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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226582856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/12/2018 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SADIE
With rattlesnake guards wrapped around our feet and legs, Marji Beach and I tromped through the tall grass out into the field where the geriatric herd lives. Marji is the education director for Animal Place, a sanctuary for formerly farmed animals in Grass Valley, California. The sanctuary, situated on hundreds of acres, is part forest, part lush green field. Barns and other animal housing dot the landscape and a farmhouse serves as the visitor and education center at the front of the property. A large organic garden near the house is tended by sanctuary workers, producing enough to run a community-supported agriculture produce program for the surrounding community.
To the casual observer, Animal Place looks like the picturesque family farm one might imagine when thinking of animal agriculture: cows and pigs grazing the fields; chickens pecking in the yard; a productive vegetable garden growing enough to sustain the farm, with enough left over to sell; and rolling green fields and large old trees meeting a clear blue sky populated by white clouds. And yet, what's going on at Animal Place is different. The animals here are not farmed. As a sanctuary, it is a place dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of animals who have labored or experienced abuse or neglect on farms around the country. Animal Place is a place where animals who would otherwise be farmed for milk, meat, or eggs can live out their lives.
Marji Beach explained this to me — the mission of Animal Place — as we approached the geriatric herd. Several old cows and steers lounged in the field in the June morning sun. We approached slowly. Some of these animals had remained wary of human strangers despite the fact that many had spent years at the sanctuary learning to trust and love the sanctuary employees. Sadie, Elsa, and Howie lay in the tall grass not far from one another. Sadie was a Holstein (with the characteristic black-and-white patches), the most common breed of cow used for dairy in the United States. As we stood there, Marji told me what was known of Sadie's history.
Sadie was born and raised on a fairly large dairy farm housing approximately three thousand cows in the San Francisco Bay Area in central California. At the farm, her tail had been docked and her ears were tagged for identification. She was impregnated via artificial insemination at eighteen months old and then once a year every year after that. Her calves were taken away from her hours after birth, and she was milked three times a day until her productivity and reproductive capacity waned. At age five, Sadie developed a bad case of mastitis (a common result of any one of a number of pathogens that can easily infect the udders) and was sent to auction for slaughter with many other cows who had been used for dairy production. Sadie was bought at auction by a university veterinary teaching hospital, to be used as a teaching tool. She spent approximately twenty weeks (two academic quarters) at the school, where students used her to practice venipuncture (finding a vein in the neck and drawing blood) and rectal exams.
At the end of the twenty weeks, Sadie was going to be sent back to auction for slaughter, but a veterinary student intervened and contacted Animal Place to take her in. While at the university, Sadie did not receive medical treatment for her mastitis and the infection got worse, so the staff at Animal Place took her back to the teaching hospital for treatment. Sadie's mastitis case was severe and extremely painful. During treatment, which lasted nearly two years, her distrust of humans grew. Adding to this distrust, the staff at the teaching hospital had hurried her while loading her into a trailer and Sadie panicked and fell and broke her leg and hip — an injury from which it is difficult for even a young, healthy cow to recuperate.
When she returned to Animal Place, sanctuary employees also discovered that she was pregnant — something that went unnoticed at the veterinary teaching hospital. Not long after, Sadie gave birth to a stillborn calf at the sanctuary. Because of the nature of dairy industry practices, she had never spent time with her newborn calves while being used for milk production. At Animal Place, she spent several hours with her dead calf, grooming him after he was born, before he was buried at the sanctuary.
For a number of years after that, Sadie lived in the main herd at the sanctuary and welcomed orphaned calves who were new to the sanctuary. As we stood there in the field, Marji told me that Sadie never fully recovered from her experiences on the farm and at the teaching hospital and remained wary of humans, but her caretakers believed that she enjoyed living in community with the other cows and steers and parenting orphaned calves new to the sanctuary. When she became too old and frail to live safely with the main herd (she could be easily injured by younger, rambunctious steers), she was moved into the geriatric herd with the other older cows and steers.
While we talked, Sadie relaxed and bowed her head for Marji to scratch her neck and back. Flies were landing on her back, and she stretched forward for Marji to brush them away and to scratch those hard-to-reach places. Sadie's story could easily be read on her fourteen-year-old body: in her docked tail that could not swat flies away from biting her back, in the holes permanently punched in her ears from the dairy farm's ear-tagging system, in the chronic limp from her leg/hip injury, and in her wariness and distrust of strangers. As I stood there watching Sadie and looking out across the field at Animal Place, I was struck by the way in which Sadie's life was extraordinary: most cows are not sold to veterinary teaching hospitals, and most cows do not end up in sanctuaries. But it was precisely her extraordinary life history that enabled a window into understanding the lasting effects of life on a dairy farm, and in a teaching hospital.
ENCOUNTERING FARMED ANIMALS
A decade ago, when I first began thinking about the politics of food production that would eventually, after a meandering journey, lead to the research for this book, I imagined that cows raised for dairy lived like Sadie did at Animal Place. This vision was rooted in my childhood. I had grown up in western Pennsylvania and had driven through the countryside and seen cows on dairy farms grazing in fields in front of red barns. As a kid, I would sit in the back seat of the car and rest my chin on the windowsill, watching as we whizzed by bucolic landscapes peppered with farmed animals. My father would announce matter-of-factly, "cows!" "goats!" "sheep!" — making sure we didn't miss seeing any of the animals as we passed. We lived in the heart of urban Pittsburgh, and these road trips out through the country were one of our only points of contact with farmed animals. My great-aunts lived in rural Virginia, and we would travel there in the summers to visit them; sometimes we would go down the road to a horse farm where my great-aunts knew the owners, and we would get to pet the horses. And now and then, we would stop on the side of the road on our travels and feed handfuls of grass or carrots to horses or cows over the fence and squeal as they nuzzled our hands with their noses looking for treats. To be that close to such a large, gentle animal was exhilarating. To look into the eyelashed eyes of a cow and feel her breath hot on my face as she snorted and shook her head was a feeling I remembered vividly for years.
Humans' relationships with other species enrich our lives in ways we may or may not readily acknowledge. Many humans engage in relationships of care and love with other animals — in the West, for instance, the dogs and cats with whom many people share their homes frequently become family members, often sharing their beds, their couches, and their emotional ups and downs. These animals are loved. They are worried over. Their thoughts and feelings are considered and wondered about. And they are grieved when they die. Although grieving the death or suffering of other species is sometimes dismissed ("It's only a dog — get over it already!"), those who have lived closely with, and loved, other animals understand the power and depth of these relationships and the hole they leave in our lives when they are gone.
These close relationships with animals are often limited to those with whom people share their homes and lives. But meeting farmed animal species and getting to know them on their own terms reveals that the nonhuman animal species that humans farm for food are not altogether different from the dogs and cats who are considered pets. The first time I met a pig face-to-face, I was shocked by how much she seemed like a dog. Her name was Ziggy, and she was a large, three-legged, pink farm pig at Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood, Washington. I approached and she snorted at me and prodded my hand with her snout. I scratched her behind the ears and rubbed her back. With one impressive thump, she flopped over on her side on the ground and stuck her legs out. Judy Woods, the sanctuary director, said expectantly, "Well?"
"Well, what?" I asked, puzzled.
"She obviously wants you to scratch her belly!"
"Oh!" I immediately knelt and rubbed her belly with my hand.
"Use your finger nails," Judy instructed. And I did.
Ziggy closed her eyes and laid her head back on the grass. If I stopped scratching, even for a moment, she would raise her head and look at me, and Judy would say, "She didn't say you could stop."
Over years of volunteering at Pigs Peace, I've gotten to know many different pigs who live there — enormous Baily (blind at birth and living in the sanctuary's "special needs" area), old Betsy (rescued from a family farm where Animal Control found her, too weak to stand, resting her head on the body of one of her dead pen-mates to keep from drowning in the mud), and Honey (a piglet found with crushed hind legs on the floor of a pick-up truck when the driver was stopped for a DUI).
These animals each have stories and personalities of their own, with distinct likes and dislikes, histories, and emotional traumas they carry with them. To talk about the emotional worlds of nonhuman animals often draws the charge of anthropomorphism, which means attributing what we consider to be distinctly human characteristics to animals. For instance, it might be viewed as anthropomorphizing cows and calves when I recall the grief and panic they exhibit over their separation. There remains a widespread belief in academic and nonacademic circles that animals do not experience grief or loss or joy or love. And this is convenient in contexts where humans may cause bodily or emotional harm to animals: maintaining ignorance over the emotional lives of animals, and describing those who talk about animal emotion as anthropomorphizing or sentimentalizing, helps to maintain and excuse the very practices that cause animals trauma. If the cow is not traumatized by the loss of her calf because she can't feel trauma, then there is, perhaps, nothing objectionable about removing her calf hours after birth to divert the milk she produces to commodity production. However, if the cow and her calf are traumatized, and that trauma is recognized by human producers and consumers, then there arises a serious ethical dilemma of whether it is acceptable to knowingly cause that trauma, often repeatedly, over the life course of that cow.
Increasingly, this charge of anthropomorphism is being replaced with a less anthropocentric way of thinking about animals — that is, to say that animals have emotions is gradually being understood not as attributing human characteristics to animals, but instead animal emotions and their particularities are being better understood in their own contexts. Ethologist and evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff argues that there is nothing necessarily wrong with anthropomorphizing; in fact, he argues that we must anthropomorphize. For Bekoff, anthropomorphism is using human terms to describe what we see in other animals; in other words, we use what descriptive tools are available to us as humans to understand nonhuman experience. Bekoff, Jane Goodall, and Barbara King have written about the complex worlds of animals' emotional lives, highlighting how animals experience grief, love, joy, play, and fear. But it is not necessary to be an ethologist to understand animal emotion. Careful attunement to animals' embodied states, and learning about how certain species and individuals tend to express themselves, is a window into knowing other species. This level of attention is something that can be developed through learning about what animal behaviorists and people working with particular species say, as well as through one's own observations and interactions.
In the summer of 2014, I taught a class (called "Doing Multispecies Ethnography") on animals in the food system in which students were paired with a pig at Pigs Peace and were asked to write an ethnographic analysis — a sort of life history — of that pig. Over the term, the students observed and spent time with the pigs for several hours each week. At the end of the course, they all noted the uniqueness and singularity of each pig. They described in detail how smart or resourceful she was, what a great sense of humor she had, what her favorite foods were, how she interacted with the other pigs, and so on. During their final presentations of their work, we all realized that every single student had written about how exceptional their pig was, a revelation that revealed that pigs — and other farmed animals — are singular beings with distinct personalities and histories that make them each unique.
The students in the course also commented on how unusual it was to have contact in this way with farmed animals. And indeed, as urban areas boom and fewer people are living in rural areas and engaging in the practice of farming animals, contact with live cows, pigs, chickens, and other farmed species is increasingly limited. It is not merely geographic distance from farms, though, that enables human disconnection from getting to know animals like cows or pigs. It is also the way humans create hierarchies and categories of species. Humans are adept at categorizing particular species according to cultural norms: in the United States, for instance, dogs and cats as "pets"; rats, mice, and cockroaches as "pests"; cows, pigs, and chickens as "food." These categorizations maintain hierarchies in which humans are situated at the top, and they justify human use and treatment of other species in particular ways. That rats are "pests" or that the nutria is "invasive" in North America justifies their largely unquestioned eradication based on their species membership. That cows are categorized as food — either as producers of milk or as beef — does important work to maintain their status as products for consumption. The hierarchical ordering of humans over animals is rarely conceptualized as problematic because of its normalization and the myriad ways in which humans benefit and profit from the appropriation of animals' lives and bodies. As Michael Parenti explains, "The most insidious oppressions are those that so insinuate themselves into the fabric of our lives and into the recesses of our minds that we don't even realize they are acting upon us."
One example of this insinuation of hierarchy into daily life is the everyday language used to talk about animals. The term cattle, for instance, is not used in this book because it has its etymological roots in chattel, meaning property, and calls up references to chattel slavery. Instead, I use bovine animals or cows to signal that they are more than mere property. As an aside, cows is a colloquial term used to refer to bovine animals. In animal agriculture's technical language and binary way of thinking about sex, however, a cow is a female animal who has given birth to at least one calf. A heifer is a female who has not yet given birth. A calf is a male or female animal under six months of age (sometimes referred to as bull calf to indicate an intact male calf, for instance). A bull is an intact adult male, and a steer is a castrated male.
Livestock literally means "live stock" and reinforces animals' status as live property. The terms farm animal,dairy cow, and veal calf, too, each define animals in terms of their productive value to humans and reproduce the notion that these animals are bred specifically for this purpose. Instead, I use the terms farmed animals and cows used for dairy to reflect the fact that these animals are subjected to processes of farming and food production (and not that these inherently form their identity). When I do use livestock or dairy cow here, I place them in quotes to emphasize the contested nature of these terms. Finally, even the use of the terms humans and animals maintains a hierarchy — or rather, a binary, with humans on one side and all other animals on the other, despite the fact that humans themselves are animals. Language shapes how we think about and treat others. The language we use to talk about other animals helps to reproduce hierarchies of human exceptionalism, or it has the potential to engage in working to liberate other species from oppression.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Cow With Ear Tag #1389"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
One. Sadie Two. The Politics of Research Three. The Smell of Money Four. Life for Sale Five. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 Six. Seeking Sanctuary Seven. Doublethinking Dairy Eight. “The Stamp of Dairyness” Nine. California Dreaming Ten. On Knowing and RespondingAcknowledgments Notes Index