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Slaughterhouses

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eating in the modern world has been narrated through ideology rather than
physiology.

With meat eating so normalised, the focus slides away from the question of
whether it is ethical to eat meat towards other questions about how to
‘harvest’ meat more humanely. Rather than consider the most obvious effects
on the animals of producing meat, that is their death, attention is placed on
the lead up to and method of death. Contemporary efforts to promote
humane farming and processing practices do just this: use language to
sanitise and naturalise their practices (Fitzgerald and Taylor 2014). As
Pilgrim (2013, p. 123) in her analysis of three popular books that consider
the notion of ‘happy meat’,2 ‘As texts calling for ethical meat consumption,
the overarching fate of the animals they describe is ultimately to pass from a
state of happy animal to ‘happy meat’; this is central to the tracts of these
authors, and the ethical meat movement overall, in that animals that are
raised in more naturalized settings are therefore well cared for . . . The insistence
on happy meat serves the twofold purpose of justifying the consumption of the
animals’ flesh, since the animal is a beneficiary of this supposed happiness, and
furthermore making the animal taste better’ (see also, Smith 2002).

Concluding Comments
Concluding this discussion is not easy. Traditional academic formats usually
call for suggestions for further research. It is difficult for us to suggest that
more research should be done into slaughterhouses because it begs the
question, for what purpose? While there may be merit in discovering more
about the mechanisms of slaughterhouses and their impacts on the humans
who work in them or even their impacts on the communities and environment around them (for example, Fitzgerald et al. 2009), their impact on the

animals who travel through them needs no such research as, in one way, their
impact is simple—animals come here alive and leave dead. Calling for more
research into how this is done and its effects seems superfluous and in some
ways complicit in the AIC as it has the potential to stall action. Similarly, we
could call here, for new methods of oversight in slaughterhouses—stricter
policies and frameworks, more abilities to actually ascertain that welfare
2

The books are Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Susan Bourette’s Meat, a Love Story, and
Scott Gold’s The Shameless Carnivore.