The sound of 73 pigs dying

A raw field recording from a slaughterhouse.

After I had left the microphones outside the slaughterhouse and walked away, a worker came to clean up the area. He cleaned right in front of the microphones, but they were placed on the other side of a metal fence. He checked the microphones. Then some colleagues came over and talked until a new truck full of pigs to be slaughtered arrived. Suddenly, a worker said, laughing, “They’ve grown again!” The workers went back inside the slaughterhouse. Then another truck full of live pigs arrived to be slaughtered. It took a while for the truck to get off the scale. The truck driver was listening to music. Later on, a man from the slaughterhouse approached me to ask what I was doing there and whether I was part of this “new contemporary sect called veganism.” After that, he explained to me that “the pigs are not suffering at all. What we listen to is just part of a process that usually occurs when they reunite because the pigs are a hierarchical society and they’re fighting with each other.” He then asked me to stop the recording.

This slaughterhouse kills around 3,500 pigs a day.