Slaughterhouses: The Language of Life, the Discourse of Death Nik Taylor and Heather Fraser Introduction To some it might sound counterintuitive to include a chapter on animal slaughter in a book about animal abuse To others, it will be a welcome addition This disjunct reflects the paradoxical ways our society approaches the slaughter of animals for human food.1 This slaughter happens in numbers so large as to be almost incomprehensible for the vast numbers of humans who prefer not to know where their meat comes from, with the foreshortened and often miserable lives of ‘livestock’ and their likely horrific deaths ignored if not made entirely invisible The cultural erasure of the violence to ‘farmed’ and butchered animals occurs when social systems render such violence normative Unwanted companion animals are also routinely slaughtered; albeit this is usually referred to euphemistically as euthanasia While the focus of this chapter is on animals farmed for human food, the numbers of companion animals killed are substantial While our relationships with companion animals are a form of speciesism, it is sobering to note that even the animals that we hold dear and seek to protect are subject to poor treatment and early death due to human actions McHugh (2004, p 9) points out that ‘the dangers for contemporary dogs are real: destroyed by the millions every year as unwanted pets, strays and research subjects’ N Taylor (*) Á H Fraser School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, South Australia, Australia e-mail: nik.taylor@flinders.edu.au © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_9 179