The hidden costs to the environment of corpse production and the subsidizing of this production by the government maintain the disembodiment of this production process. It also means that environmentally concerned individuals are implicated, even if unknowingly and unwittingly, in this process despite their own disavowals through vegetarianism. Individual tax monies perpetuate the cheapness of animals’ bodies as a food source; consequently corpse eaters are not required to confront the reality of corpse production. As much as we bemoan the war industry that is fed with our tax monies, we might also bemoan the support our tax monies give to the the flesh industry that wars upon animals and the environment. Tax monies are used to develop growth hormones like “bovine somatotropin” to increase cows’ milk production rather than to help people learn the benefits and tastes of soyfoods such as soymilk—products that are not ecologically destructive.
Maintenance is Productive: The Individual Level
The problem of seeing maintenance as productive occurs on an individual level as well. Activism is judged productive; maintenance as in cooking, especially vegetarian cooking, is usually considered time-consuming. “We don’t have time for it—it impedes our activism,” protest many feminists in conversations. By not viewing maintenance as productive, we may miss the way a vegan diet may be protective. As we write in Even Vegans Die,
Replacing animal foods with whole plant foods and healthy fats is almost assured to reduce your saturated-fat intake, for example, which in turn protects against heart disease. If you’ve struggled with elevated cholesterol, a vegan diet is an excellent approach to lowering it. Replacing meat with beans in menus boosts potassium intake, which helps lower blood pressure. And yes, research has even found that eating a healthy plant-based diet can give your skin and your immune system some extra protection. This might slow the aging process and it might give you considerable defense against viruses.
Information about the health of vegans was lacking for a long time. But we’re starting to get some insight thanks to two large ongoing studies. The EPIC–Oxford Study in England includes around 2,600 vegans. The Adventist Health Study-2 in North America includes nearly 8,000 vegans among its subjects.
Both of these studies assessed dietary intakes among vegans and also among meat eaters, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and semi-vegetarians (those who eat meat less than once per week) enrolled in the studies. The researchers are following all of the groups to track rates of different diseases. … Not surprisingly, vegans also are at lower risk for type 2 diabetes and for hypertension. Vegans appear to be less likely to develop certain cancers.29
The order we place at the fast-food restaurant or the purchase of flesh at the flesh counter also sends the message that maintaining the environment is not important either. A cycle of destruction continues on both a personal and economic-political level for the same reason, the invisible costs of corpse eating.
For women, a diet high in animal fats lowers the age of menstruation—which increases the incidence of cancer of the breast and reproductive organs while also lowering the age of fertility, and thus increasing the numbers of young teenagers who may get pregnant.30
The moment when I realized that maintenance must be valued as productive was while I was cooking vegetarian food; thus I was doing what we generally consider to be maintenance. The problem is to escape from maintenance to produce these or any “productive” thoughts. Seeing maintenance as productive is the other side of recognizing the ethical importance of the consequences of our actions.
3. The Invisible Animal Machines
A child’s puzzle called “Barn” displays chickens wandering freely, cows looking out the barnyard door, and smiling pigs frolicking in mud. But this is not an accurate depiction of life down on the farm these days. The fissure between image and reality is perpetuated by agribusiness that does not conduct its farming practices in this homespun way. Laws are being passed in various states that prevent the filming of animals who are living in intensive farming situations. (This phrasing is itself representative of the problem of image and reality: “intensive farming situation” usually means imprisonment in windowless buildings.) As Peter Singer points out, television programs about animals focus on animals in the wild rather than animals in the “factory farms”; frequently the only information on these “animal machines” comes from paid advertising. “The average viewer must know more about the lives of cheetahs and sharks than he or she knows about the lives of chickens or veal calves.”31 The majority of animals dominated by humans no longer appear to be a part of nature; they are domesticated, terminal animals who are maintained in intensive farming situations until slaughtered and consumed or laboratory animals such as mice, rats, cats, and dogs. Perhaps as a result, some ecofeminists and most corpse eaters simply do not see farm animals at all, and thus cannot see them as a part of nature.
It is instructive, then, to remind ourselves of the lives of individual animals. Consider the case of pigs. A breeding sow is viewed, according to one flesh company manager, as “a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”32 Indeed, she does: about one hundred piglets, averaging “2 1/2 litters a year, and 10 litters in a lifetime.”33 Since about 80 million pigs are slaughtered in the United States yearly, this means that at least 3.5 million pig “mother machines” are pregnant twice during any given year. For at least ten months of each year, the pregnant and nursing sow will be restricted in movement, unable to walk around. Though pigs are extremely social beings, sows “are generally kept isolated in individual narrow pens in which they are unable to turn round.”34 She is impregnated forcefully either by physical restraint and mounting by a boar, artificial insemination, being tethered and forcibly inseminated, or through “the surgical transplant of embryos from ‘supersows’ to ordinary sows.”35
The now-pregnant sow resides in a delivery crate about two feet by six feet (60 cm × 182 cm).36 In this narrow steel cage, known as the “iron maiden,” “she is able to stand up or lie down but is unable to do much else. Despite this, sows appear to make frustrated attempts at nest-building.”37 Prostaglandin hormone, injected into the sows to induce labor, also “causes an intense increase in motivation to build a nest.”38 After delivering her piglets, “she is commonly strapped to the floor with a leather band, or held down in a lying position by steel bars, to keep her teats continuously exposed.”39
The newborn piglets are allowed to suckle from their incarcerated mother for anything from a few hours to several weeks: “In the most intensive systems the piglets are generally isolated within hours of birth in small individual cages which are stacked, row upon row, in tiers. . . . At seven to fourteen days, the piglets are moved again to new quarters where they are housed in groups in slightly larger cages.”40 Often farmers clip the pigs’ tails shortly after birth to avoid the widespread problem of tailbiting.41 It is probable that tailbiting results from both a monotonous diet and the pigs’ natural tendencies to root and chew on objects in their environment. In essence, “the telos of a hog is the will to root,” which is frustrated by their existence in confinement sheds.42
Once onto solid food, the . . . “weaners” are grown on in small groups in pens until they reach slaughtering weight at around six to eight months of age. For ease of cleaning, the pens have concrete or slatted metal floors, and no bedding is provided. . . . Foot deformities and lameness are common in animals raised on hard floors without access to softer bedding areas.43
Ninety percent of all pigs are now raised in indoor, near-dark, windowless confinement sheds,44 a stressful existence that includes being underfed45 and living in a saunalike atmosphere of high humidity (meant to induce lethargy). Porcine stress syndrome—a form of sudden death likened to human heart attacks—and mycoplasmic pneumonia are common. Once they are the appropriate size and weight, pigs are herded into a crowded livestock truck and transported to the slaughterhouse, where they are killed.
This information on the life cycl
e of these pigs requires some sort of response from each of us, and the sort of response one has matters on several levels. I respond on an emotional level with horror at what each individual pig is subjected to and sympathize with each pig, whose extreme sociability is evidenced by this animal’s increased popularity as pets.46 On an intellectual level I marvel at the language of automation, factory farming, and high-tech production that provides the vehicle and license for one to fail to see these animals as living, feeling individuals who experience frustration and terror in the face of their treatment. As a lactating mother, I empathize with the sow whose reproductive freedoms have been denied and whose nursing experience seems so wretched. As a consumer and a vegetarian, I visualize this information on the life cycle of sows and piglets when I witness people buying or eating “ham,” “bacon,” or “sausage.”
Intensive factory farming in the United States involves the denial of the beingness of more than seven billion animals yearly. The impersonal names bestowed on them—such as food-producing unit, protein harvester, computerized unit in a factory environment, egg-producing machine, converting machine, biomachine, crop—proclaim that they have been removed from nature. But this is no reason for ecofeminism to fail to reclaim farm animals from this oppressive system. It merely explains one reason some ecofeminists fail to do so.
4. The Social Construction of Edible Bodies and the Cultural Myth of Humans as Predators
Ecofeminism at times evidences a confusion about human nature. Are we predators or are we not? In an attempt to see ourselves as natural beings, some argue that humans are simply predators like some other animals. Vegetarianism is then seen to be unnatural while the carnivorism of other animals is made paradigmatic. Animal defenders are criticized for not understanding that “one species supporting or being supported by another is nature’s way of sustaining life.”47 The deeper disanalogies with carnivorous animals remain unexamined because the notion of humans as predators is consonant with the idea that we need to eat flesh. In fact, carnivorism is true for only about 20 percent of nonhuman animals. Can we really generalize from this experience and claim to know precisely what “nature’s way” is, or ca n we extrapolate the role of humans according to this paradigm?
Some feminists have argued that the eating of animals is natural because we do not have the herbivore’s double stomach or flat grinders and because chimpanzees eat flesh and regard it as a treat.48 This argument from anatomy involves selective filtering. In fact, all primates are primarily herbivorous. Though some chimpanzees have been observed eating dead flesh—at the most, six times in a month—some never eat flesh. Dead flesh constitutes less than 4 percent of chimpanzees’ diet; many eat insects, and they do not eat dairy products.49 Does this sound like the diet of human beings?
Chimpanzees, like most carnivorous animals, are apparently far better suited to catching animals than are human beings. We are much slower than they. They have long-projecting canine teeth for tearing hide; all the hominids lost their long-projecting canines 3.5 million years ago, apparently to allow more crushing action consistent with a diet of fruits, leaves, vegetables, nuts, shoots, and legumes. If we do manage to get hold of prey animals we cannot rip into their skin. It is true that chimpanzees act as if flesh were a treat. When humans lived as foragers and when oil was rare, the flesh of dead animals was a good source of calories. It may be that the “treat” aspect of flesh has to do with an ability to recognize dense sources of calories. However, we no longer have that need since our problem is not lack of fat but rather too much fat.
When the argument is made that eating animals is natural, the presumption is that we must continue consuming animals because this is what we require to survive, to survive in a way consonant with living unimpeded by artificial cultural constraints that deprive us of the experience of our real selves, as though some absolute unmediated natural state can be achieved. The paradigm of carnivorous animals provides the reassurance that eating animals is “natural.” But how do we know what is natural when it comes to eating, both because of the social construction of reality and the fact that our history indicates a very mixed message about eating animals? Some did; the majority did not, at least to any great degree.
The argument about what is natural—that is, according to one meaning of it, not culturally constructed, not artificial, but something that returns us to our true selves—appears in a different context that always arouses feminists’ suspicions. It is often argued that women’s subordination to men is natural. This argument attempts to deny social reality by appealing to the “natural.” The “natural” predator argument ignores social construction as well. Since we eat corpses in a way quite differently from the other animals—dismembered, not freshly killed, not raw, and with other foods present—what makes it natural?
Flesh is a cultural construct made to seem natural and inevitable. By the time the argument from analogy with carnivorous animals is made, the individual making such an argument has probably consumed animals since before the time she or he could talk. Rationalizations for consuming animals were probably offered when this individual at age four or five was discomforted upon discovering that flesh came from dead animals. The taste of dead flesh preceded the rationalizations, and offered a strong foundation for believing the rationalizations to be true. And baby boomers face the additional problem that as they grew up, flesh and dairy products had been canonized as two of the four basic food groups. Thus individuals have not only experienced the gratification of taste in eating animals but may truly believe what they have been told endlessly since childhood—that dead animals are necessary for human survival. The idea that corpse eating is natural develops in this context. Ideology makes the artifact appear natural, predestined. In fact, the ideology itself disappears behind the facade that this is a “food” issue.
We interact with individual animals daily if we eat them. However, this statement and its implications are repositioned through the structure of the absent referent so that the animal disappears and it is said that we are interacting with a form of food that has been named “meat.” The absent referent also enables us to resist efforts to make animals present, perpetuating a means-end hierarchy.
The absent referent results from and reinforces ideological captivity: racist patriarchal ideology establishes the cultural set of human/animal, creates criteria that posit the species difference as important in considering who may be means and who may be ends, and then indoctrinates us into believing that we need to eat animals. Simultaneously, the structure of the absent referent keeps animals absent from our understanding of patriarchal ideology and makes us resistant to having animals made present. This means that we continue to interpret animals from the perspective of human needs and interests: we see them as usable and consumable. Much of feminist discourse participates in this structure when failing to make animals visible.
Ontology recapitulates ideology. In other words, ideology creates what appears to be ontological: if women are ontologized as sexual beings (or rapable, as some feminists argue), animals are ontologized as carriers of flesh. In ontologizing women and animals as objects, the dominant language simultaneously eliminates the fact that someone else is acting as a subject/agent/perpetrator of violence. Sarah Hoagland demonstrates how this works:
“John beat Mary”
becomes
“Mary was beaten by John”
then
“Mary was beaten”
and finally
“women beaten”
and thus
“battered women.”50
Regarding violence against women and the creation of the term battered women, Hoagland observes that “now something men do to women has become instead something that is a part of women’s nature. And we lose consideration of John entirely.”
The notion of the animal’s body as edible occurs in a similar way and removes the agency of humans who buy dead animals and consume them:
“Someone kills animals so that I can
eat their corpses as meat” becomes
“Animals are killed to be eaten as meat”
then
“Animals are meat”
and finally
“meat animals”
thus
“meat.”
Something people do to animals has become instead something that is a part of animals’ nature, and we lose consideration of people’s role as eaters of animals entirely. With the mass term of meat the agency of the consumer is consummately elided. When ecofeminism acknowledges that animals are absent referents but that we are meant to be predators, it still perpetuates the ontologizing of animals as consumable bodies.
5. Can Hunting Be Reconciled to Ecofeminist Ethics?
Ecofeminism has the potential of situating both animals and vegetarianism within its theory and practice. But should vegetarianism become an inherent aspect of ecofeminism? Are some forms of hunting acceptable ecofeminist alternatives to intensive farming? To answer this question we need to recognize that many ecofeminists (e.g., Warren) see the necessity of refusing to absolutize, a position consistent with a resistance to authoritarianism and power-over. Thus we can find a refusal to condemn categorically all killing. Issues are situated within their specific environments. I will call this emphasis on the specific over the universal a “philosophy of contingency.”
Neither Man nor Beast Page 14