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How the Routine Killing of Animals Works
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For the study, which was recently published in the journal “Agriculture and Human Values”, 13 workers in German slaughterhouses were interviewed for the first time about their emotions when killing animals. A qualitative analysis of their answers enabled Dr. Sebastian to identify various emotion management techniques that help workers to maintain “emotional neutrality” toward the slaughter of animals, which included, in particular, emotional distancing from the slaughter animals: The slaughterers interviewed achieved this by avoiding personal relationships with individual animals and by focusing their attention on aspects of their work that evoked less unpleasant emotions. Forms of “framing” typical for the profession also helped create emotional neutrality: Slaughter animals were described as “resources” and killing them deemed a legitimate practice, as they were handled – in the interviewees’ opinion – “in accordance with animal welfare regulations”.
Dr. Marcel Sebastian applied current approaches in the sociology of emotions to conduct a more in-depth analysis and was able to show that the practices of emotion work are rarely experienced consciously. “Rather, they largely play out below the level of everyday perception as what we call background emotion work,” he explains. The process of internalizing these emotion work techniques until they became a routine emotional habitus already began in childhood or youth for all the interviewees, he says, as they had been present or helped with a slaughter for the first time at a young age.
Peripheral Emotions
The study shows, on the one hand, how the slaughterers interviewed managed to kill large numbers of animals on a daily basis and over the longer term. On the other hand, however, it also becomes clear that they are not fundamentally unemotional. To test this hypothesis, Dr. Sebastian analyzed especially those episodes in the interviews in which the respondents exhibited “disruptive emotions” that forced the emotion work from the background to the foreground. Although these episodes were rare, they showed the relevance of continuous background emotion work. They centered, for example, on the killing of young animals or phases of unusual mass culls, such as during the BSE crisis.
Overall, the study helps to close significant research gaps vis-à-vis the inside world of meat production. “This mostly takes place outside the realm of public and scientific attention, but it is of increasing social and political importance in view of the widening controversies surrounding animal welfare, climate protection, health and occupational safety,” says Dr. Marcel Sebastian, “which is why it is all the more important also to focus on those people working directly on the assembly line every day.” The current study is part of his research work as a research associate at the Chair of Environmental Sociology with a Focus on Transformation Research; his specialist field is the sociology of human-animal relations, which he studies from various sociological perspectives.
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