Nightmares for a Week

The institution of butchering is unique to human beings. All carnivorous animals kill and consume their prey themselves. They see and hear their victims before they eat them. There is no absent referent, only a dead one. Plutarch taunts his readers with this fact in his “Essay on Flesh Eating”: If you believe yourselves to be meat eaters, “then, to begin with, kill yourself what you wish to eat, but do it yourself with your own natural weapons, without the use of butcher’s knife, or axe, or club.” Plutarch points out that people do not have bodies equipped for eating flesh from a carcass, “no curved beak, no sharp talons and claws, no pointed teeth.” We have no bodily agency for killing and dismembering the animals we eat; we require implements.

—Carol J. Adams - Eliding Fragmentation, The Sexual Politics of Meat