Animals in a slaughterhouse or feedlots are treated and the way workers who butcher them have at least one thing in common: Both groups can expect to lose pieces of there bodies. Although the animals doesn't know it's walking to it's death, the worker knows they could be fatally injured and yet they come to work everyday. The workers of the slaughter house has no choice. Even though most are immigrants, they still need money to feed their families and to send money back home. What is the difference you ask? Well the only difference I can see is at the end of the day the animals can't feel anything and wind up as a purpose on our plate. The workers in the slaughterhouses, if they aren't hurt on the job. They go off shift tired, sore, made little money in the shift they just worked to a bed waiting for them. Fall asleep to get up just to do it all over again the next day. The ones who are injured, not only lost a job, but a limb, and maybe their life. The employees who lose a limb get very little money to help them for the loss. "OSHA's voluntary compliance policy did indeed reduce the number of recorded injuries in meatpacking plants. It did not however, reduce the number of people getting hurt" (663). The amount of employees in the slaughterhouses that are injured and sick from the jobs they do, is huge. It is hard to believe that the government puts a price on how much your body parts are worth. $35,000 dollars is what you get when you lose an arm. That wouldn't be enough to help my family survive for a year. The government should relook at the price of how much money should be paid to injured workers. In Eric Schlosser's "The Most Dangerous Job" Is about the working conditions in slaughterhouses the employees go through on a daily bases. Schlosser writes his story with how cows are slaughtered for packing, then you realize he is really making a point about the hazardous conditions employees are forced to work in. According to Schlosser " The "IBP revolution" has been directly responsible for many of the hazards that meatpacking workers are now forced with" (658). To keep up with line getting faster due to high profits some floor managers are providing "crank" or "meth" for free to keep their employees going faster to help get through the shift. Animal rights in this country has been an issue for years. The long unanswered question has been can animals feel pain or have any feelings at all? In the story of " Everybody Eats" Michael Pollen is sitting in a steak house writing about animal rights and point of views of not only himself but the views of animal rights activist and lovers everywhere. Pollen says "you either defend the way you live or change it."(93) I believe that both the stand on animal rights and the rights of the workers who butcher the animals need to be defended. But people should stand up for them both. Unfortunately they both need to have people stand up for them. But I think there isn't enough people standing up for the workers in the slaughterhouses. I picture both cows and worker going into the same building but coming out different ways. As long as humans eat meat we will still have slaughterhouses, and as long as we have slaughterhouses we will have under paid, tired, sore, injured, workers along side mistreated, and abused animals. The one thing they have in common with the cows they butcher. Am I going to die today? asked the cow and the worker.

Pollan, Michael. "Everybody Eats." A Casebook for Writers. Patricia Omen, Phoebe Bronstein,eds. University of Oregon Composition Program. Eugene, Oregon: 2010. 91-106. Print.

Schlosser, Eric. "The Most Dangeruos Job" The Presance of Others. Andres A . Lunsford and John J. Roszkeiwiez, eds. Bost: Bedford St. Martin's, 2008. 654-674. Print.