I Don’t Blame the Men Who Bludgeoned Pigs to Death in Front of Me
As long as people continue to eat animals, someone will have to kill them. I feel sorry for them.
Editor’s note: This piece contains graphic descriptions of animal slaughter.
The walls of this inner-city slaughterhouse are formed by apartment buildings, and so for many of the families living there, their only window directly overlooks the killing floor. It was in one of these apartments that I was crouched down, holding my camera through the bars of the window. Below me, the pigs lay motionless in pens, likely exhausted from what would have been a horrific journey across Cambodia. The workers had arrived an hour before. Now, they lay swinging in hammocks, waiting for their shift to begin.
In April, my partner and I filmed undercover footage at an open-air slaughterhouse in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, where an estimated 600 pigs are killed every night. To capture this footage, we rented a small, single apartment room that directly overlooked the killing floor.
He would return to the same spot, flop down his body and rest his head against the pig next to him. This small act of tenderness between the two…
