In The Dying Trade, a forthcoming documentary film about slaughterhouse workers, a man named Tom describes a moment during his career that still haunts him many years later: the time he skinned a cow alive while she was giving birth.

Tom worked at slaughterhouses across Europe from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, and one of his jobs on the production line was to remove the skin from animals after they had been hung up, stunned unconscious, and bled out. That’s how it’s supposed to work in theory.

But slaughterhouses operate at a rapid, hectic pace, with animals sometimes stunned improperly and butchered while still alive and conscious. If a cow remained conscious once they got to Tom — as was the case with this cow in particular, whose calf was partially hanging out of her birth canal —

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