Case #0130111, David Laylow
Release date: August 3rd, 2016
First listen: 5th November, on the walk home. I remember walking past the Rushy Lake wall as the statement was starting.
In which I sat down to start writing, pulled up the episode, saw the title, and walked away to go make dinner early… I’m also going over my messages with dodgylogic at the time of the first listen and this one is in her Top 3 episodes.
- So I’ve done a little looking and I was somewhat shocked to see that Dalston is actually in London. Now, disclaimer, country bumpkin here, but it’s within the A406 ring road so as far as I’m concerned, it’s London. And the fact that I’m shocked, is exactly what I think this statement is going for; the fact that this sort of work is going on so close to major populations. Ok, now, I’m probably going to fumble this, but I don’t think it had computed in my brain, I’ve just always envisioned abattoirs out in the countryside, close to farms and with plenty of room. Or alternatively, the whole process handled by a butcher, because, yes, I grew up in a the sort of village you’d expect to see on the front of a biscuit tin and we have a traditional family butchers. They did damn good work during the pandemic, chased out folks who’d driven in to buy up their stock when they have an ageing an immobile population that depend on them. Taylor's Family Butchers, big respect. Anyway, I’m examining this now because historically, yeah, the animals would be driven into town to be butchered and processed in the community they were going to be sold. Makes sense. So I think it may be quiet telling that my brain had just glossed the concept over. Bit embarrassing and stupid really, my university town had an abattoir site until it was torn down in 2014. I think it’s a Premier Inn now.
- ‘I won’t say which one.’ I get that fear. There’s been so much I want to write about, about my work. Exciting things, entertaining things, things that need to be muttered into the ears of law makers with all the threat of King Claudius’ poison. But I haven’t and when I do, I keep it vague, although the discerning could probably work it out. Because my employer hasn’t the clearest guide lines on social media use and such and it became a whole lot easier just to not. Which made it all the more galling when the social media teams did put up stuff and got it wrong. It’s not like they had the experts to ask a few offices away, or failing that, the internet to ask, but I will leave that rant for the foot soldiers being kept from saying their piece for another time. But yeah, saw folk higher up the chain posting whatever they want and I was there in the knowledge if I put anything up, it would come down on me like a tonne of bricks, so forget it. Also, my industry is pretty niche and fairly incestuous, and I’ve seen stuff come round to bite folks in the arse.
- ‘I never did (get a weird vibe)… Maybe that says something about me, though.’ I work with animals. Have done for near a decade now. And people always ask me how I take the deaths, because there are a lot of them. I’m not sure if I’ve hardened or if my mentality of ‘Every day is a knife fight with God’ has solidified, but in most cases, it elicits a sigh and a small swear before I start the process of preparing for our vets to perform a post mortem. Not often does an animal’s death impact me to the point I where I grieve, it has happened, but not often. These aren’t pets of mine, they’re more like strange little work colleagues, that have a natural life expectancy much shorter than my own.
- ‘…every damn animal in that place knew exactly why they were there.’ I can believe. It doesn’t matter how well it’s cleaned, but cattle alarm pheromones will stick around and induce fear and stress to other cows. You spook one, you spook the herd. And the herd that comes after that. And the one after that. That’s before we even talk about the stress of a new environment, noise, travel etc.
- Hearing David talk about the ‘casual human brutality’ is difficult. Really difficult. Because you know it happens, not just the abuse itself, but the fact that the observer can become so numb to it. Can disassociate what is happening given time and practise. I’m thankful to say I’ve never witness what I’d consider ‘human brutality’ to animals, but I have seen ‘unnecessary carelessness’ which has often had me gritting my teeth and saying something. It’s typically down to a difference in husbandry practises. And I try and be civil. And if I couldn’t be civil I’d go get our vet, who is a woman who takes exactly zero shit and has no problem telling the collection manager exactly where he can stick it if he refuses to wear gloves despite me asking him, twice.
- ‘… just noisy meat.’ prolonged pained conflicted noises
- ‘…you start to kind of see people as meat too.’ I wonder if that’s the case in other professions too. Probably not to such a severe level of disassociation maybe, but do morticians look at people and measure them for a coffin? Do forensic pathologists try and see what would be cited as the cause of death? Do surgeons think about how much pressure they’d need to apply for the first incision?
- ‘…it’s hard to believe in any special spark that makes us humans any different.’ Mood. The only thing that makes us special is that we figured out agriculture and domestication of other species. All goes down hill from there.
- ‘…we could turn into a lifeless carcass just as easily.’ The human body is so fucking ridiculous. I am saying this as someone with a first aid level of medical training, I am very much a layman here, but the fact that we can lose limbs, multiple limbs, and pull through is incredible and wild. But you roll over funny and you can say good bye to walking or you hit you head just wrong and it’s lights out. Humans are so squishy. We make no sense.
- ‘I only worked it for a few months, and now I can’t work on any killing floor anywhere.’ Very sensible, good working practise and all, but this is a terrible jump for my brain to make and I can’t decide if it’s terribly disrespectful or poignant or both, but I recently learnt about the Sonderkommandos that worked the crematoria of Nazi death camps and how teams were liquidated at random intervals and… yeah.
- Yeah, I need a mug of tea now.
- ‘Of the people who’d worked the killing floor for over ten years, do you know what percentage went on to commit murder? One hundred percent.’ I’d like a citation of this study please. I would like to read it. But I’ve also done a quick search of more recent studies, and I realise that it’s too long since I’ve needed to read any scientific paper with anything more than surface level understanding. And while study David references would have been carried out in the 50s, there are still concerns to this day. A 2021 study, drawing data from U.S., Australia, South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, Denmark, and Ireland, found that there is a higher prevalence rate of mental health issues, depression and anxiety in particular, those affected tended to employ a variety of both adaptive and maladaptive strategies to cope, and there is some evidence that slaughterhouse work is associated with increased crime levels. Worrying, as the U.K. slaughterhouse industry has a 70% migrant workforce, people already vulnerable.
- ‘They call it “stunning”, but that’s never sat quite right with me.’ Yeah, that’s… that’s just lobotomising. more concerned distressed noises
- ‘The Bleed Crew’ is at once a horrifying concept and a baller band name.
- Tom Haan. Interesting, complicated one. The fact that he is from China and doesn’t appear to speak much English is a good representation of how the U.K.’s slaughterhouse industry relies on an immigrant work force who may otherwise be short on options for employment and are, unfortunately, easy to take advantage of. On the other hand… yikes. I have ague memories of this being discussed and Jonny unintentionally feeding back into some unfortunate stereotypes. I don’t know what prompted him to make Tom Haan Chinese, whether it was an honest desire to have more cultural variation in his characters, but he accidentality walked face first into the wall of racist stereotypes.
- ‘…but in practice no-one asks to be moved (from the killing floor). It shows a weakness that most of the people working there aren’t comfortable with.’ Iiiiii’m gonna go out on a limb here and say ‘most of the people working there’ are under the influence of toxic masculinity and a protestant work ethic amongst other things.
- ‘My feelings weren’t really working back then.’ (Hears this.) Concerned noises. (Remembers my darker days of late 2020.) Concerned noises at half an octave higher.
- ‘… in perfect English, ‘You cannot stop slaughter by closing the door’.’ Sinister in many ways; the actual words, the supposedly hidden grasp of English, and also, ok he doesn’t specify the accent, but if it IS in perfect BBC English… look, we’re the bad guys in movies for a damn good reason. And considering the British Empire’s historical relationships with mainland Asia… yikes.
- I’ve done some jobs where I was able to just switch my brain onto idle and go through the motions. I would find it therapeutic, especially one volunteer role I had at a foodbank processing stock takes. And it was wonderful because it was like reverse retail therapy, I had some semblance of control over something for 2½hrs on a Monday morning because I put the cans where they went on the shelves, and the background was a lovely group of recent retirees and stay at home dads who were happy to be a listening ear to a twitchy early 30s lass who was just trying to get her bearings. The point is, it worked because that trance like state made me very receptive, and thankfully what I was receiving was good vibes, kind advice, and tea with slightly stale biscuits. David is receptive to a circle of hell in that state.
- ‘It was the silence that finally brought me back to myself.’ The troupe of ‘it’s quiet… too quiet.’ is one of the most unnerving ones for me. Especially when there’s meant to be animal noises about; livestock, bid song etc. Because they’ll know things before we ever could.
- ‘There was no clock in that room.’ Is that typical? Or safe? Or is this just for spooks?
- ‘I surprised myself a bit with how quickly I accepted this situation.’ Another example of someone accepting the situation and dealing and processing it. I wonder if there’s a part of the psyche that realises that realises that what’s being experienced is something eldritch and unknowable and so shuts down logic and reasoning and instead concentrates on survival.
- Ok, so we’ve got a labyrinthine complex, our lone hero, and we’ve had cows coming through… Theseus and the Minotaur anyone? Also, sidebar, did you know the Minotaur of legend actually had a name? Asterius or Asterion, meaning ‘child of stars’.
- ‘These rails would never normally follow the passages of the slaughterhouse like this, and that fact bothered me, though I’m not quite sure why.’ Some little animal part of the brain still screaming ‘WRONG, NOPE, BAD’. I’ll do that, I mean, you’ve seen how I try to make the timelines behave when it can so easily be explained with ‘eldritch fuckery’. But I think I remember getting real bogged down in the delicacies of the heart surgery in Iron Man 3 that the science of the Extremis procedure completely washed on by.
- ‘Meat-bone separators, splitting saws, scald tanks.’ Delightful names.
- ‘… I don’t know how long I wandered. It felt like hours, though.’ Wibbly wobbly ooky spooky timey wimey.
- ‘The sky was a dull pink – the colour of blood being washed into a drain.’ … Yikes.
- ‘… and I began to cry. It was like something numb within me had shattered, and I couldn’t… I just couldn’t.’ I think it’s clear that David had been struggling with his mental well being before the incident took place, struggling and aware as he asked to be removed from the killing floor team. But this emotional and mental self awareness is refreshing in these statements. Especially from a man in an industry as rife with toxic masculine ideals as this.
- ‘(The scent of blood) had a strange sort of comfort to it, as it was the smell of the slaughterhouse as I had known it.’ I think the underlying horror of this other place, this abattoir in waiting is exactly that, it’s waiting. The threat is there and it hasn’t been actioned yet, it’s just waiting.
- ‘Pigs, cattle, sheep, I think I even saw a few humans in the pile, though without heads or limbs it’s hard to tell the difference between them and pigs.’ YUP. There a reason pig carcasses get used in forensic science to demonstrate the changes a cadaver goes through.
- ‘But (Tom Haan) didn’t make me fire it. I did that myself.’ Ooof, buddy.
- ‘I wish I felt bad about his death, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything at all.’ Good grief, please seek professional help.
- It got discussed in one of the Q&As that for an Avatar to… ascend shall we say, that a death was typically involved, or at least a metaphorical death. With some Avatars, the deaths have been of others; Peter Lukas’ with Jon becoming the Archivit, Jude Perry with her banking colleague, Agnes Montague with her own mother. Tom Haan’s death seems to be his own chrysalis, if this is indeed the point at which he ascended from agent to Avatar. Seems fitting, that it should be the case for The Flesh.
- I did a surface level google and couldn’t find an Aver Meats in Dalston, but there’s reason to believe that this London is not Our London, so I might leave it there. It might be Jonny has had to invent a business, it might be that if there is an abattoir in the area, they have a discreet web presence that I’m missing.
- ‘…which I would say are symptoms of PTSD, but he has strongly declined to seek treatment.’ Oh buddy, no, seek help. David was aware that he wasn’t well mentally and he’s emotional state was declining. If anything, he’s well on the way to the mental state that was so often referred to in the studies done on slaughterhouse work and crime.
- ‘… he had been renting a house in Clarence Road for almost a decade, and it was in quite a state of disrepair when he left.’ Between this and MAG018 The Flesh really seem to be murder on property, don’t they? Dread to think what the fridge looked like.
- ‘Immigration authorities are somewhat useless…. No official effort has been made to locate him, and the police were reluctant to open a new case, so we didn’t push it.’ Well… doesn’t that just make you feel fucking warm and fuzzy on the inside. Oh what? That’s rage? Oh no, yeah, that tracks.
- ‘… having trouble retaining builders, four of which have already quit.’ Interesting, considering it’s another male dominated field. I wonder if that was indeed Tom Haan’s ascension and the transformation has left a permanent scar on the site having it ‘already seemed to be way too big’.
- And I think there’s some very important discussion to be had about the industrialised meat industry. It has gotten monstrously big, and faceless, and removed, and wasteful. That image of carcasses just falling off conveyor belts and into a pit for presumably grinding up, is a terrible, wasteful image, of animal and human life and of the meat as a resource itself. I don’t know enough about butchery to know what sort of percentage of an animal goes to waste when processed for meat these days. I don’t know, I know small scale butchers will work differently but small scale and specialist butchers are harder to find and can be more expensive to buy from. I will buy local from suppliers I trust as best I can, but I’ve got the privilege of living in a market town in a rural area. And while I have the resources now, between working for a charity and the cost of living crisis, I’m having to think carefully, And I have the resources, a lot of folks may not. It grinds my gears how, like with fossil fuel burning and global warming, the ethical guilt of meat, egg and diary production is foisted onto the individual consumer who may have limited access and financial freedoms to chose, when really animal welfare and husbandry should be protected and held to a higher standard legislatively and support offered and research done properly. I know they try but I’ve heard some DEFRA horror stories and a few bad apples, whole barrel, you know the drill. Still not over the hell they put us through during the 2020 AI outbreak. Ok, I’m getting off the soap box, it’s gone midnight, I’m ranting with no receipts.
- I’ve done a little bit of butchering in my time. I’ve been part of keeper teams that’s tended tigers and lions. I’ve butchered what I think was horse meat, delivered in blue plastic barrels and thawed overnight. I’ve worn the butcher’s gauntlet, got 2 as curios on my bookcase Mum found at a car boot for me. I’ve plucked more quail and gutted more rats than I care to remember. But I’ve only ever had to kill a handful of animals, and that was always as humane euthanasia after veterinary training. Still fucking sucks.
