Through the operation of value hierarchies, value dualisms, and the logic of domination, the public/private distinction has functioned historically within patriarchal oppressive contexts to keep human male sexual violence toward women, children, and pets out of the higher-status “political” areas and in the inferior, out-of-police-concern private arena. This is to the detriment of women, children, pets and other animals, and the entire culture.
Environmental Philosophy
One could argue that environmental abuse is a form of somatophobia, that abuse of the earth is an expression of the hatred of the earth’s body. For this reason alone environmental philosophy should be attentive to the conceptual issues raised by the connection between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women. In addition, and very specifically, information about the association between guns, hunting, and battering suggests that any environmental philosophy that defends hunting or offers a hunting model must be reevaluated.60 Environmental and ecofeminist philosophers who appeal to a hunting model of any culture need to rethink the implications of applying it to the dominant Western cultures where battering is the major cause of injury to adult women, and hunting and owning guns is implicated in this battering. In fact, some advocates for battered women argue that battering incidents increase just prior to hunting season. Moreover, at least one batterer’s program requires batterers to relinquish all their guns and firearms in order to participate in the program.61
Applied Philosophy
Several areas of applied philosophy are affected by these empirical connections between human male sexual violence toward women, children, and animals. In what follows I touch on a few of these areas.
Public policy Because of Health Department regulations and liability insurance requirements, shelters for battered women cannot generally allow pets in the shelters. The movement to protect battered women needs to establish relationships with local veterinarians and animal advocates so that pets can be sheltered. Shelters need to inquire: “Do yo u have a pet that lives with you? Are you afraid to leave the animal? Do you need shelter for your pet?”62
Training humane workers and animal control officers to check for child abuse when following up on animal abuse has begun in some places, such as Florida, Ohio, Washington, DC, and parts of California. But humane workers and animal control officers should also be trained about woman-battering since injury to pets occurs not only in relationship to child abuse and neglect but also in cases of battering. Veterinarians, too, need to be trained along these lines, and the question of mandatory reporting of animal abuse needs to be addressed by the veterinary profession. But I am in no way advocating that a woman’s decisions about whether to remain or leave should be overridden by intervention by these professionals. Instead, their role as allies should be established. And information about pet injury as itself being a form of battering needs to be publicized.
Homeless shelters and battered women’s shelters are often offered surplus animal flesh from hunters. In fact, hunters, including the well-known celebrity bow-hunter Ted Nugent, often organize giveaways to these shelters. (We should be reminded that battered women make up about 40 percent of homeless people.)63 But given the association of hunting and violence against humans, and batterer programs that require batterers to stop using any guns, accepting flesh from hunters to feed battered women and other homeless individuals presents ethical problems. (I know of at least one battered women’s shelter that refused to accept flesh from hunters and of some animal activist and vegetarian organizations who adopt a battered women’s shelter at which they periodically serve vegetarian meals.)
Biomedical ethics The relationship between being a survivor of child sexual abuse and anorexia (which is receiving more attention)64 needs more exploration by those sensitive to the ethical legitimacy of vegetarian claims. One private-practice dietitian and counselor observed that “the animalistic nature of meat and dairy might seem particularly disgusting to patients recovering from sexual abuse.”65 This is, in fact, one of the symptom clusters associated with ritual abuse survivors: “Did the child suddenly develop an eating disorder, e.g., refuse meat, catsup, spaghetti, tomatoes?”66 I have argued elsewhere that young girls might have a problem with food while also being vegetarians for ethical reasons.67 In one location in Los Angeles, 90 percent of the anorexics being counseled were vegetarian (with 50 percent considered to have good reasons for their vegetarianism, i.e., they are not doing it solely to diet or restrict their fat intake because of “obsessive” concern for calories), while another program in Indiana estimated that 25 percent of “patients” at its program were vegetarian. Interestingly, “some dietitians and counselors insist that eating meat is integral to recovery.”68 Rather than having their motives for vegetarianism pathologized, anorexic young women could benefit from a recognition that a relational epistemology may have catalyzed a metaphysical shift regarding terminal animals.
Philosophical psychology Some programs offer healing to survivors of sexual victimization, including formerly battered women, through “animal-assisted therapy.” Alice Vachss describes the comforting presence of a dog she brought to work at the sex crimes prosecutors’ offices; some child victims only testified on videotape with the dog present: “With Sheba there to make her feel safe enough, the little girl was able to tell what had been done to her.”69 A social worker at a battered women’s shelter in Boston told Jay McDaniel, “The more my clients learn to trust animals and the Earth . . . the more they begin to trust themselves. And the more they trust themselves, the better they can free themselves from exploitive relationships.”70
Implications for Feminist Peace Politics
The connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women have important implications for a feminist peace politics.
The connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women call attention to the effect of war and patriarchal militarism on relations between humans and animals and on the lives of animals. Like abusers, occupying forces may kill animals as an expression of control, to instill terror, and to ensure compliance. I have been told such stories: in one case, in the 1970s, after capturing the adult men in a household, the occupying military force very deliberately shot the pet canary in the assembled presence of the family. Just as with battery, such actions are reminders of how mastery is both instilled and exhibited. In addition, the destruction of animals, like rape, is a part of wartime actions.71 Moreover, as Ascione reports (drawing on the work of Jonathan Randal and Nora Boustany), anecdotal evidence suggests that “children exposed to chronic war-time violence display violent and cruel behavior toward animals.”72
Sexualized violence takes on new dimensions in the light of the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women. “The sadistic murderer derives sexual pleasure from the killing and mutilation or abuse of his victim. . . . The act of killing itself produces very powerful sexual arousal in these individuals.”73 Thus, sex-crime offenders might relive their crime through animal surrogates. Arthur Gary Bishop, a child molester and murderer of five boys, relived his first murder by buying and killing as many as twenty puppies. (Most frequently the movement is in the other direction.)
After doing an extensive literature review of children who are cruel to animals, Frank Ascione queries, “What is the effect on the child who sexually abuses an animal and that animal dies? (such as boys having intercourse with chickens)?”74 That the sadistic attacks on horses, often involving sexual mutilation, that have occurred in southern England since the mideighties are called “horseripping” suggests the sexualizing of animal abuse.75
Making animal abuse visible expands feminist peace politics. Instead of the glorification of anonymous death in massive numbers that we encounter in heroic war writings, the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women remind us of the specific embodiment and agonizing painfulness of every single death. In the place of unnamed troops, there are named individuals, including animals. Thes
e names remind us that all victims—the pets as well as the troops—have a biography. In addition, we now see that biologisms, and the racism such biologisms give rise to, are involved in attitudes toward “animals” and “the enemy.”76 The militaristic identity, like the abuser’s control, is dependent on others as objects, rather than subjects. Moreover, it has been observed that “women are more likely to be permanently injured, scarred, or even killed by their husbands in societies in which animals are treated cruelly.”77 Finally, our growing understanding of the commodification of bodies in conjunction with militarism78 can benefit from insights into the commodification of animals’ bodies.79 Dismantling so-matophobia involves respecting the bodily integrity of all who have been equated with bodies.
In response to the conceptual connections between women and animals, feminists as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir have attempted theoretically to sever these connections. Clearly, in the light of the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women, this theoretical response is inadequate because it presumes the acceptability of the human/animal value dualism while moving women from the disempowered side of the dyad to the dominating side. Any adequate feminist peace politics will be nonanthropocentric, rejecting value dualisms that are oppositional and hierarchical, such as the human/animal dualism.
In her discussion of feminism and militarism, bell hooks refers to “cultures of war, cultures of peace.”80 We have seen how the connections between the abuse of women and the abuse of animals both enact and occur within cultures of war. It remains for feminists to define clearly and specifically how animals will be included in cultures of peace.
Chapter 9
Feeding on Grace: Institutional Violence, Feminist Ethics, and Vegetarianism
Better is a dinner of vegetables
where love is
than a fatted ox and hatred
with it.
Proverbs 15:17
(New Revised Standard Version)
The day after I arrived home from my first year at Yale Divinity School, an urgent knocking summoned me from my task of unpacking. There stood a distressed neighbor reporting that someone had just shot one of our horses. We ran through the pasture to discover that indeed, one of my horses was lying dead, a small amount of blood trickling from his mouth. Shots from the nearby woods could still be heard. One horse lay dead and the other frantically pranced around him.
That night, upset and depressed, I encountered a hamburger at dinner. Suddenly I flashed on the image of Jimmy’s dead body in the upper pasture, awaiting a formal burial by backhoe in the morning. One dead body had a name, a past that included my sense of his subjectivity, and was soon to be respectfully buried. The other dead body was invisible, objectified, nameless, except in his or her current state as hamburger, and was to be buried in my stomach. At the time I realized the hypocrisy of my actions. The question confronting me was: “If Jimmy were meat would I, could I, be his meat eater?” And the answer was: “Of course not.” Having recognized his individuality, his subjectivity, having been in relationship with him, I could not render him beingless. So why could I do this to another animal, who, if I had known him or her, would surely have revealed a similar individuality and subjectivity?
The invisible became visible: I became aware of how I objectified others and what it means to make animals into meat. I also recognized my ability to change myself: realizing what flesh actually is, I also realized I need not be a corpse eater. Through a relational epistemology I underwent a metaphysical shift.
This experience in 1973 catalyzed the process by which I became a vegetarian, as noted in the preceding chapter, slightly more than a year later. It also catalyzed a theoretical and theological search to understand why the dominant society invests so many economic, environmental, and cultural resources into protecting the current metaphysical status of animals as edible objects.
The eating of animals is a form of institutional violence. The corporate ritual that characterizes institutional violence deflects or redefines the fact that the eating of animals is exploitative. This is why conscientious and ethical individuals do not see corpse eating as a problem. As this book has pointed out, the most frequent relationship the majority of Americans have with the other animals is with dead animals whom they eat. Because of institutional violence, corpse eating is conceived of neither as a relationship nor as the consuming of dead animals. We require an analysis of institutional violence to identify just why it is that feminist ethics ought to reconceptualize corpse eating. This chapter offers such an analysis and reconceptualization.
The Institutional Violence of Eating Animals
Through an understanding of institutional violence we will come to see the dynamics of exploitation vis-à-vis the other animals, and begin to recognize their suffering as ethically relevant in determining our own actions.
For something to be institutional violence it must be a significant, widespread, unethical practice in a society. As the second largest industry in this country, corpse production is both widespread and vitally important to the economy. Though corpse eating is now the normative expression of our relationship with other animals, a close examination of the functioning of institutional violence will reveal why I call it unethical.
Institutional violence is characterized by:
1. An infringement on or failure to acknowledge another’s inviolability
2. Treatment and/or physical force that injures or abuses
3. Involving a series of denial mechanisms that deflect attention from the violence
4. The targeting of “appropriate” victims
5. Detrimental effects on society as a whole
6. The manipulation of the public (e.g., consumers) into passivity.
Corpse eating fits this definition of institutional violence. In fact, the word meat itself illustrates several of these components. It renders animals appropriate victims by naming them as edible and deflects our attention from the violence inherent to killing them for food.
The Institutional Violence of Eating Animals Is an Infringement on or Failure to Acknowledge Another’s Inviolability
Some individuals recognize the inviolability of animals; they believe that animals are not ours to use, abuse, or consume. They believe that if animals could talk, farmed animals, vivisected animals, furbearing animals, circus, zoo, and rodeo animals, hunted animals, would all say the same thing: “Don’t touch me!” Yet animals cannot proclaim their inviolability in our language. Moreover, because we have no adequate language for emotions, we have no framework into which our feelings about animals’ current violability can be fit. In the absence of such language, it is important that we widen feminist ethical discourse to address the problem of the use of animals.
Corpse eating, in almost all cases, is an unjust use of another for one’s own profit or advantage. It is unjust because it is unnecessary (people do not need to eat animals to survive), cruel, and perpetuates inauthentic relationships among people and between people and the other animals. As such, it enacts the first component of institutional violence—the failure to honor another’s wholeness and the interposition of one’s will against another’s self-determination. Through the term inviolability I assert that animals should have a “don’t-touch-me!” status in relationship with people. Institutional violence tramples these claims and arrogates to humans the right to dominate and violate animals’ bodies.
The function of institutional violence toward animals is to uphold and act upon the violability of animals. At the individual level it wrenches any notion of animals’ inviolability from one’s sense of ethics. Even if many children object upon learning where flesh comes from, this objection is rarely respected. And even if adults are discomforted by some form of flesh—whether it be because of the animal it is stolen from, a dog, a horse, a rat, or the part of the animals being consumed, the brain, the liver—they may feel they have no ethical framework into which these object
ions might be placed. The absence of such a framework means that any reminders that animals have to be killed to be consumed, experienced by children explicitly and by adults implicitly, remain unassimilated and repressed. Institutional violence interposes an ethics of exploitation for any burgeoning ethic of inviolability.
Institutional Violence Involves Treatment and/or Physical Force That Injures or Abuses
By treatment I mean ongoing conditions that are abusive or injurious. Factory farming involves such treatment. Intensively farmed animals fare poorly, being raised in enclosed, darkened, or dimly lit buildings. Their lives are characterized by little external stimulus; restriction of movement; no freedom to choose social interactions; intense and unpleasant fumes; little contact with human beings; ingestion of subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics to prevent diseases that could tear through an entire population of imprisoned animals. Hens used for laying eggs live with two to four others in cages slightly larger than this opened book. When being cooked in an oven, the chicken has four or five times more space than when she was alive. Calves whose bodies are used as veal are kept in their tiny crates, where they cannot turn around since exercise would increase muscle development, toughen the flesh, and slow weight gain. Standing on slatted floors causes a constant strain. Diarrhea, a frequent problem because of the improper diet that is meant to keep their flesh pale, causes the slats to become slippery and wet; the calves often fall, getting leg injuries. When taken to slaughter, many of them are “downers,” unable to walk.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 22