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Not all French people were in lockdown in the spring of 2020. Some workers had a duty to carry on working. Among them were the veterinary service agents who continued to work on the production lines in slaughterhouses, guaranteeing the supply of meat and meat products. Under the authority of the French Ministry of Agriculture, these agents are attached to the departmental administration when performing their daily work in slaughterhouses. Drawing on the contributions of the sociology of organizations, this article focuses on how these workers, who implement government policy, have had to reinvent their ways of working at a time when the rest of their administration has been weakened. With essential tasks having to be carried out, the crisis has shaken things up and revealed the singularities of inspection as an intermediary activity, at a time when we are seeing both the weakening of cooperation within slaughterhouses, between inspectors and those being inspected, and the weakening of cooperation between principals and inspectors.