The event would not have been possible without the help of a large team of volunteers and the generosity of many people who assisted the fundraising campaign.
I have a long history of involvement in animal advocacy including founding two activist groups. My art practice spans over three decades and is heavily informed by my activism. Though I have a substantial history as a painter, my artwork is now driven more by subject matter than medium, with another large project titled Animal Factoriesconsisting of large-scale documentary photographs of industrial farms. While animals and human-animal relations have been the subject of my work since the mid-1980s, over the year the line between art and activism has become increasingly blurred. The Duck Lake project has taken this to a whole new level.
Yvette Watt
PART THREE
From Misery to Grace
She decides she will not eat any sort of meat ever again. ... She makes a silent vow to be a vegetarian from now on even if she has to starve to do it. Better that than even the remote possibility of eating one’s friends and fellow sufferers. ... Pooch wonders, does not some atavistic need exist in all of us to save the world, exactly to the degree that we would save ourselves, for aren’t we “the world” as much as any other piece in it? Perhaps the more animal we are ... that is, Pooch thinks, that I should keep my basic nature even while becoming (or rather, hoping to become) an intellectual ... if I could retain strong links to my animal past. Never forget what I am and where I come from.
—Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog
Merely by ceasing to eat meat, merely by practising restraint, we have the power to end a painful industry. We do not have to bear arms to end this evil, we do not have to contribute money, we do not have to sit in jailor go to meetings or demonstrations or engage in acts of civil disobedience. Most often, the act of repairing the world, of healing moral wounds, is left to heroes and tzaddikim, saints and people of unusual discipline. But here is an action every mortal can perform—surely it is not too difficult!
—Roberta Kalechofsky
Chapter 8
Bringing Peace Home: a Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals
I have been a vegetarian since 1974. In 1978, I started a hotline for battered women in rural upstate New York where I lived at that time. Because my vegetarianism was motivated by a concern for animals, I began to notice that animals—as well as the batterer’s female sexual partner—were often victimized by violent men. For instance, one day a woman whom we had been helping to leave her violent husband called to report what had happened when he returned the children after his visitation was over. The children, the husband, and the wife were all sitting in his pickup truck in the driveway. Something occurred that enraged him. Simultaneously, the family dog appeared in the driveway. He plunged the truck forward so that it ran over the dog. He then threw the truck in reverse and backed over the dog. He repeated this forward-backward motion many times. Then he got out of the truck, grabbed his shotgun, and, in front of his devastated family, shot the dog several times.
Empirical evidence indicates that acts of sexual exploitation, including physical battering of sex partners, often involve violence against other animals as well. Drawing on a model provided by Karen J. Warren1 I will make explicit the variety of connections between sexual violence and injury to animals. Then I will demonstrate the importance to feminism and animal defense of taking seriously these empirical connections because of their implications for conceptual analysis, epistemology, political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and applied philosophy. In doing this, I hope to set a standard and provide a set of suggestions about what must be included in any adequate feminist peace politics. It is not my goal in what follows to use the examples of the abuse of animals solely to illustrate how women and children are made to suffer. Then I would recapitulate on a philosophical level what the abuser actually does, using animals instrumentally. Instead, I seek to broaden the reader’s worldview about what counts as “feminist peace issues” to include concern about the connections between abuse of animals and women, and to see the experience of animals as legitimate concerns in and of themselves.
This essay takes Elizabeth Spelman’s implicit understanding that somatophobia—hostility to the body—is symptomatic of sexism, racism, classism, and speciesism, and demonstrates how hostility to despised and disenfranchised bodies, that is, those of animals, children, women, and gender nonconforming men, becomes interwoven.2 To avoid somatophobia, feminist philosophy must take the connections between abuse of animals and abuse of women seriously.
Terminology
Several terms that feature in my argument deserve attention upfront.
I will use the conventional term pet to describe animals who are a part of a household.3 Those involved in the animal-defense movement prefer the term companion animal. While I find this term helpful, the word pet suggests some commonalities between sexualized behavior and animals: the term pet also connotes sexual activity, specifically, fondling and caressing.
Battering is a component or kind of sexual violation, since it occurs against one’s sexual partner. Catharine MacKinnon’s insights on this matter are helpful: battering “is sexually done to women. Not only in where it is done—over half of the incidents are in the bedroom. Or the surrounding events—precipitating sexual jealousy. . . . If women as gender female are defined as sexual beings, and violence is eroticized, then men violating women has a sexual component.”4
I am uncomfortable with the term battered woman although it is one that the movement against violence against women has itself adopted. I agree with Sarah Hoagland (whom I quoted in chapter 5), that the term elides the agency of the batterer, while also ascribing an unchanging status to his victim.5 However, because it is the commonly adopted term, and is used by the scholars and activists from whom I draw my empirical data, I use the term.
One might suggest that the violence examined in this chapter is really “male violence.” But the minute we widen the scope of inquiry to include the other animals, we must proceed with sensitivity to the way language may be inaccurate. The anthropocentric presumption that “male” and “female” can be used interchangeably with “men” and “women” is erroneous. What is actually being discussed is human-male violence. While in what follows I am vigilant in using the adjective human to qualify male, I will abide with convention in discussing animal abuse, allowing that meaning to exclude human animals.
Empirical Evidence
Karen J. Warren argues that understanding the empirical connections between women and nature improves our understanding of the subordination of women while also establishing the practical significance of ecofeminist philosophy.6 Empirical connections that reveal the intersection of the abuse of animals and the abuse of women expose another layer of intentional infliction of suffering by violent men, another way of comprehending the phenomenology of sexual violation. I am concerned about what this control and terror mean for women and our subordination, and for animals and their subordination.
Testimony from survivors and their advocates indicate two significant configurations in which sexually violent men harm women, children, and animals. There is a threat or actual killing of an animal, usually a pet, as a way of establishing or maintaining control over women and children who are being sexually victimized. And, there is a use of animals in sexually violating women or children, or the use of animals to gain some sort of sexual gratification. Of concern is a third way in which sexual exploitation influences behavior toward animals: anecdotal evidence suggests that child victims of sexual abuse sometimes injure animals. These configurations will be discussed under the specific phenomenological forms that the sexual exploitation takes: battering, marital rape, pornography, child sexual abuse, ritual abuse, serial killing, and sexual harassment. Taken together, this evidence, as we will see, has striking implications for feminist philosophical considerations.
Battering is one form of human male s
exual violence that victimizes women, children, and animals. Threats and abuse (often fatal) of pets by a woman’s sexual partner occur in his attempts to establish control. As with other forms of battering, the killing of a pet is “d one to show control and domination.”7 Lenore Walker points out, “As a way to terrorize and control their women, batterers have even been known to hold pets hostage.”8 According to guides for battered women, behaviors that are commonly shared among batterers include hunting, owning of guns, threatening, harming, or killing a pet.9 “Abusers are often cruel to animals. Many kill them for sport, and this should not be minimized. Anyone who beats a dog or other pets should be considered a potential batterer.”10 Bonnie Burstow, a radical feminist therapist warns that the killing of a pet by a human male heterosexual partner is one of the signs that “the woman is in an imminently life-threatening situation and immediate action is called for.”11 For instance, one man slashed two pet cats to death and then threatened to turn the butcher knife on his wife and her dog.12 In another incident, Molly, after a brutal battering by her husband that lasted several hours, “realized he was laughing. Molly had seen him beat a dog like that once, slowly until it [sic] died. She remembered that he had laughed then, too.” Shortly after that, Molly killed her husband in self-defense.13
Diana Russell describes an incident that occurred in California:
[Michael] Lowe casually pumped a shot into the dog. The sheepdog ran under the family’s truck, cowering in pain as Lowe went back into the house and returned with a .30-.30 Winchester rifle. He called to the animal and made her sit in front of him as he fired five more shots, killing the family pet [in front of the family]. Three months later he did the same to his wife. Then he killed himself.14
Anne Ganley, a psychologist who has pioneered in victim-based counseling for batterers, identifies “the destruction of property and/or pets” as one of four forms of battering (along with physical, sexual, and psychological battering). She observes that:
Typically, the offender and the victim do not identify the destruction of property/pets as part of the battering; yet it is. The offender’s purpose in destroying the property/pets is the same as in his physically attacking his partner. He is simply attacking another object to accomplish his battering of her. Sometimes we minimize the seriousness of this form of battering by saying that at least it is better than hitting her. Unfortunately, it often has the same psychological impact on the victim as a physical attack.15
(And we need to remember that battering an animal does injure someone.)
Angela Browne found that many of the women she interviewed who had killed their husbands in self-defense frequently reported destruction of animals: “These incidents often seemed to the women a representation of their own death.”16 The killing of pets often resulted in the loss of a battered woman’s last hope.
The kitten was sitting in the yard. Billy got his rifle, walked up to it [sic], and shot it [sic]. Then he hunted down the other two cats and shot them. Kim was hysterical—following him around, tugging on him, jumping up and down and screaming. She begged him not to kill the cats, and after he had, she begged him not to leave them there. So he picked them up and threw them over the fence. After Billy went to sleep that night, Kim crept out, found the cats, and buried them. Then she lay down in the field and cried.17
When the husband murders a pet, he may be destroying the woman’s only source of comfort and affection.18
A little-studied form of battering involves the use of animals for humiliation and sexual exploitation by batterers and/or marital rapists. This is the second form of sexual violence victimizing women and animals. Batterers and marital rapists (and the two groups are neither mutually exclusive nor completely inclusive of each other) may train dogs to “have sex with” their wives19 or force their wives to have sex with a dog: “He would tie me up and force me to have intercourse with our family dog. . . . He would get on top of me, holding the dog, and he would like hump the dog, while the dog had its [sic] penis inside me.”20 The batterer’s/rapist’s control is amplified by requiring humiliating acts of his victim. This is a form of torture. Linda Marchiano (Linda “Lovelace”) threatened by her batterer, Chuck, with death, was subjected to sex with a dog: “Now I felt totally defeated. There were no greater humiliations left for me.” She explained, “From then on if I didn’t do something he wanted, he’d bring me a pet, a dog.”21 As with the preceding cases, the threat or actual use of a pet to intimidate, coerce, control, or violate a woman is a form of sexual control or mastery over women by men, as well as an indication of how extensively abusive men sexualize their actions, including their relationships with other animals.
A third linking of violence against women, children, and animals to human male sexual violence is pornography. One genre of pornography features sexual activity “between” humans and animals. (I qualify this term since I believe this activity to be coercive.) Bears, snakes, and dogs—to name just a few of the species of animals incorporated into pornographic films—are shown in a variety of sexual and sexualized positions with women. Linda “Lovelace’s” sexual violation with a dog was filmed and became a popular pornographic loop, that is, a brief film. This loop—often cited by reporters and others in response to her book Ordeal [“Many who have seen Deep Throat or another, even sleazier film in which her co-star was a dog, will argue that Linda Love-lace liked what she was doing, and liked it a lot.”22 ]—depicts what Marchiano considers “the worst moment of my life.”23 There is some evidence that some viewers of pornography have attempted to duplicate such scenes in abusing their partners.24
My fourth case-in-point concerns child sexual abuse. The testimony of survivors of child sexual abuse reveal that threats and abuse of their pets were often used to establish control over them, while also ensuring their silence, by forcing them to decide between their victimization or the pet’s death. Sylvia Fraser poignantly describes the dilemma this threat by her father-rapist presented to her as a child:
Desperation makes me bold. At last I say the won’t-love-me words:
“I’m going to tell my mommy on you!” . . .
My father needs a permanent seal for my lips, one that will murder all defiance. “If you say once more that you’re going to tell, I’m sending that cat of yours to the pound for gassing!”
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
The air swooshes out of me as if I have been punched. My heart is broken. My resistance is broken. Smoky’s life is in my hands. This is no longer a game, however desperate. Our bargain is sealed in blood.25
This type of threat is not restricted to father-daughter rape. Alice Vachss, formerly a prosecuter of sex crimes, reports on this phenomenon in Sex Crimes: Children “are threatened with huge, child-oriented consequences if they tell. The molester kills a kitten and says the same thing will happen to the child.”26 One chilling example involved a two-and-a-half-year-old girl whose abuser claimed to have killed the pet rabbit, then he cooked the rabbit, and forced her to eat some of the flesh, warning her that if she reported the abuse, the rabbit’s fate would be hers.27
Besides physical abuse of animals by child sexual abusers, there is the sexual use of animals by some child sexual abusers. In these cases, the sexual use of animals seems to enhance or expand or extend the abuse of the genuinely powerless and unsuspecting victim. For instance, one colleague reported a case in which a veterinarian, upon discovering that the dog had a sexually transmitted disease, made a referral that resulted in the discovery that the father was also sexually abusing his two preadolescent daughters. And there are other cases.28
A child may injure animals or pets or “stuffed animals” as a sign or signal or expression that something is very wrong.29 Abuse of animals is recognized in the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III-R)30 as one of the symptoms indicative of Conduct Disorder. A preadolescent boy who had been brutally raped by his father de
scribed how he would tie a firecracker around a cat and watch as it exploded. Brohl reports that “an adult survivor tearfully related that when she was seven years old she drowned her cat.”31 While Frank Ascione, who has conducted extensive research on this issue, cautions that “much of the information we have on the relation between sexual abuse of children and children’s cruelty toward animals is derived from retrospective research,” he is also able to provide some information drawn from a more reliable methodology:
William Friedrich (April, 1992, personal communication) provided data from a large-scale study of substantiated cases of sexual abuse in children 2–12 years of age. Most of these children had been victimized within twelve months of data collection that included administration of the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach 1988). Parental reports of cruelty to animals were 35 percent for abused boys and 27 percent for abused girls; the percentages were 5 percent for nonabused boys and 3 percent for nonabused girls, a highly significant difference based on clinical status.32
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