Out of Sight

In Gail Eisnitz’s memoir, Out of Sight: An Undercover Investigator’s Fight for Animal Rights and Her Own Survival, she recounts a 40-year career working to understand and expose the gruesome truth about the unconscionable ways millions of cattle, pigs, chickens, and other farmed species are raised and killed in factory farms and slaughter plants across the United States each year.

Eisnitz is the long-serving chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association. She has worked with whistleblowers and major news outlets to shine a national spotlight on multiple instances of egregious cruelty—particularly in slaughterhouses. Her efforts have been instrumental in securing some of the few criminal charges and convictions ever obtained for farmed animal mistreatment—including in a case involving workers at an Ohio farm using chains and front-end loaders to hang and slowly strangle to death sick and injured breeding sows.

Out of Sight is a testament to Eisnitz’s decades-long mission to make publicly visible—and hold bad actors accountable for—cruelty that so often is carefully concealed behind barn and abattoir walls. At times intensely personal, the book also describes Eisnitz’s struggles with baffling and increasingly debilitating health conditions, which she must somehow overcome even as she contends with the meat industry—one of the nation’s most powerful political and economic forces.

Among her many accolades, Eisnitz was the 2004 recipient of AWI’s Schweitzer Medal for outstanding achievement in the advancement of animal welfare. Two decades later, Eisnitz is still at it, and with Out of Sight has given us an inspiring and instructive account of the playbook she honed and repeatedly employed to pull back the curtain on farmed animal injustice.

Author: Gail A. Eisnitz

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

No. Pages: 250

Program Terms: Farmed Animals

AWI Quarterly Terms: Review