A Good Kill: Socio-Technical Organizations of Farm Animal Slaughter

The practices of raising and killing animals for food have long been, and continue to be, the ‘most significant social formation of human-animal relations’ (Calvo 2008: 32). Globally, humans kill well over a billion cattle, sheep and pigs and over 16 billion chickens for food every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050 (FAO 2006). The sheer scale of these numbers is impossible to digest; 16,000,000,000 chickens killed every year. The profound consequences of these practices in terms of biodiversity, habitat destruction and greenhouse gas emissions are beginning to be made visible and become part of the political discourses around climate change and conservation (see FAO’s 2006 report ‘Livestock’s long shadow’).