This is one of the basic cliches of contemporary animal liberation and alternative food movement discourse: if people could *see* the brutal treatment of animals, they wouldn’t tolerate it. But the brutality of slaughterhouses is an open secret, well documented, and well known.

Michael Pollan famously suggested that if we built slaughterhouses out of glass, they would be immediately closed. In other words, transparency leads to empathy leads to political action to relieve suffering.

Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds, cited in both the thread and in Moyn’s article, actually has a more complicated take. It suggests that the enlightenment faith in transparency and sight is probably misplaced: it depends on who is doing the seeing and what they are seeing.

In Pachirat’s memorable riposte to Pollan, if slaughterhouses were built of glass, how do we know people wouldn’t buy tickets to get a glimpse? That possibility, while unpalatable, is more in keeping with the history of slaughterhouses.

The slaughterhouse as interdicted space is quite uneven in time and place. To begin, abattoirs in the 19th century US used to not only be open, but also tourist attractions: people went to them for the pleasure of seeing slaughter.

Chicago’s Union Stockyards were an icon of American industry and hardly closed in the least. An estimated half-million visitors per year toured the site to marvel at the efficient dismemberment of livestock. It was a pleasure to see.

Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle (1906) is now remembered as an expose of the Union Stockyards that described both the cruelty and hazards of slaughter labor. But its significance at the time was about food safety and it sparked no concern for livestock welfare.

Across the board, visibility did nothing to stoke popular concern for the fates of livestock. 19th century activism around animal cruelty rarely, if ever addressed the treatment of meat animals, though it had quite a bit to say about working and companion animals.

In fact, addressing cruelty towards livestock was not a priority for animal welfare activists until the postwar period, and then it was partially because industry groups saw mandated investment in more “humane” killing technology as a good way to push out smaller abattoirs.

Even today, the claim that slaughterhouses are interdicted, “unseeable” spaces is debatable. The last decade has witnessed a number of high quality ethnographies of animal agriculture spaces, including Pachirat’s, where academics have gained access.

It’s true that most slaughter facilities are not open to the public (though smaller abattoirs certainly are) and some state’s have used so-called “Ag-Gag” bills to punish journalist and activist exposes. But restricting public access is also related to biosecurity protocols.

Those biosecurity initiatives are not a trivial afterthought. Veterinary and zoonotic illnesses are massive liabilities for animal agriculture, so much so that, as @alexmotya's works shows meat companies also intensively regulate the sociality of their work forces

Meanwhile, the claim that the spaces are “interdicted” and opaque seems to ignore the fact that they are also the workplaces for tens of thousands of people who regularly enter and leave and, indeed, have eyes.

Slaughterhouses are far from restricted to those low-wage workers, many of whom are people of color, the formerly incarcerated, and migrants. The particular story about sight is one that presumes (and naturalizes) the seeing perspective of an affluent white audience.

It’s also a strikingly American story in an industry that is global. Many industrial slaughter facilities around the world are accessible to the public. In Mumbai, my partner toured the giant Deonar Slaughter facility in writing his first book about metabolic illness in India.

To zoom out, the transparency argument is also an argument about proximity and relation. It hinges on the idea that because we do not relate to animals, we cannot feel empathy for them and are not moved to relieve their suffering.

The focus on the slaughterhouse makes sense for that argument, although slaughter facilities are only one node in the commodity chain and animals rarely spend more than a few hours there in lives marked by nearly constant suffering.

But the slaughterhouse is a magnetizing image--we see it and not other things--because we can only reckon it as the space of mass non-relation, where indistinguishable animals are slaughtered by equally indistinguishable workers.

It is the space of mass death and therefore the ultimate in non-relation: we cannot relate to indistinguishable animals and workers, and death is itself a stark horizon of relation. We might note now how this racializes workers in that space.

But I also want to questions other than just whether we can see slaughter: who can we see doing the slaughtering, who is being slaughtered, and who are WE? A single story of optics can’t answer these questions, because they all relate to the racialization of different bodies.

I tend to think about this question through the lens of Judith Butler’s work on grief and mourning. I quote one passage at great length in my essay, “How Meat Changed Sex,” that deals with why Americans do not empathize with Palestinians. https://www.academia.edu/35295117/HOW_MEAT_CHANGED_SEX_The_Law_of_Interspecies_Intimacy_after_Industrial_Reproduction

Butler’s basic stance is that it isn’t sufficient to see if what you see is not what you recognize as a livable life. If lives are “unreal,” their negation cannot be reckoned as a loss and this, in turn, fuels insatiable violence.

I think the myopic focus on the slaughterhouse tends to ultimately produce the “derealization” it intends to critique. The fantasy scene of the slaughterhouse is so over-determined, so non-relational that livestock appear there always already destined to die.

If we take the slaughterhouse as synecdoche for the “cruel system of meat production” and we enter into moral concern about those animals when they are literally on the precipice of annihilation, it will be hard to imagine their lives as anything but “unreal” and negatable.

This is why my research is about the complexity of the spaces of animal agriculture and I insist that, despite their relationship to death-making, they are social spaces where people find themselves in relation to and intimate with animals, often in profoundly meaningful ways.

I take that stance inspired people, such as Pachirat and Blanchette, who have studied the social granularity, contingency, and contest of those spaces and have resisted the tendency to let the scene of slaughter crowd out the harrowing living we find anywhere meat is being made.

(fin.)