Maybe not entirely wrong, however. Certainly, English imported a tremendous amount of vocabulary from Norman French. But not by any means all of our common vocabulary. The basic words we use most often are words that go back to Old English, predating Norman influence.

Of course, Old English is a whole other story. The Anglo-Saxon settlers who pushed out Celtic and Latin speakers were never very numerous, according to historians and geneticists, so why Old English took root except in the west (in what are now Wales and Cornwall) is a bit of a mystery for historical linguists.

Norman French vocabulary is a little mysterious too, as in why did some Norman vocabulary become very popular but other vocabulary did not?

Putting it all down to oppression isn't very satisfying, because we know that Norman French didn't last very long. It was never adopted by the bulk of English speakers, and it died out as an everyday tongue relatively quickly among the ruling class descended from the Normans.

So the question is, why did the bulk of English speakers start using Norman French words for animals used as food when they didn't start using certain other everyday words from Norman French?

Historical linguists don't have any firm answers, but your hypothesis of psychological distancing is sometimes offered as at least one part of what is probably a very complex chain of events.