The routine, mechanized cruelty of factory farming has been exposed so frequently and documented so thoroughly that railing against it feels trite, like declaring that you’re opposed to cancer or racism. Yes, yes, we know. And it’s become almost commonplace for authors to peek inside a corporate abattoir and report back on the horrors—see best sellers like Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, not to mention academic-goes-undercover books like Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food by Steve Striffler, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

So it would take an exceptionally visceral, in-depth account to make a meaningful contribution to the literature of animals suffering for our nourishment. That’s exactly what Timothy Pachirat provides in Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press), the story of his time spent working at an unnamed slaughterhouse in Omaha. Along with the stomach-turning scenes—and there are many—Pachirat, an assistant professor of politics at the New School, focuses on how slaughterhouse employees rationalize practices they find abhorrent and how hierarchy, division of labor, and even the design of the building allows those inside to disassociate from the killing itself.