A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications

摘要

This paper traces the development of the slaughterhouseas a specialized institution through three major periods. Thefirst began with increasing concerns about animal slaughter-ing in the eighteenth century and resulted in "public slaugh-terhouse" reforms, which marked the beginning of the con-centration of animal slaughter and its movement away fromthe gaze of the public. Second, slaughterhouses became in-dustrialized, as exemplified by the development of the notori-ous Union Stockyard in Chicago during the late nineteenthcentury. Finally, during the latter part of the twentieth cen-tury, slaughterhouses in the United States were relocated tosmall rural communities, which began to exhibit negativeconsequences. This paper represents a modest step in devel-oping an historical understanding of the slaughterhouse as aunique institution and moving towards an understanding ofthe consequences of modern slaughterhouses in what Bulliet(2005) refers to as "postdomestic" societies.