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Slaughterhouses

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contentious to draw links between slaughterhouse abuse and the attempted
genocide of people during the Holocaust, or between the overlapping poor
treatment of women and animals. Yet these are our explanations, which we
expand on below, along with our earlier emphasis on animal abuse as a
condoned and socially sanctioned industrial complex.

Animal Abuse as Normative
The use of animals underpins our very existence and is inextricably tied
to capitalist relations of production, including those of profit and exploitation. As Murray (2011, p. 95) argues, ‘rather than appearing as an
anomaly opposite the capitalist system, the enslavement of non-human
animals has become embedded in and an intrinsic component of the
capitalist economy’. This is especially the case for the billions of ‘farm’
animals bred, reared and slaughtered for food who, according to Torres
(2007, p. 11) are destined to become ‘nothing more than living
machines, transformed from beings who live for themselves into beings
that live for capital. Capital has literally imprinted itself upon the bodies
of animals’ (Torres 2007, p. 11).
Earlier we mentioned that a rich body of ecofeminist work has examined
how animal slaughter is normalised in male and human-dominated societies
(see for example, Adams and Donovan 1995). Ecofeminists have helped to
establish that by humans placing them/ourselves at ‘the top of the food chain’
(other) animals are transformed into consumable things; things that no longer
have any sense of agency, individuality or (potential) personhood (see for
example, Cudworth 2014). This neatly separates humans from animals and,
crucially for the current debate, allows them to be seen as ‘walking larders’.
Quite simply they become objects and potential food sources, as opposed to
emotional individual subjects with any rights or entitlements. In effect, any

potential connection that humans may feel with other (consumable) animals
is removed through a series of cultural sleights of hand that deny empathising
with their plight. It is also why great efforts are made to separate meat
products from their sources.
Meat eating has become so normalised that it need not be explained or
seriously defended. Rather than stand by their/our decision to eat meat and
face how this ‘meat’ is produced, treated and dismembered, most people
subscribe to dominant discourses that have a variety of techniques for explaining away the inherent abuse of animals in meat production and consumption.
In the Doing and the Being, Girshick (2014, p. 57) explains that,