On the morning of an execution, two rooms are running.
In one, a condemned man is strapped to a table while witnesses watch through glass. In the other?somewhere across the country, on the same morning?a line of animals moves toward a room they can smell. Both rooms have been designed so that those who benefit from them need not be present. Both depend, for their continuation, on the willingness of society to look away.
Drawing on philosophy, theology, neuroscience, and the documented psychological toll on workers in both facilities, Slaughterhouses makes an unflinching case that the same moral logic animating the abolitionist movement applies with genuine and serious force to the industrial slaughterhouse.
Slaughterhouses asks the death penalty abolitionist to follow their own argument a little further?into the other room, at the table, with the same unflinching attention they brought to the courtroom, the prison, and the vigil outside the gates.
The question is not whether you oppose killing. You do. The question is whether your opposition is as large as your principles.
