A recent edition of the British Meat Trades Journal recommended a change in terminology designed to “ conjure up an image of meat divorced from the act of slaughter. ” Suggestions included getting rid of the words “ butcher ” and “ slaughterhouse ” and replacing them with the American euphemisms “ meat plant ” and “ meat factory. ” (Serpell 1986, 158 – 59)
The denial of the harm done to exploited animals can become culturally entrenched. For example, the Ainu people of Japan hold that they are actually helping the bears they kill, since these bears want to return to the spirit world from which they came, while the Nuer people of the Sudan justify their consumption of cattle blood by claiming that periodic bleeding is beneficial to an animal ’ s health (Serpell 1986, 148, 153). These expiatory beliefs find a parallel in the contemporary American myth that sport hunting benefits “ game ” animals who would otherwise starve. This ideology is refuted by Ron Baker (1985) and others who show that the American sport hunting system is more a cause of the overpopulation “ problem ” than a remedy. And now with the increasing popularity of cruel and ultraphallic bow-hunting comes the promotion of the theory that “ target ” animals need not suffer because:
if a bullet or broadhead [arrow] damages a vital organ, hemorrhagic shock will send a deer to a swift, painless and peaceful demise. If the general public was aware of this knowledge, their minds could be set at ease and a major argument against hunting would fall by the wayside. ( Deer & Deer Hunting, October 1991, 51, emphasis added) 13
Denying animal subjectivity.
The ability to harm animals on a daily basis without overwhelming distress requires an empathic curtailment which must be carefully inculcated. Arnold Arluke, in his studies of the sociology of animal experimentation, has found that the novice vivisector ’ s typical initial response to laboratory animals includes affectionate attention and personal name-giving. Arluke remarks that these young researchers “ have not yet learned to define laboratory animals as objects ” (Arluke 1990, 198). This changes quickly:
The emotional costs are high when one has a long-term and complex pet relationship with animals that are sacrificed. In such cases, laboratory staff often feel as though they have to kill a friend. A critical phase of the socialization of animal experimenters is going through at least one such relationship. Because of the grief entailed in the death of these pets, people learn through emotional “ burns ” that some degree of detachment is necessary. After experiencing such a loss or observing others go through it, people may attempt to restrict the extent to which they become involved with animals. (Arluke 1990, 201)
The perception of laboratory animals as data-generating objects soon becomes automatic. An episode of the CBS news show 48 Hours contains the following interview with Oscar Marino, a toxicologist who accepts money for placing chemicals in the eyes, on the skin, and into the stomachs of rabbits and mice:
Marino: Sometimes, you know, I ’ ll be riding along the road and if a rabbit comes out, I ’ ll practically kill myself to avoid hitting the rabbit. But, out here, you know, it ’ s kind of different. There ’ s no feeling for these animals here in the laboratory. You know, they ’ re a tool, and that ’ s about it. . . .
Reporter: Does it concern you in any way that an animal would be put to some discomfort, sometimes even in pain, so that a woman can have a perfume? That for reasons of vanity [ sic ] animals must suffer — does that bother you?
Marino: Well, you do worry about it. But as I said, you know, when I come in here in the laboratory it doesn ’ t bother me any more.
Similarly, an employee of Biosearch, a Philadelphia laboratory at which people expose caged animals to noxious chemicals and record the results, reports that “ once you ’ ve been here a few days, you lose respect for all living things ” (PETA videotape, “ Inside Biosearch ” ).
As in vivisection, language is managed by the animal farming industry to remove unsavory associations, since “ the meat business depends on our repressing the unpleasant awareness that we are devouring dead bodies ” (Robbins 1987, 133). Animals are not killed or slaughtered, they are “ processed ” or “ packed ” ; nor are they butchered, they are “ dressed ” or “ disassembled. ” This verbal manipulation is carried out self-consciously; Serpell notes that:
Vivisectors ’ psychological need to deny the subjectivity of their victims has been philosophically dressed up as the theory of animal automatism. In Descartes ’ s original version, all mental properties adhere in an immaterial soul, which nonhumans lack — animals are mere machines, very complex, but completely unfeeling. Descartes ’ s theory was a boon to seventeenth-century vivisectors, who could tell themselves and others that the howling of the dogs they cut into did not indicate suffering but was merely analogous to the squeaking of a rusty clock. Though theoretically rejected by some scientists today, the practical implications of Cartesian automatism are universally retained within scientific circles through a strict adherence to operational behaviorism. Under behaviorist methodology, serious scientists must talk as if nonhuman animals have no thoughts, feelings, or purposes. The employment of a discourse purged of intentional vocabulary has the same guilt-easing effect as explicit adherence to animal automatism, but without the difficulty of maintaining a preposterous theory.
Farmers have traditionally recognized animal subjectivity (naturally enough, since managing individual animals well typically requires some understanding of their mental states). But with the recent development of factory farming (i.e., large-scale systems in which many animals are closely confined for long periods of time) the ideology of animal automatism has been imported from vivisection into farming:
The modern layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material — feed-stuffs — into the finished product — the egg — less, of course, maintenance requirements. ( Farmer and Stockbreeder, 30 January 1962; quoted in Mason and Singer 1980, 1)
Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods. ( Hog Farm Management, September 1976; quoted in Mason and Singer 1980, 1)
Modern factory farming systems require treating animals as machines, so workers naturally begin to think of the farmed animals as unfeeling machines. But this extreme denial of animal subjectivity could well also be a psychologically necessary response to the extra burden of guilt modern farmers bear — unlike traditional farming practices, today ’ s factory farms entail the unremitting suffering of the confined chickens, pigs, and cows.
Overriding Sympathies for Exploited Animals
There are times at which the comforting denials detailed above cannot be sustained. In particular, those who directly inflict the harms may be too close to the situation for the usual denial mechanisms to work; and those newly exposed to animal exploitation may not yet have had a chance to internalize the ways of thinking and seeing that forestall the pangs of conscience. When denial is not possible, some mechanism for overriding inhibitions against causing harm is necessary. One example involves laboratory technicians who, for eight-hour shifts, observed pigs with implanted ventricular assist pumps:
Each pig was observed for approximately three months, and then sacrificed. These “ pig-sitters, ” as they were informally labeled, typically developed strong if not profound attachments to their pigs. . . . At the end of the observational period, one of the sitters had to sacrifice the pig. This was emotionally too difficult for a technician to do alone, so several sitters would do it as a group after first getting drunk in a bar across the street from the laboratory. (Arluke 1990, 197)
Those who cannot or have not yet detached themselves from “ game, ” “ livestock, ” or “ laboratory animals ” are still expected to play their roles as producers or consumers in the animal exploitation system. Structures of sanctions encourage or force us to find ways to act against our sympathies.
One of the most obnoxious of these structures is the practice of forcing children to eat meat. Children often refuse to eat meat when they discover its origin (the crucial fact that meat is the flesh of slaughtered animals is systematically withheld from them). Rarely is this moral stand supported, usually the power of parental authority is somehow brought to bear against the incipient vegetarianism. For example:
[M]y son ’ s first moral action . . . occurred at age four. At that time, he joined the pacifist and vegetarian movement, and refused to eat meat, because as he said, “ it ’ s bad to kill animals. ” In spite of lengthy Hawk argumentation by his parents about the difference between justified and unjustified killing, he remained a vegetarian for six months. (Kohlberg 1971, 191; cited in Singer 1990, 305)
Economic sanctions are used to get people to do the revolting work of animal slaughter. On the one hand, the dire economic situation of the dispossessed is exploited to recruit slaughterers: “ IBP [Iowa Beef Packers, the nation ’ s largest ‘ beef processor ’ ] and its competitors seized upon the rural poor and the new immigrant groups flooding into the country from Mexico, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia, building corporate empires on the backs of a cheap pool of largely unorganized workers ” (Rifkin 1992, 129). On the other hand, workers from the primary labor pool (i.e., the better paid, less transitory workers) are retained through what William Thompson calls the “ financial trap ” : though the slaughterhouse employees hate every minute of the job, they stay because they must to pay off debts accrued through conspicuous consumption (Thompson 1983). In a vicious circle, this consumption is apparently an attempt to compensate for the low social status of slaughterhouse work, a status undoubtedly tied to the work ’ s repellent nature.
Similarly, the need to keep their jobs presumably motivates lab technicians to override their aversion to harming animals. For the principal investigators, however, the motivation to vivisect may be less economic need and more the lure of professional rewards. Desire for professional status leads the aspiring vivisector to interpret her or his inhibitions as obstacles to be overcome rather than as reasons to oppose vivisection. Although the career vivisector learns generally to avoid situations, behaviors, and ways of seeing that cause uneasiness, such uneasiness, when it does occur (either unavoidably at the beginning of a career or accidentally later on), is seen as a test of one ’ s scientific mettle:
As a graduate student at Berkeley, I had many different kinds of experiences with animals. During my first year, traditionally a time of having one ’ s strengths tested by faculty, a famous scientist whose ideas I had studied and greatly admired asked me to work on a project with him. . . .
The scientist suggested that we start with some dissections. . . . It was harder than I anticipated to dismember and dissect those animals. I remember feeling tested, feeling that I would show the great man I was capable of being a scientist .
I wanted to succeed and make important discoveries about primate social behavior and human evolution. I left the basement laboratory that afternoon in a state of emotional turmoil; my head ached and my stomach felt queasy. . . . The weight of the guinea pig corpses lay heavily on me, and I felt a kind of primitive fear that I had committed a transgression . (Sperling 1988, 5 – 8, emphasis added)
Sperling ’ s revulsion at the physical manipulation of animals was eventually reconciled with her desire to succeed and to “ make important discoveries ” — she came to specialize in primate maternal deprivation, a field that requires “ only ” the psychological and social manipulation of monkeys, not dissection or brain ablation. Sperling ’ s story exemplifies the process by which a young vivisector discovers which situations are personally repellent or bothersome, and then learns how to avoid these situations or mitigate their effects, while continuing her or his climb up the academic ladder. The motivation for this effort is plain in Sperling ’ s account: professional success and status, and the permission and opportunity to address “ interesting ” and “ important ” questions such as, “ Would the infant langurs become despondent when separated from the mother? Would they exhibit the behavioral and physiological ‘ depression ’ that Harlow had observed in his famous studies of separated rhesus macaque infants? ” (Sperling 1988, 12).
Finally, people are generally capable of acting against their sympathies when they believe their lives or the lives of their families depend on it. The animal agriculture and animal research industries exploit this human capacity by propagating the myth that their products are necessary for human health and well-being. For instance, the meat and dairy industries developed the notion of four essential food groups, with meat and dairy as two of them (Robbins 1987, 171). With this false theory taught in elementary schools, generations are indoctrinated into the myth that we must eat animal flesh or animal products to be healthy. Of course, lobbyists for animal vivisection are constantly suggesting that we owe our lives to animal research. Such statements obscure three crucial points: increases in life expectancy in the industrialized West over the last century are not due primarily to animal experimentation (or even to medicine) but to improvements in public health, such as cleaner air and water, better sewage removal, improved nutrition and working conditions (Sharpe 1988); though some people have been helped by the medicines developed through animal vivisection, others have been harmed; and we cannot know whether the decision to invest in vivisection-based medicine while simultaneously repressing the nonviolent healing philosophies has had an overall beneficial effect on the health of our society. What healing opportunities have been lost by channeling funding exclusively into medical research rather than developing the so-called alternative therapies?
Going Feral
The development of such a diversity of mechanisms for forestalling and overriding sympathetic opposition to harming animals shows that human resistance is always a potential threat to the continuation of the animal exploitation industries. So the supposition that a natural human indifference to animal well-being is the problem to be solved is unfounded. But this supposition is the linchpin of the patriarchal approach to animal liberationist ethics. Recognizing compassion and an unwillingness to harm as normal human responses to animals undermines each element of the patriarchal approach. The subordination of emotion to reason is justified by describing sympathies for animals as undependable. In fact, sympathies for animals are so dependable that every institution of animal exploitation develops some means of undercutting them. So rather than focusing exclusively on logic and considerations of formal consistency, we might better remember our feeling connections to animals, while challenging ourselves and others to overthrow the unnatural obstacles to the further development of these feelings. This process of reconnecting with animals is essentially concrete, involving relations with healthy, free animals, as well as direct perceptions of the abuses suffered by animals on farms and in laboratories. Thus the patriarchal privileging of abstract principle is put into question. And the construction of ethical discussion as a battle to separate the rational from the irrational now loses its grip. All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut off our feelings and support animal exploitation is rational, given societal expectations and sanctions; but to assert our feelings and oppose animal exploitation is also rational, given the pain involved in losing our natural bonds with animals. So our task is not to pass judgment on others ’ rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society, and of the damage done to every person expected to hurt animals.
The patriarchal perspective views ethics as a means of social control, and animal liberation as a matter of taming our “ naturally ” exploitative dispositions toward animals. This view ignores the taming of compassion and outrage that proceeds every day as part of the business of exploiting animals. In this society people are domesticated, trained through
external rewards and punishments, through myths and lies, through instilled fear and ignorance, to disconnect from animals, especially from those animals designated “ game, ” “ livestock, ” or “ guinea pigs. ” So animal liberation is not so much a taming of ourselves as it is a refusal to be tamed into supporting anthropocentrism. For most of us in the West, animal liberation involves coming to reject a previous domestication into meat-eating, dependence on modern medicine, human chauvinism, etc. By reasserting and expanding our officially circumscribed compassion for animals, we are in the position of feral animals, formerly domesticated but now occupying a semiwild state on the boundaries of hierarchical civilization.
Thus animal liberation is not furthered by imposing controls ( “ reason ” over “ natural ” indifference), but by breaking through the controls on human-animal connection to which we are subject. Since those controls are limitations on our integrated agency, animal liberation can be seen, metaethically, as a process of human moral development, an extension (often a reclamation) of our capacities as agents.
Animal liberation enhances our agency in two ways: through our increased autonomy, and through our development as caring beings. First, most of the devices for continuing animal exploitation violate important formal conditions for autonomous action — such as knowledge, integrity, and moral self-determination. The promulgation of falsehoods — “ animal exploitation is necessary, ” “ exploited animals are not harmed, ” “ animals are mindless, ” etc. — obviously decreases our capacity to base decisions concerning animal exploitation on full, relevant knowledge. The sanctioned expectation that individuals (especially farmers and vivisectors) will find ways to act against their sympathies for animals undermines integrity, that is, the ability to live with one ’ s most significant desires in mutual harmony. 14 And some mechanisms for continuing animal exploitation — such as forced meat-eating, compulsory inoculations, and mandatory dissection in schools — blatantly oppose autonomy by blocking moral self-determination. By debunking the ideological legitimations of animal exploitation and creating communal support for nonexploitative practices (such as vegetarianism and nonmedical healing practices), the animal liberation movement develops individual knowledge, integrity, power, and other conditions of autonomy.
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