Slaughterhouses 191 Pachirat: Working in the chutes took me out of the sterilized environment of the cooler and forced a confrontation with the pain and fear of each individual animal as they were driven up the serpentine line into the knocking box Working as a quality control worker forced me to master a set of technical and bureaucratic requirements even as it made me complicit in surveillance and disciplining my former coworkers on the line (Solomon 2012) Such instrumental rationality and compliance to what become bureaucratic processes distract and overwhelm any lingering moral questions As Pachirat notes, ‘at the rate of one cow, steer, or heifer slaughtered every twelve seconds per nine-hour working day, the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur’ (2011, p 138) Hamilton and Taylor (2013, pp 78–80), based on their ethnographic work in UK slaughterhouses, demonstrate how violence to animals in the slaughterhouse is normalised through a ‘reverence for the efficiency of the machine and of the technology housed within it’ Considering how slaughterhouse workers refer to animals as ‘units’ and their deaths as ‘processing’, they argue that language and pride in technology combine to contribute to ‘the ideological obfuscation of them [animals] as embodied subjects Language is used here to sanitise and justify their deaths’ (p 79) This reverence for efficiency and technology, seen for example in the pride taken to kill animals ‘every twelve seconds’ (Pachirat 2011), is part and parcel of the ways in which animal deaths in the slaughterhouse are made palatable Justifying Slaughterhouse Violence: The Roles of Language and Technology Technology can be used to perpetrate but also sanitise violence It can be used to extend the magnitude of violence, allowing humans to execute violence much more efficiently than if perpetrated manually Because machines, devices and ‘innovative methodologies’ can all be used for violent purposes and ends, documenting their use is a helpful step to recognising slaughterhouse violence For example, Roe (2010) provides an excellent and detailed analysis of the treatment of pigs, sheep and other livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse As we have indicated above, knowledge from other hidden, state-sanctioned and approved violent practices can be very instructive as they can help us to see