188 N Taylor and H Fraser sanctioned enslavement and slaughtering of animals The irony here is how easily the barbaric practices of domination and slaughter are pushed away through laughter and scorn under the guise of intellectual and even ethical supremacy It is made possible by the associations of men with (trusted) reason and women with (unruly) emotions Most western post-Enlightenment discourses still need to ‘civilise’ or otherwise ‘discipline’ and control beings constructed as unruly and closer to nature, classifications long attributed to women and other animals The same works in reverse with the assumption that nature is something ‘out there’ to be ‘mastered’ by human practice, usually through technological means, and this is evident in slaughterhouse work where the technology is something to be proud of (Hamilton and Taylor 2013), something we will return to later The need to dominate and control nature—and anything and anyone associated with it— is not only old but it is so deeply embedded within modern thought as to be one of its constitutive paradigms Far from being considered an aberration, it is instead a belief system whereby oppression is considered a legitimate, and indeed necessary starting point Murray (2011), for example, points out that speciesist relations have been constitutive of capitalism, rather than an effect of it, in the same way that other scholars argue that the very roots of modern capitalist practices have been dependent upon the subjugation of women This analytical approach allows us to see the interconnected nature and consequences of animal and human abuse and oppression Cantor (2014, p 30) succinctly summarises it: ‘animal abuse is a root cause of even human miseries that not appear linked at first glance’ Accepting that such violences are linked is challenging as it encourages a different view of the role of violence—and specific violent events—in society Bauman (2001, pp 4–5), for example, argued that traditional thinking and scholarship that regard the holocaust through a ‘theoretical framework of malfunction are misplaced, and possibly even dangerous’, as they can only lead to a conception of ‘ the Holocaust as a unique yet fully determined product of a particular concatenation of social and psychological factors, which led to a temporary suspension of the civilizational grip in which human behaviour is normally held.’ This traditional understanding, Bauman argued, offers an odd sense of comfort because the alternative is to accept that such violence is endemic, normative and constitutive of our current social organisation: We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society, whose other, more