The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

If people have to kill a living, breathing, loving, gentle, innocent animal to put in their mouth, I think they will stop. Just that most people they don’t know what cruel, gruesome thing in the slaughterhouse for the animals to be killed. They don’t know it. It’s out of their mind.

They don’t even associate that piece of meat with the living, breathing, loving, gentle, kind, innocent, loving, living being. They don’t associate. But if they have to go out and kill it for themselves, then I think they will stop.

This week on Stop Animal Cruelty, we present the concluding episode on the tragic tolls of slaughterhouse work. Each year, 60 billion animals are murdered worldwide, many of them being killed by abattoir employees.

Most abattoirs use assembly lines to quickly and cheaply massacre and process the animals. Workers are paid very low wages, and the jobs are degrading, gruesome and repetitive. Employees must endure sickening scenes of blood, gore and death every day, and the working conditions are extremely dangerous.

Such a traumatic occupation exacts a huge price – draining a worker’s physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. According to US Department of Agriculture statistics, in 2008, 4,032 cows, 13,248 pigs and over one million chickens were killed every hour in the US. Hour after hour, day after day, slaughterhouse employees are engaged in this endless, bloody slaying of innocent animals.

Les Ingram, a former slaughterhouse worker in the UK, recalls the vicious process, which begins by stunning the animals with a bolt gun.

It’s just like a tube that they just put on the head, and as it contacts, it explodes and pushes the bolt into the skull to make the hole where they put the pithing cane, which they push through the hole in the skull and then it curls up. They push it in and out as it goes in the skull. It just curls up and just smashes all the brain up here. And then obviously the other part of it is the bleeding of the animal. So the throat is cut and they're bled, over the blood bath. And then, once they're bled, they bring them round, and then start skinning them.

For the cattle, the shooting box was in the corner. And then the cattle race, that they used to come up into the shooting box, came from the lairage. I suppose the cattle race is about 25-30 feet long. So, the cattle in the race, and in the pens behind obviously, because of the nature of the building, they must have been able to hear what was going on. Obviously they’d be able to smell what was going on.

And most of them looked absolutely terrified, when they came into the shooting box. I used to say, "They know what’s coming." Some of them would do anything to try and get out of that box, leaping up, trying to climb over the top. But they couldn’t because it was too high.

Mr. Ingram recalls the reactions of outside people whenever they visited the facility.

We used to get people coming around the slaughterhouse. You know, groups of students, people who perhaps they were going to be vets or some other profession like that. And you could see the faces as soon as they walked into the slaughterhouse while the killing was going on. You could see them start to heave with the sights of all the blood and noise and everything else.

Surrounded by blood, urine, feces, pus, animal body parts and dismembered organs, these murderous jobs severely affect the workers’ physical health. Between 2006 and 2008, 24 employees from two pig abattoirs in Indiana and Michigan, USA respectively fell ill with a paralyzing neurological disease. Each of these workers had been removing brains from pig skull cavities using highly compressed air.

Doctors later determined that the illness was caused by the inhalation of minute particles of pig brain tissue. Another serious problem is the devastating impact this violent environment has on the mental state of those involved in slaughterhouse operations. Jaylene Musgrave, who founded the Australian animal welfare organization Vegan Warriors, describes how her father, a slaughterhouse inspector, was profoundly affected by his job both physically and mentally.

He had to go and inspect the carcasses, to ensure that there were no diseases so that they were fit for human consumption. And this meant that quite often he was around animals that had been slaughtered where there were diseases, and that in turn made him sick. And he spent quite a lot of time in hospital being treated for the diseases that he'd picked up through that work.

Did it have any effect on his mental or psychological health as well as his physical health?

Yes, I truly believe it did, because he started to become quite an angry man. And I think it was having to deal with violence and death on a daily basis (which) really affected his psyche. And it came out in really bad ways. He started to drink very heavily. I don’t know how he would go to sleep at night. And I think that’s why he turned to drinking because it dulled the feelings that were inside of him.

There were a lot of men, because it was mainly men that worked there, that drank a lot. And unfortunately also that would turn to violence within the family home. And I do believe that has to do with what they had to go and do every single day. And I’ve thought about what impact it must have on them, going home knowing what they’ve done. So I suppose alcohol in those days definitely was very prevalent. And I would say today a lot of them would maybe even do drugs. You know, to cope with it, to try and blot it out.

Like Ms. Musgrave’s father, Les Ingram and his fellow workers also tried to block out the stress and trauma from their jobs.

Well, I think a lot of the blokes in the industry used to deal with it with the help of alcohol. I used to go to the local football clubs after work every night; I'd be there until closing time. It's one way of dealing with what you’ve been dealing with all day; push it to the back of your mind. Go for a game of darts, game of cards, a few beers.

And I think a lot of blokes were only able to cope with the situation because of that. I mean in fact one of the slaughtermen that used to work there, every morning he'd have a fresh bottle of whisky. He used to nip in and out of the locker room, and that bottle of whisky would be gone during the course of the day.

Sometimes the behavior of abattoir employees manifests the madness that surrounds them at work. Les Ingram recalls one horrendous incident at the slaughterhouse.

They had a lot of ewes coming in at one particular point, and a lot of the ewes were actually in lamb and very close to having those lambs born. And so, of course, during the process of being slaughtered, the bags were taken out, and the lambs were inside the bags.

And there was one in particular quite big. And they opened the bag up and took the lamb out and got some paper towels; wiped around her mouth, blew up her nose a few times, gave her a bit of a rub, and the lamb started breathing and was actually, alive and ready to go.

But this amused them for a few minutes and (then they) said, “Oh well, time to get on with the job.” (They) just sssst, just cut (the lamb's) throat, just like that. They brought her to life out of the womb, got her going, and then just cut her throat. And that was just for amusement. That was the sort of thing that used to go on.

This same utter lack of caring and compassion has been seen in those who kill animals for a living outside the walls of meat processing facilities.

They become desensitized to what they’re doing. I mean, anybody who can go up and hit a baby seal over the head is the same kind of mentality that’ll go and stomp a kitten to death, you know? I find it completely unfathomable to see how anybody could do that, but I’ve seen them do it and they actually look on us as being strange that we don’t partake of that.

The obscene violence shown towards animals in a slaughterhouse can also turn into violence towards fellow humans. Dr. Amy Fitzgerald, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Windsor, Canada, concluded that, in the United States, the link between slaughterhouses and murder, rape and other brutal crimes is an empirical fact, and that an average sized slaughterhouse with 175 employees increases the number of annual arrests in a community by 2.24 and the annual reports of violence by 4.69.

I really do feel that anyone involved in having to be hands-on in the taking of an animal’s life, I think it does really get into the psychological aspect of a human being, and how they are in this world and how they walk around in this world. I’ve read of so many instances of people that have committed horrendous crimes towards people, serial killers and so forth. (They) have tortured animals on many occasions.

We lost the father that we knew, who was kind and gentle. And he became very angry at the world. And he became very, very violent and very aggressive towards my mom and towards us kids. And I really do think it was all because of what he was having to go through every day at work and being surrounded by the fear and the death.

Jaylene Musgrave’s father's aggressiveness towards his family continued. Eventually he committed a violent crime and was sentenced to prison.

What was it that led to your father spending time in prison?

He actually couldn’t cope with the stress at the time, and what was going through his head and his feelings. And he took it out on my mom. And, unfortunately we had a gun and he shot my mom. (It was) very fortunate that my mom didn’t die, although she was disabled by it. So I know that my father, that evening after it had happened, went down to the river and put the gun in his mouth to take his own life, but he didn’t go through with that. And that led to him being jailed.

I saw a lot of things I didn’t like, that were absolutely shock... shocking. And they never, ever leave you. It’s just like replaying a video Putting it on, you know, reverse, and then playing it back again and again and again. Because they never do leave you. I certainly wouldn’t go back to anything like that. You know, even if it was the last job.

We are grateful to Les Ingram, Jaylene Musgrave and the others we interviewed for this two-part series on the physical dangers and psychological trauma slaughterhouse workers encounter in their occupation. We pray that we soon live on a vegan planet, where such destructive and debilitating jobs no longer exist and all animals lead tranquil lives.

Conscientious viewers, thank you for joining us for today’s program. Up next is Enlightening Entertainment, right after Noteworthy News. May our magnificent planet always be at peace.