From ritual loss of life to loss of living rituals: on judicialization of slaughter and denial of animal death

ABSTRACT

The increasingly industrial character of meat production has entailed significant changes to the relations we have to the animals we eat. In this article we first describe some of the practices and rituals that characterized slaughter in Norway up to the first decades of the 20^th century. In this period, Norwegians drew on rituals to make the killing of an animal meaningful and acceptable. Then, by exploring the original impetus toward “humane slaughter” in the early to mid-20^th century, we show how ritual transformations of animals into meat gave way to laws and regulations to justify animal killing. Finally, we provide a contemporary example of how far this “judicialization” of animal killing has come, and argue that this process has enabled the widespread denial of the animal origin of meat.

KEYWORDS:

• Slaughter
• rituals
• judicialization
• animal welfare
• meat
• denial
• Norway

As per 2019, approximately 80 billion animals are killed for human consumption annually, which means that each human individual causes on average more than 8 animal deaths every year (Ritchie and Roser 2019). That number has been on the rise almost everywhere and is now the highest it has ever been. What the author Upton Sinclair once described as a continuous “stream of animals” and “a very river of death” today runs very deep indeed (1906, 41). As historian Paula Young Lee argues, the modern slaughterhouse has become “a social instrument” that responds “to the demands of a gargantuan belly,” consequently producing “serial death along with saleable meat” (2008, 2).

The increasingly industrial character of meat production has entailed significant changes to the relations we have to the animals we eat. Perhaps most strikingly, a far smaller number of those who eat animal flesh today have ever witnessed animal slaughter, and much less performed one. Only a select few have ever been inside a modern slaughterhouse. One would perhaps think that, because we now consume a greater number of animals than ever before, we would be increasingly preoccupied with how we make sense of this unprecedented scale of animal death. The killing of an animal is, after all, an action charged with moral ambiguities, and practically everywhere and at all times people have felt a need to justify the fact that we kill animals to consume them. As we will suggest in this article, however, quite the opposite appears to be the case: There are now mechanisms in place that allows us not to think of how, or how many, animals are killed for our consumption.

At least in part because animal killing has been morally and emotionally difficult, it has often been ritualized, and thus placed within a cultural context the meaning of which went far beyond a need for nutrition. In order to cope with the transition from caretaking to lifetaking, various cultures have erected different rituals, taboos and traditions that helped remove some of the moral and emotional burden of the killing (Archetti 1997 [1992]; Vialles 1988; Willerslev, Vitebsky, and Alekseyev 2015; Willerslev 2007). In our time, however, we find that such rituals have all but disappeared. While our killing of animals has taken on an increasingly industrial character, we have shed the rituals that once made animal deaths justified and meaningful, and replaced them with technical laws and regulations that allow consumers to retain their distance from the act of animal killing.

In this article, we look at the loss of slaughter rituals in one particular locality, Norway, as a case of a phenomenon that several scholars in animal studies and adjacent areas have suggested is characteristic of contemporary society, namely a tendency to deny the animal origin of meat. As the anthropologist Noelie Vialles points out in her classic study, Animal to Edible, the “origin of […] meat is entirely hidden from view” of the modern consumer (1994, 28), and this, she suggests, happens through a series of “dissociations.” To the extent modern society fails to confront the issue of animal killing, this is a matter of some moral importance, since “one-to-one slaughter, in which the roles of animal and man persist right up until the act of killing, is easier to accept that industrial slaughter” (1994, 31). As Vialles notes, we find it so hard to accept the unprecedented scale of animal killing, in fact, that we prefer to look away, avert our gaze. Sociologist Robert Chiles has suggested that the tendency to deny the animal origin of meat is neither a coincidence nor a conspiracy, but that there is a “suppressive synergy” at work, in which “[i]ndustry, mass media, and consumers’ everyday habits jointly contribute to the maintenance of” distance to the idea of where meat comes from (Chiles 2017, 793). Norwegian scholars Vittersø and Kjærnes (2015) have argued that a similar dynamic is in place also in Norway, as part of what they call a “politics of meat promotion,” which on the one hand encourages Norwegians to eat more meat, and on the other encourages them not to think about the moral implications of that consumption. Our contribution to this literature is to show how our ways of framing animal killing have changed over time – more specifically, how denial of the animal origin of meat has been implicated in a shift from a ritual to a legal justification for slaughter. This focus adds another layer to the existing scholarship, by highlighting the resources we use to frame and make sense of animal deaths, the implication being that the mechanisms we currently use to deny our industrial scale killing of animals are even more numerous and complex than we have thought.

In what follows, we make three plunges into the history of slaughter in Norway: First, we describe some of the practices and rituals that traditionally characterized the act of killing animals in rural Norway, up to the first decades of the 20th century. In this period, Norwegians who were involved in the act of farm slaughter drew on a ritual vocabulary of animal killing, which they used to make the killing of the animal meaningful and acceptable. Next, we look at how an impulse emerged, from early in the 20^th century, toward “civilizing slaughter.” A push to make slaughter “humane” expelled the old rituals, and replaced them with requirements for pre-slaughter stunning and the reduction of needless animal suffering. Finally, we elaborate on recent Norwegian legislation on slaughter, to show how laws and regulations, in our time, have taken over the job of justifying and framing animal killing almost completely. During the last 100 years or so, the framing of animal deaths has moved from a cultural sphere, which was widely shared, to a legal sphere, which is dominated by technical expertise. By framing slaughter in this thoroughly technical manner, laws and regulations have contributed to removing the need for consumers to confront the fact that animals are killed for their consumption.

As we will show, this technical judicialization of animal killing has become part of Norwegian culture, to the point where it inspires critiques of the allegedly barbaric ritual slaughtering practices of “foreign” cultures. But while the historical shift toward “humane” slaughter in some ways represent progress, it contributes, at the same time, to averting our gaze from the ever-growing scales of our industrial killing and consumption of animals. As we shall argue, the judicialization of animal killing adds to a wider set of social mechanisms that allow us to deny our own meat-eating practices, and which consequently stands in the way of our developing a responsible way of treating the animals we eat. While the judicialization process has clearly contributed to raising the bar for animal welfare, it has, at the same time, supported a more general tendency of alienation and denial which characterizes our contemporary relations to the animals we eat. For an elaboration of this point, see Bjørkdahl & Syse (forthcoming).

The three plunges we make in this article certainly do not make a comprehensive history of slaughter, but they do allow us to highlight what animal killing was, why and how it began to change, and how far this process has taken us. With this procedure, we forfeit the richness of historical chronology, but at the same time, gain a more pointed understanding of (continuity and) change. These three “deep dives,” for which we have found inspiration in Asdal (2008), allow us to identify key aspects of how our symbolic transformation of animal to meat has changed in the course of the 20^th century. Further, we have not sought to streamline our collection of source material, quite the opposite: We juxtapose disparate materials, including cultural historical archives, manuals and newspaper articles, and pieces of legislation. In this sense, our approach resembles what Ehn, Löfgren, and Wilk refer to as bricolage, where one puts together “different materials [to] complement or provoke one another” (2016, 4). Again, this approach cannot ensure a comprehensive or systematic view of the phenomenon in question, but it is apt for identifying difference and change, which is our main concern in this article.

Animal killing and ritual

Wherever animals are part of the diet, people need to place the killing of animals into a context where their deaths gain meaning, and where that meaning is widely shared and accepted: The living, breathing creature must be transformed – not just physically, but symbolically – into inert matter fit for consumption. The animal must be made edible, to cite a telling book title (Vialles 1994). We should not be perplexed by this need for symbolic transformation: After all, the animals we eat are much like us, and up until fairly recently, people’s everyday lives were lived in close proximity to these animals, who were often considered members of the household. It only stands to reason that we are reluctant to kill and eat our family members.

At least in part because animal killing has always been morally and emotionally difficult, this act has often been enveloped by rituals. In order to cope with the transition from caretaking to lifetaking, various cultures have erected different rituals, taboos, and traditions that helped remove some of the moral and emotional burden of the killing (Archetti 1997; Vialles 1988; Willerslev, Vitebsky, and Alekseyev 2015; Willerslev 2007).

According to the historian Keith Thomas, rituals were used to reduce the possibility of things not going as planned; they were used, in other words, to appease providence. In his classic work, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas explains how rituals can provide confidence and give agency and control to those involved in a practice. Although such agency or control might be illusory, a magical rite “lessens anxiety, relieves pent-up frustration, and makes the practitioner feel that he is doing something positive towards the solution of his problem” (Thomas 1991 [1971], 775). Magic, chants, blessings, and other rituals help bridge an unbridgeable gap, between what a person can control and what they cannot control. Slaughter was considered an action in which many things could go wrong, and the yearly surplus of animal husbandry relied heavily on this process going well. People were dealing with existential matters of life and death: The people involved had to change from caretakers to lifetakers, and ensure that the meat products this transformative act resulted in did not, for any reason, go bad. Thus any action that could tip the scales of fortune so that things went well, were important.

According to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, another function of rituals is to transfer blame and responsibility from the individual to the collective (Van Gennep 1999 [1908]). We find examples of this from Norway, where the killing of “soul-animals,” such as horses, cats, and dogs, was taboo (Lid 1924). As if to offer the community an exit from this problem, a special class of horse slaughterers, called rakkere, who lived as untouchables, would ambulate in the countryside, offering to slaughter and skin the animals that no one else would kill. In places where there was no rakker, the villagers would agree that everyone had to partake in the process, so that no one in particular could be blamed for the heinous deed (Skar 1909, 142). The anthropologist Victor Turner claimed that rituals could also be used to cement conflicting social norms (Turner 2017 [1969]). Using the example of soul animals again; if some voices within society regarded the slaughter of a horse with disgust, the ritualization of its slaughter (including everyone on the farm, also those that voiced disgust) still allowed the deed to take place. Rituals were thus tools of agency in situations where people would rather not act, and slaughter was in many cases such a situation.

“Die! This is why you are here”

In Norway, the tendency to envelop slaughter in various rituals go far back in history, and spring out of the fact that, for most Norwegians, animals were a part of everyday life throughout the day, all year, for the duration of their lives (Bjørkdahl and Lykke Syse 2019). In 1900, 47% of all working Norwegians were still active in the primary industries (Hansen and Skoglund 2009, 25). For these people, countless hours of work were spent carrying water, feeding, and cleanings styes, stables and byres. Farmers spread dung, milked the cows, clipped the sheep and lambs, and worked side by side with the horse. Taking part in lambing in the spring and slaughter in the fall was part and parcel of the agricultural cycle (Taksdal 1943). Newborn lambs were tended to with great care and affection, fed, blessed, given names. In some parts of the country, they were even Christened (Visted and Stigum 1952, 162). To quote the critic and author John Berger, animals were “with man at the centre of his world” (Berger 2001, 12), and the human-animal relationship was both multisensory and embodied.

Around 1900, this human-animal relationship had already started to change, and this occasioned the scholarly collection of materials on old slaughtering practices, not least by the Norwegian cultural historian and folklorist, Nils Lid. He was himself the son of a slaughterer, and would become Norway’s first professor of ethnology. Traditional precautions relating to slaughter were among his main research interests. Between 1917 and 1920, he initiated a series of questionnaires which were distributed all over Norway, with additional series of questionnaires distributed in 1930/31 and 1943, deposited in the archive Norsk folkeminnesamling [Norwegian Collection of Folk Memory]. Then, in 1950, a second cultural archive, Norsk etnologisk granskning [Norwegian Ethnological Research] was established.¹ In what follows, we draw on Nils Lids published thesis (1924) and sources from the archives mentioned above to describe Norwegian slaughtering practices in the decades leading up to and following the turn of the century. Although these sources were collected at a particular point in history, they are often accounts of the interviewee’s or informant’s remembrance. They may therefore point further back in time than the date in which they were collected. These archives are unique depositories of past and present thoughts, beliefs, memories and practices in Norway (Kjus, (2013, 143), Esborg and Johannsen 2014)

Although slaughter was part of the annual calendar within any traditional rural society, it was still an extraordinary part of this cycle. Like other important peaks of the annual calendar, such as sowing or harvesting grain, various traditions and rituals surrounded slaughter, which were connected to each of the phases of the process: preparation, slaughter, and butchering. For instance, in good time before slaughter, one had to make sure unwanted traits from the animal were not passed on to humans through consumption of the meat. Male animals were gelded. This was particularly important for bucks and rams. The practical reason was that the rut would make the meat taste bad. In the same way that people believed that a man would take on the strength of a bull by drinking bull’s blood (Lid 1924, 92), he could become horny like a ram by eating the meat of an uncastrated ram. In some districts, an unruly and horny girl would be called a goat.² These traits might have been unwanted because they posed a threat to the social structure and stability of society.

Before slaughtering could take place, the timing had to be right. Moon cycles were observed, as it was considered best to slaughter during the first quarter of the waxing moon. People believed the meat was at its fattest this time of the month (Lid 1924, 31). Slaughter at flow tide was deemed beneficial, because something filling up rather than running out seemed good. Finally, certain days were more beneficial than others, and breaching the Sabbath made Saturday night through Monday morning a bad time of slaughter. The term griseotta (pig-early) refers to getting up in the middle of the night – a relic from when pig-slaughter was carried out that early.

Once the time of slaughter was established, other rituals needed to be observed. Slaughtering was a serious and risky undertaking, which one thought could influence providence and fortune. The meat could spoil and one’s fortune in animal husbandry could be at stake. Pregnant women had to stay away, since blood stains from the animal could be transferred as birth marks on the child.

People dealing with animals observed rituals, and made small offerings to fairies or fortune. Everyone present at the slaughtering scene had to be absolutely silent; this was a solemn act. No strangers could be present, as they might look at the beast with jealousy or the evil eye and thus magically spoil the animal’s meat. Another notable rule was not to feel sorry for the animal that was being led to slaughter. Children would be scolded if they shed tears, because this would lengthen the animals’ suffering, and its death would be long and painful. If you felt sorry for the animal, people believed that it would understand what was coming, and hence would refuse to let go of its blood. The blood would coagulate, and spoil the meat. Besides, if you felt pity for the animal, this was admitting that it was not right to kill it.

Taking pity on the beast about to be slaughtered did not seem to be a prevalent issue in some of the earliest quotes in the material we have studied. In Lindås outside Bergen an informant states that “they thought that if you chased the animal before you slaughtered it, the blood would leave the body faster. So the pigs were ridden hard before they were slayed.” In Fjærland in South-West Norway “one would pull at the harness, the other in the tail, and they would pull the pig around and upset it so it would bleed a lot.” A bit further west, in Gulen, “[t]hey pulled the pig and topped it over until it was totally exhausted.” Perhaps the most disturbing quote comes from the south of Norway, from Håland, in Jæren:

Before the [time of the] enclosures, the village would share a pig and would take turns feeding it. When it was time to slaughter it, the whole village got together. It was time to “knead” it. They would get sticks and branches and would beat and whip it, they would run around the farmhouses and across the fields, beating when they could, and when they finally had kneaded it well enough, they would beat it with sticks until it collapsed.

Then they would say: “This is not for hatred, but for food,” to confirm that it was right to kill it (Lid 1924, 78). A source from Sweden says that if it took too long before the animal died, the person who held the rope should shout: “Die! This is why you are here” (Lid 1924, 79). It was common to say “In the name of Jesus” before stabbing the animal, as a kind of blessing. The slaughterer himself could say “Glorify my stroke.” Other blessings were physical in nature, and involved drawing a cross on the animal’s back with a piece of coal, or crossing their foreheads with a hand movement.

Until the early 1900s, it was common to strangle smaller animals such as sheep and even pigs by hanging them. Pigs were scolded while they were hanging. In certain areas, newborn calves were deemed unclean, and were slaughtered at a different site on the farm, away from the usual place of slaughter. There are descriptions of hanging and in part skinning calves before slitting their throats, and also accounts of decapitation (Lid 1924, 123). Another practice was to bleed the animal to death, by slitting it open without stunning it. Slitting or bleeding the animal without stunning was a practice common all over Norway, and was not restricted to certain districts. It was maintained for the longest period with pigs. It was common to scald the pig around the neck before slitting its throat. In fact there are several references to scalding the pig before the life ebbed out, since pig’s bristle was supposedly easier to remove on a live animal. Later in the century, larger animals were stunned while smaller animals were still often slaughtered simply through stabbing with a knife. The variation in terminology reflect this, as larger animals are “beaten” while smaller animals were “slaughtered” (Lid 1924, 75). The sources show a lot of references to blood. Blood from some animals was occasionally ritually drunk by the slaughterer, as it spewed out of the wound. Most of the informants who refer to this ritual, believe it is something hunters and semi professional slaughterers do to demonstrate bravery, rather than a common practice among farmers.

A certain part of the heart (the auricula cordis) of any slaughtered animal was cut off and thrown away. It was not, like other unwanted offal, fed to the pig or to domestic foxes, it was simply cut off and discarded. None of the informants in the source material know why they do this. However, a well-argued explanation (Lid 1925) traces it to a pagan offering to either the Norse god Odin or the god Ull: It is called “the raven’s bit” (Odin had two ravens that would keep him informed about everything in the world) or Ullsøyro (Ull’s ear). The spleen was also disposed of in this manner. Several other rituals were carried out while the butchering took place. A part of cartilage connected to the ribs was cut off and tossed with force against a wall. If it stuck it meant good fortune. A cross was scored in the liver using the butcher knife.

Anthropologists Lykkegård and Willerslev (2016) explain that killing a sacrificial victim is associated with moral ambivalence, and this had to be dealt with by observing a set of rituals to maintain a balance between taking and giving from nature. In the material we have studied, we find a constant underlying anxiety about provoking destiny and chance which is often solved by sacrifice, such as the ritual disposal of the auricula cordis described above. One of the informants warns that it is dangerous to make use of “the animal or animal parts that should be wasted, as this may lead to death and destruction.³ The words “should be wasted” are key, because they signify that there is a strong incitement to perform this little sacrifice. Again, this is a little bit of surviving magic – it was important to play along with the forces of fate, and to give the offering that is required (see also Visted and Stigum 1952, 281).

Many of these practices, customs, and rituals spring from the circumstance that those who were tasked with killing animals had also often been the caretakers of those animals, and had lived in close, everyday proximity to them. To take off some of the discomfort of killing a creature that had been almost like a family member, some sort of symbolic transformation thus had to take place. For instance, the beating and chasing ritual described above may be a way of transforming the animal from a subject with personhood which has been fed and probably cherished by the whole village, to an edible object devoid of human traits. The collective beating might be a way of beating this personhood or soul out of the animal. It is a social ritual, thus slaughtering the pig is something everyone takes part in. No individual was responsible for eating an animal friend; a ritual of maltreatment transformed the friend to foe, and this ritual was acted out collectively.

Civilizing slaughter

Most of the practices and rituals we have just described would over time disappear, and in fact, the scholarly effort to collect material on the old slaughtering practices in the early 1900s was itself an attempt to capture a way of life that was now going extinct. When Norwegians gradually shed their old slaughtering rituals, this change was arguably due to a number of complex causes related to various aspects – practical and economic, as well as political and moral – of modernization. As several scholars have pointed out, however, a particularly important impetus was the growing impulse toward “civilizing slaughter” (Otter 2008) – an attempt to regulate, more strictly and in formal terms, how animals could be killed, where, and by whom.

The push to establish public slaughterhouses, wherein the process of killing could be monitored and controlled, was one important part of this program, for as long as slaughter was done by private individuals or by small slaughtering outfits, one could not trust the killing to be performed according to the emerging standards of hygiene, cleanliness, and concern for animal suffering. As historian Dorothee Brantz notes, slaughterhouse reforms “were a European-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century,” starting with the first public slaughterhouse in Paris in 1818, and spreading to most major cities of Europe as the century progressed (Brantz 2008, 71). The process was set in motion by urban development, that is, by the fact that growing numbers of people were now living in ever more densely populated – and often quite unsanitary – areas, which increasingly were populated also with animals meant for slaughter (Brantz 2008; see also Cronon 1991). The many practical problems that ensued from this situation merged with moral motives, however, and together they formed a vision of a civilized modernity.

In the early 1900s, legislation was established in Norway which established that animals were to be slaughtered in municipal slaughterhouses. A newspaper article in connection with the opening of the grand municipal slaughterhouse in the capital, Kristiania, is illustrative:

It is well known that several of the private slaughterhouses in this city have been in a condition that have made it a sanitary necessity to move beyond the present state, as they, by their location, were a great annoyance to their surroundings. Conditions have been wretched and primitive, unworthy of a big city. It is apparent that meat made by slaughter in tight, miserable, and overfilled (and for that reason insufficiently cleaned) venues, will be a less valuable and healthy food than meat produced under good conditions. In addition, animals for sale and slaughter are also kept intight and miserable styes and byres. The new central slaughtering facility with the adjacent cow market, which was opened yesterday, is a definitive step out of this accumulation of sanitary wretchedness, over into timely and modern care. (Muri 2005, 121)

An important aspect of modern animal killing was the idea that slaughter should be “humane,” which one could recognize first and foremost by its use of pre-slaughter stunning – and, over time, with other forms of anesthetics – which removed needless infliction of pain on the animal (Otter 2008). In Norway, the authorities were central actors in the push toward making slaughter more civilized and humane. In a booklet first published by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1923, for instance, Norway’s “public veterinarian” E. Laukvik regretted the fact that, for the lack of public slaughterhouses, “people have to slaughter at home, both for their own consumption and to sell” (Laukvik 1938 [1923]). In the book’s preface, the Director of Agriculture wrote that, still, “Slaughter is often done in such a way that needless suffering is inflicted upon the animals. This is a form of animal abuse which cannot be excused, as it can easily be avoided with some care and caution,” and he explained that this was precisely the purpose of the book: “The present text aims to better these conditions, as far as both the humanitarian and the economic aspects are concerned. (Norway’s Director of Agriculture, in Laukvik 1938 [1923], 2). The book was, in effect, a manual in how to perform humane slaughter, and it was not the only one (see e.g., Blomqvist 1917).

The book’s author went on to give a series of concrete requirements and suggestions, shifting constantly between economic and moral justifications. For instance, he would explain that the animals needed to rest for a specific period of time before being killed, as the meat would be tough and not very durable if one failed to do so. He would also list the practical requirements for performing slaughter in a clean and orderly fashion, by making lists of the necessary equipment: “Tools to keep at hand include: gun, axe, sharp knife, saw, butcher’s bench, pulley; tray, bucket and whisk for the blood; a cart or a trough for the entrails; washbasin, soap, towels, and plenty of water” (Laukvik 1938 [1923], 5).

At the same time, Laukvik would emphasize the need for humane treatment of the animal to be slaughtered: “The law mandates that when slaughtering livestock or reindeer, the animal is to be stunned before the bloodletting. The effect of the stunning should be so immediate that the animal loses consciousness before any sensation of pain sets in” (Laukvik 1938 [1923], 3). The moral injunction was somewhat more complex than simply to avoid inflicting pain upon the animal, however, as the author adds: “During the killing, other livestock and children under the age of 14 must not be present. A slaughtered animal should not be flayed, scalded or ribbed until one can ascertain death. The slaughter should be performed by an adult, and as far as possible a competent, person” (Laukvik 1938 [1923], 3). With the new Animal Protection Act of 1935, which shifted the weight from injunctions against abuse of animals toward a positive obligation for their welfare, the principle of humane treatment of animals was firmly established in Norway. The central paragraph in that Act held that, “Animals are to be treated with care, so that they are not exposed to unnecessary suffering” (Njaa 1940, 13).

Surely, sentiments such as those expressed by Laukvik, and codified in the Act of 1935, created a push toward more humane treatment of animals. Such legal notions were motivated by ideals of civilization – by ideas that said that to treat animals as one had in the past, amounted to a form of barbarism, a vulgarity (see e.g., Laukvik 1938 [1923]). It was certainly not the kind of thing one would want children to witness. The act of killing animals increasingly became something to be “cleaned up,” and the main way to do this was to make it into a professional practice, which was performed by especially trained people (slaughterers) at designated sites (public slaughterhouses). This process did not remove animal killing, but it did remove animal killing from sight. As Chris Otter points out, this process is thus part of what the sociologist Norbert Elias called the civilizing process, where “Civilization […] advances by distancing itself not from killing itself but from the perception and reminder of it” (Otter 2008, 90).

Judicializating death

The push to civilize slaughter would rely heavily on legislation, and with the coming of formal laws to regulate our treatment of animals, slaughter would be moved, more decisively, out of the widely shared cultural sphere of ritual and into the more technical sphere of legal expertise. In Norway, a watershed was 1935, when the above-mentioned Animal Protection Act went into effect. Since then, this law has been replaced twice, first in 1974, and then in 2009, as the Animal Welfare Act. Today, this law – which the Minister of Agriculture incidentally declared would make Norway a world leader in animal welfare – is the main frame with which Norwegians justify and make sense of the killing of the animals they consume.

The law and its attendant regulations are expressions, we argue, of a judicialized transformation of animals into meat – where the emotional and moral distress that used to be solved by a ritual of some sort is now, largely, taken care of by law. If one gives any credence to this reading, it may be argued that slaughter is one of many practices that participate in a more general shift in our society toward the judicialization of politics, which is defined by law professor Ran Hirschl as “the reliance on courts and judicial means for addressing core moral predicaments, public policy questions, and political controversies,” and which he argues is “one of the most significant phenomena of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century government” (Hirschl 2008, 119).

When juxtaposed with the description we gave above, of Norwegians’ traditional slaughtering customs and rituals, the laws and regulations point to radical changes in how we relate to animal deaths over the last 100 years or so. In the latest version of the law, from 2009, the killing of animals is mentioned at various points, including in a separate paragraph on the taking of animal lives, i.e., slaughter. The main ordinance is that “the killing of animals and the handling of animals in connection with the killing must responsibly secure the animal’s welfare” (emphasis added). The law further orders that any animal to be put down “must be stunned before slaughter,” and that “the method of stunning must procure a loss of consciousness,” which must endure throughout the act of killing (Ministry of Agriculture and Food 2009). Alternatively, the animal can be killed with a method that causes immediate loss of consciousness.

Clearly, this paragraph primarily responds to a moral call for humane treatment of animals, not just because it opens with the general requirement about securing the animal’s welfare, but also because it establishes that “animals are not to be slaughtered as an independent part of any entertainment or a competition” (Ministry of Agriculture and Food 2009). The law disallows the killing of animals for fun or for sport, and hence acknowledges that animals are more than commodities. In fact, the law states in a central earlier paragraph that, “Animals have an intrinsic value which is independent of the utility they offer humans.” In this way, the Norwegian law rests on the idea of humane slaughter as outlined by Burt, which is (supposedly) a form of slaughter that answers “only to the abstractly conceived higher cause of humanity” (2006, 129–30). The whole purpose of the law is to make sure that slaughter does not inflict pain, or at least no needless pain, on the animal. This ordinance, then, has a function that is in many ways similar to old rituals. Both remove some of the moral and emotional stress associated with taking the life of an animal, since they allow Norwegians to tell themselves that, while they do in fact kill, they are the type of people who kill humanely – they bring death, but not pain, on the animals. Because it strictly and successfully removes animals from “sources of pain and distress,” this judicialized humanitarianism allows us to “slaughter without quite the horror the word ‘slaughter’ should connote” (Burt 2006, 131).

This, however, is only the first, the humanitarian, aspect of the judicialized transformation of animals into meat, the other being the hygienic and economic. We can get an idea of how slaughter is circumscribed in our time by looking not only at the law but also at the more concrete, lower level regulations relating to this activity. In Norway, the entity responsible for these regulations is the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA). While the Animal Welfare Act comes across as a fairly readable document for regular citizens, the information offered by the NFSA illustrates just how far into a specialized, technical sphere slaughter has moved today.

NFSA’s webpages on “Production of meat and meat products” begin by announcing that, “There are comprehensive regulations in the area of foodstuffs, and there are special rules for foods of animal origin” (NFSA 2019), which communicates well enough, but then quickly turn to listing a selection of the various regulations concerning slaughter. One such says, for example:

The requirement is for one stamp mark on each part of the slaughtered carcass. When pigs are divided in two, each half requires only one single stamp. Sheep are not divided, and in that case, one stamp suffices.

See the regulation on special rules for implementation of public control of productions of animal origin destined for consumption (the animal control regulation), cf. 854/2004 (H3) addendum I paragraph I chapter III (2) (b). (NFSA 2019)

Another says:

On slaughtered cattle, SRM is to be removed.

See the regulation on prevention, control, and eradication of transferable spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), cf.999/2001 addendum IV (4.1) (b) and (11.3) (NFSA 2019)

These excerpts are not terribly informative to the general consumer and citizen, but that is precisely our point. The context in which we find these regulations is NFSA’s version of a FAQ, which is addressed to specialists in the agricultural sector, or even, to slaughtering professionals. What is significant for our purposes, is not so much what these regulations actually say, i.e., how they regulate slaughter, but the fact that ordinances concerning slaughter are couched in highly technical language that tells the ordinary citizen and consumer of meat very little indeed. For most people, an attempt to interpret this text would be like trying to get a handle on the Corpus Hermeticum. As discourse, these ordinances are highly esoteric; they communicate exclusively to a small group of specialized professionals.

The highly technical nature of these regulations is particularly interesting when one considers that these regulations are about the only thing we have to take the place of the rituals of old. While the emergence of laws to regulate animal welfare are in themselves a sign of judicialization of animal killing, the Norwegian act, as we saw, does appeal to public morality with its universalist statements concerning animals’ intrinsic value, and so on. Meanwhile, the regulations that actually determine how slaughter should take place illustrate how the symbolic transformation of animals into meat has moved away from being a public issue to being a specialized, technical one.

The symbolic transformation of meat today takes place not with blessings or sayings or excuses, with offerings or particular uses of the animal, or with particular ways of comporting oneself during slaughter. In other words, slaughter does not involve widely shared and practiced rituals that justify to all (or many) of us that we may rightfully take the life of an animal. Rather, it takes the form, on the one hand, of a judicialized morality – what Burt calls “humane slaughter” (2006, 126) – and, on the other, of regulative hygiene – that is, of specialized rules and instructions concerning how slaughter should take place in order to ensure food safety. Gone with the old rituals, then, is much of the messiness of slaughter. The act of taking an animal’s life has been cleansed, one could say, on both a moral and a practical level.

Laws and regulations as smokescreens

What emerges from the three plunges we have made in this article is that we have gone, over time, from ritual loss of life to a loss of living rituals. While the laws and regulations of today still regulate, specify, and justify, like the old rituals did, we argue that the shift toward a legal paradigm goes hand-in-hand with, and might even enhance, the modern alienation from animal killing. Laws and regulations, while they undoubtedly incentivize animal welfare and help us avoid the worst cases of animal abuse – and hence, represent real progress – also have another, and more insidious function: They act as an efficient smokescreen for the industrial scale of current meat production and consumption, and allow us to deny the moral questions raised by this industrial scale of killing. As the French anthropologist, Noelie Vialles, argues,

[T]his killing is something we would rather know nothing about. In former times, sacrifices were solemn occasions celebrated in public. Later, slaughterhouses operated in the middle of towns, when animals were not actually killed in the street. Nowadays, slaughtering has become an invisible, exiled, almost clandestine activity. We know it goes on, of course, but it is an abstract kind of knowledge. […] [W]e demand an ellipsis between animal and meat. (Vialles 1994, 5)

The replacement of ritual by law enhances this “invisibilization” of animal killing, since when this killing is regulated merely by law, there is nothing – or at least nothing much – that forces us to confront the fact that we kill an animal to eat it. Laws about animal welfare ordain that animals are to be treated, and killed, in particular ways, but they do not offer us any incentive to confront our own practices. To the contrary, those laws tend to restrict access to the sites were animals are killed, and their overall effect, we submit, is a certain moral outsourcing: As long as the taking of an animal life is regulated by law, we – consumers and citizens – do not have to ponder that act any further. In this sense, the judicialization of the ritual, which we can see as a loss of a living ritual, functions as a smokescreen for the act itself. The existence of a law that regulates the killing actually contributes, in its way, to making the killing less visible and, one might say, less visceral.

In this regard, the cultural shift we have described, from ritual to juridical, has run in parallel with a spatial and social shift, from private home slaughter to professional slaughter taking place in industrial slaughterhouses. As Vialles (1994) and Pachirat (2011), among others, have pointed out, this spatial and social shift has also meant that the killing of animals is removed from sight, in a process Lee refers to as the “the extraction of animal slaughter from quotidian experience” (2008, 6). Modern slaughterhouses, she argues, were invented “to eliminate the mundane horror of encountering hand-slaughter in the streets by displacing it to the urban outskirts, where the geometry of the killing system could expand without restrictions” (2008). As we have tried to show, this shift has been consolidated in the cultural sphere, as the act of killing has increasingly moved out of folk or popular culture and into the technical, specialized domain of legal expertise. The result of this process is that the ordinary consumer and citizen no longer “owns” the meaning and the justification of his killing of animals – a killing which is now of course only indirect. This means in turn that the ordinary consumer and citizen is in no position to prevent that the “very river of death” described by Upton Sinclair continues to run wild.

Merciful Norway vs. Muslims and Jews

While there has been a shift from a widely shared ritual frame around slaughter to a more exclusive technical-legal frame, which allows the average consumer to retain a distance to animal killing, this technical legal frame has, interestingly, itself become a part of culture – even, one might say, of Norwegian identity. When Norway’s discrimination ombudsman proposed, a few years ago, that Norway should take a more lax – or rather, more generous – approach to so-called “ritual slaughter,” i.e., slaughter which for religious reasons is performed without prior stunning, Norwegians had evidently forgotten about their own not so distant past. This proposal infuriated several Norwegian commentators, many of whom used the occasion to “nationalize” the legally mandated, pre-stun, slaughter as a civilized alternative in contrast to the more primitive, ritual, even barbaric, form of slaughter favored by some Muslims and Jews.

One vocal opponent of this proposal was the philosopher, author, and cow farmer, Tore Stubberud, who began one of his op-eds on the issue by noting that while there was a long philosophical tradition of considering the moral status of animals, “in traditional halal and kosher animals have no moral standing. On the butcher’s block they are nothing but objects for the archaic, religious needs of Muslims and Jews.” Stubberud compared conventional Norwegian slaughter with halal and kosher slaughter thus: “Two animals are to be slaughtered and are met with rules and guidelines concerning animal welfare up to their killing. But now, one animal is led into panic and the religious sphere, while the other is gently anesthetized,” he wrote, adding pathetically, “But does not the animal too have a face?”

Stubberud had quite a lot to say about halal and kosher, but apart from the note about animals being “gently anesthetized,” he neglected to engage in-depth with the realities of conventional slaughter: He spent several graphic paragraphs laying out the cruel consequences of halal and kosher, describing how “the artery is throttled and loss of consciousness delayed” and how the result is “blood, slime, and vomit.” By marginalizing any real description of conventional slaughter, he arguably validated a sort of non-concern for the context around this “normal” practice. The contrast he drew up allowed those who identify with conventional, Norwegian slaughter not to think about what they are doing – since the attention is uniformly focused on the cruel practices of a set of villainized “others.” While we do not know how this op-ed was read, an effect of it could be a disburdening of responsibility for animal killing onto other people, who demonstrably were killing more brutally than what “we” are. This too is a sort of denial mechanism, we would argue, which encourages us to dispel any thought of the bad things that we do, by focusing on what even worse things that certain others are doing.

Conclusion

In many countries, including Norway, the laws and regulations that were introduced in the early 1900s, and which since then have only grown in scope and complexity, have indeed lead to less suffering in connection with animal killing. The designation “humane slaughter” is not entirely wrong. With the coming of laws to protect animals, many of the ritual practices that we described in the first part of this article were cataloged as animal abuse, and rightly so. We believe, in other words, that the drive to civilize slaughter is a form of progress. At the same time, this progress has been double-edged, since alongside the emergence of more humane ways of slaughter, we have moved toward an increasingly industrial, large-scale – and therefore indirect and impersonal – relation to the animals we eat. The likes of Stubberud, with their focus on the objectionable nature of ritual slaughter, tend to overlook, as Burt argues, that “[t]he phrase ‘humane slaughter,’ when considered in the light of the scale of killing for meat and the deanimalizing (and dehumanizing) technologies that meat production entails, [it] is a contradictory one” (2006, 126). Although the old ways of animal abuse have long since disappeared, some would argue that, “the distinction between what is civilized and what is barbaric – mainly on the grounds of whether a creature is stunned before slaughter or not – takes place within a system that is deeply inhumane by virtue of its scale” (Burt 2006, 126).

When we, over the last 100 years, have put in place a set of strict laws and regulations that aim to “civilize” slaughter, we have removed many sources of animal suffering. But these laws and regulations might be what, at the same time, allows us to turn a blind eye to the fact that each one of us, unlike our forebears 100 years ago, causes more than 8 animal deaths every year. The judicialization of animal killing thus appears to have contained one source of animal suffering, only to better accommodate another.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Arve Hansen and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions to improve this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristian Bjørkdahl

Kristian Bjørkdahl is a rhetoric scholar who holds a PhD in rhetoric from the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is currently Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment. He does work on moral and political rhetoric, the idea of the Nordics, pandemic preparedness and response, as well as on research communication. He is co-editor of several books, including Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion (Lexington 2018), Pandemics, Publics, and Politics: Staging Responses to Public Health Crises (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), and Do-Gooders at the End of Aid: Scandinavian Humanitarianism in the 21st Century (Cambridge 2021). He is also co-editor of the Norwegian language rhetoric magazine Kairos.

Karen Lykke Syse

Karen Lykke Syse is an agronomist and an ethnologist, and holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment. Her research interests pivot around landscape history and the cultural history of food. Her most recent books are the co-edited volumes Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge 2015), Denialism in Environmental and Animal Abuse: Averting Our Gaze (Lexington 2021), and Changing Meat Cultures: Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals (Rowman & Littlefield 2021).

Notes

1. The first questionnaire resulted in Lid’s published doctoral thesis, Norske Slakteskikkar [Norwegian Slaughter Customs] (Lid 1924). The other series were: Innsamling av tradisjon um slakt [Collecting traditions about slaughter], in 1930/31; Ord og Sed, Avliving av slaktedyr 89 [Killing animals for slaughter], in 1943; and NEG Norsk Etnologisk Granskning 19 Slaktedyr [Norwegian Ethnological Research 19, Animals for slaughter].

2. Source from NEG questionnaire no. 25.

3. Norwegian “Død og fordervelse” Source from NSF cabinet 5 drawer 2.