By Jack Keller

In the animal rights space, progress can feel slow. It takes ages to change the status quo, shift mindsets and achieve what feels like a small dent in the meat industry’s stronghold.

But, every once in a while, something so loud and compelling happens that it doesn’t just leave a dent: it feels like someone took a sledgehammer to the foundation itself, inviting the public inside to have a look.

That’s precisely what happened with the publication of Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse—required reading here at Friends of Animals.

Eisnitz uncovered how the meat industry’s lust for profits lent itself to consolidation and cruelty, putting workers and consumers at risk, while permitting the freezing, bleeding, throwing, maiming, hanging, discarding and torturing of the doomed animals.

She returns with a new book, Out of Sight, in which she furthers the conversation from Slaughterhouse, while telling the story of her own personal and professional rollercoaster.

The result is a somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Rachel Carson—relentless in her pursuit of truth, and fearless in her confrontation.

I spoke to Gail about her new book and the toll of everything that came with it.

What compelled you to write Out of Sight?

I’ve spent decades both in the field documenting violations against farm animals, and in my office preparing cases and writing about my investigations in articles and books. But my efforts to expose and prosecute animal abusers were largely thwarted by network television producers and law enforcement authorities. So I decided to write Out of Sight in an attempt to bring awareness to the topic of what animals suffer to become food on America’s dinner tables.

By sharing the challenges I experienced in both documenting and exposing farm animal cruelty, I’m hoping to provide readers with insights into what takes place behind the locked gates and guard shacks of U.S. factory farms and slaughterhouses. Also, because the book describes my personal and professional trials and triumphs, it actually reads like a detective story. It brings readers behind the scenes where they can see the inner workings of how the media, law makers, and prosecutors work to shield animal abusers from accountability. I purposefully didn’t want to subject readers to a litany of horrors. The reviews I’ve seen so far all state that readers are finding it difficult to put the book down.

One of the most shocking parts of the book came when you described the Wiles Hog Farm case in Ohio, where undercover footage you helped produce showed sows slowly hanging to death. Yet in court, only one minor charge stuck, and the judge accepted the farm’s killing methods because a veterinary lethal injection wasn’t determined ‘feasible.’ Why do you think the industry evades responsibilities in cases like this, with clear video evidence of cruelty?

In this particular case, the judge was a farmer in that small town. He was part of the old boys network–something we often see in rural communities. The minor misdemeanor charge that stuck–for throwing piglets like footballs into bins – was nothing more than a token conviction. Had the judge not convicted one of the three defendants of some crime, his bias and malfeasance would have been extremely flagrant. By convicting a defendant of something, he was provided himself political cover; he didn’t want to give the appearance that he wasn’t doing anything.

What do cases like this say about the enforcement of existing cruelty laws?

First, it’s important to note that there are no federal laws protecting animals in factory farms; therefore, oversight is non-existent. And when it comes to state anti-cruelty statutes, the laws that do exist are subject to local or even state politics. In my experience of trying to convince local prosecutors and state attorneys general to enforce cruelty laws – even in open and shut cases with irrefutable evidence – I’ve found that they invariably side with agribusiness. It has been extremely frustrating.

The COVID-19 and Bird Flu depopulation events were shocking in scale and brutality, but seemed to quickly pass from public consciousness. Do you think we missed an opportunity to confront the realities of industrial farming during those crises? Why didn’t it stick?

It hasn’t passed quickly enough, because we’re still dealing with it. The Humane Farming Association has been sounding the alarm about the myriad dangers associated with factory farms for years, as well as the atrocities of “depopulation” beginning at day one of the COVID outbreak. In fact, as soon as COVID hit and I learned about Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD+) – the sealing up of barn inlets, turning off ventilation fans, and heating the barn to triple digits or pumping in added steam, causing the animals to bake to death – I contacted a reporter at the Washington Post describing how that practice was going to be used to exterminate millions of chickens and pigs. While the newspaper didn’t give it as much coverage as I had hoped, my predictions were quoted in the Post and later came true. That’s why I wrote about VSD+ and other heinous forms of depopulation in my book.

The killing of 175,000,000 poultry and counting since 2022 to prevent the spread of Avian Flu is still very much a “live” issue, and we’re determined that it doesn’t pass from public consciousness. I make it a point to mention horrific depopulation practices every time I’m interviewed about Out of Sight. Amazingly, hosts and viewers have never heard of these killing methods and are invariably outraged.

You spent some years working for HSUS, a group that’s often criticized for not promoting veganism. Looking back, do you feel that working under such an umbrella constrained your ability to pursue or frame your investigations the way you wanted to?

Unfortunately, the problem goes well beyond not promoting veganism. The bigger problem was that they were rarely advancing animal protection and have at times partnered with livestock producers in promoting harmful legislation. As I describe in Out of Sight, after many months of documenting slaughterhouse violations so I could expose them nationwide, HSUS pronounced that all investigations had to be completed in 11 days. That put an end to my investigation, and I thankfully left for much greener pastures at the Humane Farming Association. At HFA, I was given the means to continue documenting atrocities and later we exposed them in my first book Slaughterhouse and on the front page of the Washington Post.

Aside from HSUS, what other obstacles did you come up against?

As I continued my investigations into slaughterhouses, industrial pig, calf, and dairy farms, the symptoms of a then-undiagnosed visual processing disorder I had grappled with since childhood dramatically worsened. Other obstacles included my breast cancer diagnosis at age 35, a robbery in which one of three gunmen shot somebody in my presence, elaborate cover-ups by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and a state governor, and an unscrupulous HSUS supervisor being sentenced to serve life in prison. As for the rare visual processing disorder, it was only identified in the scientific literature a short ten years ago. I was only diagnosed after I began writing Out of Sight – a diagnosis explored at the book’s climax.

Throughout Out of Sight, there’s this constant tension between emotional suppression and deep compassion. This presents itself in your own handlings of trauma, and even in the ways in which you interpret others’ emotional detachment, like your doctor’s awful eggs joke. How did repressing your own emotions help you do your job—and what did it cost you?

It was necessary to compartmentalize my emotions and focus on the task at hand; it enabled me to document unthinkable violations. That compartmentalization, as the reader will find, caused tremendous stress and impacted that visual processing disorder from which I suffer. It caused me a lot of pain and suffering, but from my perspective, I had to persevere and overcome such obstacles; I had no choice but to stay the course.

It also seems like you’ve sort of outgrown that detachment. How has this reinvigorated compassion lended itself to your work?

Let’s just say I’ve begun to outgrow that detachment. Learning to treat myself with compassion has been a process. Plus, I’ve begun to have more of a sense of optimism, which enables me to continue doing this work at HFA.

One of your doctors described your survival and continued determination as “sheer power of will.” Given everything you endured, from your health crises and the many roadblocks the industry put in your path, how did you sustain that will?

It’s not easy, however, we periodically win hard-fought victories – like shutting down the third largest hog factory farm in the world, seeing veal production drop by 85 percent since HFA started the National Veal Boycott, litigating against animal abusers and putting them out of business, and providing forever homes to hundreds of animals at HFA’s Suwanna Ranch. These victories are a powerful mechanism to keep hope alive. I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t have hope.

Was there ever a moment where you thought about walking away?

There were many times when, because of my visual processing disorder, that I couldn’t see straight and I could barely function. But not for one moment did I ever think about walking away. Never. Because the animals are suffering, too. And they can’t walk away.