Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice
368
Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice
368Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786606488 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2018 |
| Series: | Rowman and Littlefield International - Intersections |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
John Sorenson is Professor of Sociology at Brock University.His many publications include About Canada: Animal Rights (2010), Ape (2009), Ghosts and Shadows (co-authored with Atsuko Matsuoka, 2001) and Imagining Ethiopia (1993).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Animal Agency, Resistance, and Escape
Sarat Colling
In 2012, a calf captured media headlines after escaping from a Paterson, New Jersey, slaughterhouse, swimming across the Passaic River, and eluding police for hours. After NBC ran footage of police in pursuit and someone backing into him with a truck, public outcry called for sparing his life ("Cow Breaks Free from NJ Slaughterhouse" 2012). Eventually, Mike Jr. (as the calf was later named) was located by a concerned citizen and given a permanent home at New York State's Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary (WFAS). The sanctuary's cofounder Jenny Brown (personal communication, March 18, 2013) explains the effect the story had:
A lot of people heard about it because they played that footage over and over on TV. ... People saw this and were so happy that we were able to take him in. ... Meeting him up close and personal, realizing the good fate that has come to this animal, in terms of his escape, and that now he gets to live forever and free at the sanctuary, it does get people to think: he's an individual.
Mike Jr. is not alone in his resistance against agribusiness. This chapter examines the experiences of farmed animal resistance and its effects. In particular, I examine their stories of escape, which is a dramatic and relatively rare form of resistance. Each year, hundreds of animals escape from slaughterhouses, factory farms, and other places of confinement. Exploring several stories of farmed animals' escapes in New York City, I ask how animals resist and what impacts their resistance has on the distancing strategies of humans who consume animal products in industrial society.
Humans have long fantasized about the individual and collective revolt of other animals. Representations of animal resistance are recurring in traditional, popular, and contemporary fiction, from works that suggest animal rebellion as a response to human atrocity and threat of domestic apocalypse, such as Machen's The Terror (1917), to numerous plots about bird attacks on a grand scale (Baker 2013; Du Maurier 1952; Hitchcock 1963; MacDonald 1931) to those depicting animals resisting their own captivity such as Richard Adam's The Plague Dogs (1977) and The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). But, as some of these authors have suggested and as farmers, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, hunters, vivisectors, trappers, and animal trainers have long known, animal revolt is not just a fictional phenomenon. It has been a real response to the human exploitation of other creatures in agribusiness and other industries.
In a sociopolitical context, some of the first documentation of nonhuman resistance was produced by anarchist and left-wing publications such as "Revolt of the Bats" in Fifth Estate (1993) and "Animal Antics" in Do or Die — Voices from Earth First! (1995). Most recently, the observation that other animals resist human exploiters has been recognized by (critical) animal studies scholars (Bekoff 2010; Best 2011; Corman 2012; Gillespie 2012b; Hribal 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2010; jones 2006, 2009; Masson 2003; Nibert 2002, 2013; Philo 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000; Wilbert 2000).
In the twenty-first century, cases of animal resistance, particularly of animals in the entertainment and medical industries, are beginning to be documented and analyzed (Hribal 2003, 2007a, 2010; Nance 2013). The documentary film Blackfish illuminated the plight of orca whales at the notoriously cruel amusement park Sea World and how whales resist captivity (Cowperthwaite 2013). While farmed animal resistance has yet to receive much academic analysis, scholars have engaged with stories of farmed animal resistors (i.e., Gillespie 2012; Hribal 2007a, 2007b; Masson 2003; Nibert 2002, 2013; Philo 1998). Masson (2003) cites several cases of resistance, such as when lambs in New Zealand flee from farms by unlatching gates, "evidently not an uncommon skill." Masson describes how some sheep farmers worry that "the lamb might teach his less clever companions to do the same" and shoot them "so they can't pass on their knowledge" (Masson 2003, 103–4). In contrast to discourse that presents farmed animals as dim-witted, these stories suggest they are indeed thinking subjects who desire freedom, and highlight their status as commodities. Sociologist David Nibert describes several cases of farmed animal resistance in his books (2002, 2013). Nibert explains how nonhuman animals, like human resistors, seek liberation from human exploitation, yet their stories often go unheard:
Like many humans who strive to break free from confinement and deplorable maltreatment — including famous individuals such as Spartacus, Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesey, Sitting Bull, and countless others — innumerable other animals ... have attempted their own liberation. However, their efforts, whether successful or unsuccessful, are rarely recorded in history or even come to public attention. (2002, 76)
Not only should their efforts be recorded in history, but, as Gillespie (2012b) suggests, these animals should be acknowledged as "making history." Gillespie cites the case of Yvonne, a cow who fled a small farm and lived in the Bavarian woods for several months, as one of these world-making individuals.
ANIMALS WITHOUT BORDERS
Animal resistance occurs across highly securitized or geographically exclusionary spaces. The transgressions of animal subjects across borders, that is, the metaphorical and literal walls, fences, boundaries, and barriers, inform us about animals' societal exclusion/inclusion, resistance, and agency. In this chapter, I take an "animals without borders" approach to understand how humans and other animals resist the borders of the slaughterhouses, farms, markets, and transport vehicles intended to confine them. This approach, rooted in Critical Animal Studies, is informed by the decolonial politics of transnational feminism. Transnational feminism facilitates the recognition of race, culture, and the colonial legacy that, as Maneesha Deckha (2012) has suggested, needs to be more central in writings on "the animal question." The phrase "animals without borders" carries figurative and literal meaning in the imagined and real lives of "animals," in all the complexity and contradiction the term entails, and is inspired and influenced by transnational feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty's (2003) articulation of a "feminism without borders." The approach supports the resistance of many nonhuman animals toward human-produced borders and it challenges the ideologically constructed divide of the "human" in opposition to all that is "animal." We can recognize real differences between humans across borders, and additionally between humans and other animals, yet move beyond these in a way that builds bridges and solidarity.
Thus, the framework has both material and conceptual significance. First, concerning material, human-made borders, nonhuman animals rarely concern themselves with such barriers. Pattrice Jones (2009) calls this "natural anarchism in action" in which "birds and other outlaws routinely disregard the authorities and boundaries established by people while working cooperatively with one another to pursue their own purposes" (236). These crossings of boundaries, particularly when they entail daily acts such as biting and kicking, dragging one's feet and escape can also be understood as everyday acts of resistance that influence society yet often go unnoticed (Scott 1985). Many humans, too, reject the imposition of borders on their lives and their crossings can be directly connected with those of animals. For instance, ranchers living along the Mexico-US border report frequent occurrences of "illegal" border crossers cutting holes in the fences on their property and consequently making way for cows to "wander through the holes, get lost, even disappear into Mexico" ("Arivaca: Broken Fences" n.d.). Here, the overlapping transgression of borders — the private property, the Mexico-US crossing, and the fences that keep animals captive — brings attention to how multiple types of arbitrarily defined borders are often rejected by those they intend to contain.
Second, "animals without borders" refers to the conceptual undoing of the human/animal binary rooted in dualistic Cartesian thought and the speciesist violence this justifies. Nonhuman animals have long been misrepresented under the umbrella term "the animal," which forms in radical opposition to the "human" (Derrida 2008). This homogenizing of many nonhuman animals into a single category is similar to the universalizing representation of "third-world" women and the East challenged by transnational feminists and postcolonial thinkers. The discursive placement of millions of different species into one category, despite the "infinite space" that separates them, is an act of epistemic violence that contributes to the wide-scale confinement, slaughter, and consumption of other animals (Derrida, 34).
ANIMAL RESISTANCE
In transgressing boundaries, escaping confinement, and fighting back against oppressors, other animals demonstrate intentionality and resistance. In some cases, several hundred animals will escape together, such as a group of 100 rhesus monkeys who broke out of a laboratory (Hribal 2010, 96) and hundreds of buffalo who fled from a "meat" farm (Pfeiffer 2012). A deep uneasiness occurs for human observers when animals, domestic and wild, transgress human spatial orderings, and we see "a measure of (resistant) agency on the part of animals" (Philo and Wilbert 2000, 23). Acts that are judged to be "out of place" by societal institutions such as the media and government are "transgressive acts" that "provide 'potentials' for resistance" (Cresswell 1996, 23).
It is unsurprising that other animals respond with force and cunning to the systematic violence they face daily. Animals have long been recognized as resistors by their captors. Hribal (2003) cites an eighteenth-century botanist who believed that within every herd of cows, some would refuse to obey the rules: "there was no enclosure strong enough to resist them if they had a mind to break through it" (448). Other cows would follow their lead. Hribal also cites observations of pigs and horses who refused to let fences confine their movements. As well as corporeal movements, nonhuman animals may also mobilize by refusing to move:
Donkeys have ignored commands. Mules have dragged their hooves. Oxen have refused to work ... each of these acts of resistance has been fully recognized by the farmer, owner, driver, supervisor, or manager as just that: acts of resistance. (Hribal 2007a, 103)
However, the question of whether other animals possess cognitive capacities associated with resistance, such as intentionality, or the ability to resist in a meaningful way, remains contested (Hribal 2011; Philo 1998; Thierman 2011). Hribal (2011) distinguishes resistance from instinctual response. Using the example of circus elephants, he argues that animals who repeatedly act against their own self-interest to remove themselves from oppressive situations demonstrate resistance:
Every captive animal knows, through years of direct experience and learned response, which actions will be rewarded and which actions will be punished. So elephants, for instance, most of them are trained with bullhooks, if they do something wrong they get hit repeatedly or stabbed with the barbed end to correct those actions so that they don't do them again. So really it's against their own self-interest to be disobedient in any way, because who wants to get hit. ... Yet, history is filled with cases of captive elephants doing just that: continuously refusing commands or purposefully injuring trainers even though they are going to get beaten, and then they do, and then they get back out again, and then they do it again. That's why I say these are acts of resistance: because these animals are struggling [emphasis mine] against their captivity and against domination.
Thus, according to Hribal, resistance is apparent especially when an animal is subject to something terrible as a result of their struggle, a common occurrence in violent animal training procedures. I agree with Hribal that elephants and other animals who repeatedly fight back against their oppressors are engaging in intentional resistance. Circus elephants are conscious of the fact that they will be beaten if they dissent, but they repeatedly ignore the instincts that would lead them on the path of least resistance, which suggests a reflective intentionality.
Whether animals can resist in the political and social sense is an important question (Philo 1998). Given their position as oppressed subjects, nonhuman animals can resist in the political and social context. Resistance, in a political context, includes actions that oppose and challenge the dominant paradigm through the transgression of borders by defying the conceptual or material walls, fences, and other boundaries that keep human and/or nonhuman animals captive. Resistance is understood by the material or conceptual changes it invokes. Resistance may or may not include strategy or self-reflection on the intention, but resistance is an act that entails the desire to be free from captivity, violence, and suffering that occurs in systems of oppression and domination. This definition of resistance applies to both humans and other animals. While nonhuman animals may not actually form a secret organization as represented in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), they are certainly capable of "force or violence to oppose someone or something" (Resistance [Def. 1–4], Oxford Dictionary). Undoubtedly, the very notion of escape signifies resistance.
DISTANCING STRATEGIES OF ANIMAL ENTERPRISES
Farmed animal escapees are distanced from the human community, in slaughterhouses, factory farms, and live animal markets, yet simultaneously celebrated in media stories as "unique" or "special" cases, and as having "earned" their freedom because of their escape. Thus, I am concerned with discovering the degree to which the public goes beyond viewing animal escapes as special cases and instead questions the oppressive system that enslaves, marginalizes, and kills countless animals every year — a system that hides this killing "in plain sight" (Pachirat 2011).
Addressing this phenomenon of sympathizing with the one who escapes, while ignoring the approximately ten billion animals being killed every year in the United States alone, Brown (2013) states:
there is an interesting phenomenon that happens when there is one animal, a mammal, that gets away and it makes the news. And you see the animal running, or you see them back at animal care and control, or wherever they are being kept, and people will sympathize because all of a sudden that animal is an individual. When you think about the ten billion farmed animals that are killed every year for human consumption, those numbers are staggering. And it's hard to think of them as individuals, so when one animal escapes, and if a newscaster or somebody has nicknamed them something, that animal in the eyes of the public becomes more of a someone and not a something, an individual and not just a statistic.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Critical Animal Studies, Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson, PART 1: ACTIVISM / 1. Animal Agency, Resistance, and Escape, Sarat Colling / 2. Tolstoy, Bearing Witness and The Save Movement, Ian Purdy and Anita Krajnc, PART 2: REPRESENTING ANIMALS / 3. Disengagement in Journalistic Discourse about Nonhuman Animals: An Analysis, Karen Davis / 4. Advertising Oppression: The Reproduction of Anthroparchy on UK Television, Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart / PART 3: NEW DISCIPLINARY ADVANCES / 5. Animal Emancipation and Historical Archaeology: A Pairing Long Overdue, Daniel Sayers and Justin Uehlein / 6. Political Animals? Finding Space for Animals in Contemporary Political Science, Paul Hamilton / 7. Making Space for Anarchist Geographies in Critical Animal Studies, Richard J. White and Simon Springer / 8. Psychological Implications of Undervaluing Animals, Gordon Hodson and Kimberley Costello / PART 4: ANIMALS & THE LAW / 9. Building a Better Legal Order for Animals: The Benefits of Beingness as an Alternative to Personhood in Rethinking Law’s Response to Animals, Maneesha Deckha / 10. Posthumanist Animal Studies and Zoöpolitical Law, Krithika Srinavasan / PART 5: PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS / 11. Animal Ethics and the New Materialism, Josephine Donovan / 12. Affectiveness and the Nonhuman World: Examining the Critique of Empathy, Elisa Aaltola / 13. The Radical Potential of Analytic Animal Liberation Philosophy, Jason Wyckoff / PART 6: INDIGENEITY AND ANIMAL RIGHTS / 14. The Roots of My Indigenous Veganism, Margaret Robinson / 15. Indigenous Worldviews and Critical Animal Studies: Decolonization and Revealing Truncated Narratives of Dominance, Ruth Koleszar-Green and Atsuko Matsuoka