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Sangbin Park
Professor Gillespie
Honors 231 A: Animals, Environment, Food & Justice
8 February 2015
Week #5 Reflective Journal: Yolanda Valencia and Timothy Pachirats Every Twelve Seconds
Yolanda Valencia shared with the class a very personal story about her experiences with
the meat industry. As an immigrant from Mexico, Yolandas experience with the factory farming
began when she took the job at one of IBPs meat packing plants. She said that the job was
attractive among many people for economically reasons because it usually paid a few more
dollars per hour than other physically laborious jobs. Interestingly enough, the dehumanizing
aspect of meat industry is not just about how they treat animals, but also how they treat the
workers. She offered a valuable insight into a life of a meat factory employee.
She described her job at the plant as very physically demanding. The work was fast-paced
and repetitive. Her main duty was cutting a large piece of meat on the conveyor belt into desired
ratios of lean meat and fat such as 80 percent lean meant and 20% fat. She and her colleagues
worked without taking bathroom breaks to keep up with the demanded pace. While performing
her work, she was completely removed from the killing process of the animals. She was just
cutting big chunks of meat for consumers who purchase packaged meat at a supermarket. Based
on her experience, it seems like her employers intentionally kept workers separated in each
processing cycle. Workers like Yolanda, who are removed from the killing process, are able to
handle meat mechanically without emotions because all they see is a chunk of meatwhich needs
to be further processed.

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I am convinced that factory farming can be dehumanizing for both humans and animals.
For animals, the reasons for dehumanization are obvious. They are treated as nothing more than
commodities. For humans, it seems a little bit more complicated. Workers at the factory farms
are also victims of dehumanization. They work in a cruel environment. Some of them are
involved in taking animals lives. In addition, consumers are taking part in the factory farming by
continuing to consume large quantities of meat. Yolanda mentioned that workers are doing the
killings for consumers so consumers can eat what they want.
To me, dehumanization of workers stood out to me in both Yolandas lecture and Timothy
Pachirats book, Every Twelve Seconds. Essentially, humans are dehumanizing themselves to
fulfill their ever-growing desire to eat more meat. Both factory farm workers and meat
consumers are directly involved in the process of homogenization of the animals. Stripping off
animals personality to make them all samea bunch of packaged meat products. Animals are
reduced to one temperature, one consistency, one thing identical to the thing next to it
(Pachirat 40). It saddens me to learn about the details of a slaughterhouse as described by
Pachirat in his book. As Yolanda mentioned, many workers chose their job for economic reasons.
Clearly, humans growing meat-consuming behavior is influencing dehumanization of
themselves and the animals.

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Works Cited
Pachirat, Timothy. (2012). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of
Sight. Yale University Press.