186 N Taylor and H Fraser our society is founded upon animal consumption and use, and people are blinded to the horror of this Packaging meat in a way that does not look like an animal separates the consumer from the fact the product contains what was once a living creature with feelings, family, and a community This encourages a mental and emotional disconnect, and creates enormous alienation both from the self and from nature Yet, the idea that animal abuse is normative and institutionalised through animal slaughter can be difficult to fully grasp as it forces us to look at such abuse not as an aberration but as constitutive of modern society Digging underneath the human respectability afforded modern societal life can feel destabilising Even members of the committed left, outside human–animal studies circles, might find it hard to comprehend the crude barbarism that lies behind our human lives of fast-paced work and travel, our lust for electronic devices and pride in high-tech health products Rather than face the slaughter of animals the argument might be that such a focus is an indulgence, given the scale of problems facing humans across the world Recognising (Animal) Abuse beyond Individual Acts of Intended Cruelty As humans, especially those of us in the West, we are encouraged to think about violence predominantly as an individual and intentional, if not psychotic affair We see this in the media reports that concentrate on the individual perpetrator, his psyche, childhood and more recently, the possible triggers to the outburst This lone psychotic focus occurs even when there are mass killings, such as gunmen opening fire on people in cinemas, shopping centres or schools (Kimmel 2013) Less frequently, attention is given to groups of people involved in violence Sometimes, blame for this violence is attributed to the entire group, irrespective of perpetrators or victims, as in theories about cultures of violence, sometimes attributed to racially profiled groups (see Birzer 2012); groups that have a history of being likened to animals Seriously facing the scale and extent of animal slaughter takes us into some difficult and uncomfortable terrain For example, Cantor (2014, p 29) draws parallels between mass animal slaughter and human genocide when he argues that ‘Such institutionalized atrocities as the American Holocaust and human slavery derive from the logic inherent in humanism that any kind of animal, including human animals, can be less than human’ This idea picks up on