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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research following the closure of a major pig slaughterhouse in northern Denmark, this paper examines how pressures within industrial animal agriculture are absorbed through spatial reorganisation rather than structural change, after the cessation of slaughter.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Danish town following the closure of a large industrial pig slaughterhouse in 2023, this paper examines how the end of local slaughter reshaped, rather than transformed, regional pig production. The slaughterhouse had long structured local livelihoods and social life, employing hundreds of workers and anchoring the region’s pig production. Its closure produced collective grief and uncertainty about the future of the site. However, rather than opening space for alternative forms of agricultural practice, slaughter was reorganised elsewhere through the centralisation of processing capacity and through the increase in the export of live piglets. Pigs continued to be raised and killed within the same industrial system, even as the local infrastructure that had long sustained these practices was shut down.

Grounded in archival materials, production records, and interviews with farmers, former slaughterhouse workers, and other local actors, the research shows pressures within industrial animal agriculture are absorbed through spatial reorganisation, rather than structural change. While welfare reforms, climate regulations, and technological innovations are often presented as transformative, they frequently reproduce the underlying logic of industrial animal production. By examining the afterlives of pig production in a region where slaughter has ceased but pig farming continues, the paper explores how the absence of alternatives in industrial animal agriculture is not simply ideological but produced through economic dependence, infrastructural centralisation, and spatially uneven transitions that redistribute labour and responsibility without fundamentally altering food systems and human–animal relations.