Killing Animals: Sociology, Species Relations and Institutionalized Violence

Abstract

Influential voices have argued for a sociology which acknowledges the way we are co-constituted with a range of non-human species as part of the condition of life on this planet. Despite this, sociology has generally retained a conception of the social that is centred on the human. This paper argues for the inclusion of non-human animals in sociological agendas, focusing on the emerging field of the sociology of violence. It examines the institutions and processes through which non-human animals are subjected to different forms of violence, most notably, mass killing. The practice of killing animals is routine, normative, institutionalised and globalised. The scale of killing is historically unprecedented and the numbers killed are enormous. The paper argues that this killing of non-humans raises questions around inequalities and intersectionality, human relations with other species, the embedding of violence in everyday practices and links between micro and macro analyses. These are questions with which the new sociology of violence might engage. KeywordsHuman-animal relations, institutionalised violence, farmed animals, companion animals 2 IntroductionIn her essay, 'Being Prey', Val Plumwood (1996) reflects on her experience of being attacked by a crocodile. While the crocodile attempts to kill her, Plumwood feels outraged -she is human and should not be food. She suggests that it is a mark of our status as beyond and above 'the animal' that we cannot position ourselves as prey. On the other hand, we do not usually think of ourselves as predatory animals, despite being highly effective in this regard.The most common relationship we have with domesticated non-human animals is that we eat them, and this requires the routine killing of enormous numbers. (ASPCA, 2013). These levels of routine and normative killing of those animals we refer to as 'livestock' and 'pets' is not, however, an issue that has concerned sociologists of violence. 3In sociology, violence has been understood as both individual and collective but as unmistakably a social phenomenon, socially organized and socially institutionalized (Stanko, 2001;Ray, 2011). There are specific arenas where violence is seen to occur -in sport, in war, in the home (domestic violence), and in association with criminal behavior. In some cases, this violence is linked to widespread forms of inequality and social exclusion (Toombs, 2007).Forms of violence have been understood to reflect multiple forms of domination -for example, feminist work has drawn our attention to the intersected qualities of racialised, gendered violence in situations of armed conflict (Cockburn, 2007). However, species is not factored into such analyses despite that non-human animals are embedded in the social institutions and processes of intra-human violence.In thinking about the killing of domestic animals in more developed countries, this paper attempts a posthumanist intervention in the agenda of the emerging sociology of violence. Sociological animal studies are increasingly d...

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