Bare Bones

In the agrarian world, there were no slaughterhouses. Livestock was slaughtered for consumption in private spaces and, of course, there were butchers. In medieval London, butchers and fishmongers shared space in the market house in the city. In Erasmus’ colloquy, A Fish Diet, the fishmonger ribs his rival saying people would rather have 10 pimps than one butcher for a neighbour. As countries chan-ged gear to an industrial economy, the slaughterhouse was born. 

Think About It: Voltaire said: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

French connection  

In A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications, Amy J. Fitzgerald notes that the demand for public slaughterhouses came around the beginning of the 18th century. The first one is believed to have come up in France in the 19th century. The word “abattoir” for slaughterhouse comes from the French “abattre” meaning “to beat down”. By the 1880s, animal slaughtering in the US had become industrialised. Some say it was the first mass-production industry there and Henry Ford adapted his concept of assembly-line production from it. In London, slaughtering continued within city limits till end 19th century.

Think About It: Dickens’s 1851 essay, A Monument of French Folly, was a tongue-in-cheek piece (no pun intended) supporting the demand to relocate the livestock market beyond city limits. 

Out of sight...

Mounting health hazards and public disgust raised a uniform cry to push the slaughterhouse out of the city. Fitzgerald points out that though labelled “public”, the new outfits removed animal slaughter from public view. So on one hand, all that large-scale production made meat accessible to more people, while on the other, the physical distancing created this psychological hiatus. Citizens were removed from the killing process, so they felt absolved of the moral responsibility of taking the animal’s life, says Paula Young Lee in Meat, Modernity, and Rise Of The Slaughterhouse. The structural design — like any other factory — lent even greater insularity. 

Think About It:  Upton Sinclair writes in The Jungle: “...was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning?”

Upala Sen