If They Were Dogs

In the stillness of night, under the dim glow of streetlights just outside downtown Los Angeles, the trucks begin to arrive. We are in Vernon, California—an industrial zone hidden in plain sight. Here, in one of the largest cities in the world, a modern-day slaughterhouse receives shipments of life: pigs who are terrified, voiceless, and barely six months old. They arrive caked in filth, crammed so tightly they can barely move. Most have had no food or water for days. Their eyes—glassy, searching, and filled with pain—meet ours through narrow metal slats. They shiver from cold, shock, and fear. The air is thick with desperation. Alongside members of The Save Movement, I came here bear witness and to document. In the darkness, activists offer sips of water, soft words, and fleeting moments of compassion—likely the only kindness these animals will ever experience from a human being. These pigs were born into suffering and bred for profit. They are never seen as individuals—only as commodities. Their lives, rich with emotion and sensitivity, are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. This is not a broken system. It is an efficient one—perfectly designed for mass suffering. As I photographed the haunting faces of these babies, I couldn’t help but think of humanity’s darkest chapters—of crowded boxcars, the machinery of mass death, and the ideologies used to strip beings of their worth. I don’t say this to diminish the horrors and human atrocities like the Holocaust, but to acknowledge the dangerous parallels: the capacity for systematic cruelty when empathy is suspended, when we decide that some lives matter less than others. We call it food. But if they were dogs, would we still look away? If these were the cries of golden retrievers, would we accept this? What is the difference? If their suffering were more visible, their faces more familiar, would we still justify it with taste or tradition? These images are a confrontation—not only with what we do to the animals we eat, but with the stories we tell ourselves to make it acceptable. They ask us to see not “pork,” but a sentient being who wanted to live. To look past the labels we’ve inherited. To question the systems we support. And they ask us to remember: kindness—like cruelty—is a choice.