For several decades, Sue Coe has been drawing and painting the brutality of the meat industry. She snuck into slaughterhouses and, because she carried only a pad and pencil, not cameras, has been allowed access to chicken and other livestock factories and production facilities.

Brief essays accompany the shocking, sorrowful images. Many of the drawings have a Third Reich feel, black and bloody; tortured animals and human workers mutated by their own cauterized feelings. Coe writes of mother cows and pigs separated from their young; of the yearning of animals for family members. She refuses the truism that animals and fish have no feelings, that sheep feel nothing when they are sheared. Her environments, her backdrops are poisoned, toxic, apocalyptic. She writes with certainty that our cruelty will come back to haunt us.

Read the full article in the Los Angeles Review of Books