846: Gail Eisnitz: The Inside Story of a Life Investigating Factory Farms

About this episode

Gail Eisnitz discusses her investigations into the meat industry and the challenges she faced in exposing animal abuse.

Gail shares her investigations into meat industry practices, exploring how exorbitant slaughterhouse production line speeds in a consolidated slaughter industry affect animals as they are being handled and killed, and how the proliferation of massive factory farms impacts animals being raised in intensive confinement. She spent decades in the field documenting violations against farm animals and in the office preparing cases and writing about her investigations in articles and books. Her efforts to expose and prosecute animal abusers were often thwarted by network television producers and by law enforcement authorities. Producers considered her findings too disturbing. The law refused to prosecute abusers. Instead they provided cover for the meat industry---a billion-dollar industry. She gives an inside view behind the closed doors of U.S. slaughterhouses and factory farms. She also shared her challenges and successes in documenting and exposing the findings. As a memoir, Out of Sight has been described by reviewers as a “detective story” and a “page turner” that they “can’t put down," probably for her personal challenges related to her diagnosis with a rare medical visual…

People in this episode

Host: Joshua Spodek

Guest: Gail Eisnitz

Topics covered

• animal rights
• factory farming
• slaughterhouse practices
• investigative journalism
• animal welfare
• personal memoir

Keywords

• factory farms
• slaughterhouses
• animal abuse
• investigations
• animal rights
• memoir
• Gail Eisnitz

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Humane Farming Association

Books & works: Out of Sight, Slaughterhouse

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