticism out the window if their prejudices are affirmed.
posted by Amanojaku at 12:15 PM on May 15, 2010 [8 favorites]

Malice: "I cannot imagine that someone who has the ability to rip thousands of animals throats out is all that kind, gentle and law abiding of a person..."

Does that reasoning extend to my grandmother, who slaughtered, say, tens of chickens to feed us? Maybe she was a bloodthirsty maniac, and I never knew because all that shrieking and crying and feeling sorry for the flailing, headless chickens was a big fat ruse.
posted by klanawa at 12:32 PM on May 15, 2010 [5 favorites]

The problem is you can't just shut down slaughter houses, because that leads to all kinds of chainsaw massacres down the line.
posted by brundlefly at 12:42 PM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

well, now I'm curious about how many convicted criminals are slaughterhouse employees.
posted by shmegegge at 12:50 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Bullying and Animal Abuse: Is There a Connection? Excerpt: Those who were above the median with regard to both victimization and perpetration of physical bullying exhibited the highest rates of involvement in multiple acts of animal abuse and also exhibited the lowest levels of sensitivity with regard to cruelty-related attitudes pertaining to animals.
posted by binturong at 1:13 PM on May 15, 2010

Here's a shirt which illustrates the cuts of meat available on the human torso.
posted by gman at 1:31 PM on May 15, 2010 [6 favorites]

It's not that hard to come up with alternate hypotheses.

How about: Normally, people try to prevent slaughterhouses from opening in their community. When the members of a community are suffering economically, they become less resistant to the opening of a slaughterhouse. People who want to open slaughterhouses tend to open them in places where there will be less resistance. When members of a community are suffering economically, crime rates increase, but only after a while.

It's possible to control for things to eliminate this hypothesis, but there's no mention of this. And there are countless other similar, reasonable alternative hypotheses. Seeing Fitzgerald's data and concluding that slaughterhouse workers commit more violence is shoddy thinking, and potentially insulting and unfair to slaughterhouse workers.

If you want to test out this unsupported hypothesis (that slaughterhouse workers become desensitized and commit more violence), it's not hard to do.
posted by nathan v at 1:49 PM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

I'm not clicking the link because I fear I will relive really really bad memories*, but I actually visited a large factory slaughterhouse as an 11 year old child in the mid-70s. I watched the butcher of a cow, and I can tell you it was a horrific, terrifying experience--especially for a sensitive kid. I can still smell that coppery smell; see the blood pool on the floor; see them chopping the cow's head off to inspect the brain for disease; see the miserable conditions the animals suffer. When I went back home I cried and vomited and swore I would never eat meat again.

With the memories of the violence of the whole thing, it doesn't surprise me a bit that these people would become desensitized, abusive, and barbarous. It would really surprise me if they didn't.

It still fucking pisses me off when people casually dismiss the cruelty I saw. I have no doubt the experience fundamentally changed me and my view of humanity and life itself.

Who am kidding: I've never stopped reliving them.
posted by belvidere at 2:04 PM on May 15, 2010 [8 favorites]

Other findings in here - "an increase in employment in iron and steel forging is associated with a decrease in arrests for rape," and "an increase in the number of truck trailer employees in these counties would be expected to decrease the number of total arrests."

Also, according to the article the introduction of a slaughterhouse increases arrests by 2.24. Is that a big number? How many arrests are there typically? If it's 10, that's a big deal, if it's 1000 this is article is crap. But we don't know.

From the article:

"By fixing the control variables at their means and adjusting only the number of slaughterhouse employees in a county it is possible to see how different levels of slaughterhouse employment would affect the scales (see Table 5). An average-sized slaughterhouse, which employs 175 people, would be expected to increase the arrest scale by 2.24 arrests and the report scale by 4.69 reports. Particularly telling is the fact that the expected arrest and report values in counties with 7,500 slaughterhouse employees are more than double the values where there are no slaughterhouse employees. These results demonstrate that the effect of slaughterhouse employment on these scales cannot be explained away by the control variables and that the comparison industries do not have similar significant effects. Also, because the analyses employ fixed effects they also therefore control for time-invariant variables in these counties that might affect the crime rates, such as geographic location. These findings, however, cannot provide insight into how slaughterhouses, the comparison industries, and the control variables affect individual crime variables. To provide this insight, we used negative binomial regression."

The arrest scale goes from 69.32 to 71.56, the report scale from 115.40 to 120.09.

nathan v:"If you want to test out this unsupported hypothesis (that slaughterhouse workers become desensitized and commit more violence), it's not hard to do."

She tested 3 sociological hypotheses in the paper already. She does call for more theorizing, but I don't think it is shoddy thinking at all when looking at the work of these authors.

Here's part of the description of scale creation:

"For some analyses, crime rate variables were created and factor analyzed to create two scales (arrest rate and report rate scales). Using the scales as dependent variables mitigates the variables mitigates the violations of OLS regression assumptions by creating a more normal distribution of scores than obtained with the counts or rates for particular crimes. To create the scales the counts were first converted into rates. Then principal components analysis was used to determine the factor structure, followed by iterative principal factors to obtain the factor loadings. The resulting Arrest Rate Scale is made up of the following variables: rape, robbery, burglary, other assaults, forgery, possessing stolen property, vandalism, offences against the family, and disorderly conduct.8 The same process was followed to create the Report Rate Scale.9 The Report Rate Scale is made up of the following variables: reports of rape, robbery, assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arson."

"8. The factor loadings are all above the commonly accepted minimum values of 0.3 to 0.4 and the Chronbach’s alpha for the scale is .6728.
9. Again, all of the loadings for these variables were above the acceptable range and Chronbach’s alpha was .6062."

I haven't finished completely going over it, but it doesn't look shoddy to me. Fitzgerald does say at the end "We believe that this is another of a growing list of social problems and phenomena that are undertheorized unless explicit attention is paid to the social role of nonhuman animals."
posted by cashman at 2:09 PM on May 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

Where'd you find the paper? Didn't see a link anywhere.
posted by nathan v at 2:12 PM on May 15, 2010

Doh! I'm dumb. Will read.

The paper if anybody is as unobservant as me :)
posted by nathan v at 2:14 PM on May 15, 2010

I would think that the increase in crime wouldn't necessarily come from the slaughterhouse workers but from those in the town that saw their only alternative to crime as working at the slaughterhouse. As someone above stated it takes a certain type of person to work in a slaughterhouse so if that's your only opportunity for legal work maybe crime would seem a little more palatable.
posted by any major dude at 2:34 PM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

We already know that killing for a living will screw you up. See: soldiers returning from every single war ever.
posted by tehloki at 2:56 PM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Malice: "I cannot imagine that someone who has the ability to rip thousands of animals throats out is all that kind, gentle and law abiding of a person. There are exceptions, perhaps, but it takes a certain kind of special to kill over and over again, sometimes mindlessly. "

That 'certain kind of special' is called lacking other options. Assuming that people who work with meat do so because they are dangerous lawbreaking psychos is more than a little weird.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 2:59 PM on May 15, 2010 [8 favorites]

Thanks Any major dude. That's what I'm wondering as well. I wonder if you get quite the same criminal record check for a slaughter house as you do in certain other industries.

In a slaughterhouse you aren't dealing with the public, like you would at a minimum wage job at McDonald's. You can probably have a certain set of beliefs about blood and gore that the rest of the population doesn't share, and none will be the wiser.

So what about the idea that people who aren't squeamish (and perhaps might think violence isn't such a big deal) are drawn to becoming slaughterhouse workers, instead of slaughterhouse work necessarily making people bloodthirsty?
posted by The ____ of Justice at 3:09 PM on May 15, 2010

Whoa belvidere, what kind of fucked-up science field trip is that? Sorry you went through it.
posted by yerfatma at 3:29 PM on May 15, 2010

Was any attention paid to the notion that when abbetoirs open up, historically the mob has been right there with them? It seems just as likely (or unlikely) a notion that this causes crime spikes than the idea that people who work in slaughterhouses are souless killing machines rather than people trying to, you know, support their families as best they can.

Someone who's less sensitive to gore is less empathic to the pain gore causes.

Oh you mean people like surgeons? Midwives? Field medics? EMS and rescue?

Bullshit. Years ago I worked in major urban ERs/A&Es and loved it. I am not remotely bothered by gore; I don't recoil from gunshot wounds, impalement injuries or open fractures, and when faced with burn injuries (which I do struggle with) you just get on with the job that needs to be done.

But I don't know anyone who works in that environment who is less empathic to the pain gore causes because they are exposed to it day in and day out.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:16 PM on May 15, 2010 [6 favorites]

But I don't know anyone who works in that environment who is less empathic to the pain gore causes because they are exposed to it day in and day out.

I'm pretty sure there have been some complaints about doctors or surgeons, or likewise, that become less empathic over time. But that's another thread, and the reasons may nor may not be linked.

Still, fixing people or animals is different than killing them.
posted by Malice at 4:23 PM on May 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

Cashman:

So after making a big fool of myself, I still can't read the actual article, because it's behind a paywall. I don't know if that makes me more of a fool or less of a fool :)

I don't know that the researchers' thinking is (or isn't) shoddy. My reference to shoddy thinking referred only to overstating the findings of the study. The researchers don't make the claim that the data support their "Sinclair effect." (In the abstract, they say the data suggest it; I take that as meaning that they consider further research appropriate.)
posted by nathan v at 4:51 PM on May 15, 2010

Well, despite what they would have you think, Quincannon Meats doesn't hire the best of employees.
posted by Samizdata at 6:13 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

I still want to know what kinds of work she found to compare. Industry and factories don't seem that good a fit; certain agricultural work like mucking horse stalls and stripping tobacco seems closer. And the tobacco work was done, as I recall, by people who could not get anything else. Those jobs don't generally move new into a neighborhood, though.
posted by dilettante at 6:53 PM on May 15, 2010

let's do an experiment whereby all the abbatoirs are changed into soybean processing plants, via a federal stimulus grant. see what happens.
posted by angrycat at 7:18 PM on May 15, 2010

Killing animals on an disassembly line is not a trivial thing.

I was a welder building handrails, etc. at a rural NC meat packing plant in the mid seventies. The plant was under construction when I hired on, and I saw it through to completion and didn’t finish my end of the job until after they had been killing animals, mostly brought in by local farmers, for a month or so.

We had a construction crew of 5 or 6 guys. Most of us were long-hairs and we took off for lunch, smoked a joint and got a cold beer at a bootlegger house. In that part of NC back then beer was only legal in the county seat and it was sold warm, so there was a thriving back country market for cold beer and backroom poker games... but I digress.

I got pretty close to three of those guys. One of them was the scion of small time local gentry fallen on hard times. He was the most charming, cavalier person I have ever met. The other two were sons of farmers in a bad small farm economy, looking for a way out; and they volunteered, having had some previous experience ... to stay on and learn to kill full time.

It takes a special kind of person to do that sort of thing and make it pay on a commercial basis. Those guys were OK with killing sick cows as needed, but they winced at killing healthy cows as fast as possible all day long. So the owner contracted veterans from an established slaughterhouse to teach them how to kill the most animals in the least amount of time, but it didn’t work.

Everyone was appalled beyond belief by those assholes.
posted by Huplescat at 7:22 PM on May 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

I still want to know what kinds of work she found to compare.

"Iron and steel forging, truck trailer manufacturing, motor vehicle metal stamping, sign manufacturing, and industrial laundering. These industries were selected because they are similar to the slaughterhouse industry: They are categorized as manufacturing (with the exception of one industry, which was included due to a high rate of immigrant concentration), the industries are characterized by high immigrant worker concentrations, low pay, routinized labor, and dangerous conditions."

Industry and factories don't seem that good a fit; certain agricultural work like mucking horse stalls and stripping tobacco seems closer.

"Unfortunately, comparisons could not be made with agricultural production industries, as the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns does not record that information."
posted by cashman at 7:22 PM on May 15, 2010

correlation != causation

I hear this a lot. It's not always the case.
posted by davemee at 8:02 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

correlation != causation

I hear this a lot. It's not always the case.

Came here to say that! It's like the atheism thread just below. Knee jerk stats bashing is the new knee jerk Christian bashing. ;)
posted by uncanny hengeman at 9:31 PM on May 15, 2010

It seems some people are reading "correlation /= causation" as "correlation never indicates causation," which is ridiculous, since if there was an element of causation, there would definitely be correlation. The true reading is "correlation is not always an indication of causation." Correlation is always a reason to look deeper, whether for a causal mechanism or some other explanation.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 10:28 PM on May 15, 2010

correlation != causation

Perhaps I am reading the article incorrectly, but I don't see where it says that slaughterhouses cause violent crime to increase, only that they appear to be linked.
posted by Hicksu at 10:40 PM on May 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

My understanding was that slaughterhouse workers are supposed to rotated on and off the actual killing duties, in order to reduce the psychological stress for the workers. I'm guessing that this gets ignored, like a lot of the health and safety regulations in the meat-processing industry?
posted by harriet vane at 11:27 PM on May 15, 2010

Whoa belvidere, what kind of fucked-up science field trip is that? Sorry you went through it.

Thanks yerfatma. I was a city kid, but I had a few cousins who were children of farmers, and they belonged to a group called 4-H. I think it was just a field trip for them, and I was tagging along. Lucky me. Over thirty years later, every time I think of that day, I physically flinch. The whole thing left me with some strange psychological scars; prior to the experience, I was a relatively well-adjusted kid, and afterward, well, not so much. I would gladly volunteer to have all memories of it erased.

Although, there have been times I've thought that everybody should tour a factory slaughterhouse to witness the whole process at least once--especially the more cavalier meat-eaters (of which Anthony Bourdain is a fine example, asshole that he is). Afterward, I can guarantee there would be less meat-eaters in the world, and the "joy" of eating meat would be fatally dampened for the cold-hearted that remained.
posted by belvidere at 3:55 AM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

A few years back, a government agency promoting the American agrarian ideal shipped baby chickens and piglets to Koyukon Indian villagers- people who have been hunters, trappers, and fishers all their lives. Some folks took to the notion, built pens, raised healthy pigs and successful flocks, and eventually found eggs under their hens. That's when things started going awry. After watching the chickens grow, many couldn't bring themselves to eat the eggs, and it was even worse to think of dining on the birds or pigs. "People felt like they'd be eating their own children," a Koyukon woman told me. "A lot of them said, from now on they would only eat wild game they got by hunting. It felt a lot better that way.
- Richard K. Nelson, Heart & Blood

I recently attended both a chicken slaughtering workshop and a hunting workshop. The former managed to convince several people to be vegetarians, the latter had several former vegans and convinced a current vegan to eat venison.

Meat doesn't have to come from a slaughterhouse. Unfortunately, small farmers have to use them thanks to regulations. It's a big difference between respectfully killing a single cow under a killing tree, near where the cow was raised, and then feasting on it with your family...and repetitively killing over and over and over animals you didn't ever have contact with before, who are probably stressed from travel, and going home and not even being able to afford meat yourself.

Meat is a big part of our history, slaughter isn't. For me it was a totally different experience to deal with a single wild animal and treat it as a sacred compared to repetitively slaughtering a bunch of birds raised by humans. I feel the same as the Koyoukon.

It's not even just about animals, it's about wanting to support livelihoods that are fulfilling for humans.

The solution for me is to bypass the slaughterhouse. So I learned to hunt hunt and I buy whole animals with my friends and we process them ourselves.
posted by melissam at 6:40 AM on May 16, 2010

belvidere, as a very little kid I read a story by Astrid Lindgren describing a kid's trip to a slaughterhouse (AL was a fierce campaigner against factory farming) which burned itself into my memory. On the upside, don't have to think about why I avoid factory farmed meat today.
posted by yoHighness at 6:46 AM on May 16, 2010

So then Chicago's crime rate has vastly decreased over the past century? Or maybe this isn't a 2 way correlation?
posted by mygoditsbob at 8:00 AM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine used to be HR manager at a chicken processing plant. She always said how difficult it was to staff the kill line. People would come in ready to work as the pay was good, but they would either get physically ill due to the dust and feathers or they couldn't stomach killing chickens for hour after hour. She said about half of new hires were washouts and had to be moved elsewhere in the plant.
posted by TorontoSandy at 8:23 AM on May 16, 2010

As Obama slowly masticates dead meat at a state dinner, smiling with amusement at his own witticism, his victims like rotting in the sun overseas, where they are slowly pulled to pieces by carrion birds.

Good lord, that's a stretch. How did you manage to make this about Obama?
posted by krinklyfig at 3:53 PM on May 16, 2010

All I can think of after reading this thread is "I'm going to Bovine University!"
posted by antifuse at 8:28 AM on May 17, 2010