About five thousand head of cattle enter a High Plains slaughterhouse every day, single file, and leave in a different form. Workers on the line wear about eight pounds of chain mail beneath their white coats, shiny steel armor that covers their hands, wrists, stomach, and back. The chain mail’s designed to protect workers from cutting themselves and from being cut by other workers.

We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. The man who welcomes the cattle to building is called the “knocker.” Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner – which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air.

Now the cattle suspended above are upside down swinging on hooks. The sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, lifeless. For eight and half hours, a worker called a “sticker” does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing the carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again.

I see a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us.

A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler. It feels like a slaughterhouse now. Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly dodging them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time.

Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all the strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. Workers – about half of them women, almost all of them young and Latino – slice meat with long slender knives. You see hardhats, white coats, flashes of steel. Nobody is smiling or chatting, they’re too busy, anxiously trying not to fall behind.

At the end of the line is the fabricating room. Some machines assemble cardboard boxes, others vacuum-seal subprimals of beef in clear plastic. The workers look extremely busy, but there’s nothing unsettling about this part of the plant. You see meat like this all the time in the back of your local market.