The palgrave international handbook of a 203
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N. Taylor and H. Fraser
policies are being applied or even the installation of CCTV in all slaughterhouses. While all of these have their merits, they do not stop the violence
done to animals in slaughterhouses. They may prevent the ‘incidental’ acts of
cruelty that are commonly exposed in the media, but if one accepts that the
taking of animal lives is abusive and violent then no measures will stop this as
it is the very raison d’être of the slaughterhouse.
With that in mind, the only real call we are left with, then, at the end of
this chapter is for a cessation of meat eating and the promulgation of vegan
lifestyles (and by this we mean ideological outlooks, not simply dietary
choice). This is no simple solution, as it necessitates a wholesale revision of
how we see ourselves, other animals, the earth we live on and the relationships between all three. It requires us to move beyond anthropocentrism,
beyond bastardised, neoliberal reformulations of rights that stress the individual over the communal and give rise to claims of personal freedom and
choice regarding who we eat. As Jenkins and Twine (2014, pp. 230–231)
note, assuming that ‘the choices of the individual are somehow sovereign and
free from much in the way of social and ecological consequence’ is a corollary
of our belief in our inalienable right to a freedom of choice. What this misses,
however, as we have aimed to show throughout this chapter, is that ‘consuming animals is a dominant cultural practice, and so it is part of the set of
normalised values and ontological distinctions of the culture we are born
into . . . Discourses of choice de-socialise and personalise eating practice as a
means of attempting to remove them from the political.’ Politicising slaughterhouses and attendant meat eating practices is a crucial first step, and one to
which we hope to have contributed.
References
Adams, C., & Donovan, J. (Eds.) (1995). Animals and women: feminist theoretical
explorations. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
AKC (n.d.). Animal kill counter. Accessed
20 November 2015.
Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. New York:
Penguin.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2012). Australia’s food and nutrition
2012, Australian Government, Canberra. Accessed 13 October 2015.
Bauman, Z. (2001). Modernity and the holocaust. New York: Cornell University
Press.
