Long Sunday

The Idea of "Tradition" and Animal Studies

Being the sort of person who reads - and comments - at blogs, I've found myself in discussions from time to time regarding the morality of animal use. Lately, the context has been the Canadian seal hunt and efforts by Native advocates to justify one form of seal hunt (traditional), but condemn another form (capitalist). Notably, the major American animal welfare organizations also make this distinction between traditional use and commercial exploitation. I am in the minority, it seems, as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Mr. Money-bags just as much as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Noble Savage.

Advocates of the "traditional" hunt will routinely make reference to using much more of the seal's carcass than what is found in the "capitalist" hunt. (Although the reason why Mr. Money-bags doesn't use the entirety of the carcass is likely because there is limited potential for commercial exploitation (e.g., meat, oils, by-products) and, if there were, seals would be rounded up and placed in factory conditions.) Of course, the advocates of "tradition" usually forgot that a commodity, the base unit in capitalist economies, is any good produced for sale. The seal is, indeed, largely slaughtered for sale - the "traditional" hunt is as capitalist as the "capitalist" hunt.

But, from the theoretical standpoint, that isn't the most interesting thing - fetishizing cultures isn't really an academic interest in mine (although one has to wonder if the fetishization of Noble Savage as engaged in an authentic lifestyle outside of capitalism has something to do with a feeling of inauthenticity experienced by many living in large cities where no outside of capitalism can be seen; it is the urban advocates of the "traditional" seal hunt that are interesting). What is interesting is the recourse ostensibly "progressive" people have to defenses of "tradition."

Why do self-named "progressives" find security in tradition? What is so "progressive" about tradition? The question I put to them is quite obvious: how do you justify one form of "tradition" for the very reason that you perceive it to be "tradition" but condemn another form of "tradition" because you just don't like it? How can the seal hunt be defended because it is "tradition" but anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and the like cannot? How can you say Noble Savage is a being who finds his moral core in the traditional hunt while at the same time condemning marital rape or genital mutilation? How do you distinguish between "good" traditions and "bad" traditions? Can that even be done? Once you've defended one thing "because it is tradition," it seems that only logical position one can adopt is to defend all practices deemed traditional.

The only response I ever get is that I am being shrill.

The Idea of "Evil" and Animal Studies

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary "Death on a Factory Farm" (if HBO asks "HBO Canada or HBO USA," choose the latter) and I was trying to impress upon them a significant point: they needed to video of a pig being killed via hanging in order to proceed with animal cruelty charges. They didn't understand why the hanging was so important. The reason they needed to video of the hanging is, in simple terms, that if the practice is generally accepted, then it cannot by definition be cruel. Hence, regardless of how horrible generally accepted practices are, they are completely legal. So, just providing footage of gestation crates, of piglets being thrown up to ten feet into a cart, tossed by their tails or ears into the back of a school bus (what they used to move animals on the farm), segregating dying animals among themselves without food or water or medicine, not providing medical assistance to sick or injured animals, use of electric prods, etc. is not sufficient because these are the normal practices of all pig farms. Cruelty, under the law, requires exceptional cruelty. Thus, the investigation focused on getting footage of the favoured method of euthanasia on this farm: hanging pigs by chains from forklifts. Once I had established this point, the students wanted to know if the people working on the farm were evil - only an evil person would willingly act this way. I wasn't expecting that question and I wasn't sure how to proceed.

Now, this is important. In much animal rights/animal welfare literature, the concept of evil is strongly resisted, largely for rhetorical rather than theoretical reasons: if you are trying to convince someone to change the way they live their life, calling them evil is likely not especially productive. My first attempt to answer their question was to point out a series of incidents in the documentary: the defense lawyers and many locals attending the trials would routinely point out that these are radical animal rights activists coming in from California (the farm was in Ohio) to tell them how they should live their lives. They experienced the animal cruelty charges as an attack on their lifestyle. To an extent this is true. Afterall, most of the people in this community are farmers and all of them had come from farming families. Generations of their families had lived in this way. What they were doing - raising animals for slaughter - was completely normal to them as were the practices entailed in raising animals for slaughter. In effect, to accuse one of them of acting cruelly was to indict the entire community for being cruel and evil. This led the students to consider if evil was dependent upon one's standpoint: how could what they do seem evil to use but seem absolutely normal to them?

After this line of discussion, I tried pushing it a little further and asked them what would mean if the farmers - even the ones charged with animal cruelty - weren't evil. What if it is the system as a whole that is evil, but that the individuals themselves are not necessarily good or evil? The point here, in part, being that if they want to call the farmers evil and if they themselves eat meat, then there is a good chance that they are also evil. The students certainly didn't feel evil even though many of them ate meat, besides they would know - or so they thought - if they were evil or not.

I then pointed out that all of us have incredible capacities for violence and cruelty without even being aware that we are acting in violent and cruel ways. I told them about the Stanford prison experiment. The basic conclusion of the experiment is that so long as an authority is telling us to do it, we tend not to experience the action as evil or cruel. This, in turn, led to another unexpected development. A student who was Jewish - she had previously talked about kosher restrictions on her diet - said this sounded a lot like the Holocaust. I agreed with her that it did, but I didn't push the point. She went on to say that it was hard to call individual Germans evil and that it would be hard to distinguish between death camp guards and regular Germans, but that she also wanted to call the Holocaust as a whole one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by humans against humans. I agreed with her: it is hard to say that every individual German suddenly became evil in 1933 and suddenly became normal again at the conclusion of the war. Given this, how are we to think about the Holocaust? Surely, we want to call it evil but doesn't that also mean that millions of regular, everyday Germans went into a decade long trance of ultimate evil and then came out as normal as ever? This hardly makes sense.

The conclusion they came to, it seems, is that we need to differentiate between "subjective evil" (the evil individual) and "objective evil" (the evil institution). People can operate within objective evil without themelves being subjectively evil. However, that does not mean that all people in an objectively evil system are more or less good - there are surely subjectively evil people too: those who derive a great deal of pleasure from cruelty. The advantage of this, they agreed, was that we could also talk about incidents of subjective evil admidst a generally objectively evil situation - Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for instance.

The question they unfortunately never raised was the relation between the objectively evil institution of the factory farm and the rest of society: without the factory farm, societies as they currently exist could not exist. In order to consume nearly 60 billion animals annually worldwide, it is necessary to produce animals under factory conditions. Does that mean that if our societies cannot exist without these objectively evil insitutions that we ourselves are all subjectively evil?

The Idea of "Dominion" And Animal Studies

After putting it off for far too long, I've started to read Erica Fudge's Animal (2002). In the introduction she takes up the theme of Biblical dominion as a way to understand our "lived contradictions" in our relations to animals (e.g., how dogs and cats are pets, but cows and pigs are food). I'm sympathetic to the general argument: even if most people don't believe what is written in scripture regarding dominion, it remains the case that much - if not most - European and North American social, political, legal and cultural institutions are derived from Christian concepts. (Being Durkheimian on this point, I'd argue that all possible human institutions are in some sense 'religious' being based upon distinctions between the sacred and the profane and, internally to the sacred, between the pure and impure, all of which are upheld through a complex set of rituals called the cult; the point here is that the basic structure of the distinction between sacred and profane in Western cultures is 'Christian,' be it a religious or secular (e.g., liberalism, socialism, conservatism) form of 'Christianity.') She points to two particularly important passages, the original grant of dominion to Adam (1:28, which she does not explicitly discuss) and the naming of the animals by Adam at 2:19 (wrongly cited as 1:19 - poor copyediting!). She appears to give more importance to the latter than the former because she understands 2:19 to be an actualization of the power over animals that was merely manifest at 1:28. In the donation, dominion is given to Adam over the animals, but only at 2:19 does Adam exercise that power by naming the animals. In Fudge's interpretation, this naming reveals the inherent power of humans and the inherent powerlessness of animals. Humans can name themselves, but animals cannot. Scriptually, this seems questionable: Adam appears to be a generic term for "mankind" rather than a designation as a proper name; Adam too is unnamed when he gives names to animals. Hence, what we seem to have is a situation of the 'un-named naming the also un-named.' (Although there is a parallel that Fudge does not pursue: Eve is also named by Adam before he takes on Adam as a proper name for himself.) If Fudge is correct that is a name that gives a being substance, then Adam=mankind is at this point also an unsubstantial being. The result is that the world is populated with substantial beings (animals bearing names) and then there remains Adam=mankind who has not yet taken on a proper name for himself, either given to him by God or given to himself by himself. If she wants to extend naming as an exercise of power and names being that which gives a being substance, then she needs to account for why Adam=mankind remains ineffable and unsubstantial. After introducing the naming argument, Fudge comments:

An animal cannot think, we argue, and therefore it is down to us to think for it. If we firmly believed that a cow could think like us it would become very difficult to justify eating it. Instead, we decide that a cow can't think as we understand the term, and that it is therefore morally acceptable to eat the cow. In these terms, dominion is a claim for the human right - even duty - to treat animals as objects of use rather than as fellow subjects of the planet.

The consequence Fudge draws from naming is also at odds with what is recorded in scripture. Naming, she seems to argue, is what enables us to eat animals. The problem is that animals are not given to Adam as food in Genesis. However, immediately following the donation of dominion, God outlines what is permissible to eat:

Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

It would seem that at the time of creation, humans and animals alike were vegans, being "given every green plant for food." This is confirmed when God brings Adam to the Garden of Eden,

You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.

Again, Adam is limited to the fruits of the trees. This leads to a new problem, what then does dominion mean if Adam cannot eat animals? We should recall that dominion is granted to Adam prior to the Fall. Consequently, Adam has no need of oxen to bear his yoke. Likewise, Adam has been instructed to eat the green plants. Hence, he has no need of chickens for eggs or cows for milk. Similarly, Adam is naken and does not realize his nakedness. Thus, he has no need of hides or furs for clothing. (And, when Adam and Eve do realize their nakedness, they do not cover themselves with furs or leathers, but with foliage.) The animals over which Adam has dominion have no value in use; they could not have been given to Adam for instrumental exploitation. Originary dominion must mean something else entirely and it certainly cannot be used as a foundation for the justification of exploitation. Indeed, it isn't until well after the Fall and the birth of Cain and Abel that humans begin to gather animals in flocks. Although, again, it isn't clear why Abel gathers sheep into flocks if there are no grounds for their use, except, perhaps, as wool for clothing. The short of it is that despite how we often proceed in "animal studies," blaming the exploitation of animals on Genesis is far more complex than it would otherwise appear.