The animal is stunned and stuck, shackled and suspended. “In the chutes,” he explains, “each of the cattle has its own unique characteristics: breed, sex, height, width, hide pattern, level of curiosity, eyes, horns, sound of bellow.” Then comes the cold mechanism of slaughter. The erasure of identity pervades Pachirat’s account. Instead of the face of a worker, instead of an expression that we can see and read, we–many of whom eat the products that come from this anonymous scene– get a generic rubber apron and boots, splattered with the viscera of animals that have also been “de-animalized.” The affect is poignant. Much as the slaughterhouse attempts to engineer individual animal identity out of the picture, so the worker on the book’s cover has his individuality erased. That is, to ensure that the elemental nature of their work is never quite acknowledged, never quite seen.

Pachirat’s signal achievement is to show–really show–in detached but vivid detail the calculated methods used to protect slaughterhouse employees from the psychological weight of their actions. While the temptation might be to interpret this image as a sensational eye-catcher chosen to sell books, it’s something else entirely–it’s an apt visual metaphor for the contents of a magisterial study, one that the author wrote based on several months of full-time employment in the bowels of a Nebraska slaughterhouse.

The cover of Timothy Pachirat’s haunting new book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, is a photograph of a blood-stained slaughterhouse worker shown from the waist down.

Every 12 seconds timothy pachirat