This reply might not be a popular (judging by the comments in this thread), but I worked in an abattoirs for 4 years and I want to point out that the article has a bit of an agenda:
> The only slaughterhouse job worse than eviscerating animals is cleaning up afterward. The third-shift workers, as the cleaners are often called, wade through blood and grease and chunks of bone and flesh, racing all night to hose down the plant with disinfectants and scalding water. The stench is unbearable. Many workers retch.
I should mention that I worked in New Zealand so YMMV, but this was never my experience. There was cleanup with high pressure hoses throughout the day, most of the time cold water to save power. No animals were eviscerated, they want as little wastage as possible; if it isn't consumable by humans it can be sold as animal food. The animals were knocked out (like a strong taser) before they were killed. Nobody was retching; it smelled bad (particularly pigs) but you get used to in the same way you adjust to any bad smell.
I agree with the comments here that we need to move quickly to lab-grown meat or a vegetarian diet. But I have to acknowledge that the abattoirs I worked at acted as responsibly and humanely as possible
Conditions in US slaughterhouses are considerably worse than a lot of other first world countries. And instead of cleaning up its act the industry is doing what it can to make exposing its practices illegal:
I would agree, TFA says much more about USA industrial organization than it does about butchering animals. After all, humans have butchered animals for many millennia. We recently had a cow slaughtered by local Mennonites. I can report that none of these awful things were going on there. There might be some "child labor", if one's definition of "child" is more expansive than that of the Mennonites. Still, they have none of these nightmare machines and anyway not even a Mennonite would make his own kids try to clean one while it was still running.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16033895