I am not vegetarian.

I occasionally eat meat, although it has never been one of my favorite meals and, for personal health reasons I try to limit as much as possible its consumption.

Anyway, this book is not about my alimentary habits but rather about my personal, visual meditation on the condition of living beings, people and animals, a meditation about life and death.

I shot these photos in a rather primitive slaughterhouse in the south of the Dominican Republic, where, perhaps due to the lack of strong social movements against cruelty to animals, a photographer is still being allowed to enter such place and freely document it.

Despite a lack of all those humanitarian implications that such a place would provoke in “the modern world”, here, the only concern in letting me photograph the slaughterhouse was the obvious lack of hygiene, which could jeopardize business even in the Dominican Republic, should these photos be published locally.

My reassurance that it was not my intention to do so, quickly gave me access all areas to photograph “business as usual” in the slaughterhouse.

All along, while shooting, and later, while editing these photos, a question was in my mind: who is suffering more and longer over here? The animals or the people? The killers or their victims?

Of course these cows and these pigs are being killed in a very violent and inhuman way, a knife shoved into their heart to then let them bleed till they die, but what about the killers? In this pre-industrial world they don’t even wear the rubber boots, the face mask, the gloves and the white apron their American colleagues are issued (as per FDA rules) in order to preserve a certain degree of hygiene and as a pretence for a more professional and perhaps detached approach to their license to kill.

No, here the killers walk barefoot in the blood of their victims, they plunge their bodies inside the carcasses to extract their innards, they struggle, man versus pig, sweating, screaming as loud as the pig, while searching for the deadly spot, right above the heart, to give a painful, yet almost instant death.

And while the animal dies, they don’t. They continue to live in this gory theater of guts and blood and screams, killing animals day after day. In a paradoxical way, the life sentence to the executioner can be perceived as crueler than the death sentence of the victim.

And then you think: how can they do it?

They kill to earn a living.

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Giovanni Savino is a photographer based in New York City and in the Dominican Republic, specialized in editorial, documentary and portrait photography. See more: 

http://magneticpic.com/
http://magneticpic.posterous.com/

http://about.me/magneticpic

http://www.flickr.com/photos/magneticart/

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