196 N Taylor and H Fraser policies are being applied or even the installation of CCTV in all slaughterhouses While all of these have their merits, they not stop the violence done to animals in slaughterhouses They may prevent the ‘incidental’ acts of cruelty that are commonly exposed in the media, but if one accepts that the taking of animal lives is abusive and violent then no measures will stop this as it is the very raison d’être of the slaughterhouse With that in mind, the only real call we are left with, then, at the end of this chapter is for a cessation of meat eating and the promulgation of vegan lifestyles (and by this we mean ideological outlooks, not simply dietary choice) This is no simple solution, as it necessitates a wholesale revision of how we see ourselves, other animals, the earth we live on and the relationships between all three It requires us to move beyond anthropocentrism, beyond bastardised, neoliberal reformulations of rights that stress the individual over the communal and give rise to claims of personal freedom and choice regarding who we eat As Jenkins and Twine (2014, pp 230–231) note, assuming that ‘the choices of the individual are somehow sovereign and free from much in the way of social and ecological consequence’ is a corollary of our belief in our inalienable right to a freedom of choice What this misses, however, as we have aimed to show throughout this chapter, is that ‘consuming animals is a dominant cultural practice, and so it is part of the set of normalised values and ontological distinctions of the culture we are born into Discourses of choice de-socialise and personalise eating practice as a means of attempting to remove them from the political.’ Politicising slaughterhouses and attendant meat eating practices is a crucial first step, and one to which we hope to have contributed References Adams, C., & Donovan, J (Eds.) (1995) Animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations Durham and London: Duke University Press AKC (n.d.) Animal kill counter http://www.adaptt.org/killcounter.html Accessed 20 November 2015 Arendt, H (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil New York: Penguin Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2012) Australia’s food and nutrition 2012, Australian Government, Canberra http://www.aihw.gov.au/publicationdetail/?id=10737422319 Accessed 13 October 2015 Bauman, Z (2001) Modernity and the holocaust New York: Cornell University Press