Due to the isolation she experienced in childhood suffering from an undiagnosed neurological disorder, Gail found solace with animals, especially those who were neglected or injured. Her childhood desire to rescue animals was eventually realized when, after writing several articles about animal issues for the New York Times, she was hired as staff writer at the largest animal protection organization in the country. She later became the only female cruelty investigator at that organization, where she worked to expose violations involving puppy mills and the dog racing industry, ritual animal sacrifice, factory farms, and slaughterhouses.
Eventually forced to quit her job because her supervisor would not allow her to expose her slaughterhouse findings, Gail began working at the Humane Farming Association, where she continued investigating and wrote her first book, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (Prometheus Books, 1997, 2007). 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 since its passage 43 years earlier.
As she continued investigating 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 her 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, her unscrupulous former employer being sentenced to serve life in prison for an unimaginable crime, and ongoing clashes with state attorneys general as Gail struggled to obtain prosecutions of animal abusers. Out of Sightculminates in an intense courtroom trial for one of her animal cruelty cases. As for the rare neurological disorder from which she suffers, it was only identified in the scientific literature a short ten years ago. She was only diagnosed three years ago, after she began writing Out of Sight – a diagnosis explored at the book’s climax.
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