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.

This week on Stop Animal Cruelty we present part one in our two-part series on the tragic toll of working in slaughterhouses, where billions of animals are callously murdered each year.

What is it like to work in a slaughterhouse? 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.

Many slaughterhouse workers feel trapped in their jobs, having no other way to provide for their families. Such a traumatic occupation exacts a huge price – draining a worker’s physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. One couple who worked in a chicken-processing plant in England describe their former jobs.

I did several kinds of jobs in the chicken factory. First my role was to hang the live chickens. They had to be put on a line that led to the slaughtering. If the job for this was already filled, then my task was to hang the already dead chickens.

I had a job in the factory on the line, in which we selected the chicken breasts and chicken legs. And it was given how many grams could be in a box. And that had to be selected and arranged in a shape. So even that mattered, in what order they were in the box. Because we were always at a different line, there was another section where we cut the chicken breasts into pieces using scissors.

The point is that, just like an animal, they made us work under very cold, very bad conditions. No break, no rest, no work clothes. (No work clothes either?) Nothing, nothing, nothing (No.) I had to put on the only pair of rubber boots which had been taken off by the person before me. If they were wet from him, I just had to work also in wet rubber boots.

These obscene killing factories can be absolutely massive in size. The largest slaughterhouse in the world, operated by a company in the US, can butcher over 32,000 pigs a day. And in the US alone, 270 chickens are slain every second or about 8.5 billion chickens a year. To kill and process this many innocent beings, employees are under constant pressure to work quickly and keep the murderous assembly lines going.

There were machines. There were machines everywhere.

These were very powerful machines that the person had to put the chicken inside one by one, from the right or left side. But your hands had to be fast there, like a machine. And even then, they were shouting a lot and were strict.

They were shouting at us, "Faster, faster!" If you weren't fast enough, you were told to leave.

But one aspect of abattoirs is even more revolting than the working conditions.

Because of the drastic sights in the factory, because of the torture of animals, the animals did not have a chance. And this was very disgusting and disturbing to us that every day just more, and more, and more (of this).

We hanged the chickens every day, and I saw every day the large amount of meat, the carcasses, the bodies of that huge number, many thousands, many thousands of chickens. I reflected upon how many thousands of chicken go away in a month, in a year, and that all of these are living beings.

And to fulfill animal-torturing roles like this, this was a very bad sight. And it was very bad to think about the fact that we raise something only to be killed under such torturous conditions, and to eat it.

Witnessing countless deaths day after mind-numbing day is utterly devastating to one’s mental state. In her report, “A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress through Legal Reform,” Jennifer Dillard, a lawyer in the United States, examines some of the many psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, suffered by slaughterhouse workers.

And in her book, "Slaughterhouse," Gail A. Eisnitz, chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association, describes the crippling mental effects of this violent line of work. For many employees, the endless bloody murders they see at these factories of death continue to haunt them, even long after they leave their jobs.

We are sorry for what happened and that we also had to see this, what people do to an animal. We cannot forget what happened there and the things we did. It was a very bad experience for me.

And I do not wish this upon anyone. How they keep those animals, as we said, in the 21st century, and what they do to them, it's hideous. It is horrible. This is a horrible sight. It is like murder. Everything is covered in blood, and she (the chicken) is still alive. Her head is no longer there, but her body is still alive. And it's terrible.

Do the workers ever think about the feelings of the animals they slay? Former slaughterhouse employee Ed Calles, now a vegan, shares some of his personal experiences.

I grew up the son of a dock foreman in a beef slaughterhouse. When I got back home from the Vietnam War, I went to the slaughterhouse where my father was working, and took on some work. Back then I saw many things that were fairly disturbing, not knowing how de-sensitized I had become. I saw animals being led to their slaughter. That really impacted me.

Was this the purpose they were put on Earth for? I asked myself that question over and over as I saw them coming out of the cattle trucks and into the corrals and even jumping the corrals and fearing for their lives, running down the avenue, and taking on automobiles head-on, crashing into them. And this animal was in fear of her life. So, in seeing that, I was just aghast. How cruel! I mean, I had been back from the war and saw a lot of cruelty and death and killing and that sort of thing, and here I was, in need of a job, and I saw all this cruelty again.

Constantly surrounded by the animals' heart wrenching cries for help as well as blood, urine and feces, slaughterhouse employees often try to find ways to cope.

Eventually, I became desensitized. But in my heart of hearts, I knew there was something wrong here. I didn’t know exactly what. Guys carried on in a bloodthirsty kind of lifestyle. During work, in the early morning hours, loading trucks with these animal carcasses, men drank all night long; (they were) severely intoxicated. But they did their job.

And I was offered a lot to drink, but I couldn’t. Now looking back at it, I think they had to. Because it was their way of desensitizing themselves. I just wanted to be at peace with myself and everybody around me, but I just couldn’t find it there.

In Ed Calles' experience, the brutal work often resulted in another outcome.

These men had episodes of rage and anger if little things didn’t go their way. Many times there were drunken brawls over the smallest of things. And the toughest guy was the guy who picked up, the most amount of weight, that you just gave more respect to.

But a smaller little guy would pick up something and start swinging, I mean (swinging) hooks, (the) big hooks that these pieces of meat would roll down the dock to, for us to swing them, and cut them and load them. So many times there was an outbreak of a fight. And a lot of it just was not making much sense. And I had to find another way out, and eventually I did.

Slaughterhouse workers can become so unfeeling to death and devoid of compassion that they sometimes injure or kill animals simply for amusement. Les Ingram, a former slaughterhouse employee in the UK, recalls one such incident.

And so one young bloke I remember, he goes down in the lairage one day, and he’s carrying a boning knife. And there are pens full of sheep. And he just stuck the knife through the bars and stabbed it into the side of a sheep. I said, "What did you do that for?"

When you're going into those places, killing animals is part of everyday life, because that’s what happens there. So it must affect some people quite badly. Whether people manage to deal with it, and whatever the system they use to deal with it, some do (have it), but some don’t.

Are people who live in the vicinity of a slaughterhouse also affected by the murderous atmosphere? Jaylene Musgrave, a vegan in Australia whose father worked in an abattoir, shares her childhood experience.

Each night, I'd go to sleep and you'd hear the cows mooing and you could just feel the fright and terror that they were going through. And I just felt sick all the time, knowing that these poor animals were being held captive and what they were going to go through. It just made me always anxious. And I never, ever want to live near anything like that, ever again.

While the employees in a slaughterhouse may be doing the killing, they are actually just one part of a system that supplies meat to consumers. Hence there’s only one way we can end this murderous cycle: adopt a plant-based diet.

I actually think that anyone that consumes animal products should take time to visit an abattoir. The people that work in those situations are doing the dirty work for consumers. And I believe that if anyone who wants to eat meat had to slaughter their own animal, we’d have a lot more vegans in this world.

How do the workers handle their heinous jobs? What happens when an employee can’t cope? Does working in an abattoir affect family life? Please join us again next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty as we answer these and other questions in the concluding episode of our series on the horrors faced by slaughterhouse workers.

Thoughtful viewers, thank you for joining us on today's program. Enlightening Entertainment is coming up next after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May all beings on Earth enjoy long lives filled with peace and dignity.