Slaughterhouses and violent crime -more reason to be vege

About three weeks ago at a staff "Christmas" do one of my colleagues -having observed my vegetarian option and exercised a modicum of curiosity about it, confessed to considering becoming vegetarian having come across research showing a link between factory-slaughterhouses and crimes involving lack of empathy in communities surrounding them. It has stayed in my mind and so I decided to do a web search on the matter
Perhaps the quickest and fullest way in is this article reporting the research: Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime | Toronto Star. The basic finding is this:

Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

It seems that the correlation is rock solid. However, as often, the interpretation needs more work.Mainly the interpretive issue is whether working in slaughter houses causes an increase in the categories of crime studied, or whether the work itself attracts the kind of people most disposed to such crimes. The latter seems to me to be less likely given an aspect of the research itself:

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors.

My suspicion is also that, taking into account framing and priming, there is a plausibility to work involving high levels of desensitisation to suffering tending to form people more likely to commit crimes where a lack of empathy is likely to be a significant factor. The desensitisation issue is problematised in the article:

"the correlation was not as strong for smaller farms where animals were killed. " Though I actually predicted that when I began to read the article - "“It seems like there’s something about the industrialization process,” says Fitzgerald. “you have people who are actually responsible for slaughtering thousands of animals a day.”

My reason for not eating meat is largely about environmental impact and sustainability: not eating meat reduces ones carbon footprint and there is not enough land to feed meat to the world's population at western rates of consumption. I can however, as something of a peace activist, begin to feel this reason gaining credibility for me.