Dive Brief:

• Investigators from the USDA have closed a veal and lamb processor in New Jersey after they received undercover video of alleged cruelty at the facility. 
• Catelli Bros., based in Shrewsbury, N.J., said it took the charges seriously. The company's CEO issued a statement, saying, "Any mistreatment of animals at our facility is unacceptable."
• Videos shot at Catelli Bros. by investigators for the Humane Society of the United States depict graphic scenes of animals suffering.

Dive Insight:

This sort of horrific behavior seems to go on and on and on in the meat industry. The major companies, like Tyson, are trying to draw some sort of line beyond which no meat processor may pass. But our sense is that the problems are deeper than they appear.

At issue here is not whether or not animals suffer needlessly. That is apparent to anyone outside of the process. The problem, more likely, is that the suffering becomes invisible to the people who work inside the process. 

Almost a hundred years ago, an Irish immigrant took a job at the Union Stockyards in Chicago. It was a good job, with good money. And landing it meant that the long, difficult years for his family had come to an end. But on the first day of that job, the man found himself surrounded by thousands of frightened cows being herded toward death by men armed with truncheons and spiked clubs. The sound and the smell of it — the fear and the viciousness — was unbearable. He was a man who had killed before. He was hard in the way that men often are after war and death and hunger and exile. But this wasn't killing in any way he recognized. This job didn't just require that he be hard, it required that he not be him.

So he quit. He walked back home through the streets of Chicago to a wife and two children. And he told them that he wouldn't do the work, couldn't do the work, because it would cost him his soul.

That man was our grandfather.