The Slaughterhouse Secrets

By M G Nelson

Dr. Jessica Bergstrom has job pressures—deadlines, a cranky boss, a meth-addled co-worker out to kill her. As a public health veterinarian at a meat packing plant, she knew the place would be rough and dirty. What she didn’t know was the depth of the corruption between the industry and government agency regulating it.

When Jess

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barn Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997819144

M G Nelson

M.G. Nelson whiles the time away crafting novels on a farm tucked away in a quiet corner of the Upper Midwest. Cows, chickens, cats, and a couple of good hounds keep things lively for the author. Good books, travel, and solid friends keep things real.

Book preview

1.

During winter finals my sophomore year of veterinary college, a wiseacre tacked a National Enquirer article to the class bulletin board. The title, Wealthy Octogenarian Seeks Young Woman for Matrimony caught everyone’s attention, but it was the remark in the second paragraph, highlighted in yellow, that he’d like to wed a smart gal—preferably a veterinarian—which filled the hall with laughter.

The accompanying photo featured the wheelchair-bound gent being kissed on his bald pate by a buxomly, bikini-clad blonde. The denture-laden leer and liver-spotted hand caressing the babe’s bottom spoke volumes. Only gold diggers in search of a sugar-daddy would respond to such a brazen advertisement.

I should’ve called.

Instead, I finished my studies and became a bona fide veterinarian. The first two years post-college I entered into indentured servitude for a tightwad wanting cheap labor for his dying cattle practice. It took me falling behind on a couple of student loan payments before I wised up and searched for a job paying a livable wage while still working with my favorite species, the humble bovine.

My job search mantra became First time for love, second time for money. When Dr. Kline called offering me a job as a federal veterinarian at a beef slaughter plant, I snatched at it to stop my financial hemorrhaging.

Anyone in my shoes would’ve. It was 9 p.m. of one of the most excruciating work days of my sorry life and I wasn’t even done for the day. I had a 4 a.m., 10 degrees below zero start with a cow down in a snowy, muddy feedlot. I spent the rest of the morning chasing around the gloomy Minnesota winter countryside surgically fixing displaced stomachs on grain-overloaded dairy cows. As an added bonus, I did an unassisted bloody Caesarian section on a scrawny cow in a cobweb-filled barn without any lights.

I finally snagged lunch/dinner at 6 p.m. when I returned to the clinic to restock my truck. I rushed into the bathroom and multitasked while using the toilet by running a brush through my hair. Snag city. I pulled handfuls of my brunette hair out of the bristles, and then threw them in the trash.

I had no time to fret over what I felt was excessive hair loss, so I washed my hands and splashed tepid water on my rosacea plagued cheeks. Since there was also no time to worry about the damage being done to my face, I forwent dabbing on face cream and cinched the belt tighter on my jeans. Hard to shop for clothes that fit when you don’t even have time to eat.

I grabbed the on-call phone from the charger, flipped the clinic lights off, and turned to lock the clinic door. It was already dark and as I shut the door an eaves snow avalanche fell right onto my head. I practically rubbed the blue out of my eyes trying to remove the ice from my face. I fumed all the way to my next case, to stitch up a horse which had decided to jump out of the narrow side door of a stock trailer. Dr. Kline’s call came as I was leaving the horse stable to treat a cow down with milk fever at a farm which I had never been to located forty miles from town.

That’s how I came to be sitting at my tiny government-issued steel desk in a refurbished closet waiting to be summoned down to the kill floor to give a disposition on the next diseased carcass. My official title at Dyersville Packing Plant is antemortem veterinarian. I check to make sure all the live cattle in the barn are fit to be slaughtered. Definitely not a glamorous job, but I was raised on a cattle farm so I accept the fate of each calf that comes into this world.

I finished my morning paperwork, filed the flimsy green live cattle transportation sheets, and cracked open a Diet Coke. My boss was on the slaughter floor giving the floor inspectors their morning breaks along with Pete, the head inspector. That gave me a little time to myself and I sat back to appreciate the beauty of my surroundings. Our cramped little office consisted of a small main break room, the vet’s office, two locker rooms, and two toilets. It had a typical industrial color scheme: concrete gray floors, sickly yellow brick walls, and flakey, rusty steel tables and chairs.

My break ended when the outer room door banged open and Gale stormed into my office. My shoulders involuntarily sagged; so much for time to myself.

What’s up? I asked in my perkiest voice, hoping to make up for my poor choice of body language. I swiveled my chair to face the big guy.

Doc, I gotta tell ya, Doc Tagget’s making us mad. Gale plopped his three-hundred-pound-plus body into the spare office chair. The plastic creaked under his bulk and the chair legs bowed slightly. I held my breath, but the chair held together; the magic of modern engineering.

What’s going on now? The question was purely rhetorical, because Gale had brought up the same complaint for the past six months.

Gale shook his head slowly, his chins jiggling one beat behind the head toss.

He’s messin’ with our breaks again. He ain’t supposed to make changes in our routine without notifying the union.

There’s a few things wrong with this situation. One is Gale. The man knows how to draw a ten-minute break into a twenty-minute or longer ordeal. I don’t blame him. He’s about 5 feet 6 inches tall and grossly overweight. Wearing his inspector whites, and with his eyes and mouth sunk into his pudgy face, it’s like watching the Michelin man lumbering around the kill floor. At the end of our typical ten-hour shift the poor guy’s feet must throb in agony.

Second wrong thing: Dr. Ted Tagget. Despite the two-inch heels on his boots, I can still see the dandruff flaking off his scalp when we stand nose to nose. This happens quite frequently given his high level of incompetence. He has all the shortcomings of a stunted man in a position with a modicum of power: a joy to spend a sixty-plus-hour workweek with in our broom closet office. He refused to deal with Gale’s complaints, leaving me to deal with the issue.

Third wrong thing: Despite the fact that I am not a labor-relations negotiator, and in spite of the fact that Tagget does not acknowledge me as a member of the inspection management, everyone at the plant considers me the go-to person. It’s probably because of the legacy of Doc Anderson, who had Tagget’s position for years.

I worked with Anderson for six months before he had to retire due to poor health. Tagget had been salivating for Anderson’s job for years, and since I had no seniority to step into the job, Tagget snatched it. Never mind that Tagget had spent the last fifteen years in a poultry plant and had never worked with cattle. Chicken, cow, they both start with a C so they have to be similar, right?

I decided to bite at Gale’s bait.

It works both ways, I told him. Everyone has to abide by the union contract and breaks are ten minutes. No more, no less. It’s what your union negotiated.

I know that, Gale said. I don’t need no fancy degree to read a clock. He’s trying to jerk us around on our routine.

So much for the subtle approach. I reached up to the shelf above my desk for the red book and thumbed through the union contract manual. The tome is a testament to years of political squabbling and name calling at its finest.

Management reserves the right to time inspector breaks to ensure the smooth operation of federal inspection, I quoted.

Gale’s lips pursed to a puckered white halo.

I continued my reading. This includes on-the-fly changes in routine to accommodate the work load.

Past practice comes into play here, he sputtered. His meaty face flushed red and I swear I witnessed steam rolling off his sweaty head.

I took a deep breath before continuing. Not when it evolved into taking ten minutes to clean up before break and ten minutes after break to rearrange your equipment. That’s not fair to the inspectors waiting to go on breaks or to the people who give the breaks.

I hate the reprimanding of grown adults almost as much as I despise working with Tagget.

Gale leapt up, surprisingly quick for such a hefty man. The chair flew back, scraping along the floor before crashing into the file cabinets.

Just because I don’t have some fancy-schmancy degree and I’m not getting paid some damned huge salary don’t mean I don’t got rights, he yelled.

Gale, you’re running out of break time, I said. I refused to be drawn into his woe-is-us banter. He glared at me, then turned and stomped out of the office.

I hope I hid it from him, but my hands were shaking when I reached for my can of pop. I finished the drink in blessed peace listening to the inspectors making their way in and out of the break room, with the occasional Hi ya, Doc’s floating through the door from the ones who weren’t ticked off at me.

A pounding on the door frame made me swivel in my chair.

Hey, Doc, we got a couple of bad ones coming down the line. Joe Torres, one of the two kill floor foremen filled the doorway. He flashed a broad smile, crinkling up his brown doe eyes. He took off his helmet and scratched at the do-rag holding his long, glossy black hair in a neat bundle.

Be right on it, I said. I stood up and reached for my hairnet and helmet, and tucked my hair under the flimsy gauze and fitted the hat on my head. The white helmet along with my baggy-butt blue coveralls completed the frumpy look I strived to achieve each day on the job. It saved on the clothes budget, which was just as well since it all went for student loan payments anyhow.

Hey, thanks for the help with Mickey, said Joe as he led the way from the office into the company break room. I ducked under his arm as he held the door open and then paused right outside the office. We both rolled our orange earplugs into small cylinders before inserting them into our ears.

No, problem, I said. You have to keep on top of those bladder infections with male cats, otherwise they’ll get blocked.

He gave an embarrassed smile. That’s what the vet said when we took him in. The kids would’ve been heartbroken if old Mick had died.

I returned his smile. And tough old dad wouldn’t have been? He refused to respond beyond raising his eyebrows. I followed him down the stairs to the kill floor. Joe’s shoulder radio crackled, and he yelled something unintelligible into it before darting off behind a row of recently deceased cows.

My first week at the plant, I frequently got lost on this wide expanse of industrial floor. It’s not a wide open space; rather it’s a cluttered menagerie of equipment, people and dead animals. The process of turning Joe Bull into your tasty burger isn’t a pretty one, especially at the beginning.

From the barn the cattle are herded single file into a chute leading up to the knock box. I guess that’s where the term to knock someone off came from. The victim, I mean, cow is enclosed in the narrow area and a worker uses a captive bolt stun gun to render the cow unconscious.

The knock box side opens to allow the cow to tumble to the floor where chains are wrapped around a rear leg hoisting it into the air where a sticker slashes the jugular vein. The chain around the rear leg is attached to a moving overhead horizontal chain called the rail, which snakes throughout the kill floor where systematically the cow is de-hided, beheaded, gutted, halved, and trimmed before the final wash sprays the halves with a lactic acid solution.Then they are placed in the cooler for a day or two before being further processed into cuts or ground meat.

All this is done at breakneck speed. The plant processes over 200 head of cattle an hour and employs at least sixty people on the kill floor alone. It’s as chaotic and bloody as it sounds.

I turned left, skirting the jerky dance of succession the carcasses do after de-hiding. Julio, a wiry skinner wearing an eye patch, nodded at me, giving me the okay to pass by. I always make eye contact with the employees working with knives and chains as one misstep can find the carcass line shut down as people scramble to look for your body parts. God forgive the person who causes the line to stop. Every minute of downtime means hundreds of lost dollars to the plant.

I fought my way through two, four-hundred-pound carcasses finally reaching the scale desk to retrieve my scabbard holding my knives and node hook. Three carcasses hung on the vet rail, ready for my thumbs up or thumbs down based on food safety issues.

I checked the first carcass, which the inspectors working the viscera table had tagged for a large area of bruising high up on the rump. I clambered up the ladder to the platform to get a better look. Really nothing, but the guys have only a few seconds to look at the carcasses as they whiz by the inspection station, so I passed it as safe for food. The company trim gals, smart, quick and able would give it a thorough inspection and trim any bruised parts off.

The second carcass was a different story. I loved pathology in college and there’s really no better place to practice it in livestock than in a slaughter house. The lymph nodes on this critter were H-U-G-E. I’m talking where normally they may be chicken egg sized, this poor animal suffered from what’s called malignant lymphoma, or lymph node tumors, to the extent that her leg nodes were the size of a basketball. Just for kicks, I cut into one and mushy tissue bulged out. A definite condemn for human food purposes.

I washed and sterilized my knife and node hook before looking at the third carcass. It was a very lean piece of beef without much body fat. Along one side of the abdomen, about the size of a throw rug, was a yellowish, gelatinous mass. A serious fresh bruise probably inflicted by a rough ride to the market or being bullied away from the water fountain or hay feeder by bigger, stronger cows.

I had to correlate the carcass findings with the abdominal organ findings so I slid down the ladder and scurried over to the viscera vet station. Large, grey tubs held the relevant internal organs: namely the heart, lungs and trachea or in slaughter terminology the pluck; the liver; spleen; and kidneys.

I dumped carcass number one’s viscera onto the stainless steel inspection table. No abnormalities so I disposed of it down the chute which eventually fed into the rendering truck. Carcass number two had cancer in the lymph nodes around the lungs-the same cancer I had found in the body. Number three had kidneys polka-dotted with pinpoint red spots, better known as petechiae hemorrhages, most likely a result of an infection elsewhere in the body. I cut off palm-sized pieces of kidney and liver and placed them in the small holders welded onto the table.

Part of the job also includes testing animals that might have been treated with antibiotics or no-no drugs. I had a hunch that a cow that had become that skinny might have been ill for awhile, tempting the farmer or cattle jockey to have tried doctoring her up before sending her to market.

I washed my hands and rinsed and sterilized my knife and headed back to the scale desk. On my way I took one of the two ID tags off the second carcass and used the blue-inked USDA condemned stamp to liberally mark the carcass as condemned for food.

Hey, girl, I shouted, trying to catch the scale operator’s attention. The cacophony of clanging shackles, grinding gears, and hissing hydraulics made normal decibel conversation impossible.

Brenda, the brunette working the scale, glanced over and grinned at me before darting between carcasses. She stabbed a few beef halves with plastic identification tags before they left the kill floor for the coolers. She rushed back to her station just in time to operate the keyboard before another set of halves swooped onto the scale.

Hey yourself, watcha got? she asked.

First one good, second one goes down, third one goes in for testing. I flipped my thumbs up, then down, then sideways to reinforce the message.

Gotcha, said Brenda. She confirmed with a thumb up, and then snatched a marker from her shirt pocket to scribble on the corresponding body tags.

There’s a lot of cattle going down today, I said when Brenda rushed back. I’ve condemned fifteen this morning. What’s your count?

Sixteen. Doc Tagget even put one down. Took him a long time to make a decision.

Doesn’t he always?

I wrote the letters M.L., packing house short hand for malignant lymphoma, on the tag and handed it to Brenda. She flung the tag on the desk and darted between carcasses armed with her tagger. As she came back to the desk, a carcass spun out of control, hit her in the back and knocked her forward. I caught her arm and steadied her.

Whoa! Thanks, Doc. That one got me. Brenda straightened her helmet and stumbled back to the scale. How come your boss won’t do that? she asked. She typed my diagnosis into the computer.

Do what? I asked, doing a mental eye roll. The man had a knack of offending everyone in the plant, leaving me in the uncomfortable position of fielding all complaints.

Write the reason the cow was condemned on the tags.

It’s beneath him, I guess He thinks it’s the company’s job. I had been ignoring his suggestion, just short of a direct order, not to write on the tags for Brenda. It was such a picky little thing and it took all of two seconds to scratch it on the back.

I know he’s your boss and all, but he can be such a jerk sometimes.

You don’t need to remind me. I guess he thinks you don’t have enough to do.

Brenda stuck out her tongue, making me laugh. I turned to leave, and then spotted Keith Johnson entering the kill floor. I tensed and took a deep breath. Talk about going from carefree to on guard in a nanosecond. He’s the other kill floor foreman and a bona fide pig. One of his favorite pastimes is grabbing his groin every time he passes me and today was no exception.

A freaky smirk, accentuated by his black goatee and scar bisecting his check, and an upward thrust of his head completed his greeting.

Really, Keith, I think you need to investigate some sort of healing cream for your problem, I said.

Huh? he asked, turning to wink at me.

Knock it off.

Whatever. He sauntered off, toying with his fly as he walked toward the splitting saw.

I gave my eyeballs a go around their sockets, and then stopped by the evisceration table. I decided to do a spot check of sanitation since I was in the area. I watched the three men, dressed in head-to-toe white, stationed on the moving stainless steel evisceration table. Water constantly bathed the table, making surefootedness a definite prerequisite to this position, the most highly paid job on the floor. Another qualification was skill at quick, careful removal of all the innards, from chest to abdomen without accidentally nicking the guts and spilling stomach contents or manure onto the organs or carcasses.

Today’s crew was up to snuff. I gave the guys a thumbs up, and received shy smiles and nods from the young crew. Most of the workers on the floor are young, male and Hispanic and very deferential to us feds. I like to encourage all the floor people when they are doing a top-notch job since it makes my job a heck of a lot easier when they‘re at their best.

The final task I needed to do was a random ten carcass check for contamination. After being gutted, the carcasses are split in half before winding their way past dozens of employees whose jobs consist of trimming off any defects, including specks of manure or gut contents. It’s as mundane and boring as it sounds. Occasionally things are missed, so we feds have spot checks to make sure the plant’s procedures are adequate.

I ran my eyes up and down each carcass half, spinning them to check inside and out, paying special attention to the armpit area and neck. It sucks to bend over 1600 times a day to check these areas so they tend to have the most problems.

By the time the third carcass rolled around I spotted two trimmers sneaking down the line. One thing about this job, all eyes are on you when you step onto the floor. The plant had decided that when we do our inspections, they’d place extra trimmers on line to try to avoid any noncompliance reports, or NR’s, which is what they get when their sanitation plans don’t work as planned.

I ignored them and continued to check, until Keith decided to squeeze in between me and the trimmers. He grabbed a half and rubbed his hands up and down it, panting heavily.

What’s your problem? I snapped, twisting his fondled side around to inspect the inner leg.

Just doing my job, he said, caressing the next carcass.

Rubbing the carcasses to remove contamination isn’t in your sanitation plan, I said. My left eye began to twitch. You’ll just drive it further into the tissues.

I can do whatever I want until they reach you.

No you can’t, I said, drawing my hand across my throat and nodding at Brenda. You’re getting an NR for improper dressing procedure. Brenda stopped the line, the warning horn blared and everyone on the kill floor turned to watch the show.

What do you think you’re doing? he screamed, leaning over me. I stared past his flaring nostrils into his black eyes with their dilated pupils.

I’m waiting for your boss to tell me what his corrective actions will be on the carcasses you rubbed. My teeth squeaked as I clenched them tight.

You start my line up right now! Keith punched a half, sending it swinging. I jumped back as the four-hundred-pound slab swung in a violent arc. He pressed against me his rock solid chest level with my face. He leaned down and hissed in my ear.

You know, broads who think they can do whatever they want on a kill floor have more ways of getting hurt than by just getting bumped by a carcass.

Steady, girl. His warm breath on my neck sent a wave of chill down my spine.

A slender, white-clad figure slipped between us. Ian Morgan, Keith’s supervisor, backed into Keith forcing the foreman to step back.

Hey, Doc, said Ian. He grinned, crinkling up his blue eyes under the brim of his helmet. So what did we do this time?

Keith seems to have devised a new way of removing contaminates off of the carcasses, I said.

What’s that? Ian raised an eyebrow, and glanced back at Keith.

Rubbing his hands up and down the carcasses, while panting heavily, I clarified.

Ian’s smile disappeared.

That certainly isn’t in our standard operating procedures, he said turning toward Keith.

There weren’t nothing on those halves, said Keith. And I wasn’t panting. I had just turned a carcass to spot check the trimmers when she accuses me of rubbing dirt on them.

You weren’t just turning them, I countered. You rubbed your hands up and down them. And you were panting, and you did tell me that I could get hurt in more ways than one on the kill floor.

I did no such…

Ian raised his hand, silencing Keith.

Tell ya what, said Ian. "It’s probably