EXCERPTS:

THE ENEMY IS UPON US. WE RESPOND WITH SPEED and fury, with all the might of tecnology and greed on our side, but no matter what we do, they won't stop coming. We cut off their feet, their ears, and their heads, we split their carcasses in two and grind up their insides for our children to eat at baseball games. Pieces of the enemy areeverywhere-on chains, on belts, hanging from the ceiling on hooks-but the message is apparently not getting out. In this nightmare, for every one we kill, there is one more to take its place.

I thought war could teach me something, which is why I took a job on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse. I thought it would give me new insight into the ethics of carnivorousness. I had been vacillating on the issue for the past few years, recently sliding to the veggie side, but without the deep conviction that makes it painless to pass up the House Special Marinated Pork for the Bean Curd With Mixed Vegetable Platter. It has seemed to me that our removal from the brutal consequences of our choices-from meat eating to capital punishment to war-has made it too easy to make these choices. But the view from the trenches would raise a whole different set of issues for me.

THE SPOT WHERE THEY ACTUALLY KILL THE cows is only a few hundred feet from where I stand all day, but it takes me a few weeks before I venture over there. I wait around for the second shift and walk back in as if I'm returning to work. I'm expecting some secret, hidden corner, with guys in chest waders sloshing through a quagmire of gore. But it only takes three men to finish off all those cattle. The "knocker," as he's known, stands on a platform holding a pneumatic gun, like a large stapler. The cattle are funneled through the corrals until they are in single file, straddling a ruber conveyor. When a cow's head emerges into the light of the kill floor, it is greeted with a blast from the gun, which shoots a bolt of steel into it's forehead, stunning it in a single mechanical blow. "Stunned" is the appropriate word to describe the expression on the animal's face: eyes and mouth frozen open, tongue sticking out, teeth biting into tounge-an expression which, were it human, would be asking, "How could it all come to this?" The pathos of that look catches me by surprise. I thought that a few weeks of gut cutting had numbed my feelings. I know I am anthropomorphizing, but I still have to bite down on my own tongue to keep the tears from welling.

The "shacker" then slaps a chain around the cow's ankle, and it falls forward onto another conveyor belt. The other end of the chain is attached to a pulley system, which slowly lifts the steaming, furry beasts toward the ceiling, in a line. Stunning, as with any system, is not perfect. Not all the victims go down on their first knock, and many of them continue to kick the air with their free legs as they ascend. But hanging upside down for a few minutes subdues them.

It also brings the blood to their heads, making it easier for the "sticker" to finish them off. Today the guy doing the killing is a Mexican man whose petite size and regal manner remind me of the artist formerly known as Prince. With a dagger he makes an incision in the neck, reaches inside, and severs the jugular, bringing forth a crimson tide, most of which gushes into a trough in the floor. From there the blood pours down into the basement, where it is boiled up and its elements extracted and used for fertilizer and animal feed.

Prince has to be careful. Occasionally the cattle are not paralyzed; rumor has it that a month earlier some guy in his position broke his arm when he got a surprise kick. When Prince encounters an animal that has too much spunk left in it, he reaches for his miniknocker, a gunpowder- powered weapon that delivers an additional bolt to the skull. One particular beast won't quit, so Prince has to brain it a few times. But once it's jugular is cut, it's as docile as the rest. Prince saunters over to the sink, washes the blood off his blade, and hits a button, where upon the dearly departed enters the stream, to be flayed by the pneumatic knives and skinners.