Slaughterhouses 195 eating in the modern world has been narrated through ideology rather than physiology With meat eating so normalised, the focus slides away from the question of whether it is ethical to eat meat towards other questions about how to ‘harvest’ meat more humanely Rather than consider the most obvious effects on the animals of producing meat, that is their death, attention is placed on the lead up to and method of death Contemporary efforts to promote humane farming and processing practices just this: use language to sanitise and naturalise their practices (Fitzgerald and Taylor 2014) As Pilgrim (2013, p 123) in her analysis of three popular books that consider the notion of ‘happy meat’,2 ‘As texts calling for ethical meat consumption, the overarching fate of the animals they describe is ultimately to pass from a state of happy animal to ‘happy meat’; this is central to the tracts of these authors, and the ethical meat movement overall, in that animals that are raised in more naturalized settings are therefore well cared for The insistence on happy meat serves the twofold purpose of justifying the consumption of the animals’ flesh, since the animal is a beneficiary of this supposed happiness, and furthermore making the animal taste better’ (see also, Smith 2002) Concluding Comments Concluding this discussion is not easy Traditional academic formats usually call for suggestions for further research It is difficult for us to suggest that more research should be done into slaughterhouses because it begs the question, for what purpose? While there may be merit in discovering more about the mechanisms of slaughterhouses and their impacts on the humans who work in them or even their impacts on the communities and environment around them (for example, Fitzgerald et al 2009), their impact on the animals who travel through them needs no such research as, in one way, their impact is simple—animals come here alive and leave dead Calling for more research into how this is done and its effects seems superfluous and in some ways complicit in the AIC as it has the potential to stall action Similarly, we could call here, for new methods of oversight in slaughterhouses—stricter policies and frameworks, more abilities to actually ascertain that welfare The books are Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Susan Bourette’s Meat, a Love Story, and Scott Gold’s The Shameless Carnivore