Pete Paxton: Good People Who Do Bad Things

Species Unite

"I cannot put enough emphasis on this. I have seen so many things that are so weird that even when I would show it to law enforcement at first, before there were like a lot of these cases coming out, law enforcement would look and they'd be like, “what? Why would someone do this?” Right? As if what I'm showing them wasn't real. And what I learned to say to get past that is, I would say to cops, “how many times have you seen someone do something for reasons they can't even explain to themselves?" - Pete Paxton

For the past 23 years, Pete Paxton has been working undercover in puppy mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, pet stores, and on-board commercial fishing boats to document horrific cruelty. Some of these high-stress, horror show jobs last for weeks while others go on for months at a time - months of ten-hour days, doing hard, heavy labor, witnessing animals being abused or killed and watching your co-workers hurt the already abused animals even more.

Pete does it because he is good at it, because he loves animals and because his work has often resulted in big change for animals.

What perplexes me the most about Pete, is that after 23 years of working in hellish places like slaughterhouses and factory farms, he hasn’t become dark and dour. Instead, he is the opposite. He's extremely funny, super engaging and seriously joyful. He doesn’t allow this work to take him down. Most people I know, me included, would be a shell of a human being after a couple of hours in his world.

Pete is also the author of Rescue Dogs and has had two HBO documentaries made about him and his work, Dealing Dogs and Death on a Factory Farm.