Every day, every hour, every minute, every second.

You have arrived into this world; and I am witnessing the only experiences you will have. I am here to capture this moment, this is work, I am here for a job, and I am numb to the existence you are being forced to endure. Because I need to be. It is a necessity - if I allow myself to remember that your life is not just in this hour I spend with you here, but your every waking reality, what are the consequences? It’s not that I don’t care about you - I do, that's why I’m here, that’s why I do this. But who am I? To be able to see this and feel so numb? Am I the very thing I set out to destroy? Indifference. To your suffering, to your world - to this fucked up reality we have created for you?

I leave, I go home, I shower the night away and I lay down in my bed and I sleep. You stay behind. If you weren’t dead by morning, you would have been picked up by your back legs and swung down, your head slamming against the ground, killing you. Should I have done that myself to save you the night of suffering? Should I have taken you to be euthanized? There were at least 20 others like you I met that night too. Is this just an excuse? Or is it the attitude necessary to get the job done? 

When it has been some time since I remember feeling the depths of despair for everything that is going on around me, I begin to wonder what it is I have become. A monster? I should be feeling something more than I am. Something is there, but rather than the surge of rage, desperation and motivation it once was, it is a mild humming of distorted memories of what that feels like.

I sat down to edit your picture, and here is my painful reminder. But too, my saving grace; a reminder that I still care as much as I did before I became this, my brain has just learnt to disassociate with that part of myself. Those embers of raw emotion are still burning somewhere, in a place that is kept quiet - closed in a deep corner of my mind.

You could be mistaken as being dead in this picture - a single frame captured 1/125 of a second into your life. What this image didn’t capture was your rhythmic cries out in pain, only centimeters from your sibling in the very same state. Looking at two others behind you, I got a pretty good sense of what happened to you. Your confined mother was physically and mentally exhausted after giving birth to you, her newborns staggered around the cage where she stood. She needed rest, you were all desperate to be close to her. She laid down on top of you, causing debilitating injuries, unable to even turn around to see you, she lay there listening to your cries all night, unable to help.

I moved through another 10 farrowing crates that night, in a shed with more than 100. Not long after spending time photographing you, a fellow investigator called me over to them. As I reached them, the source of their concern was obvious. A sow was beginning to lay down on one of her piglets, who was trapped by their leg. Before we had a chance to remove them, she laid down on her piglet completely. I immediately began to take photos as they screamed out in pain and desperation. My fellow investigator began trying to move the sow and asked for my help. We both began pushing desperately to free them and we succeeded. Their back legs were mostly paralysed. As we placed them down below the heat lamp, the collective regret we felt was obvious without words. Have we just made matters worse? This is a question I am no stranger to. Why do I even bother? Foolishly perhaps, I always will.

In the days following, my fellow investigator and I talked back and forth about methods of which we could have used to end their lives ourselves to alleviate their suffering. What might we be able to equip ourselves with next time to avoid this guilt?

It’s not your fault.
But you have a responsibility to act.

It happens every day, every hour, every minute, every second.
But you were there this time, you could have done something.

I’ll meet more like you, in fact I met more like you the following night. I took your picture, capturing the smallest moment in time of your suffering, it means nothing at all to you. It didn’t help YOU one bit. All that is left of you is images.

My hope is that it won’t be in vain - that someone else will bear witness to your anguish and it might make them feel the way I did when I started on this journey; motivated and ready to help uproot the very system that ensures others will continue to suffer like you did.

I am sorry. I am doing the best I know how to.