Slow Violence in Slaughterhouse Practices: The Right to Render

• In Event: Animals from a Sociological Perspective Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Violence, Exclusion, and Inclusion

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that farmed animal bodies are (re)produced, maimed, and literally rendered obsolete, and what it means to consider nonhuman bodies alongside the always already marginalized human bodies of most slaughterhouse workers in terms of precarity and debility amidst the slow violence of these operations. While how farmed animals experience abuse differs among species, the perception of their lives and physical embodiment as readily disposable does not. In conversation with Puar and Nixon, I analyze literature, websites, and documentaries to argue that, like the water cycle, farmed animals have a patterned life from birth to death, but it is anything except natural. The violence experienced differs not only across species but gender, too, with female animals raised for dairy, meat, and breeding purposes, whereas most born males are immediately put down, as it is productive to utilize just one male for the insemination process. A good example are cows. Once born, they are immediately separated from their mothers and often fed hormone-induced formulas to quicken the reproductive process such that they can get artificially inseminated and milked as early as possible. This process is increasingly becoming shortened to account for the heightened needs of growing human populations. In effect, the livelihoods of fenced and caged critters are becoming more limited as the timespan between birth and slaughter is diminished. The sole function of female farmed animals is to be repeatedly bred and milked until she is spent, at which point she is sent off to slaughter—indeed, the implemented slow violence that results in crip time is deemed reason enough to eradicate them. Because male calves are less desirable, they are regularly pulled off this production line and immediately put down. Livestock are viewed as worthy only to the extent of their physical beingness. As capitalism expands, so does their precarity, which extends well beyond death to include grinding up unused portions of their bodies into nonexistence.

Author

• Gregory Leath Serrano, University of Kentucky