Out of Sight is both an investigative deep dive into the meat industry’s treatment of farm animals, and a story of resilience and, ultimately, professional and personal triumph.
This insightful and moving memoir chronicles the author’s forty-year career conducting undercover investigations and documenting animal abuse in the U.S. meat industry while simultaneously coping with a mysterious and incapacitating medical condition. Due to the isolation she experienced in childhood suffering from an undiagnosed neurological disorder, Gail Eisnitz found solace with animals, especially those who were neglected or injured. Her childhood desire to rescue animals was eventually realized when, she was hired as staff writer at the Humane Society of the United States, the largest animal protection organization in the world. She later transitioned to become the only female cruelty investigator at HSUS. In that capacity, Eisnitz initiated investigations into many issues, including documenting violations in puppy mills and the dog racing industry, ritual animal sacrifice, factory farms, and slaughterhouses.
Exposing the slaughterhouse violations she had uncovered proved extremely difficult. Network television producers invariably concluded that the evidence Eisnitz had secretly obtained was too disturbing to air on TV. Forced to quit her job at HSUS, the author hired on with the Humane Farming Association, where she continued investigating and wrote her first book, Slaughterhouse. She then implored a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the Washington Post to write a story exposing the slaughter evidence she had documented. That front-page article prompted immense outrage in U.S. Congress and resulted in an annual multimillion-dollar appropriation for enforcement of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the first funding for what had been a zero-budgeted law.
As she continued her investigative efforts around slaughterhouses and also documented unthinkable abuses at industrial pig, calf, and dairy farms – exposed in vivid detail in Out of Sight – the symptoms of the undiagnosed visual processing disorder she had grappled with since childhood dramatically worsened. The many plot twists that occurred during the author’s campaign to expose the meat industry included her breast cancer diagnosis at age 35, a robbery in which one of three gunmen shot somebody in her presence, elaborate cover-ups by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and a state governor, and ongoing clashes with state attorneys general as the author struggled to obtain prosecutions of animal abusers.
Out of Sight is both an investigative deep dive into the meat industry’s treatment of farm animals, and a story of resilience and, ultimately, professional and personal triumph. It is a poignant account of a lifelong struggle towards self-acceptance that takes the reader on an inspiring journey from helpless victim – much like the animals the author investigated – to empowered victor.
