To author Upton Sinclair, the hellish world of factory
slaughterhouses was as dangerous to human beings as it was to
pigs. He filled his 1906 novel The Jungle with meat-packing
images that seem ripped from a slasher movie: "... and as for
the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in
some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor,
their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and
when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left
to be worth exhibiting -- sometimes they would be overlooked for
days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world
as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!" Sinclair's abattoir labourers get
so desensitized to violence that rates of murder, rape and
brawls among them rise. The book cemented the link between
slaughterhouses and crime for decades to come -- long before pig
farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton haunted headlines. More
than a hundred years later, a University of Windsor researcher
may have proven the literary class