“Please forgive me. If I don’t kill you, I can’t feed my family” was the desperate apology a slaughterhouse worker used to whisper to the dogs in their cages in the Cambodian slaughterhouse where he used to work. The worker burst into tears as he described killing up to 6 dogs a day in a Cambodian slaughterhouse. Unlike workers in slick Western meat processing plants who are removed from the killing, Cambodian workers who participate in horrific violence on a daily basis fully experience the reality of what they are doing.
The dogs themselves are rounded up and put into cages and then suffer a drawn-out, tortuous end to their lives. They are transported to the slaughterhouses in crowded cages huddled with other dogs, and kept in rusty cages before being killed. The dogs are killed in brutal, horrific ways with no agreed upon system of killing. Some are hung from trees, others are drowned in fetid water. Some are strangled. Some are stabbed and some are beat over the head. Workers learn to prefer beating dogs over the head because it’s quicker, or drowning them in closed cages so they don’t have to hear their cries.
Yet amid all the horror, somehow there is a ray of light for Cambodian dogs. The organization Four Paws, which has worked tirelessly on behalf of dogs in Cambodia, has succeeded in shutting down the worker’s former employer, one the country’s biggest slaughterhouses. If the closure of this business disrupts the supply chain, it will send a strong message about the acceptability of the dog meat trade in Cambodia. The province of Siem Reap has also decided to ban the trade. But in Cambodia over 3 million dogs a year are slaughtered for the dog meat trade. There is still so much more work to be done to turn the tide against this horrific slaughter.
Four Paws did not just shut down the slaughterhouse, it supported workers to find alternative income and helped some of them to open a grocery store. The organization follows through on an understanding of the relationship between human misery and animal misery. One begets the other as poor workers are forced to kill for a living and dogs die to make profits for rich humans who are conveniently removed from the killing. The kind of clothes that those in business wear are different from the blood-stained rags of hired animal killers, yet it is the clean suits that are the real hallmarks of mass killers.
In a poignant moment, the worker who had murdered the dogs was able to release fifteen of them from their cages when the factory shut down. This time the worker was able to whisper to the animals: “you are free now” In this moment, the workers’ freedom and the animals’ freedom were not different, they were intricately intertwined and impossible without each other.
Please visit Four Paws website and make a donation to support the important work they are doing: four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/campaigns?utm_source=google&utm_medium=grant&utm_campaign=Evergreen&utm_content=UNR1907ADGRNTevergreenBrand&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInt2_1rKq6wIVFIzICh25fAV7EAAYASAAEgLww_D_BwE
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