films of slaughterhouses

In her Introduction to The Golden Rule Cook Book Freshel uses the refusal to consume animals as the fundamental paradigm of intersecting social transformations: “Stop and think for a moment what the world would be like to-day if it were Vegetarian. The filming of slaughterhouse practices at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was used more to promote and celebrate the development of advanced industrialized technology in mass meat producation than to raise public awareness of the mistreatment of animals. Thomas Edison made two such films in 1897: "Cattle driven to slaughter" and "Sheep run, Chicago stockyards." An example of filming the practices inside slaughterhouses in order to advance the cause of animal rights is the short British documentary: "Early Animal Rights Film: Slaughter House 1930-1939." Dominic Pacyga notes that tours of the Chicago stockyards and packinghouses were regularly offered to the public and that, as late as the 1950s, these sites were a destination for elementary school field trips.