In large barns across the US, packed with gates, crates, and hollering farmhands, animals are unloaded, pushed around, reloaded, and hauled away. Those who survive the chaos are sold to the highest bidder, to be killed for their meat. Those unable to cope with the hectic pace, intense heat, and harsh treatment are injured and sometimes die before they ever leave the grounds.

Livestock auctions — the stop between the farm and slaughterhouse — are a key cog in the machinery of animal agriculture. Formal livestock auctions date back to the 19th century, when they became not only a way station for animals but also an important meeting place for farmers and others in the farm business. Today, there are approximately 1,000 livestock auction markets across the US, mostly located in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Southeast.

Many small farms depend on auctions to acquire animals, which they raise before either selling them off to other farms or to sending them to slaughter. Factory farms buy young animals at auctions to mature in overcrowded mazes of outdoor pens before they are eventually killed, while corporate slaughterhouses purchase animals to be killed immediately. A 2017 market analysis estimates that “cattle sold in conventional auction markets account for 69 percent of the receipts.” The USDA told Vox that “it’s not uncommon for the same feeder calf to go through two or three auction markets in the same week.”

The auctions employ locals, support local businesses, and provide opportunities for youth through programs like 4-H. In these spaces, a lifestyle that was forged during America’s westward expansion endures: “Get ‘em in, get ‘em out,” says Renee King-Sonnen, a former cattle rancher turned animal sanctuary operator. “It’s cowboy culture.”

But behind the scenes, beyond the ramblings of the auctioneer and the bustle of the buyers, exists a “wild west,” says Pete Paxton, an undercover investigator with the group Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development, or SEED, who shared his findings from a sprawling, multistate investigation into the auction system (Vox has agreed to use an pseudonym due to the undercover nature of Paxton’s work).

Between late 2022 and early 2024, Paxton said he investigated 17 auctions and markets, working undercover as an employee at 15, and attending two others as a member of the public. The auctions took place in 10 states: California, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. He found he could get hired by auctions with minimal effort. He would work for a day — during which he said he would witness multiple instances of abuse — before moving on to the next market.

According to Paxton, these markets are dark places where confused animals are kicked, shocked, and thrown. His findings also expose a stark lack of legal protections for animals at auctions, which are dominated by an industry culture that ignores animal suffering. Paxton, who for decades has investigated animal cruelty at factory farms and puppy mills, says he wanted to expose these hidden venues where corporate slaughterhouses and family farms meet — and where rampant abuses are usually shielded from public view.

Paxton reports witnessing “sadistic abuse” and other disturbing but common practices, documenting his experiences in undercover video footage, photos, and thoroughly written firsthand accounts. Experts say the materials highlight a hole in US animal welfare law.

“The US has no federal laws or regulations protecting farm animals from physical abuse,” Dr. James Reynolds, a veterinarian and professor of large animal medicine at Western University of Health Sciences, said. The treatment of animals at auctions revealed by Paxton’s investigations “speak loudly for [the need for] federal regulations to protect these animals.”

Horrific abuses documented at livestock auctions across the country

Auctions typically walk animals — including cows, sheep, goats, and donkeys — through to be sold, Paxton said. (Smaller animals, such as birds or rabbits, are sold in cages.) Auction workers have to keep the animals moving, but many animals resist, or are too injured or ill to move. That often leads to violence.

In Paxton’s videos and photos, cows at various auctions who are unable to stand (also known as downed cows) are shocked with electric prods in efforts to make them move. Older animals like cull cows — cows who no longer produce enough milk for the dairy industry — are often brought to auction injured, sick, or otherwise immobile. Animals young and old alike can endure great stress while being transported, inside cramped trailers, enduring extreme weather, transport times up to 28 hours (or more), where some fall and get injured.

At Buffalo Livestock Market in Texas, Paxton witnessed a downed cow being dragged by a forklift with a chain around her neck. The forklift operator can be seen in the video and heard laughing. Reynolds, after reviewing the footage, called the treatment “definite animal cruelty.”

At the same auction, footage shows a worker throwing a calf with a broken leg into a transport truck for a buyer, who remarks, with a laugh, “He can’t get no more fucked up than he is.”

Reynolds told Vox he believed the auction employee handled the calf “without regard for the pain being inflicted on the animal,” adding that he thought the animal “needed to receive either medical care or to be euthanized.”

At Athens Commission Company, another auction in Texas, Paxton documented a goat being dragged by the horns and thrown to the ground before being chased. He recorded similar abuse of goats at Central Livestock in Kansas, and of sheep at Pawnee Sale Barn in Oklahoma.

At Emory Livestock in Texas (owned by the same family as Athens Commission Company), a donkey from whom a worker is attempting to draw blood is intentionally squeezed between two gates to hold the animal still. The worker repeatedly kicks the animal while screaming at it “for no clear reason,” Paxton said. Workers also violently push goats from transport trucks, and force collapsing cows to keep moving.

Dogs attack a sheep in another video from Colby Livestock Auction Company in Kansas. And a calf is shocked with an electric prod to the face at Empire Livestock Auction in New York to keep the animal moving.

Reynolds told Vox he was particularly “appalled” by footage from Waverly Sales Company in Iowa, in which a worker squeezes a goat’s head between a wall and a gate while “the poor animal scream[s] in pain,” he said. One worker then grabbed the goat by the scrotum and threw the animal several feet. The abuse was severe enough that Paxton sent photos and video to local law enforcement; the individual was charged with a misdemeanor.

These acts of violence may seem extreme to outsiders, but Paxton says they are the norm at auctions in order to keep the animals moving and maximize sales. “Workers are often ordered by management to move downed or slow animals by any means necessary,” Paxton said.

The compiled footage shows people acting with “appalling cruelty and lack of care about animals,” Reynolds says.

Vox reached out to each auction company mentioned for comment, but did not receive any replies.

State and federal laws don’t protect animals at auctions

Animal agriculture generally operates under regulatory exemptions or relatively lax rules — a doctrine known as agricultural exceptionalism. As a result, livestock auctions are governed by norms often set by the industry rather than animal welfare laws.

There are no federal laws in the US that protect farm animals at auctions from mistreatment, says Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. (Disclosure: I attended a media fellowship at VLGS in 2021.)

While most states do require licensing for livestock auctions, this is generally regulated by state agriculture departments, Winders says, “and their priorities are not animal welfare.”

Rather, Winders continues, the objective for state agencies is to support the agriculture industry. She points to Nebraska, where the stated purpose of the state’s Livestock Auction Market Act is “to encourage, stimulate, and stabilize the agricultural economy of the state in general, and the livestock economy in particular” — not to regulate animal welfare.

Some states, including California, Maryland, Michigan, and Oregon do have limited welfare requirements for animals at auctions. They may require that downed animals be humanely euthanized or that the sale of animals unable to move on their own is prohibited. But Winders describes such laws as “not robust,” and she doubts whether they are enforced. California law, for example, requires that “no slaughterhouse, stockyard, auction, market agency, or dealer shall buy, sell, or receive a nonambulatory animal.” Yet the evidence Paxton gathered at a California auction shows a downed Holstein cow being shocked with an electric prod and then dragged by machinery when unable to move.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) said in a statement to Vox it “does not condone inhumane treatment of livestock but does not have authority for enforcement” and added that “suspected abuse should be referred to local agencies as soon as possible for investigation.”

Auctions are part of a distinctly American way of life

Livestock auctions, insider accounts suggest, are insular, male-dominated spaces that, while technically open to the public, remain removed from the mainstream gaze. They are a world where animals are moved with ruthless efficiency, and their commodification is handed down over generations as a way of life.

The auction environment is a “frenzy of consumption,” said Kathryn Gillespie, the author of The Cow With Ear Tag #1389, who has visited dozens of auctions while researching that book and a forthcoming book focused on auctions. Sales happen in “under a minute,” she says; calves with umbilical cords still attached can sell for around $15. She said some of those calves die.

Some of the auctions Gillespie visited were populated “almost entirely [by] men,” she says. She often felt uncomfortable as a woman who was not native to the culture. “I didn’t always feel safe,” she recounts. One time, she was asked to leave.

Other auctions were more fun and family-friendly, even entertaining. “It’s very engaging to watch an auction. The auctioneer is very dynamic,” she says. “It’s a sort of performance.” These auctions function as a gathering space for the community. “It’s a very communal, social space.”

Tommy Sonnen, a former cattle rancher, agrees. “It’s a place that the locals go; they spend a lot of time there. … They have their lunch there.” Sonnen comes from a long line of ranchers, but says he “always felt uncomfortable” when he saw injured animals at auctions. About a decade ago, he became a vegan and an animal rights activist. He has since co-founded, with his wife Renee King-Sonnen, Rowdy Girl Sanctuary in Texas, which cares for animals rescued from the meat industry.

Treating animals inhumanely has always been normalized at auctions, King-Sonnen says, as a necessary means to get the job done.

It’s also a culture that protects its own. Paxton recalls witnessing auction workers beating animals in the open, while people attending with their kids watched.

Animals need legal protections at auctions

The broader fight to protect animals farmed for food in the US faces many obstacles: powerful agricultural lobbies, economic concerns about the impact of raising animal welfare standards, and a lack of widespread public awareness of the industry’s cruelty that might create empathy for these animals. Auctions, which are usually only a brief stop on the way to the farms and slaughterhouses where other well-documented abuses are systematized, have not been a priority for reform given the larger struggle to get the government to do anything to stop the abuses of factory farming.

Nonetheless, Reynolds said,“it is apparent that livestock auctions in the US need regulations that protect animals from abuse.”

For Winders, the first step would be to take the responsibility of animal welfare away from state agriculture departments “whose focus is on promoting agriculture and trying to protect industry.” She points to Vermont, which recently created an animal welfare division within the Department of Public Safety tasked with enforcing animal welfare laws.

Humane handling requirements, inspections, and meaningful enforcement including the loss of auction licenses could all have an impact, Winders said. She is not aware of any such efforts, however, by state lawmakers or regulators.

Some animal advocacy groups are working to create better federal regulations for the transportation of livestock, which could help improve the condition in which animals arrive at the auctions.

The Animal Welfare Institute has petitioned the federal government to create new protections for livestock in transport. They are lobbying for mandatory fitness checks and veterinary inspections for any vulnerable animals sent across state lines directly to slaughter.

“Our petition would tangentially help the most vulnerable animals that go through auctions,” said Adrienne Craig, policy associate and staff attorney for the AWI’s Farmed Animal Program.

But merely creating these new rules would not mean they’re followed.

“The problem with focusing on transportation regulation is always enforcement,” says Chris Green, executive director of Animal Legal Defense Fund. The USDA, which is in charge of regulating and overseeing the transport of farm animals, does not have a record of “much, if any, meaningful enforcement,” he says.

Paxton says that while he supports efforts to improve regulations for transport, including decreasing travel time, “that won’t do anything for 99 percent of animals that go to an auction” because most come relatively short distances from local farms.

It also wouldn’t stop the abuses at the auctions themselves. It’s there, Paxton says, where change will have to happen.