![\"Gail](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.animals24-7.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Picsart_25-05-09_21-29-29-786-e1746851426802.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n(Beth Clifton collage)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n These days Beth and I hear from Gail Eisnitz mostly as cc. on emails pertaining to investigations of cockfighting and steer-tailing conducted by Showing Animals Respect & Kindness,\u00a0 partially funded by the Humane Farming Association,\u00a0 her employer of the past 30 years.<\/p>\n I recall meeting Eisnitz just once.<\/p>\n Karel Van Noppen.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Already aware of her undercover investigative work on behalf of farmed animals for about five years,\u00a0\u00a0 I received an unexpected call from her late one night in November 1994.\u00a0 She had somehow obtained a thick dossier of affidavits pertaining to illegal use of the synthetic steroid clenbuterol by the veal industry.\u00a0 She wanted to deliver copies of the affidavits to me,\u00a0 as the nearest sympathetic member of the press, \u00a0in person,\u00a0 from two and a half hours away.<\/p>\n Eisnitz was afraid the information might otherwise be intercepted by some of the bad guys who were trafficking in clenbuterol\u2013\u2013or that she herself might be.<\/p>\n I gave her directions.\u00a0 She arrived amid a blizzard,\u00a0 well after midnight,\u00a0 handed me the dossier,\u00a0 which became a page one investigative feature a few days later,\u00a0 accepted a refill of her coffee flask,\u00a0 and vanished as quickly as she came,\u00a0 on her way through the falling snow to investigate yet another slaughterhouse the following morning.<\/p>\n Gail Eisnitz.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Unknown to either of us then,\u00a0 Belgian livestock inspector Karel Van Noppen,\u00a0 43,\u00a0 was also investigating illegal use of clenbuterol by vealers.\u00a0 The Dutch and Belgian vealers whom Van Noppen was investigating were linked by family and business relationships to the U.S. vealers whom Eisnitz had been looking into.<\/p>\n Van Noppen in February 1995\u00a0was shot dead in front of his home in Wechelderzande\u00a0village,\u00a0 Antwerp province,\u00a0 Belgium,\u00a0 by alleged hit men for the clenbuterol traffickers.<\/p>\n Bringing Van Noppen\u2019s killers to justice took until 2002.\u00a0 One is now serving a life sentence without parole.\u00a0 Three others were sentenced to serve 25 years each.<\/p>\n Eisnitz,\u00a0 in short,\u00a0 had been worried for good reason.<\/p>\n Veal calf.<\/strong><\/em> Clenbuterol itself can kill people.\u00a0 This is why use of clenbuterol in farmed animals is illegal.\u00a0 (See NFL warns players\u201322 years after Humane Farming Association<\/strong><\/a>.)<\/p>\n Pressured by the Humane Farming Association,\u00a0 the U.S. Justice Department during the 15 years after Gail Eisnitz\u2019s late night visit won a string of convictions of veal industry leaders.<\/p>\n Among them were Pricor BV pharmaceuticals company owner Gerard Hoogendijk,\u00a0 who avoided extradition to the U.S. by remaining in the Netherlands, \u00a0and Jannes \u201cJohn\u201d Doppenberg,\u00a0 who was in 1997 fined $25,000,\u00a0 sentenced to serve 44 months in prison,\u00a0 and ordered to make restitution of $1.1 million.<\/p>\n Both were former business partners of Aat Groenvelt, \u00a0who had introduced the use of the veal crate to North America and popularized\u00a0milk-fed spring lamb, \u00a0the meat of lambs\u00a0raised in essentially the same conditions as crated veal calves.<\/p>\n The last related conviction came in 2009,\u00a0 when the Brown Packing Company of Milwaukee pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, \u00a0and agreed to pay a fine of $2 million for illegally giving hormones and steroids to veal calves between 1997 and 2004, \u00a0while marketing the meat as \u201call natural.\u201d<\/p>\n Eisnitz gives just a few pages to her clenbuterol investigation in Out of Sight:\u00a0 An Undercover Investigator\u2019s Fight for Animal Rights & Her Own Survival.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>Though the convicted vealers were among the first and still almost the only bigtime factory farmers to face a semblance of justice for their crimes against both humans and animals,\u00a0 the clenbuterol investigation was only one brief chapter in Eisnitz\u2019s long career\u00a0 as originally an illustrator of nature books,\u00a0 then a staff writer for the Animal Welfare Institute,\u00a0 an investigator for nine years with the Humane Society of the U.S.,\u00a0 and as an investigator for the Humane Farming Association ever since.<\/p>\n (Beth Clifton collage)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Eisnitz in Out of Sight<\/em> credits former Humane Society of the U.S. director of investigations David Wills,\u00a0 who was easily the most corrupt executive in U.S. humane history,\u00a0 with pushing her toward her work with the Humane Farming Association.<\/p>\n (See David Wills, ex-Humane Society of the U.S. vice president, gets life in prison<\/strong><\/a>.)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>As a highly motivated,\u00a0 highly ethical person,\u00a0 obsessed with the systemic cruelty inflicted on farmed animals throughout their brief lives,\u00a0 Eisnitz found she simply could not work with or under the meat-chomping,\u00a0 self-aggrandizing,\u00a0 bullying, \u00a0and fundamentally dishonest Wills,\u00a0 even though she desperately needed her Humane Society of the U.S. medical insurance to help her cope with a rare,\u00a0 mysterious,\u00a0 often physically disabling neurological condition afflicting her vision and frequently triggering migraine headaches since she was four years old.<\/p>\n This affliction was finally medically recognized in 2014 as \u201cVisual Snow Syndrome,\u201d\u00a0 incurable and basically untreatable.<\/p>\n Timothy J. Walker.<\/strong><\/em> Out of Sight <\/em>veers frequently back and forth between Eisnitz\u2019s unflinching efforts to document and expose slaughterhouse and factory farm cruelty,\u00a0 including systemic abuse of workers as well as of animals,\u00a0 and her own increasingly frantic and desperate struggle to find out what was,\u00a0 and is,\u00a0 destroying her health and stamina.<\/p>\n Indeed,\u00a0 her determination to keep working for farmed animals,\u00a0 no matter what,\u00a0 appears to have been at times her main means of coping with her physical infirmities,\u00a0 also including a bout with breast cancer during which she worked right through six months of chemotherapy.<\/p>\n Eisnitz in 1997 produced her expos\u00e9 book Slaughterhouse<\/em>,\u00a0 focusing on the abuses she documented at Carolina Food Processors in Bladen County, \u00a0North Carolina,\u00a0 but including considerable information from investigations of other slaughterhouses as well.<\/p>\n (See Timothy J. Walker, 73, exposed slaughterhouse cruelty<\/a>,\u00a0 by Gail Eisnitz.)<\/strong><\/p>\n A passage from Slaughterhouse<\/em>,\u00a0 repeated in Out of Sight<\/em>,\u00a0 recounts a conversation with a \u00a0\u201csticker,\u201d \u00a0the slaughterhouse worker who cuts each doomed pig\u2019s throat.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you re killing 16,000 hogs a shift,\u201d\u00a0 the sticker said, \u00a0\u201cthose guys aren\u2019t going to stun them hogs all the time. \u00a0If a hog ain\u2019t stunned correctly, \u00a0then the shackler\u2019s supposed to let it hit the floor. Somebody else is supposed to re-stun that hog and hang him up.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the supervisors don\u2019t want the shacklers to do that. \u00a0They want the shacklers to try to shackle the hog, \u00a0hang him up, \u00a0and keep on going. \u00a0A shackler don\u2019t have no choice but to hang hogs alive in order to keep his job. \u00a0If a hog comes out kicking too much for the sticker, \u00a0he\u2019s going to let him go until somebody tells him that hog needs sticking.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it\u2019s too late and that hog hits the tub,\u201d \u00a0where skin is scalded to facilitate de-hairing, \u00a0\u201cthen he goes all through the scald tank and out to the de-hairer and to the dry kill [where workers eviscerate the hogs]. \u00a0And probably by that time he gets around to where they cut off \u00a0the feet and stuff, \u00a0then they\u2019ll stick the hog. \u00a0I\u2019ve stuck them,\u201d\u00a0 the sticker testified, \u00a0\u00a0\u201cafter they\u2019ve had their hooves off, \u00a0their toes split down, \u00a0and everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n Eisnitz went on to detail similar at slaughterhouses throughout the U.S.,\u00a0 using a combination of worker interviews with hidden camera confirmation.<\/p>\n (Beth Clifton collage)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Eisnitz in April 2000 obtained video of shackled and hoisted cattle having their legs hacked off and being skinned alive at the Iowa Beef Processors [IBP] slaughterhouse in Wallula,\u00a0 Washington.<\/p>\n IBP,\u00a0 local authorities,\u00a0 state authorities,\u00a0 and the USDA all denied the video evidence,\u00a0 but the Humane Farming Association\u2013\u2013as it has done many times since\u2013\u2013published the evidence in newspaper and television ads, \u00a0first aired by major TV stations in May 2000.<\/p>\n The IBP investigation confirmed that high-speed slaughter methods introduced decades earlier had made the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958 more an unenforced suggestion than a rule,\u00a0 and helped Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) to obtain funding in the 2002 Farm Bill for improved Humane Slaughter Act enforcement.<\/p>\n Unfortunately the USDA diverted the funding.\u00a0 Humane Slaughter Act enforcement was still no better than it ever was when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second presidency in January 2025 and immediately began firing much of the already thin USDA slaughterhouse inspection staff.<\/p>\n Sitting Bull, killed on the Standing Rock reservation in 1890; White Bull, a Sioux victim of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre; marchers opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Eisnitz next helped Sioux opponents of factory pig farming to fight plans by Sun Prairie Inc. to establish pig barns on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.<\/p>\n The Humane Farming Association had been assisting the Sioux since 1998.\u00a0 Most of the Sun Prairie scheme was eventually stopped by a 2002 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals verdict,\u00a0 but Sun Prairie had in 1999 begun producing 96,000 pigs per year at two Rosebud facilities.<\/p>\n Eisnitz gathered 65 pages of employee testimony detailing conditions in the Rosebud barns falling short of even the basic animal welfare and sanitation standards that factory pig farms usually claim to meet.<\/p>\n While that effort was underway,\u00a0 Andrew Martin of the Chicago Tribune<\/em> in March 2004 used information collected by another Humane Farming investigator,\u00a0 Robert Baker,\u00a0 at the HKY Farm in Bloomfield,\u00a0 Nebraska,\u00a0 to publish an expos\u00e9 of comparable conditions there.<\/p>\n Eisnitz meanwhile received the 2004 Albert Schweitzer Medal, \u00a0presented by the Animal Welfare Institute for outstanding achievement in animal welfare.\u00a0 This produced renewed media attention to Slaughterhouse<\/em>,\u00a0 seven years after first publication.<\/p>\n (Beth Clifton collage)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But even then,\u00a0 and in the 21 years since,\u00a0 animal agribusiness has never instituted substantive reform,\u00a0 and has instead grown even larger and more abusive of animals than ever.<\/p>\n Eisnitz in the latter chapters of Out of Sight<\/em> describes how USDA indemnification programs shield factory farmers from the economic consequences of preventable animal deaths due to disease and neglect of basic care.<\/p>\n Federal indemnification makes even the \u201cdepopulation\u201d of millions of pigs and poultry, \u00a0by methods as self-evidently cruel and prolonged as \u201cventilation shutoff,\u201d\u00a0 almost as profitable for agribusiness\u2013\u2013after selling the carcasses for rendering\u2013\u2013as raising the animals to slaughter weight.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the advertising clout of the meat industry keeps most mass media reluctant to publish expos\u00e9s that might permanently turn readers and viewers away from supermarket meat counters.<\/p>\n Readers themselves,\u00a0 further,\u00a0 tend to turn away from articles and images that upset their stomachs.<\/p>\n Gail A. Eisnitz.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much of the animal advocacy sector learned long since that it is much easier to persuade the public to give up meat and animal byproducts for positive reasons,\u00a0 if only for a day or two,\u00a0 than to rally sufficient public support through expos\u00e9s to achieve meaningful support for enforcing humane laws on behalf of farmed animals.<\/p>\n Fewer people eating meat,\u00a0 permanently,\u00a0 is the longterm answer to the unconscionable and ongoing systemic cruelty of animal agriculture,\u00a0 but translating the shock value of expos\u00e9s into lasting behavioral change comes slowly,\u00a0 while farmed animals continue to suffer by the multi-billions.<\/p>\nOut of Sight:\u00a0 An Undercover Investigator\u2019s Fight for Animal Rights & Her Own Survival<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
by Gail Eisnitz<\/h2>\n
Skyhorse Publishing<\/strong>
307 West 36th Street,\u00a0 New York,\u00a0 NY\u00a0 10018<\/strong>
www.skyhorsepublishing.com<\/a><\/strong>
250 pages,\u00a0 hardback,\u00a0 2025.\u00a0 $32.99.<\/strong><\/h3>\nReviewed by Merritt Clifton<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nMurder<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
(Humane Farming Association photo)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nClenbuterol kills<\/h2>\n
<\/a>One brief chapter<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\nDavid Wills<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
(Gail Eisnitz photo)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nAbuse of workers as well as of animals<\/h2>\n
<\/a>16,000 hogs a shift<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIowa Beef Processors<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nFighting alongside the Sioux<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nFactory farmers indemnified for losses<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nFrustration<\/h2>\n