Slaughterhouses 185 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,