DR. PINEDA OCHOA: I wanted to go to a slaughterhouse
and I wanted to see exactly what was happening there.
And I wanted to do a little bit of filming.
And so I asked a friend of mine, a close, physician friend
of mine, actually, who I knew his uncle was
the general manager of a large slaughterhouse.
I asked him, just -- I thought they would say no,
but I asked anyway if there was any possibly I could do that.
And to my surprise, they said yes.
Prior to being slaughtered, the animals were so desperately
fighting for their lives.
They were so moving around violently and jerking around,
that when they were supposed to be killed,
they were really not even killed.
Many times they were just injured or weakened.
Actually, that's what I saw that happened most of the time with
the cows -- that they would hit a captive bolt more so down
the neck instead of in the head, probably because of the reason
that it's not easy to hit them in a strategic point with those
conditions.
And so the animals would fall to the ground,
and they would put a shackle on the hind leg.
And now these animals were still alive.
The cows were still completely alive.
And they were even making movements with their head.
They weren't as strong to walk out and leave the place,
but they were still making movements,
and they were still conscious, and their eyes were wide open.
And then the slaughterhouse worker would put the shackle
and they would be hanging by their hind leg.
And then a worker would come up to, like, a platform
so that he would be at the same level of the cow,
and then he would get close to the cow.
And then he would cut off the legs of the cow from the knee
down, the three legs except for the leg from where she was
hanginghanging[.] And then the three legs would fall to the floor.
And then he would come close to her
again and lift up the tail of the cow.
And from the very tip of the tail,
he would make a vertical incision.
I don't know how deep or superficial,
but a vertical incision, and then put the object down.
And then he would pull the skin of the cow
down so that the cow's own skin was
hanging next to her own head on both sides of her head.
And then he would make an incision in her neck
and then blood would come gushing out,
and she would start choking on her own blood.
And then eventually she would die.
I went to the holding areas.
First of all, I saw that these animals were really, really
terrified.
And somehow they all knew what was going on
because they would start walking back and being afraid
of us, even in the holding areas,
because somehow they sensed that something wasn't right.
I think.
But at the end of the holding areas visit,
I saw some of the cows were housed individually.
Some of them were housed in very large groups.
Not sure why.
But at the end, there was a cow that was housed individually.
This was a huge, beautiful, completely white cow.
And she was terrified.
Like you could see that she was really, really anxious.
She was really afraid.
I have a feeling that somehow they know.
I don't know why they would know,
but maybe they can smell the blood
because it was right adjacent to the slaughterhouse.
Maybe they can smell it.
I don't know.
But she was really nervous.
And we were at the end of the visit,
so I asked the guy who was giving me
the tour, if you want to call it that,
or the visit, who was with me, and I asked him
if I could stay there with the cow.
So he stayed with me, and we were
talking with the cow for about 15 or 20 minutes.
I was.
He was just standing there.
But she calmed down.
And I was even petting the cow.
And she really calmed down.
And she was in much better condition.
But then the next day, when I went to the actual slaughter
facility, and when I was filming all of these horrible things
that I just told you, it came the turn --
of all of the cows -- it came the turn of that white,
beautiful cow to go through slaughter.
And it was so much harder because the fact that this
white cow wasn't -- she didn't even fight back like the other
cows.
She could smell the blood.
She could hear the other cows.
She knew exactly what was going on.
But for some reason, I think she thought
that I was going to help her.
Because she came -- she even positioned herself.
They didn't have to shove her in too much.
The workers were shoving the other cows,
and the other cows were jumping on their -- I mean,
getting on their hind legs.
They were trying to crawl [over] the wall.
And this white cow, she just went straight up to me,
because I was about half a meter away from where their heads
were with my camera.
And she walked straight up to me,
and she was just staring at me.
And the other workers were pushing her.
And then the door, the metal door, closed behind her.
And even with all of that, she was not fighting back.
All she was doing was with her eyes wide open,
she was standing still, and she was staring at me.
She wasn't even blinking, like she was begging
for me to help her somehow.
She probably sensed that I didn't want for this to happen.
And obviously, I didn't want that to happen, obviously.
But it was so hard, because she was just
imploring for me to help her.
Then there was absolutely nothing that I could do.