Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  Figure 7 Pink-wrapped hay was part of a breast cancer awareness campaign in rural ­communities. The addition of a sexualized pig was the decision of the proprietor of a specific farm and barbecue restaurant. From the road, one could see the nursing sows and their piglets. Outside Scarborough, England, September 2016, photograph by Carol J. Adams.

  A primary means of making a subject into an object—of objectifying a being—is through depictions, representations. Representation enables conceptualizations in which the subject-object dichotomy recurs: looking at representations provides the gazer with pleasure while simultaneously reinforcing the distance between subject and object as unbridgeable. We learn within a patriarchal culture that the subject feels himself to be by the response he perceives in himself to looking at objects arranged for his viewing. This “arrogant eye” is an aspect of what constitutes human male subjects against human female objects, and contributes also to constituting scientific subjects over the other animals. Because both men and women assimilate patriarchal culture, the human male gaze is exhibited by both when looking at other animals. The practice of animal experimentation is both enabled and reinforced by the unquestioned, culturally established to-be-looked-at-ness of animals.

  Problem 2: Animal Experimentation

  The [human] male gender’s project of constituting [human] male subjectivity is a serious business that has nothing to do with fictional and playful fantasy. It is the means by which the [human] male subject convinces himself that he is real. . . . He feels the more real, the less real the Other, the less of a subject the Other, the less alive the Other. And the reality he creates for himself through his cultural self-representation is the Authorized Version of reality, the dominant reality for all of us.

  —Susanne Kappeler5

  We cannot know how the other animals subjectively experience looking, and we seldom make the inquiry: particularly in animal experiments the environment is constructed so that the only look is that of subject to object, and the object’s look is contained, restricted, eliminated. It is remarkable how many experiments fetishize the animals’ eyes in a way that guarantees that the animals will be injured or blinded and thus physically unable to return the experimenter’s look. The long-established Draize test, often used in testing cosmetics and chemical products, involves dripping concentrated solutions of these products into rabbits’ eyes. A former animal-care trainee at the Gillette testing laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, described what she witnessed one day: “I was walking through the eye room and saw one technician grab a rabbit who had pus draining out of his swollen eye. He forced the eye open to examine it under bright light. I’ve heard rabbits scream before, but never like that.”6 In the name, “eye room,” the arrogant eye achieves an eponymous existence. And perhaps it is because of the importance of sight to us that the Draize test has become so effectively a rallying point for animal defenders.

  Consider Helen, a female monkey, whose visual cortext was removed. Helen can scan her surrounding but she is unable to identify what she sees. The title of her experimenter’s report on this situation, “Seeing and Nothingness,”7 —an obvious reference to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness—makes clear the ontological nature of the human male gaze: Seeing is Being. I see an object, therefore I am a subject. The patriarchal subject is turning subjects into nonseeing objects, thus robbing them of the notion of subjectivity and being.

  But as Susanne Kappeler observes the important feature is not blindness per se, but the subject’s attempt to turn the “object” into “a non-seeing one—i.e., to rob them of his notion of subjectivity and being. But of course, whether blinded or with averted gaze, the animal or the woman still remains a subject”—in reality.8

  Besides imputing an ontological crisis that accompanies a disabled gaze—not seeing is not being—“Seeing and Nothingness” hauntingly, and no doubt inadvertently, indicts the animal experimentation it enacts. Once her visual cortex was destroyed, Helen was dependent on interaction with others to help her relearn what it was she saw. After making this fact clear, the experimenter, Nicholas Humphrey, reports that because he had to finish his thesis, “she was left to her own devices for about ten months—such devices, that is, as she could manage in a small cage.”9 When Humphrey describes her later opportunity to walk in the open air, he calls it “the experience of three-dimensional space,”10 conceding that life in a cage is not fully real. Helen’s object status is confirmed not only by the impunity with which she can be deprived of sight but also by the restriction to a less-than-real life in a cage.

  Kappeler argues: “Viewing and self-expression are themselves actions in the world, actions performed by the culture’s legitimated subjects. In the structure of representation, the act of perception, of viewing and of self-expression, is predominant and overlays the represented action of a (potentially) represented agent.”11 The way most people learn about animal experimentation—scientist to scientist, animal supporters to their constituency—is through representations and reports. The denial of access of most lay people to scientific laboratories reinforces the dependence on representations and reports, visual and verbal texts, to communicate the details of the encounter between the arrogant human eye and the other animals. Photographs and videotapes are ineluctably a part of much experimentation these days, reinforcing the subject-object dichotomy enacted by the experimenters themselves. A particularly notorious example comes from the videotapes stolen in 1984 from Dr. Thomas Gennarelli’s Head Injury Clinical Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania—a laboratory widely considered as one of the best in the country. (We do not know how extreme this example is because most videotapes of animal experiments are as closely guarded as the laboratories themselves.) The following dialogue is described by a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News:

  The tapes show injured monkeys tied to wooden baby highchairs, drooling from the mouths, arms and legs flapping uncontrollably. Researchers twist their heads from one side to the other and clap hands to see if they respond. In one scene, a dark-haired woman supports a monkey while its [sic] arms and legs dangle.

  “She’s on TV holding her monkey,” a male off-camera voice jokes. “Say cheese.”

  Again a male voice says, “Better hope the anti–vivisectionists don’t get a hold of this,” while a woman tries to get a monkey to move its [sic] arms. Another voice says, “He has the punk look.” The monkey, which has been shaved from the middle of the chest to the top of the head, has electrodes taped all over its [sic] body, and has a red scar in the middle of its [sic] head, extending from the back of the skull to its [sic] forehead.

  “Show his part to the camera,” a man says.12

  Note the composition of this representation: the human being filmed with the animal is female; confirming the cultural role of the human male gaze that looks at women and animals. “Say cheese,” she is told, for she is posing as well. As with photographic representations of women in which they are silenced objects who stimulate banal discussion between men, the voices in this portion of the videotape are men’s; the woman, like the monkey, is silenced, and she follows orders given by an off-camera male director. Through such representations women’s and animals’ object status intersects.

  When Kappeler discusses how representations enable the viewer of them to feel real, she posits that “he feels the more real, the less real the Other, the less of a subject the Other, the less alive the Other.”13 What she describes is the situation of animals in scientific experimentation as well as their fates.

  The Less Real the Other

  Animals are defined as not having feelings, not suffering. Because they do not write or talk to us in languages we understand or admit as lang uage, we presume to know their intellectual capacity: they don’t have any. Yet, if animals weren’t like humans nothing that applies to humans could be gained by studying them. This is the crux of the problem in justifying animal experimentation. (And note that Mighty Mouse, Mickey Mouse, the Church Mice, and Templeton the Rat
notwithstanding, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s interpretation of the federal Animal Welfare Act, mice and rats are not even “animals.” Neither are birds!)14

  The Less of a Subject the Other

  The animal experimented upon cannot be a subject, an actor, only an object called the “subject” of the experiment. The animal does not have interests, does not have legal rights. The animals are called “models,” “tools,” (“suckers” in the Gennarelli tapes), “it.”

  The Less Alive the Other

  The modus operandi of many experiments is to measure what is fatal. The LD50 test, an acronym for Lethal Dose 50 percent, announces in its unabbreviated title that it must seek the death of animals. The LD50 test involves calculating the lethal dose of a substance “as the amount that would kill half the group of animals to which it is administered.”15 Many experiments involve long phases of slow dying before euthanasia intervenes. This is a time period during experimentation that could be called precisely the less-alive period. The less-alive period is an important time for observation by experimenters. Peter Singer summarizes one report that demonstrates how the less-alive period is observed:

  Anthony Hopkins of the Institute of Neurology, London, poisoned twelve adult and three infant baboons by injecting them with lead in varying doses for periods up to one year. Because earlier experiments on cats had shown that absorption of lead is more complete through the lungs, the doses were injected directly into the trachea, or windpipe, of each baboon, which was then held in an upright position so that the poison could “trickle” into its [sic] lungs. Before death occurred, loss of weight was “striking,” five of the twelve adults losing 40 percent or more of their initial weight. Eight baboons had convulsive fits, thirty-four convulsive fits being observed, although “it is likely that others occurred when no observer was present.”

  In one baboon, seizures began with “twitching around the right eye, spreading to the rest of the right side of the face. During the next fifteen seconds the right arm became involved, and then seizures became generalized.” Seizures were “occasionally preceded by a cry” and were sometimes “precipitated by a sudden movement of the animal as it [sic] tried to avoid transfer from one cage to another or whilst reaching up to take a banana.” Other symptoms included bloody diarrhea, pneumonia, inflamed and bloody intestines, and liver degeneration. One baboon became so weak it [sic] could not stand up, and its [sic] left finger could not grasp orange segments. For three weeks before it [sic] died this baboon was partially blind; “it [sic] groped for proffered fruit and on occasions appeared not to see it.” [Again, damage to vision that eliminates reciprocating gaze.] Five of the baboons died in seizures; seven were found dead in their cages; the remaining three were “sacrificed.”16

  Singer reports other examples of experiments calculated to make animals less alive including ones that “ ‘terminally deprived’ 256 young rats of food and water.”17 This less-alive period terminates with the animals’ deaths, one way or another—if the animals do not die in the course of the experiment, they are put to death.

  Problem 3: The Dominant Reality

  Among the whole gamut of coercive structures in patriarchal capitalism, the scenario of vision, the representational structure imposed on them, isolates a partial “content,” framing part of a phenomenon, so as to exclude possibilities of analysing the larger network of structures in which it is embedded.

  —Susanne Kappeler18

  The use of animals in experiments is all “for the benefit of mankind. If you don’t use animals, you don’t do research.”

  —Henry Foster, founder of the Charles River Breeding Laboratory19

  The dominant reality is this: the belief in the necessity of animal experimentation is strongly entrenched. Though some may be saddened by the information that animals are experimented upon, they optimistically have faith that the experimenters are not inflicting cruel suffering, or at least not unnecessarily. Information about animal injuries is filtered against the belief that human deaths may be the consequence if these experiments do not occur and the knowledge they could yield is not obtained. Scientists can be irresponsible toward animal rights because they are focused on a “higher” right, the rights of humans to survive. These rights are positioned as being in opposition.

  Essentially animal experimentation is to “scientific knowledge” what pornography is to literary culture, and each is protected by this relationship. Kappeler argues that pornography exists on a continuum with all of patriarchal culture, that it may enact the values of this culture more explicitly, but that all of patriarchal culture conceptualizes women and uses representations in ways akin to pornography. Challengers to the legitimacy of animal experimentation are often accused of being anti-science, neo-Luddites who oppose modern advances in science, advances claimed to have been due to animal experimentation. The questionable nature of the activity within the circumscribed inner sphere—something being done to the animal, something being done to a (usually naked) woman—cannot be questioned because of its relationship to the unquestioned verities of the (human male) culture that encloses them. Where the principle of freedom of speech and the quest for artistic expression protects pornography, the need for scientific truth and progress protects animal experimentation.

  While alternatives to animal experimentation exist, (simulators, computer models, cell cultures, living human tissue testing, or clinical and epidemiological studies), animal experimenters have not been asked by those in authority (funding agencies and federal law) to try an alternative and prove it has failed. Certainly, the substitute would not so w ell confirm the status of animals as objects.

  Pornographers say we are just giving the public what they want. Animal researchers say we are just giving the public what they need. Yet what their research focuses on often is “protection” from something we are doing to ourselves or remedying the results of what we have done. Because some human beings smoke, rats and mice must get cancer. It is common knowledge now that next to smoking, animal oppression through the eating of flesh and dairy products is linked to many of the major forms of diseases (heart attacks, certain forms of cancer) that appear in industrialized culture. Experiments continue on what causes cancer while the consumption of these cancer-producing agents also continues; the focus is kept narrowly on the supposed need for scientific experimentation that protects us (making us objects as well) excluding any question of the dominant reality that causes both our object status and our need for protection. The Authorized Version of reality disempowers both consumers and animals.

  Problem 4: Strangers and Other Victims

  Under his aesthetic gaze any woman, known or unknown, turns into the “stranger,” that object of no interest except for its capacity to stimulate the subject’s feeling of life.

  —Susanne Kappeler20

  Animals must be kept as “strangers” to permit experimentation. We could rephrase Kappeler to say, “Under his scientific gaze, any animal, known or unknown, turns into the ‘stranger,’ the material, that object of no interest except for its capacity to be a medium for the subject’s sense of knowledge.” Strangers are less likely to arouse emotional attachment; strangers already exist within a framework of distancing. They are marginalized beings. The outcry over dogs and cats used for experimentation may be explained because they are defined as pets, not as strangers. The drive for legislation against getting animals from pounds for experiments arises to protect these pets. According to Andrew Rowan, the humane shelters view the forced surrender of cats and dogs to animal experimenters as threatening their cornerstone: “namely, a suffering-free sanctuary for animals.”21

  The Charles River Breeding Laboratory provides “micropigs,” “macropigs,” and “minipigs” and expects that the increased use of pigs instead of dogs will decrease the outcry against animal experimentation since “everybody eats them”—i.e., pigs have already been rendered strangers through our consumption of their kind.

 
Animals must be strangers to confirm the myth of scientific objectivity. As Kappeler writes of literature, “The claim to universality stems from the fact of the disinterestedness with which the subject regards the represented object.”22 The other animals, like women, are points of exchange between two or more subjects. According to Kappeler, pornography occurs when the pornographer speaks to another subject, the consumer of the photographic material, about a woman who is an object, a point of exchange between them. Animal experimentation similarly involves one scientist speaking to another scientist about the animal, their point of exchange.

  Problem 5: The Combining of Categories

  Pornography connects the centrality of visual objectification to both [human] male sexual arousal and [human] male models of knowledge and verification, objectivity with objectification.

  —Catharine MacKinnon23

  Frequently pornography employs language that celebrates the combining of the categories of “women” and “animals.” Besides pornography that explicitly documents women with animals, either as supposedly willing sexual partners, or the use of animals to establish the appropriate animalized environment, we hear of “beaver hunters” who bag a woman, the existence of Playboar with photographs of a variety of sexualized pig poses, and the “woman-breaking” tradition of late nineteenth-century pornography that was built on horse-breaking images. In her analysis of this type of pornography, Coral Lansbury finds parallels with the then-current medical treatment of women: