Bringing Horse Slaughterhouses to Your Town Will Likely Raise Crime and Violence Rates

Tell me again, Sue Wallis, why would you do this to your state of Wyoming and it's communities? Rep Butcher in Montana...what do you have to say to this?

"Workers exposed to the killing of large numbers of animals on a regular basis become disturbed and appear to lose empathy." This can only increase exponentially when workers kill companion animals - horses - versus animals that are food source animals. Particularly when you consider that horses scream in pain and fear, and the slaughterhouses they are killed in are not designed to properly restrain a horse's long neck and innate fear that result in them trying to elude the very inefficient and inhumane captive bolt meant to stun them. The workers are undoubtedly appalled by being part of this cruelty, until such point that they lose their ability to empathize with a living being's fear and pain.

Then consider that many horses are cut apart while still alive...

Below article excerpted from this article:

Probing The Link Between Slaughterhouses and Violent Crime

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/809521--probing-the-link-between-slaughterhouses-and-violent-crime

University of Windsor Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

In a recent study, Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offense reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. Fitzgerald says she was inspired by The Jungle to study crime records in U.S. communities where slaughterhouses are located.

She became fascinated by studies of the environmental effects of slaughterhouses that mentioned crime rates, without explanation, seemed to go up when the factories opened in communities.

Fitzgerald carefully weighed the figures in order to see whether a link really existed. She found that an average-sized slaughterhouse with 175 employees would annually increase the number of arrests by 2.24 and the number of reports by 4.69. The larger the abattoir, the worse the local crime problem.

She controlled for factors such as the influx of new residents when slaughterhouses open, high numbers of young men — even the number of immigrants.

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labor pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors.

Nor can the violence be blamed on factory work itself. Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down.

“The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.”

More studies are needed to determine if crimes were being committed by factory workers or by others in the community, she says, and how exactly that kind of work could cause crime to go up. But the numbers leave few other explanations other than the slaughterhouses being somehow to blame.

It’s a case of science catching up to what has been folk knowledge since industrialized slaughterhouses began to appear in the 19th century: workers exposed to the killing of large numbers of animals on a regular basis become disturbed and appear to lose empathy.

But the etiology of the problem remains something of a chicken-and-egg puzzle. Do slaughterhouses desensitize workers to killing? Or, could the work attract people who are less sensitive to begin with?

Fitzgerald suggests a similarity between slaughterhouse communities and military communities, which have been studied for higher incidence rates of partner abuse.

“One of (the explanations) is the violence they witness and sometimes have to participate in might result in some kind of desensitization,” she says.

“There is something unique about the slaughterhouses,” says Fitzgerald. “There’s definitely a need for further research to figure out exactly what that is.”