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ОглавлениеDREADED COMPARISONS AND OTHER STORIES
The Vegan Papers
August 2014London
It’s almost six months since I stopped eating animal products. This short voyage into new habits has been accompanied by fits of writing, sorting thoughts and observations. I am going to call this haphazard diary “The Vegan Papers.” I’m writing because I want to make sense of why, at this relatively late stage in my life, I became vegan virtually overnight. What was behind and around this personal and political turning point? What were the connections between this change and my other ideals and commitments? These questions are striking: posing them reminds me that in the omnivore culture in which I grew up and continue to live, eating, wearing and otherwise using animal products for our human-centred ends is the norm. Giving up the habit of exploiting animals is abnormal. A little deviant even.
I also need to make sense of others’ opposition to this giving up. I write in part because I want to understand why veganism sometimes encounters resistance, even provokes other people to anger. The most difficult anger to face has been the accusation that vegans don’t care about people. That by not eating meat, milk and eggs, or not buying leather or wool, we are complicit in violence against other human beings. The first time I heard someone accuse me directly of being a privileged vegan who didn’t care that millions of people in the world don’t have enough food to eat it felt like a kick in the gut. Red rage rose to my cheeks, anger shielding against anger. But after the defensive reaction came the questions: How could choosing to minimise my complicity in violence against other-than-human animals be equated with complicity in violence against other humans? Why does veganism sometimes become a flashpoint for anxiety and anger about differences and power relations among people? And how can vegans and animal advocates tell stories about our relationships to other animals that honour the lives of those creatures without making simplistic comparisons to the ways in which human beings do harm to one another?
Shortly after starting “The Vegan Papers” — excerpts from which appear throughout this book — I started to look for answers to these questions by investigating veganism’s connection to feminism. I took that focus because feminism was the broad movement and community in which much of my political formation had taken place. My aim was not to come up with a singular theory or explanation of how and why sexual politics and veganism are related. And because it is impossible to separate sexual politics and human-animal relations from other forms of power relations among people, I also had to examine the ways that some vegans reference histories of racism and genocide in their attempts to raise awareness of the exploitation of animals. The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of those examples and to explain why big-picture analyses that make sweeping claims about similarities among different forms of oppression, while sometimes useful, also run the risk of reductiveness.
Following the wisdom of the animal rights activist and performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross, I argue that we should be wary of forcing connections and obsessively trying to bring everything together at the expense of being faithful to the specificity of each issue.1 While keen to see links where they exist, my storytelling technique in this chapter and the rest of the book is designed less to tie things up than to follow threads to see where they meet, all the while paying attention to webs of power and struggle. I understand veganism as inseparable from feminism and other struggles for justice among people because I believe these movements share a commitment to an ethics of non-violence and a recognition that we are all responsible for, as well as dependent upon, other animals, including people.2 Understanding the ways hierarchies, power structures and systems of exploitation operate against different bodies and groups is an important step towards challenging them. Although those systems are interlocking, extending an ethics of non-violence to all creatures does not depend upon demonstrating that people and other animals are exploited or violated in similar ways. On the contrary: it requires that we pay as much attention to difference as similarity. It also requires that we avoid pitting different forms of violence against one another by, for example, implying that one is more urgent than another. Finally, it requires that we be aware of what comparisons might obscure as much as they clarify.
Vegan feminist stories
My first regular contact with vegans and veganism was in London’s hodgepodge queer anarchist communities around the turn of the millennium. Preparing and sharing plant-based food was part of a wider social and political project that also incorporated a critique of neoliberal capitalism, migrant solidarity, campaigns for affordable safe housing, and alternative sexual relationships. Although not active in animal rights campaigns or practising veganism at that time, I recognised that there was an ethos in these communities that emphasised solidarity with people and other animals alongside what I would call a politics of pleasure. We were committed to struggles against different forms of violence without reducing our personal experiences or those of others to the status of victimhood.
When I started to investigate the relationship between feminism, sexuality and veganism I was surprised to find that much writing on the topic emphasised similarities in the ways animals — especially those raised for food — and female human beings were victimised. The main reference for this theory was The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams, published in the United States in 1990. In this book Adams “examines the connections between male dominance and meat eating” and argues that “animals’ oppression and women’s oppression are linked together.”3 Although she was not the first to demonstrate a connection between meat-eating and masculinity, Adams made an original contribution by extending theories of objectification and male violence against women to human violence against other animals, claiming that these processes are related and reinforce one another.4 Adams’s book was important in uncovering the misogynist underpinnings of meat advertising in the U.S. and in showing how, in Anglo-American societies, dominant forms of masculinity are partly constructed in violent opposition to an undervalued femininity and to other animals. Although the contemporary U.S. is not representative of all omnivore societies, Adams’s thesis remains relevant to Western popular culture, in which meat-eating and aggression towards animals and women are often represented as part of a tough-guy masculinity.5
Adams explained the connection between violence against women and other animals with something called the “absent referent.” When live animals are butchered, wrapped up in plastic, sold and eaten by people, they are metaphorically as well as literally repackaged. The act of erasure involved in this process is particularly evident in the English language: cows become “beef,” sheep become “lamb,” pigs become “pork,” and so on. As a result, the living, breathing animals become absent to the people eating them. The theory of the absent referent stresses not only human beings’ capacity for violence, but also our ability to deny that violence and, along with it, the history of the other beings against whom we commit it. We don’t have to feel responsible towards the animals we are eating, because we have already erased them from our memories. Of course, not all meat-eaters try to forget that they are consuming what was once a living being; some actually promote this fact. In the most voraciously carnivorous corners of contemporary North America, for example, meat-eating is sometimes celebrated through the present referent. Kelly Struthers Montford demonstrates this in her analysis of beef advertising in the Canadian province of Alberta, which often features images of living animals.6
The theory of the absent referent explains some, but not all, the ways people relate to live and dead animals. It also rests on a simplistic understanding of human gender relations. The Sexual Politics of Meat divides people into two groups — men and women — and presents these in a fairly rigid power hierarchy. The book has little to say about the experiences of men who reject hegemonic forms of masculinity (for example, gay men or vegetarians), about transgender people, about how and why some women may take pleasure in eating animal products, or about cultural traditions in which masculinity is not associated with meat-eating. Adams’s work also overemphasises female biological reproductive capacity as a point of identification between women and female animals of other species. I do not think women have a particular identification with the suffering of cows and hens, or a special investment in avoiding milk and eggs because these are forms of “feminized protein.”7 Such claims reinforce the idea that womanhood is defined by motherhood and that females across species are united in victimhood. In Adams’s version of the world, men are consumers of flesh — literal and representational — while women and animals are objectified and consumed.
The absent referent is a valuable concept for helping us to understand the doublethink sometimes involved in consuming animal products. But the theory has too often been used as an overarching explanation for the interconnections between the oppressions of women and animals.8 In much writing on veganism and feminism published in English, the absent referent has taken on the status of common sense, as defined by the early twentieth-century Marxist Antonio Gramsci and further developed by the cultural critic Stuart Hall. Gramsci defined common sense as thinking that has the status of “traditional truth or wisdom of the ages” and is therefore taken for granted.9 Common-sense thinking is apparent anywhere an argument takes on the air of a universal explanation. When this happens the history of a particular idea — the context in which it was first formulated, why and under what circumstances — is forgotten or ignored. When certain explanations are repeated time and again they take on the power of timeless truths, resistant to evidence of changing circumstances. For this reason it is important to ask about where arguments come from, how they have been passed down, and what may have gotten lost in transit.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is a book of its time and of a very particular kind of feminism. The language and theory Adams uses to explain the relationships between violence against women and other animals draws substantially on feminist critiques of pornography as they were developed in the U.S. in the decade before the book was published. In the 1980s a number of American feminists — most famous among them Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon — argued that pornography was a main cause of women’s oppression. In their understanding, pornography was much more than a series of representations of certain sexual practices; it was in itself a form of violence that affected all women. Not only did anti-pornography feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon call for the legal censorship of pornography; they implied that all forms of sexuality, especially penetrative sex, were violent, and that all women were potential victims of violence.10 Sex, in their account, was basically dangerous for women.
Anti–pornography feminism was challenged by many other feminist activists, in the U.S. and elsewhere.11 But the work of Dworkin, MacKinnon and their allies was influential in some feminist circles in the West in the late twentieth century. This influence is very much discernible in The Sexual Politics of Meat and the later work of Carol Adams.12 It is important to recognise this because the world as seen through the eyes of anti-pornography feminism is a limited one. It excludes the perspectives of entire groups of people, most notably those who work in pornography and other parts of the sex industry. And by emphasising women’s experience of victimhood the theory of the absent referent presents women as having little agency. This is a problem for those of us who believe that women are active sexual beings, and it is a problem for vegans. This is because Adams’s writing does not explain the significant differences between the representation of women in pornography and advertising, on one hand, and the confinement and slaughter of farm animals for meat, on the other. It is just not possible to understand the complexities of either sexism or animal exploitation with reference to how some women and some animals are represented in a small range of cultural texts. When vegan activists cite The Sexual Politics of Meat they should keep this in mind: although the book has some valuable reflection on points of connection between sexism and the exploitation of animals, the theoretical framework and examples it draws on are limited. Ultimately, Adams’s reliance on anti-pornography feminism obscures and simplifies the experiences of women and animals. We could say that they both become absent referents in her work.
An early critic of the comparison between pornography and the fate of farm animals was sex worker, performance artist and animal rights activist Mirha-Soleil Ross:
I was always offended that women who are prostitutes or who work in pornography could be compared to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Frankly we are talking about two different things. Yes there’s this image that appeared in a magazine a decade or two ago of a woman’s body going through a meat grinder but that was an image, big deal! There are real animals going through that grinder! What animals are enduring on factory farms, during transportation to the slaughterhouse, and during the slaughtering process is absolutely incomparable to our experiences as women consenting to being paid — and quite well thank you — for providing sexual services. Women who work in the sex industry do not think of themselves as pieces of meat and frankly if one did, she’d need a serious reality check. She would need to be dragged to a shed where hundreds of thousands of hens are piled up and rotting in battery cages. She would need to smell and hear and feel the blood and the fear and the agony that goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year for billions of animals in thousands of slaughterhouses across this continent. So I always found that the comparison was offensive and really minimizing what the animals are actually going through.13
Ross highlights the dangers of making comparisons that focus on similarities at the expense of exploring differences among diverse forms of violence. In the next section I turn to some of the other comparisons that have been made in arguments in favour of veganism — those that cite historical examples of mass racism and genocide — and the problems they raise.
“Dreaded comparisons”14
Comparisons have a long and controversial history in the movements for animal welfare and rights. For over two hundred years, animal advocates in the West have relied on comparisons between the maltreatment of animals and oppression of certain groups of human beings. In nineteenth-century Britain and the U.S. some slavery abolitionists made links between the abuse of animals and human slavery, and animal advocates in turn took lessons from the campaign to end slavery.15 Later in the nineteenth century some female anti-vivisectionists noted similarities in the methods used in live experimentation on dogs and other animals, and those employed in the gynaecological examinations of poor women. If women as a whole were considered less rational and therefore more like animals than men, literature published at the time sometimes portrayed working-class women as wild animals who needed to be brought under the control of male doctors.16 A hundred years later, in his landmark philosophical and political treatise Animal Liberation, Peter Singer proposed that animal liberation was a natural extension of the Black civil rights and women’s liberation movements, advocating the use of the term “speciesism” as an equivalent to racism and sexism.17 Singer was proposing, in effect, that the exploitation of animals was comparable to the oppression of women and African Americans. While these are very different kinds of comparisons, they demonstrate that violence against people has, historically, sometimes been justified on the grounds that those people are no more than “animals,” and that different movements against the mistreatment of animals have drawn analogies with violence against people.
In the early twenty-first century it is not uncommon to find animal advocates comparing animal abuse to histories of racial violence and genocide. Most notoriously perhaps, the campaigns of the largest animal rights non-governmental organisation in the U.S., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, founded in 1980), have drawn analogies between the fate of farm animals and the historical enslavement of African Americans. Other activists have compared animal slaughter to the murder of Jews and other prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. These comparisons have often received harsh criticism from people who argue that they trivialise the historical experiences of human victims of racism and genocide and reinforce racist stereotypes associating Blacks, Jews and other racialised groups with animals.18 These comparisons and criticisms have been given so much air time that it might seem redundant to revisit them here. However, in the course of researching this book I became aware that slavery and Holocaust analogies have taken on new life in the age of social media, circulating far and fast.19 I am also aware that some vegan activists believe that such comparisons, when made carefully, can be useful guides for understanding how different forms of power and violence relate to and reinforce one another. For these reasons, I think it is worth considering briefly how these different kinds of comparisons work and why they continue to cause controversy.
The Black vegan writer Christopher-Sebastian McJetters provides an example of what I would call a useful comparison. He argues that the “mindset” that allowed for the justification and continuation of chattel slavery for several centuries in the United States and elsewhere is comparable in some ways to that which enables the widespread justification today of the raising, slaughter and consumption of animals. Note that McJetters is not comparing human slaves to animals; he is comparing the ways certain kinds of oppressive attitudes and systems are formed and become the norm.20 In a similar vein, the vegan writer and activist A. Breeze Harper approaches comparisons between human slavery and animal agriculture with caution and open-mindedness. In her book Sistah Vegan, an anthology of writings by Black female vegans in the U.S., Harper discusses the controversy surrounding a 2005 PETA campaign entitled “The Animal Liberation Project.” PETA has removed the link to their online version of the exhibit, so I quote Harper’s description of it:
images of human suffering juxtaposed with nonhuman animal suffering: a painting of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears positioned next to a photo of herds of nonhuman animals being led to their demise; the atrocity of a Black man’s lynched and tortured body next to a picture of an animal that had been burned; a black-and-white Jewish Holocaust photo next to animals in confined, crammed structures on a meat-production farm.21
From my observation of individual photos still available online I can add to this that the historical photographs of violence against people are in black and white while the contemporary images of animal abuse are in colour, and the juxtaposed images are emblazoned with words including “Enslaved,” “Hanging” and “Beaten.” These images were exhibited in public places throughout the United States, including on university campuses, where they were often met with protest.22
The PETA campaign is different from the analysis of McJetters. Even if it implies a comparison between systems of oppression, the juxtaposition of violent images can readily be interpreted as a comparison of certain groups of people with animals. In the words of Claire Jean Kim, “Jews, blacks, and others have historically been constructed as liminal figures standing at the boundary between humanness and animalness precisely in order to justify their enslavement or extermination.”23 The PETA exhibit draws on this history, not to raise awareness of the persistent use of the tropes of bestiality in contemporary racist language, but as a publicity stunt to get people to think about the suffering of animals. PETA’s use of sensationalist imagery fails to take into account that these will have different meanings for different groups of people, most notably those whose ancestors are represented in them. While recognising that such representations were aimed at raising viewers’ consciousness, Harper argues that they are oppressive to people of colour because the “images and textual references trigger trauma and deep emotional pain.”24
Harper contrasts the “lack of sociohistorical context” in PETA’s video and photo campaign with what she calls the “sensitive, scholarly explorations” of Marjorie Spiegel and Charles Patterson, who have written books analysing the historical interconnections between the violent instrumentalisation of animals in farming and scientific experimentation and, respectively, slavery and the Holocaust.25 In The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Spiegel takes the reader through a brief account of the different ways chattel slavery was interlinked in the past with the forced keeping of animals, especially those destined for human consumption. She shows that white writers often compared Africans, as well as Indigenous Americans, to other animals (“brutes”), how similar instruments of control (for example, muzzles and chains) were used to restrain slaves and animals, and draws parallels between the forced breeding practices used on human slaves and farm animals. Based on such evidence, Spiegel makes a compelling case for comparing the institution of chattel slavery to industrial farming, and for taking the experiences of those oppressed by these systems as the impetus for change. “It is vital to link oppressions in our minds,” she writes, “to look for the common, shared aspects, and work against them as one. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power.”26 In Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust Patterson makes a similar case that ideologies and practices of white Christian supremacy are historically interconnected to human control and abuse of other animals. Christian vilification of Jews as beasts and vermin went back centuries; National Socialist propaganda drew on and expanded these anti-Semitic metaphors. Patterson also examines the interwoven histories of forced breeding and sterilisation, eugenics and industrial slaughter that were developed and used on different species of animals and on millions of people during the Nazi genocide.27 Eternal Treblinka, like Spiegel’s Dreaded Comparison, draws out these interlocking systems, without insisting they are the same. Nor does either book claim that the histories of slavery or the Holocaust can be explained entirely with reference to similarities with the violent instrumentalisation of animals, or that a myriad of other factors did not contribute to these histories of genocide.
In contrast, all too often comparisons between animal abuse and genocide are made in sensationalist ways that reduce complex historical processes to dramatic images, slogans or simplistic analogies that emphasise similarity over difference. Some such bad comparisons can be found in contemporary defences of veganism. For example, in 2009 the vegan philosopher Gary Steiner published an article in the New York Times in which he made a reference to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Letter Writer” (the story also inspired the title of Patterson’s book). Steiner wrote that Singer “called the slaughter of animals the ‘eternal Treblinka.’”28 Singer did indeed explore the theme of human maltreatment of animals in a number of his short stories, frequently drawing comparisons with the Holocaust.29 However, to use the term “eternal Treblinka” as a shorthand for animal exploitation belittles the complexity of meaning in Singer’s fictional work. The “Letter Writer” is not a political tract; it is a moving tale about a Holocaust survivor and his multiple relationships with the human and other-than-human world, including a mouse who inhabits his house.30 Following some objections by readers to his use of the phrase “eternal Treblinka,” in a chapter entitled “Cosmopolitanism and Veganism” Steiner excused himself, saying he “had absolutely no intention of belittling the hideous fate of the Jews.”31 This strikes me as a defensive reply that demonstrates a lack of willingness to listen and engage, in Harper’s words, with other people’s accounts of the “painful history of racially motivated violence.”32
But Steiner persists — going beyond the use of the comparison between animal slaughter and the Holocaust to make it into a competition:
when we occupy the anthropocentric standpoint, we do something that is arguably much worse: we fail to appreciate the fact that this sacrifice of innocents is so woven into our everyday practices and values that we tend to shudder at the characterisation of this regime as being in any way comparable to large-scale human tragedies.33
Steiner seems to suggest that one history of mass violence — the Holocaust — enjoys greater recognition than the other — mass animal slaughter. The implication is that the anti-Semitism and other forms of racism that enabled the Nazi genocide are now fully recognised and therefore not as urgent as the issue of mass animal slaughter. A similar problem was on display in the PETA campaign “The Animal Liberation Project.” As one critic observed, the juxtaposition of black and white photos of historical violence against African-Americans, Jews and Indigenous people with colour photos of violence against animals created a visual image “implying that ‘hey oppression of minorities is in the past. It’s over!’”34 In both cases, there is a failure to acknowledge and confront the realities of persisting forms of racial discrimination and violence.
In Steiner’s usage, the Treblinka extermination camp is shed of its historical specificity and the realities of the people who perished there. It becomes instead a catchphrase to promote veganism as part of a philosophical argument. There are other examples of vegan and animal rights activists making similarly reductive references to Nazi camps. During the protests against the live export of veal calves from England to the European continent in early 1995, some activists carried placards reading, simply, “AUSCHWITZ.”35 Other campaigns have employed photographs of a pile of animal corpses next to a photograph of a pile of skeletal human bodies.36 As with the examples from PETA and Steiner cited above, these campaigns imply that anti-Semitism — like racism generally — has been overcome and allocated to history. These signs and representations try to promote animal rights by exploiting painful pasts of violence against human beings, without regard for how these campaigns will impact people living with the legacies of that violence. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has argued that the PETA “Animal Liberation Project” is morally defensible, because it draws attention to an urgent moral issue — the mass exploitation of animals — but that it is politically indefensible “because it may complicate the project of building cross-group alliances in the context of fighting ‘interlocking structures’ of domination.”37 But I don’t think these two elements are so easily separable. It is precisely because these comparisons fail to address “interlocking structures” of domination that they are morally unjustifiable. In order to be morally defensible they would have to give full recognition to the different forms of violence referenced in the comparisons, including recognition of the ongoing forces of racism. This is where the analogies used by PETA and Steiner differ from the more carefully contextualised comparisons of Spiegel and Patterson, which are attentive to how “interlocking systems” of violence affect different species, including human beings.38
Kim is right that, ultimately, the uncritical circulation of images and words that imply or directly make comparisons between factory farming, animal experimentation and Nazi death camps is politically counterproductive. One reason for this is that competitive comparisons can never do justice to either element being compared. We cannot extend solidarity to other animals by pitting their needs against those of different groups of people. Competitive comparisons obscure the details that we need to understand in order to appreciate what is at stake in confronting violence against different groups. It feels almost absurd to have to point out that the forced breeding, raising and slaughter of farm animals for human consumption on a mass scale is not a form of genocide.39 This does not mean that it should not be opposed. PETA spokespeople claim that they make comparisons with the Holocaust and slavery in order to drive home the point that people, too, are animals, and that we have a moral obligation to all animals, not just to our own species.40 This is an important argument. But their campaigns can also be read to imply that other animals are only worthy of our consideration if we can imagine them as suffering as people have. Moreover, photographs or words that present animals as little more than distressed victims may actually reinforce rather than challenge anthropocentric attitudes by implying that human beings are the heroes who should save poor helpless creatures. When presented with endless images of animal suffering we get no sense of animals as complex beings with agency. Nor are we enlightened about the institutional powers behind animal agriculture, why the slaughter of animals for meat continues to rise precipitously throughout the world today, and how we might end this.41 If the reason for using comparisons between different forms of oppression is to encourage people to rethink our relationship to animals in the present and to stop abusing them, the analogies we need are those that open people to new information rather than close us down. And even this is not sufficient: it is not enough that comparisons raise awareness about violence against other animals. They need to do the work of challenging oppressions against people too. Only then can we rid ourselves of the competitive logic which, as Spiegel so convincingly argues, can only support master narratives and the forces of oppression against all beings.
From dreaded comparisons to strategic images
It is never good enough to stop at a critique of bad language or representations. One task of activists is to consider in what contexts particular comparisons might work well, and what kinds of language and images we might use most effectively to promote positive change. Used with careful consideration, provocative representations might promote reflection that prompts people to treat animals in more humane ways. The historian Hilda Kean emphasises the importance of visual imagery in changing attitudes and actions towards animals in the past. Focusing on the rise of campaigns against cruelty to animals in Britain in the nineteenth century, she argues that there was a close relationship between the act of seeing the mistreatment of animals and campaigning to end it. Similarly, in her discussion of the English live export protests of the 1990s, Kean insists that demonstrators were affected both by witnessing the suffering of caged veal calves as they were transported to ports and airports, and by the hidden cruelty they imagined the animals would undergo at the end of the voyage.42
According to the artist and critic Steve Baker, animal advocates should not be in the business of recycling old images, but instead should try to create new ones that will promote more ethical inter-species relations. In a world saturated with images of animals, Baker wonders “whether and how things might be changed — to the advantage of the animal — through the constructive use of representations.” In his book Picturing the Beast, Baker makes a useful comparison between two posters used by the British Royal Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (RSPCA) for the launch of its advertising campaign for dog registration in 1989. The first poster — which, significantly, Baker does not reproduce — features a picture of “a huge pile of dead dogs.” The photograph “(i)conographically,” and presumably on purpose, recalled images of heaps of human bodies from concentration camps, similar to the one described above, and, according to Baker, “understandably caused controversy and offence.” A second poster — which does appear in Baker’s book — shows a photo of a black bin bag (a “doggy bag”) filled with something and tied at the end. Although this second image was “superficially, more restrained” than the first, Baker argues that by “the very act of leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations to picture the final body which the bag concealed, thus denying them the catharsis of responding to its literal depiction, the image arguably remains more potent and more horrific than the pile of dogs.”43 Baker implies that a political image may have more currency when used in a way that trusts the human viewer to make the imaginative link herself rather than having it thrust upon her.
When animal advocates turn expressions like “eternal Treblinka” into slogans, carry signs emblazoned with the word “Auschwitz,” or circulate photographs of dead chicken bodies in heaps, they literalise and force analogies, reifying them and presenting them as perpetual truths. In so doing, they simplify the historical specificity of the Holocaust and of the exploitation of animals alike. While representations of violence committed against animals have a certain shock value that may motivate people to change, such images also carry dangers. When they try to impose a particular message on an image or word, animal advocates do something similar to anti-pornography feminists: they tell us that there is only one way of interpreting the images around us. If we sincerely want to change what Baker calls the “contemptuous attitudes and painful practices to which animals are still too often subjected,” we may be better off with powerful but subtle representations of animals that allow room for people’s careful contemplation and consideration.44 All vegans would do well to keep this in mind when we choose the images and language we use.
Alternative animal metaphors
Baker’s approach to images that might help to disrupt anthropocentric attitudes acknowledges that people’s understanding of animals always relies to a certain extent on our imaginations. We understand animals as symbols as well as living beings. This is apparent in the use of animal metaphors in language. While some metaphors reduce both human and other animals to one-dimensional stereotypes, others may help people to identify with animals in more positive ways, and even to challenge the boundary between human and other species. An example of the former is those metaphors used to deride certain groups of people by associating them with despised creatures. When political activists call the security forces “pigs” they mean to insult the police, but they denigrate the real animals as well. The expression “fat cats” similarly degrades the wealthy people who are meant as its target, but insults and belittles felines and fat humans in the process. The English language is full of such metaphors. Even when they have a poetic ring, they do little to help us to understand animals as living beings worthy of our care.
The performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross has used her art “to ask some hard questions regarding our use of animals as ‘metaphors’ for human suffering.”45 In her description of preparing for and writing her one-woman performance piece, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, Ross provides a useful contrast between animal metaphors that draw attention to human causes without adequately taking into account the experiences of animals, on one hand, and those that offer the potential for transforming human-animal relations, on the other hand:
One of the first and most prominent prostitutes’ rights organizations in the United States was called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) founded in 1973.There are several stories about why the name COYOTE was chosen but the most popular one is that there was a parallel to be drawn between how coyotes are used as “scapegoats” by ranchers and others — and nowadays even in cities like Toronto and Vancouver — for everything that’s going wrong and also how prostitutes are blamed for everything that’s going wrong in our neighborhoods. So a year ago I just felt this coyote presence crawling into my life and I decided that I had to explore that metaphor more profoundly. I think there is a link between how coyotes are treated and how prostitutes are treated and perceived. But I have an issue when people appropriate another group’s oppression to make a statement about their own if they’re not going to also speak about that other group’s oppression.46
Yapping Out Loud explores examples of violence against sex workers through seven monologues, two of them featuring linguistic and visual images of wild canines:
Coyotes are very powerful animals, beautiful animals. And they can also be intimidating animals. You cannot help but feel something when you’re in the presence of a coyote either on video or in real life. Just like prostitutes also. When people are in our presence, we can come across as powerful people. So I wanted to have this very beautiful and strong and grounded coyote presence.47
Ross’s coyote metaphor does not insist on parity or even similarity between the persecution of coyotes and sex workers. Her description of feeling “this coyote presence crawling into my life” is an example of what the late Gloria Anzaldúa, in her short essay “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman,” called the “working of […] the imagination act(ing) upon the body.”48 For Anzaldúa, images and words communicate with the body’s organs, reshaping them in the process. The way our imaginations work, the kinds of metaphors we choose or have imposed upon us, can make us sick. This is especially true of racist and other oppressive metaphors (for example, comparing people of colour to animals). But metaphors can also heal and open the way for transformation. One task of the poet is to cure societies by purging dead, harmful metaphors and replacing them with new, healing ones:
Like the shaman, we [poets] transmit information from our consciousness to the physical body of another. […] If we’ve done our job well we may give others access to a language and images with which they can articulate/express pain, confusion, joy and other experiences thus far experienced only on an unarticulated emotional level.49
I detect in Ross’s story of the coyote entering her life echoes of Anzuldúa’s transformative poetry. And I learn from the words of queer artists such as Ross and Anzaldúa that animals can work their way into our imaginations and bodies, helping us to see the world in ways that may empower us to change it. As Ross insists, other creatures are always more than metaphors for human existence and dreams. Similarly to Baker’s call for animal representations that offer alternatives to the violent, anthropocentric images of animals that saturate Western society, Ross’s coyote metaphor reminds us that the use of animal symbolism need not be reductive and oppressive for human beings or animals. At different points in this book I consider how we might use animal imagery, as well our everyday encounters with animals, to learn more about the lives and experiences of other creatures, in the process thinking about how we might construct new, less oppressive relationships to them.
The history of the use of animal metaphors and comparisons between people and animals shows that these can sometimes be transformative. But they can also be dangerous, for people and animals alike. Making comparisons between different forms of oppression and violence can be a useful way of prompting people to examine more carefully the gaps in our thinking and compassion, to draw attention to our inconsistencies and our hypocrisies. But in order to do that effectively, comparisons need to be done in ways that recognise differences as much as similarities. This includes, crucially, the fact that comparisons of different kinds of past atrocities will have very different meanings for different people. If the aim of veganism is to encourage people to end the exploitation of all animals, including humans, we need to be careful and conscious about the kinds of comparisons we use, and how. And we need to be honest about whether certain metaphors and comparisons are likely to promote change, or whether they carry the risk of injuring others while keeping the hierarchical status quo firmly in place.
