Louisville Magazine

JUL 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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68 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 glish strong but sometimes shaky. He has worked at JBS since 2005, finding the job through Catholic Charities — an organi- zation that helps resettle recently arrived immigrants and refugees — after winning the U.S. visa lottery out of Cuba. Originally, Rodriguez was a stunner, the person who kills the regularly functioning pigs by applying a 300-volt electric charge. Now he's a "charge shooter" and must kill an animal on the spot if it appears to be suffering. He'll go wherever a pig is dis- tressed — on the unloading trucks, in the barn, down into the tunnel. He'll drive the CAT over, gently scoop the pig into the front loader. "I pick them up, so slow. And put them in the pen, so slow," Rodriguez says of separating the struggling ones. "I am taking care of them like a baby." He has killed four pigs so far this mid-morning. One had a broken leg. Another foamed from its mouth. Rodri- guez took his captive bolt gun, centered it against each hog's head, pulled the trigger and — boom! — the .22-caliber steel pin of the barrel killed the pig. In summer and winter, when the pigs are more sensitive to the extreme tem- peratures, he'll kill 100 to 200 of them a day. (He estimates somewhere around 40 to 50 in the subdued spring and fall seasons.) He'll place the dead pigs in a line outside the barns, blue dye coming from a slit in their skin, meaning not for human consumption. en they'll go to rendering, where bones are smashed up, hair burned, guts churned, some of it to become dog food or makeup. "It's not a pretty job," Rodriguez says. "But it's easy for me. In a way, I am help- ing. I free them from suffering." Rodriguez only gets one shot at this, or else the inspectors will consider it animal cruelty. He's one of four people chosen by the company for this job. Best of the best. He has to be after a January incident and the slap of humane-slaughter violations. It took three shots of the bolt gun to render one non-ambulatory pig senseless. e hog stumbling and squealing. Rodriguez shakes his head at the thought of it. e USDA shut down the plant because of this egregious act. It was the third incident like that in two months. Since then, the plant has implemented a more effective portable electric stunning system. e day after the USDA shutdown, a lunchtime crowd gathered in the facility's sparse cafeteria, pulled pork selling for $1.75. One barn worker complained, "ey're working us to the bone trying to make up for the time we missed." An older man tried to remember the order of the letters for the ASCPS. No, ASPCA. e American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He scoffed. "Inhu- mane. Hog's a hog. You bring it here to kill it. It's gonna die either way. What's it matter how you do it?" e "hog drivers" slap their orange or purple or green paddles against the divides of the pigpens, which narrow closer to death. Hundreds of pigs to 50 to ten to one. e pigs flinch or jump in response. Squeals add to the loud reel of machinery. Chains hang overhead like a windy roller-coaster track. e restrainer clicks and snaps. e paddles: bang, bang, bang. Now the pigs are single-file, because now they're in the shoot. A metal gate lies horizontally over the tops of these pens, so the pigs can't jump up or out. Two lines reduce the chance of employees acciden- tally electrocuting each other. e pigs are immobile, except for their alert heads. ey thrust forward toward the "stick pen," the magic killing wand, eyes open until they're not. Death is a quiet thing, electric. e death wand zaps them behind the ears and on their sides, stopping their hearts: cardi- ac arrest. ey flinch tense, eyes cinched, shocked in the first second of the five-sec- ond hold. e stunners are expressionless in the silence of the hogs. ey simply put the wand where it needs to be and pull the end of it to release the charge. One Span- ish-speaking stunner says, "Es un parta de la vida." It's a part of life. He says that if you do the job well, the pigs always die. Death ends as it sometimes does: with a heavy flop to the conveyer belt a half a foot below. e hanging chains snake their way along the track toward the employees who shackle each pig's right ankles. ey lift to the next platform, where they're bled out, knife-to-throat, from the carotid artery. A bloody waterfall. en, they rise, some of their legs still twitching involuntarily from the shock. On July 4, a carbon dioxide gas cham- ber — or "controlled atmosphere stun- ning" or, more romantically, the "gondola" — will be finished. It is a $15-million project with the goal of a more humane kill. Group gassing will replace a solo stun. Five or six pigs will load into a chamber that will lower into a room where the gas will be released, 30 seconds to death. e thinking is that pigs are calmer when they die together. e gas chamber will be adjacent to the barns, meaning less walking for the pigs, less of a chance of getting stressed, hysteri- cal. Stress makes bad products that can't be used on the shelves at Costco or Kroger or Meijer, or the kitchen at Outback Steak- house or even Burger King. Blood vessels and capillaries can burst and leave blood specks throughout the meat. Tenseness can lead to toughness. "If you over-stress the animal…the color and texture of the meat are adversely impacted," Wallin says. "It's like when you're scared and 'go white.' e blood leaves you." "ey're a huge global company," says Tyler Smith, the executive vice president at PRG Commercial Property Advisors. He has been selling property in Butchertown for 10 years. "is site means nothing to them. ey could move it over- night if they really wanted to," he says. Smith believes the city, prominent busi- ness figures and JBS need to work together to move the plant, which he thinks is in the way of prime real estate and recre- ational development. "Let's move them where they can meet code requirements for smells and environmental issues and let our neighborhood continue to flourish," he says, though he isn't exactly sure where in Louisville that site might be. He's a big fan of "day-lighting" Beargrass Creek, which JBS butts up against. Day-lighting: maintaining foliage around the creek, cleaning it up and getting light into the creek to enable wildlife growth. Currently JBS shadows the flora and fauna. "e thing for me is getting the park system to go in there," Smith says. "I'd love to see a plan where we go in, clean the creek up and use the space recreationally. Have Quest Outdoors do kayak rentals. How cool would that be to do in a downtown environment?" The judge concluded that the neighborhood's "problem is with JBS's very presence in Butchertown."

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