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Killing unproductive animals and managing their corpses makes up an increasing part of work in industrial pig production. Until now these tasks were carried out by slaughterhouses. But the situation is changing. In industrial systems scientists and technicians are incorporating death as part of work. They produce concepts and tools so that workers can do their killing job “cleanly”. New procedures such as euthanasia, composting and incineration have been introduced to this end. A review of scientific and technical papers and analysis of the concepts used enabled us to show that these procedures are based on the euphemization of violence and occultation of animal death. By describing animal pain as a biological problem which can be measured independently of other considerations, slaughter of unproductive animal may be constructed as “euthanasia”. Worker suffering is thus mitigated since “euthanasia” is in fine considered merciful to animals. Corpse management is based on corpse construction as raw material in which animal raw material is considered similar to plant raw material: both refer to nature, i.e. to inevitable death and decomposition. The role of machinery and workers is simply to clean this animal raw material to produce hygienic, safe, useful and profitable “compost”. This death work raises serious questions relative to animal welfare. Can death be an innocent part of work for farmers and workers?