Slaughterhouse workers, bullfighters, and cockfighters in Ecuador: paradoxical moral and affective action on non-human animals

Abstract

ABSTRACT The process of killing non-human animals demands certain psychosocial, affective, and moral processes. In the case of so-called ‘death-saturated environments’, psychic numbing and systematic desensitisation related to violent attitudes and behaviours against non-human animals acquire contradictory dimensions. To understand these processes in depth, this article proposes a theoretical perspective based on the social psychology of human-animal relations. Empirically, the study examines the experiences, attitudes, and worldviews of men in Ecuador whose jobs involve inflicting pain and death on animals and focuses on the ways in which these subjects deal with ‘moral stress’ and ‘the caring-killing paradox’. It examines how slaughterhouse workers, bullfighters, and cockfighters establish ambivalent relationships with the animals, characterised by a certain paradoxical moral and affective action. Eleven in-depth interviews, lasting one to three hours, were conducted for this purpose, and are analysed through the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti, using thematic analysis as a qualitative research technique.