Animal death is routinised, normalised and mechanised; existing in the background of daily life. The dimensions of animal death are vast, with the emotional divide from animal death and the associated utility for humans, certainly putting animal death in the background of daily life. This highlights a particular emotional hierarchy surrounding animal death, the majority being invisible.
At the top of this hierarchy appears to be companion animals, whose deaths are intertwined with human moral complexities. The death of a companion animal is a significant and traumatic occurrence for the guardians, with human properties attributed to the animal and their death. Meanwhile, subsets of animals die without a second thought.
Human behaviours incidentally destroy the environment to the point of being uninhabitable to other species. Conceptually, this is understood, however, this death is largely invisible to us. Humans inflict death on humble spiders and earthworms die merely by being stepping on them, right through to hastening mass extinctions through ongoing damaging behaviours. This reflects the routinised and normalised death of animals – causation and correlation are elucidated between human behaviour and animal death, yet these behaviours are considered necessary or too difficult to change, even for the sake of preventing animal death.
I feel the most significant example of routinised, normalised, mechanised animal death is the meat industry. 58 billion chickens are slaughtered worldwide for consumption per year. This is more than any other animal killed for meat. The death of billions of animals for meat is actively encouraged by human desire, making it highly productive. This concept exemplifies the notion of ‘background noise’, as to engage in an engrained dietary behaviour, the idea of animal death must be ignored to negate guilt. Therefore, this death exists in the background of daily life, practices and behaviours, without mourning or noting.
Lady Gullet 