Slaughterhouses 183 activity to continue largely unfettered and unquestioned However, there are other cultural and social mechanisms at play that support the rearing and slaughter of animals for food Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014, p 21) refer to these as ‘carnistic defences’ that ‘enable gross cognitive and affective distortions in order for human consumers to support the system’ It is our contention that these various mechanisms work to normalise the animal abuses that occur in the slaughterhouse (and in society more generally) and that the concept of the animal industrial complex is a useful way of making such mechanisms visible The Animal Industrial Complex First discussed by Barbara Noske (1997) in a prescient book, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals, the term AIC picks up on the original idea of a military-industrial complex, which was first used in a speech by Eisenhower in 1961 to highlight the increasing problem of the connections between government force and industry (Twine 2011) Throughout the 1970s, and beyond, this concept of interlocking institutions was extended and is now commonly used to understand the prison-industrial complex, the entertainment-industrial complex, and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex The terminology is intended to problematise the overlapping interests of capital accumulation and particular industries Specifically, the AIC is a partly opaque and multiple set of networks and relationships between the corporate (agricultural) sector, governments, and public and private science With economic, cultural, social and affective dimensions it encompasses an extensive range of practices, technologies, images, identities and markets and seeing it as a complex, integrated ideological system then opens the door to us asking, for example ‘What networks are at play? How they interconnect? How are particular speciesist norms naturalised, carried and circulated? Why are such norms so successful at recruiting adherents? (Twine 2011, p 23) Attempting to answer such questions allows us to highlight the complexity of the systems of animal rearing and slaughter and to demonstrate the ideological support they have—support which renders them normative and thus powerful The AIC and our related poor treatment of nonhuman animal species both rest upon the idea that animals are ‘other’ to our humanity They are not only different, but categorically inferior Binary worldviews invoke hierarchical