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Home , Ethics of eating meat, Friends of Animals, Gidon Eshel, John Peter Haines, Mollie Katzen

HAPPY MEALS:

ANIMALS, NATURE, AND THE MYTH OF

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF MODERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Vasile Stanescu

May 2014

© 2014 by Vasile Stanescu. All Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ph312vx3092

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of .

Shelley Fishkin, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Ursula Heise, Co-Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Matthew Kohrman

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

iii iv

Abstract

In describing man as an “animal rationale,” argued for a “myth of consent,” i.e. that slaves, barbarians, women, and animals have all “agreed” to be owned and controlled by Greek male citizens for their own “protection.” Therefore, there are two main themes in Aristotelian thought in the original definition of man, which became inscribed in later thinkers. The first is that the exclusion of the slave, and later of the colonized, as biological inferiors is rendered possible in part because of these pre- existing caesuras in politics, , and philosophy which exclude animals, women, and slaves, based on their shared equation with the human body and supposed lack of reason.

And second, this domination is justified via a rhetoric of care and benevolent protection.

These two points should not be seen as two separate ideas but as a single unified argument. In other words, for Aristotle it is because certain classes of living entities

(animals, women, children, barbarians, and slaves) are all seen as less rational that it is necessary for them to be “protected” by the Greek male ruling over them, even if this

“protection” by unfortunate necessity entails an inevitable degree of violence, control and domination. We can, therefore, see in Aristotle two very different visions of nature. On the one hand, nature represents a loss of control, the absence of the human, and an unbounded wildness and freedom. On the other hand, there is a description of nature as a

“preserving” and “protecting” nature, which is a vision of complete control in which every aspect of life is forced to conform to the “natural” order of masters over slaves, men over women, mind over body, and humans over animals.

Based on a critique of this “myth of consent,” in the first half of the dissertation I argue that the practices of “locavorism,” “humane slaughter,” and being a v

“compassionate carnivore” obscure the reality of the death and that such practices entail. I argue that the effect of the so-called “humane farming” movement is not a critique of anthropocentric privilege, but instead the restatement and re- entrenchment of the most basic claims of the factory farm system. The claims that the animals “want” to be there; they choose to be there, and, therefore, they, in some sense, agree to their treatment, and hence their death becomes the ultimate expression of their protection. It is, in fact, not the case that animal agribusiness renders the animal as “voiceless,” but instead that the voice is only allowed one answer: always, already, and irrevocably “Yes.”

In the second half of the dissertation, I explore the “myth of consent” for marginalized populations which have been oppressed, in part, based on a supposed belief in the need to “protect” them (even when this “protection” involves their death) as well as a belief in their supposed “animalistic” nature. I demonstrate the material reality of this dynamic by focusing on the display of colonized peoples from around the world in and -like settings throughout the United States and

Europe; the abuse of colonized populations in the Philippians and prisoners in Abu

Ghraib, the extermination of victims of the Holocaust, and the stigmatization of people from my family’s homeland of Maramureș, Romania. Underlying all of these arguments, I argue that that the question “what is man?” (as opposed to the animal) is not a question philosophy should attempt to answer, but a power dynamic that we should, instead, seek to critique.

vi

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Matthew Kohrman. It was his class on biopolitics that first ignited my interest in the topic. I still remember it fondly as one of the very best courses I have ever taken.

I would like to thank Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Her decision to serve as my advisor after

Ursula accepted a new position helped to save my academic career. However, more than just an advisor in name only, she has grown to be a friend and mentor.

And, most of all, I would like to thank Ursula Heise. She is a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration. She was the one who first suggested that I study locavorism and first encouraged and supported me to work on at a time when no one had ever heard of it. I could not have asked for a better advisor.

vii

A Brief Note on Numbers:

Depending on when an individual chapter was written or the specific source cited, the estimates in the total number of animals killed worldwide range from 55 billion to 70 billion. However, this is not because there is any confusion about the approximate number of animals killed a year. In 2006 the pegged the total number of land animals killed for human consumptions at approximately 55 billion. Current estimates suggest that total number of land animals killed for human consumption is at over 60 billion. If non-land animals are included in those estimates, that number rises to approximately 70 billion. In all cases these numbers include only animals directly killed for human consumption (for food) and exclude additional animals killed for entertainment, research, fashion, or developments.

Additionally, the number I cite for the amount of greenhouse emissions released

(18%) is the most conservative (and most widely accepted) estimate currently available.

The actual percentage may well be much, much higher. For example, researchers Robert

Goodland and Jeff Anhang calculate that farmed animals could account for as high as

50%1. In either case, there is no question that the rate of for farmed animals is quite significant (and growing).

1 Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang“ and : What if the key actors in climate change are...cows, pigs, and chickens?” World Watch Magazine, November/December, Volume 22, No. viii

ix

Table of Contents

Introduction: New Weapons ...... 1 The Compassionate Carnivore (and Other Oxymorons) ...... 6 Locavores and the Commodity Fetish ...... 9 “Happy Cows” and Biopolitics ...... 12 Deleuze and the “Happy” Farm ...... 15 Engaged and Subjecthood ...... 18 Part I: Green and ...... 26 Cowgate: Livestock’s Long Shadow and the Rise of “ Eating ” ...... 27 Livestock and Climate Change ...... 28 Comparing “Apples and Oranges” ...... 31 “Proactively” Shaping the Debate ...... 40 World Hunger and Factory Farms as an Environmental “Model” ...... 45 Climate Change Denial by Environmentalists ...... 54 You Can’t Be a Meat-Eating Environmentalist ...... 61 “Green” Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of Locavorism ...... 63 “The Vegan Utopia” ...... 66 Lack of Land ...... 69 Belgian Chocolate ...... 71 T-Shirts and DVDs ...... 73 Women in the Kitchen ...... 76 “All American” ...... 78 Saving Souls ...... 83 I Am a “Locavore” (and a Vegan) ...... 86 Tears, Compassionate Carnivores, and the Marketing of “Happy Meat” . 89 “Meet Fluffy—She’ll Be Your Lamb Chop Tonight” ...... 92 It Is Not Physically Possible to “Humanely” Raise Animals on a Large Scale ...... 95 Humanely Raised Meat Is Neither Sustainable nor Helpful to the Environment ...... 98 Consumers (and Producers) of Free-Range Animals Still Support Factory Farms ...... 101 The Big Lie: “Humane Meat” Is Neither “Happy” nor “Humane” ...... 105 Profit and Marketability, or “ Doesn’t Pay the Taxes” ...... 109 Conclusion: “Compassionate” Conservatives ...... 112 The Judas Pig: ...... 117 Of Pigs, Eagles, and Foxes ...... 119 “Fetishes” ...... 123 The Human Burden ...... 131 Part II: One Struggle - Humans and Animals - Extermination by Means of Their Continued Existence ...... 133 Introduction: What Is “Man” or Who Is Animal? ...... 134 Intersections of Oppression ...... 141 What Holds for the Animal Holds for the Colonized ...... 143 The Divisions Within Man ...... 148 Dying from Improvement ...... 151 Political Animals, Human Zoos, and the “Man in the Monkey House” ...... 156 Violence via Protection ...... 161 The Anthropological Machine ...... 169 x

The Man in the Monkey House ...... 173 “Cultural Parks” and “African Villages” ...... 181 “Man’s” Best Friend: Why Human Rights Needs - from the Philippines to Abu Ghraib ...... 194 Genocide and “Concentration Camps” ...... 201 Hot Dogs and Cannibalism ...... 204 The Benevolence Proclamation ...... 213 Part II: Animals and Abu Ghraib ...... 215 Only a Matter of Perception ...... 217 The Whopper Virgins: , Gender, and Xenophobia ...... 233 “The Purest Taste Test in the World” ...... 235 “A God-Given Right to a Juicy ” ...... 236 “Transylvania Farmers” ...... 237 “Effeminate Rice Eaters” ...... 241 Whitewashing Xenophobia ...... 244 “The Guy Who Gave Kevin A Coat” ...... 250 An Un-Happy Meal: as Humanitarian Assistance ...... 254 Exterminated by Means of Their Continued Existence: J. M. Coetzee, Animals, and the Question of Biopolitics ...... 259 Birth of Biopolitics ...... 259 Eternal Treblinka ...... 260 Extermination by Means of Their Continued Existence ...... 267 The Anthropological Machine ...... 271 Bibliography ...... 274

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Table of Figures Figure 1 Photo of Ota Benga, a captured pygmy, on display as "the missing link" between monkey and man in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo in 1906 .... 173 Figure 2 Ad for the Tjapukai "Aboriginal culteral park". Notice the difference in both race and dress. The text reads, "We've been rehearsing for 40,000 years." ..... 182 Figure 3 Cardboard cutout of an unnamed and now faceless "aboriginal." Tourists put in their own faces to take pictures of themselves as “aboriginals.” ...... 187 Figure 4 Advertisement for the “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo in Germany188 Figure 5 Souvenir Igorot Village. St. Louis: Philippine Photograph Co., 1904. Held in the Special collections department, University of Delaware ...... 197 Figure 6 A photograph of a "reconcentrado camp" or "concentration camp," at Tanauan, Batangas, ca. 1900. Held at the University of Michigan...... 201 Figure 7 Photograph of the "water cure" by Corporal George J. Vennage. Held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Special Collections department, Ohio State University ...... 215 Figure 8 Still from the original reporting on Abu Ghraib...... 227 Figure 9 Cell phone photo taken from Abu Grahib ...... 228 Figure 10 Image ...... 229 Figure 11 Hunting Image #2 ...... 229 Figure 12 Still from the “Whopper Virgins” Advertisement ...... 234 Figure 13 Still from Whopper Virgins Advertisements #2 ...... 238 Figure 14 Still from “The Whopper Virgins” Advertisements #3. Note the similarity to humanitarian relief missions...... 254 Figure 15 Still from Saturday Night Live ‘s parody “The Whopper Virgins” ...... 256 1

Introduction: New Weapons

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

—Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Societies of Control

Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

—Ani DiFranco

2

Nicolette Niman refers to herself as a “vegetarian.” She is also the former co- owner of Niman Ranch, the largest producer of so-called “humane meat” in the entire country. To justify this dichotomy, between personally being vegetarian and raising animals for slaughter (which she will never, herself, eat), she made the following claim:

As I see it, animals have entered into an arrangement with humans, an exchange of sorts. When is done, as it should be, humans can provide animals a better life than they could hope for in the wild and almost certainly a better death. That's quite significant. I have accidently left a gate open here on a number of occasions. Not one of the animals has even left the area. They don't go because what they have here is the safety of the herd, really nice pasture, water, occasional hay, and plenty of predictability. And their friends are here. To a certain degree, they chose to stay. 2

In every text for either “local” or “humane” meat, I keep coming across the identical argument—that the animals have at some undefined time and in some undefined manner “agreed” to be used by humans in a type of original “social contract” theory of animal husbandry. ,3 Joel Salatin,4 Catherine Friend,5 Kathy Rudy, 6and

Donna Haraway7 all make this same argument. These activists and academics can be quite grueling in their critique of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), since such “factory farms” are seen as violating this “original” contract between humans and other animals. However, these farms are not wrong (in the minds of proponents of humane meat) because they kill, own, or imprison animals, but only because they fail to adequately treat animals well before they are killed. In other words, factory farms are

2 Quoted in Jonathan Safran Foer, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 207. 3 Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 4 Ibid. 5 Catherine Friend, Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn (New York: Marlowe & Co., 2006); ibid., The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat (Philadelphia: Da Capo Lifelong, 2008). 6 Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 7 Donna Jeanne Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

3 only wrong because they have broken the human end of the “natural contract” between human and animals.

This argument is not a new one. Aristotle makes this same argument in his

Politics. He writes:

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this , of necessity, extends to all mankind.8

Indeed, Aristotle’s passages about animals read very similarly to Nicolette

Niman’s views on animal husbandry. In both cases, the rule of humans over animals is justified based on a belief that the animals are “better off” under than the rule of humans than they would be in the “wild,” in that they are able to live longer or enjoy a less painful death. In both cases, the domination of humans over animals is not (at least supposedly) based on humans’ desires or needs, but instead is based on saving, protecting, and preserving the animals’ lives.

Perhaps the most important part of this idea of an original “social contract” is its connection to “nature.” In one view of “nature,” it represents a series of eco-systems and environmental sustainability. Under this view, there is no way in which veganism can be seen as “unnatural” since, by virtually all accounts, it is the most environmentally

8 Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Press, 1988), Book 1, Chapter 5. 4 sustainable that one can choose. However, there is a different understanding of

“nature” and the “natural;” a view of “nature” which, in fact, stems from Aristotle as a series of teleological ends, as a kind “chain of being” that is divinely set to order the universe. Under this view of “nature,” veganism and animal rights could, arguably, be seen as “unnatural” in the sense that they represent an inversion of this “natural” order of humans over other animals. This second view of nature, as a type of God-ordained theological order, is the view of many advocates for humane meat support. For example,

Joel Salatin is the most well-known farmer and spokesperson for “local” and “humane” farming. While he is opposed to all forms of factory farms, he still believes that animals, unlike humans, “lack a soul,” so “when they die, they just die.”9 It is under this second view of “nature” that this idea of a “social contract” operates.” Hence, when Salatin (or others) speaks about factory farms as being “unnatural,” it may sound as though he is making an environmental argument when he is not (Salatin does not even believe in anthropogenic climate change).10 What makes factory farms “unnatural,” under the logic of “humane” meat, is their failure to uphold the supposed social contract between humans and animals.

In the logic of the species contract, the individual choice of a naturalized and original moment of consent becomes conflated in a single argument. The animals have

“consented” because it is “natural,” and it is defined as “natural” because the animal is presumed to have “consented.” In fact, the linkages between “consent” and “nature” are even more fundamental in that the supposed “species contract” presupposes that all

9 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 331. 10 Melissa Pasanen, “Eat Local, or Not? Debate Starts with Localvore Question and Veers Afield,” Burlington Free Press (Burlington, VT), April 11, 2014, http://archive.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20140413/GREEN/304130008/Eat-local-not-Debate-starts- localvore-question-veers-afield. 5 animals have always and already consented to all acts by human animals simply by being

“part of nature.” Hence, the species contract of a naturalized consent really removes the space for the possibility of any actual consent. In other words, the speech act of the animals seems to work in a purely one-directional valence. Via acts of supposed

“empathy” of a faux “becoming-animal” by so-called humane farmers (“translators”) we are informed that the animal has consented. (For example, cattle “chose” to stay in pens because “their friends are here.”). Yet, at the exact same time, there operates in a parallel movement a demonstrated inability to understand even the most basic ideas of animal refusal based on a supposed unspeakability and incommensurability of the animal. What we see of this supposed affect within the so-called “humane farming” movement is not a critique of anthropocentric privilege, but instead the restatement and re-entrenchment of the most basic claim of the “factory farm” system. The claim that the animals “want” to be there; they choose to be there, and, therefore, they, in some sense, agree to their treatment and hence their death becomes the ultimate expression of their protection. It is, in fact, not the case that animal agribusiness renders the animal as “voiceless” but instead that the voice is only in one direction: “Yes.”

As J. M. Coetzee,11 Alice Walker,12 Catherine MacKinnon,13 and Jonathan Safran

Foer14 have all argued, such an argument is wholly specieist. Animals never “agreed” to be owned or killed by humans any more than women ever agreed to be owned by men15,

11 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 86. 12 Alice Walker, "Am I Blue?" in Through Other Eyes: Animal Stories by Women, ed. Irene Zahava (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988), 4–5. 13 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Women's Lives, Men’s Laws (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 14 Foer, Eating Animals, 100 15 This is Catharine MacKinnon’s argument. 6 or slaves by their masters,16 and there was no more an original “founding” moment of the species contract than there was of a founding social contract as described by Hobbes in the Leviathan. All are simply biopolitical myths created to justify continued animal exploitation. As Jonathan Safran Foer phrases it, “Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.”17 In other words, the animal can, indeed must, always say “yes,” but she can never say “no.”

The Compassionate Carnivore (and Other Oxymorons)

The term biopolitics and its related corollary the “state of exception” are complicated but, at their core, they attempt to understand the way in which violence occurs in order to protect others, the way in which death occurs in order to protect life.

One can think of the famous dictum during the Vietnam War that “[i]t became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it"18 to see the fullest distillation of this idea. For example, in the Collège de France lectures, Michel Foucault charts how the concept of eugenics, a theory based on ending disease, suffering, and death, became a justification for active eugenics that caused precisely these same problems.19 Death is justified via life, disorder by order, violence by protection. It is this point that Foucault is trying to make in the beginning of Discipline and Punish—between the spectacle violence of the king, and disciplinary violence of the prison. For “power” to work most effectively, it has to “naturalize” itself to the point that it seems voluntary, invisible, and unremarkable. In

16 This is Alice Walker’s argument. 17 Foer, Eating Animals. 100. 18 “Major Describes Move,” (New York, NY), February 8, 1968. 19 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (New York, Picador, 2003); Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003); Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: , 2007); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7 other words, an under-examined aspect of biopolitics is its optical function. It is not as the “panopticon” on the one hand and the concept of “biopolitics” on the other. Instead, the panopticon is itself an example, an architectural arrangement and expression of biopolitics in which force (the discipline and regulating of human behavior) can be rendered as seemingly normal and without force and therefore, is seen to be ”protecting” and “sustaining” life. So, activist scholars such as Foucault offer us two, interrelated goals: First, how to render the seemingly invisible reality of the violence against animals visible? And, secondly, how to belie this constant, if wholly false, “biopolitical” justification for the continuation of such violence (that is, that the animals have “chosen” to be hurt and killed)?

This is why, as both an activist and a scholar, I am so particularly concerned about the “locavore” and “human farming” movements. On one hand, in terms of pure numbers, this singular focus on the locavore movement may seem ill-placed, since 99.9 percent of all animals killed for human consumption within the United States are killed in factory farm systems.20 So to focus on the locavore movement is to focus on the less than

1 percent exception that merely “proves the rule.” And, secondly, it seems misplaced in that no matter how much actual suffering occurs on these supposedly “humane farms” no one, including myself, could argue that the animals suffer “as much” as those housed in factory farm conditions. However, my worry is, in part, that by drawing increasing focus to these statistically wholly unrepresentative examples of the theoretical “” farm serves primarily to hide from the average consumer the reality of the life of animals and our species relation to them. For these locavore farms represent a manner in which the

20 “Food Choices,” Farm Forward, accessed May 17, 2011, http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/food-choices. 8 inherent power relations of become masked in a now literal rhetoric of

“pastoral care” and supposed benevolence. The reality is that the locavore movement could never function on anything other than its current tokenistic basis, as the United

Nations and many others have pointed out that it utilizes more land per pound of meat then the current “factory farm” system.21 So the locavore movement currently represents both a movement that does not currently help virtually any animals at all and one that cannot do so in the future. But this is not the essence of my critique. It is instead to suggest that even if, via the suspension of laws of either space or physics, the entire sixty (and soon to be 120) billion22 land animals currently raised and killed could be transformed from CAFO to local, free-range, and “humane” farms, such a practice would only serve to help render the staggering level of speciesist violence as even more naturalized and therefore “invisible.” In other words, far from a critique, the “locavore” or “” movement and the “factory farm” system work in tandem, allowing the locavore movement to help set up a false (but viewable) proxy for what is supposedly occurring throughout all meat production, and, at exactly the same time, rendering invisible—via the universal nature of the factory farm system—the statistical reality that a “humane farming” system is wholly impractical and would in practice make 99.9 percent of all meat unviable.

Therefore all that seems to occur via “locavorism” is that consumers in higher socioeconomic brackets purchase overpriced “humane meat,” which they consume to

“atone” for the factory-farmed animals that they continue to consume as the vast majority of their diet. And, indeed, this is exactly the case we see with virtually all advocates of

21 Henning Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome, Italy: Food and Organization of the United Nations, 2006). 22 Ibid. 9

“local humane farming” such as Michael Pollan, who repeatedly assures his readers that there are no strict rules and that small steps constitute actual change, or Catherine Friend, who, in exactly parallel fashion, not only assures her readers that they are wholly free to continue to purchase factory-farmed meat (as long as they also purchase some “happy meat” as well), but even assures us that she herself continues to consume factory-farmed meat for at least 25 percent of all her meals “because it is so convenient.”

Locavores and the Commodity Fetish

To phrase the same idea in a Marxist register, in a post-Fordist economy, consumers increasingly seem to want to “feel” like they are piercing the commodity fetish and the standardization of the assembly line, even if, in reality, this belief is wholly false. (We know we are missing something even if we don't want to actually know what it is that we are “missing.”) We see this trend in the rise of “pottery stores” where it is possible to paint pre-fabricated pottery items in order to “make” a gift for a friend. The consumers did not mine the materials, shape the pottery items (which are frequently marked on the bottom “Made in China”), or even finish the pieces in a kiln, and yet, at the same time, there could still exist an idea of “making” the item for a much higher price than if the items had been “pre-made.” Likewise there are stores in which children can

“make” their own teddy bears by easily assembling pre-fabricated components into a bear. We can see this trend in the rise of “open” kitchens in restaurants in which a small section of the food production is visible to the public so that people can “see” the food being prepared (even if it is only a small part of the kitchen that we ever see). But perhaps the best example is the move toward the creation of berry farms, where people can, for a fee, pay to pick their own berries. This movement, in which labor is re- 10 classified as a hobby (and a novelty), is itself a shift and reflection on the current state of post-Fordist society structure. But what we want to focus on is the manner in which it actually serves, via a supposedly experimental critique of the commodity fetish, to reinforce both its reality and invisibility, that is, the fact that children “assembling” a teddy bear at a mall bears little similarity to the mass production of teddy bears (perhaps also manufactured by children in far different conditions) in other countries, or paying to

“pick your own berries” bears little resemble to the reality of exploited farm labor in an industrial agriculture system. However, these experiences do not represent a “critique” of this system, but instead are part of the same system in which a certain anxiety of exploitive labor practices can, in part, be alleviated via a wholly token, expensive, and recreational experience of playing at “labor.”

So too both the locavore movement and the associated do-it-yourself self- slaughter movement represent a similar false, and wholly token, indictment of the commodity fetish. For example, both Pollan and Joel Salatin speak, at length, for the need to go “beyond the bar code” (their term for, in essence, transcending the commodity fetish) by personally interacting with the farmer, personally raising one’s “own” animals, and even personally killing these animals. Indeed Pollan (in the two most disturbing scenes of the text) personally kills “his” own chickens at Polyface farms and personally kills “feral” pigs in Santa Cruz (an experience he enjoys so much that he compares it to being high).23 And, in turn, these practices have spawned “cottage industries” of individuals raising and then killing their own animals (primarily chickens and ).24

However, while these descriptions are filled with a rhetoric of transcending the

23 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 342. 25 “Don’t Tell the Kids,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 2, 2010. 11 commodity fetish, like paying to leisurely pick berries, it represents a way to deal with the actuality of not knowing where our food comes from—while at the exact same time still managing not to know where our food comes from. In the first place, the pastoral romanticization of only eating locally, of meeting the farmers, and of “piercing the bar code” simply hide the reality of both the violence of these supposedly “happy” farms and their retrenchment of commodity culture. For example, Salatin uses exactly the same selectively bred birds on his farms (who live abnormally short and painful lives) as the factory farms do—and does so purely because it is more profitable.25 Likewise Catherine

Friend, on her supposedly “humane farm,” engages in castration, tail docketing, and forced sexual violence of her lambs (who she then sends to the exact same industrial ). So for all the rhetoric of “knowing” how these animals supposedly live, the consumers of these products actually do not know how these animals are actually raised (or killed). However, since they now believe that they know, the reality that they are still wholly engaged in the politics of the commodity fetish is not revealed but, instead, becomes even more hidden. So, like the pottery “maker” or the maker of teddy bears, what these consumers are purchasing, at premium, is the illusion of authentic knowledge and relations which are carefully constructed to produce the appearance of better care (regardless of the reality of that situation). Perhaps the best example of this

“marketing of authenticity”—or the re-entrenchment of the commodity fetish under the guise of piercing it—is that of “Niman Ranch.” Niman Ranch is the world’s largest producer of so-called “humanely raised .” However, it is no longer even owned or operated by the founder, Bill Niman, who was forced out by shareholders who wanted to

25 Gaby Wood, “Interview: Joel Salatin,” The Guardian (London, UK), January 31, 2010. A print version of this article also appeared in “The Observer Food Monthly” section of The Observer (London, UK), January 31, 2010. 12 lower animals’ living standards while still keeping the same name (and price).26 In fact, the former owner and founder, Bill Niman, will no longer eat “Niman” beef because of the current treatment of the animals.27 What I am trying to suggest that what is actually being purchased, the true “product,” is, in fact, less the meat (or for that matter the pottery) but more the idea of transcending the commodity fetish, which, since it is always and already still itself a “product” does exactly the opposite. One cannot simply “buy” her way out of the commodity fetish relationship no matter how much one pays for

“local” meat.

“Happy Cows” and Biopolitics

However, my deepest critique of the humane farmer movement is the manner in which it serves as the absolute distillation of the logic of “biopolitics.” As earlier mentioned, to the degree that there is any defense of the animal agriculture at all, it tends to stem from wholly biopolitical argument (that is, the manner in which the system helps protect life—even animal life). For example, a common attack against veganism is that the animals in the animal agriculture system would “ not have been born at all” if it weren’t for the system. Now, to be fair, every industry puts forward similar justifications.

(For example, the coal industry claims that their pollution, and consequently contribution to climate change is justified because it protects “jobs,” powers people’s homes, and keeps “America safe.”) However, what is so uniquely ironic in the case of the factory farm system is the manner in which the only product they produce is literal corpses. In other words, while other industries (such as coal) may indirectly help cause death

26 Stacy Finz, “Niman Ranch Founder Challenges New Owners,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), February 22, 2009, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/21/MNHM15ME01.DTL#ixzz1MjKULepe. 27 Ibid. 13

(releasing CO2, which helps foster climate change and therefore death), factory farms not only indirectly help produce death (the “lagoons” of waste that release CO2) but also directly produce death, since the only product of the factory farm system is the

“fabrication of corpses”(meat is, after all, simply a dead body). They are literally factories, which make, as their only product, corpses and yet, at the same time, justify themselves by the claim that they are “protecting” animals’ lives.

In other words, the primary claim for raising and killing one’s “own” for example is that she would have a “better life” than if she had been raised on a factory farm. Phrased in this manner, it can sound as though there is a critique of the factory farm system. However, by even more deeply re-entrenching the basic biopolitical argument that is the basic justification of the factory farm system (the owning and killing of animals is necessary to “protect” the animals themselves), such an argument does not, and cannot, represent an effective critique of the factory farm system since it simply replicates the original justifications of the factory farm system. In fact, in one of the industry-funded “documentaries” produced to defend the factory farm system, Smithfield farms claims that the CAFO model is justified because it helps protect animals and gives them a “better” life. For example, Temple Grandin, a pioneer in “improving” , explains how the pigs are safer “indoors” because that way they are safe from predators and disease, have access to “veterinarian care,” and even get to “enjoy air conditioning.”28 Of course, the reality is that extreme close confinement produces disease, and the predator that they have the most need to fear is the humans who keep them locked in their entire lives. The point is not only that these claims are

28 “Animal Care—Taking the Mystery out of Production at Smithfield Foods,” YouTube video, 9:07, posted by Smithfield Foods, February 24, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeXAqvj5nvg&list=PLlQ5WM5yTI9t3oHm9NtLstIC6frkCzS69. 14 wholly false, but also that they are, in essence, the same argument made by the proponents of “humane” farms. All those in the animal husbandry industry claim that their farms are “humane” farms; all farmers claim that they are better than some other farm. (Temple Grandin explains how much better factory farms are now than they used to be.)29 Most importantly, all farms claim, in the complete distillation of the biopolitical logic, that killing of the animals is justified in order to protect the animals’ own life.

This is, of course, not meant to suggest that animals suffer as much at a “humane” farm as they do in a CAFO system. They do not. It is to suggest that locavorism, which presents itself as a “critique” of the factory farm system is, in reality, part of the same system. Hence, in the same manner that consumers attempt to (ineffectively) pierce the commodity fetish via purchasing, they likewise attempt to confront discomfort at the reality of killing of animals via the killing of animals. However, it is no more possible to kill one’s way out the ironies of biopolitics than it is to purchase one’s way out of the commodity fetish. In other words, when Catherine Friend tells us that she raises and slaughters lambs because she “loves them,” there is something even more biopolitical in this justification than if she justified killing them under the belief that they were merely automatons without feelings. Humane farming, like prison “reform” versus public execution, serves the purpose of helping to render the power relations themselves both more normalized and more invisible, a fact that is, in essence, the basis of their continued justification and support. As such, humane farming not only can never mount an adequate critique of the factory farm system, but it in fact primarily serves to defend institutional practices and deflect criticism.

29 Ibid. 15

Deleuze and the “Happy” Farm

To extend briefly beyond Foucault, Gilles Deleuze in his essay “Postscript on

Societies of Control” 30 attempted to, in essence, apply Foucault to Foucault in order to illustrate strategies that go beyond Foucault himself. For example, in terms of the prison,

Foucault charts how the sovereign power of the public execution becomes more hidden

(and, in reality, more controlling) via the “humanitarian” reform of the prison system.

31Deleuze, in complete agreement with Foucault, wishes to argue that these systems did not simply stop with the industrial prison system and demonstrates how contemporary and ongoing supposedly “humanitarian” reforms represent further control, systems of surveillance, and normalization of power relations.32 Deleuze charts how the contemporary “humanitarian” reforms of the prison industrial complex, such as home arrest and ankle bracelets, while seeming to provide greater “freedom,” allow a far greater number to be included in the system of surveillance and control. 33(There are currently several times more people on “parole” then are currently in prison). Moreover, to highlight an argument that Deleuze does not make, such “reforms” do not even trade off or mitigate the original system. Hence we witness the rise of simultaneously more people incarcerated, in even more draconian conditions (“supermax” prisons with “24- hour” lockdown) in perfect parallels with the rise of new systems of probation tracking and reporting. The result is not less control but the development of new forms, techniques, and justifications of disciplining and monitoring even greater percentages of the population.

30 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 3–7. 31 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 32 Deleuze, 3-4. 33 Ibid. 6. 16

So too the purported “reforms” of local or humane farms, like ankle bracelets for inmates on probation, while seemingly more benign, in reality represent only greater control and normalization of pre-existing power relations. One could write a history of the rise of the factory farm that is parallel to the beginning of Discipline and Punishment, the spectacle violence of the in the public square, contrasted with the rise of the intensely regulated time clock of the factory farm system, which, while purporting to be more “humane” (after all the animals are now “safe” from predators), in reality represents far greater control over the lives of individual animals who can no longer even lay down or see sunlight. However, like Deleuze, we must go beyond these “politics of enclosure” to highlight that the rise of the “humane” farming movement itself represents a “society of control.” For the key myth behind the entire pastoral façade of the “local” farming movement is that it represents movement “backwards” to a time before the rise of industrial agriculture and animal farming. Indeed this is Pollan’s own precise claim when he described his experience of Joel Salatin’s farm as reminiscent of a time “long ago in

America.”34 What we are seeing, via Deleuze, is that the rise of the locavore/humane farming movement is not, nor ever has been, a move “backward” at all, but instead a creation of a new form and technique of control in order to attempt to effectively respond to mounting criticism of the existing factory farm system. Take, for example, Joel

Salatin, Pollan’s representative example of this pastoral nostalgia. Salatin buys genetically engineered chickens, moves his cattle around daily with ATV’s, markets his products online to people who drive (as he quotes on his own website) “150 miles one way to buy clean meat for my family,” markets (via his website) DVDs and t-shirts all over the country, all the while generating most of his current income by touring the

34 See “Green Eggs and Ham” (this manuscript) 17 country to lecture on the need to “return” to a more local and sustainable system. Such moves are ironic in terms of being “local,” but they are also false in terms of representing in any authentic sense a return to an “earlier” time in American history. If animal agriculture moves forward by the breeding of genetically modified animals, such a move is, in full alignment with Deleuze, a move of continuing (if less visible) control. We can see the chickens and turkeys “happily” plucking away in the images of an open pasture, which, at the same time, conceals their misshapen, and abnormally large breasts, the killing of all the males unneeded for agriculture production, their abnormally short lifespans, the shipping in FedEx containers across the country, and they reality that they have become so genetically modified that they can only be bred via . To return to our optical discussion, this supposed hyper-visibility of the open pastoral farm and the open-air slaughter house (highlighted in documentaries such as Food, Inc.) conceal the intense amount of anthropocentric control we are intentionally not shown. To repeat Deleuze, the local and human farms represent not a “return” to previous forms of public sovereign violence over animals’ lives, but instead the creation of something new—a movement beyond the politics of full enclosure (the animals are now seemingly more free) into the societies of control (but this very freedom is now predetermined by their genetic control and conditioning).

Moreover, as earlier mentioned, Deleuze makes, in essence, one important mistake. In Postscript on Societies of Control, he claims that the politics of enclosure are both ending and are being replaced with societies of control. As he writes,

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure— prison, hospital, and factory, school, family… everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a 18

matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.35

However, given the coterminous rise of both probation and incarceration (in both total numbers and intensity of confinement), societies of control have not operated by displacing or reducing preexisting disciplinary apparatuses or spaces of enclosure but instead have operated in perfect tandem. Hence, one can respond to the criticism of prison not by calls for decimalization, or prison abolition, but instead by increasing the use of probation, ankle bracelets, and home tracking mechanisms. So too, as already discussed, the rise of the locavore/human farming movement has not, in any way, correlated with a decline in the factory farm system in terms of either the number or the intensity of the CAFOs themselves. Hence, like the coterminous rise of probation and supermax prisons, we can witness the rise of “humane farms” and the growth of the factory farm system (which is now being effectively exported to countries such as India,

China, and Brazil and is excepted to double in the next ten years). So the actual result of people raising and killing their own animals is not to improve the lives of any animals, but instead to bring more animals (and people) into the animal industrial complex who are now simply killing more rabbits themselves (in order to provide them with “a better life”), even as the factory farm system continues to increase exploitation unabated (and indeed to double in size).

Engaged Veganism and Subjecthood

Late in his life, Foucault started to articulate an idea that he referred to as

“technologies of the self.” The essential idea was that each of these technologies that he had been charting that shaped subjecthood (for example, controlling certain types of

35 Deleuze , 3-4. 19 posture, sexual relations, diet, etc. . ) could be appropriated by the self to shape the

(future) self. For example, Foucault charted how the military utilized certain techniques of posture (“head back, shoulders straight”) in order to foster a certain subject (a certain

“self”) within the members of the military. So in his work on “technologies of self,” he began to explore how an individual could start to use these same techniques, to begin to shape one’s own subjecthood. As should be clearly noted from the awkward phrase “to shape one’s own subjecthood,” such a process is, by definition, ironic. The subjecthood by which one begins the practice is intentionally changed by the practice itself that, in the end, creates a different subjecthood. In otherwords the “self” that “chooses” to engage in the “technologies of the self” is not the same “self” that such “technologies” in turn

“produce.”

The idea that the manner in which certain practices can help to foster an internal subjecthood is therefore our final critique of “humane” farming, and, at the same time, the way in which we can articulate a positive solution in the version of engaged veganism based on “care of the self. “ For my final critique of the humane slaughter movement

(and do-it-yourself backyard slaughter) is the manner in which it can foster a certain subjecthood within its participants. As earlier discussed, in terms of the more than sixty billion animals that are raised and killed for human consumption each year, the impact of the person who raises and kills her own rabbit or chicken is almost negligible (although in terms of the individual animal wholly important). But why it matters is that it helps to

“democratize” the same subjecthood which lies at the basis of the factory farm system, which the humane farming/do-it-yourself slaughter movement purports to critique. Now everyone can experience that moment of raising, and then killing, their own animals. The 20 traditional advocates of , such as , would attempt to understand these practices under a utilitarian calculus of suffering—for instance, do human farming practices cause more or less suffering for individual animals than a factory farm system?

And, as already conceded, under such a calculus, such action can appear relatively benign. However, I would like to ask a very different question, namely: what are the effects on the individual subjecthood of those who raise and slaughter their own animals?

What if we understand the individual raising and killing of animals as a “disciplinary” tactic designed to foster a certain individual subject who engages in such actions? If merely standing in a particular manner can shape one’s subjecthood, how much more so would the actions of individual engaging in killing? If power is, as Foucault claims,

“always productive” what, exactly, do the power relations of personally killing animals

“produce” within the human subject?

The “answer,” as documented in every single human slaughter memoir that I have read, is, ultimately, to neuter any true effective of a critique of factory farming system and anthropocentric privilege, and at the same time to foster a betrayal of many of the practitioners’ most deeply held values. For example, , Catherine Friend, entered into raising her own lamb in part as a way to confront gender and heteronormative stereotypes of what it meant to be a “farmer.” At the same time, she records examples of forcing her female lambs to mate to against their will in a section she names “Let’s Just Forget This

Ever Happened.”36 However, we must see such actions as not simply hypocritical but instead as representative of the type of subjecthood “humane meat” practice can help to foster. How can one ever truly be critical of when she personally engages in

36 Friend, The Compassionate Carnivore. See also “Crocodile Tears” in this manuscript . 21 the killing of animals? And how can she ever truly critique the commodification of animal life when she both buys and sells the animals and their dead bodies?

To bring this introduction full circle I would ask this same question, but from the opposite direction, about the practices of engaged veganism. Again from a purely utilitarian perspective, the act of saving one (or two, or five, or ten) animals’ lives would seem negligible in a global system of production that kills over sixty billion a year. But what we must understand is not the simple arithmetic calculus of such actions but how such actions shape the subjecthood of the practitioners. If killing an animal can shape a particular subject, how can being vegan shape one in another, and wholly, different direction?

Specifically, I start with a chapter entitled “Cowgate,” in which I prove that factory farms are harmful to the environment despite the systemic moves by the animal industrial complex and its paid scientists to confuse the issue. Having established the harm to the environment created by industrial farming, in the second chapter, entitled

“‘Green’ Eggs and Ham,” I reveal how the environmental defenses by “locavores” are also untrue and, indeed, exist in part to conceal xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and calls for returns to traditional gender norms. I continue this same critique of so-called

“humane” meat in the chapter entitled “Crocodile Tears,” which critiques the work of the humane farmer Catherine Friend, as an entry point to examine these broader contradictions found within the “local” and “humane” meat movements. As discussed in this introduction, while Friend believes that she is raising animals because she loves them, her own texts reveal that they live short lives filled with pain and confinement. In a 22 final chapter entitled “The Judas Pig,” I examine the biopolitical justification for the extermination of so-called “feral” pigs on Santa Cruz Island by The Nature Conservancy.

In the second half of the text, I return to other sections in Aristotle about “slaves” and “females” and their supposed relationship to animals. I start with a chapter entitled

“What is ‘Man’ or Who is Animal?” in which I set out the theoretical stakes in the chapters to follow In the second chapter, entitled “Political Animals, Human Zoos, and the ‘Man in the Monkey House,’” I return specifically to Aristotle and his definition of man as a “political animal.” My argument is that the idea of personhood represents only a social construct in which the polis can decide who does, and does not, count as a

“person.” I then explore these theoretical ideas via the historical legacy and ongoing reality of so-called “human zoos,” in which colonized subjects are displayed in zoos with animals, and as exotic animals themselves. My point is that these so-called "human zoos," which still exist to this day, point to the performance optics by which power attempts to police who is, or is not, considered socially as a “person.”

In “‘Man’s’ Best Friend: Why Human Rights Needs Animal Rights from the

Philippines to Abu Ghraib,” I extend this same analysis of the social construction of personhood to examine the historical case of the Philippines and the contemporary example of the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib. In a broader sense, the chapter argues that a failure to include animals’ rights renders human rights indeterminate and ineffective.

Therefore, the paradoxes inherent in human rights, such as the state of exception as outlined by Giorgio Agamben, can only be solved if animal rights are included within this analysis. Therefore, I argue, both the Philippines and Abu Ghraib demonstrate that as long as “animals” lack any rights or standing under law, human animals will also always 23 be in danger of being redefined as “only animals” and therefore can lose any rights or standing under law.

In the fourth chapter, “The Whopper Virgins: Hamburgers, Gender, and

Xenophobia,” I extend these same analyses to my family’s homeland of Maramureş,

Romania. Specifically, I focus on a 2008 advertisement campaign by Burger King entitled The Whopper Virgins, which purported to go to the “the most remote parts of the world” to discover people who “did not even have a word for hamburger.” In this chapter, I argue that the success behind this campaign was not tied to a taste test as the ads claimed. Instead, I argue, the advertisements were effective because of the linkages they made between the consuming of meat from Western-style fast food restaurants and the stereotype of “the effeminate rice eater” which has a long history of being deployed as a rhetorical means to naturalize colonialism and xenophobia. More than a focus on a single ad campaign, however, the point of this chapter is that such a campaign “worked” because the stereotypes between meat eating, gender, and xenophobia continue to have relevance with a broad section of the public in the United States. These ads mask the hunger and poverty of the so-called “third world” in a naturalized discourse based on supposed deficiencies in diet. Consequently, “The Whopper Virgins” refigures the imposition of the Western-style fast food diet from a neoliberal imposition into an act of

“humanitarian” assistance. As such, this chapter combines the first half of the text

(focused on eating meat) with the second (focused on issues of race, gender, and colonization) to highlight how two strands can work synergistically and Western-style meat can, itself, become the ultimate form of “humanitarian assistance.” 24

In the final chapter, entitled “Exterminated by Means of their Continued

Existence: J. M. Coetzee, Animals, and the Question of Biopolitics,” I examine the highly controversial claim made by J. M. Coetzee, Jacques Derrida, Theodore Adorno, Isaac

Bashevis Singer, and Reviel Netz, among others, that there exists a connection between the mistreatment of animals and the Holocaust. My essential argument is that these so- called “comparisons” have been dismissed as suggesting a moral equivalency between the mistreatment of humans and animals. Instead, I argue, what these theorists actually argue is not about moral equivalency, but historical genealogy. Or, in other words, what they argue is that, in part, these types of extreme abuses we witness in examples such as death camps are rendered possible (in both technical and legal terms) because of this preexisting mistreatment of animals, and, more specifically, that coming to view life in purely statistical terms represents a view of life harmful to both humans and other animals

A brief final word on both the disciplinary home and writing style of this text as a whole. Much like the diverse committee members who have helped me to write it, this text draws from and is grateful to the fields of American studies, literary studies, critical theory, and anthropology. For example, the chapter “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham” might well be at home within an American studies program, and the chapters “Political Animal,” and

“‘Man’s’ Best Friend” not only reflect on the historical origins of anthropology, but also draw on my own ethnographic experiences at contemporary “cultural parks” in Australia.

And the final chapter “Extermination by Means of Their Continued Existence” draws on

Elizabeth Costello, a literary text. However, while this text draws upon each of these fields, it is not, in fact, based within any of them. It is instead, intentionally and self- 25 consciously, written in a style that places it within the still emerging field of critical animal studies, a field of study that I have spent the last decade helping to create. The key idea behind the field of “critical animal studies” is to create a type of discourse that unites activists and academics together in a way of thinking and speaking that can put all of our work together in service of helping actual animals.

There is tendency I have noticed for people to respond to critiques by Foucault and Deleuze against previous acts of “reform” in a defeatist manner, as though no change were possible (since it is all “power” in any case). However, such a view flies directly against the rejoinder made by Foucault that “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.” The same holds true for the comment by Deleuze that what we need is “not fear or hope,” but only to “look for new weapons.”

To critique systems of “reform” is not to suggest that there is nothing to be done, but instead that what is needed is not “piecemeal” reform but revolutionary actions. What we need are not “better” (“free,” “kinder,” “more open”) prisons but no prisons at all. What we need are not “better” (“gentler,” “more humane,” “more local”) animal farms but no animal farms at all. The realization that “reform” may always fail should not dampen activism but instead could serve to ignite it. Because every tool, even our own pens as scholar activists, can become a weapon, if we but hold it right. 26

Part I: Green Eggs and Ham

27

Cowgate: Livestock’s Long Shadow and the Rise of “Meat Eating Denial”

The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of , climate change and air pollution, water shortage and , and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale, and its potential contribution to their solution is equally large. The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.

—Executive Summary, Livestock’s Long Shadow, Report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization , 2006

Forget all that indecorous talk of animal flatulence, cow burps, , and global warming. Welcome to Cowgate. Lower consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming—despite persistent claims that link such diets to more greenhouse gases. So says a report presented Monday before the American Chemical Society. It is the bovine version of Climategate, complete with faulty science and noisy activists with big agendas. —The Washington Times, March 23, 2010

28

Livestock and Climate Change

Virtually every researcher that has studied these issues has come to the conclusion that animal agriculutre harmful to the environment. For example, in a special energy and series of the medical journal , all of the members interviewed agreed on the environmental effects of livestock on climate change.37 They reached the conclusion, as Dr. John Powles, a public health expert at Cambridge University, put it, “that leaves reducing demand for meat as the only real option.”38 Likewise, researchers at The

University of Chicago suggested that the food people eat is just as important as what kind of cars they drive when it comes to creating the greenhouse-gas emissions that many scientists have linked to global warming.39 These conclusions, in turn, led , an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at The University of Chicago to claim, “We neither make a judgment nor do we make a categorical statement. We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet.”40

The most categorical and effective of these statements on the environmental dangers of raising livestock was made by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization

(FAO), which issued a report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow, concluding that animal

37 For a clear summary of the issue see “Eating Less Meat May Slow Climate Change,” Associated Press, September 13, 2007, http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/23011. See also Sharon Friel et al., “Public Health Benefits of Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions: Food and Agriculture,” The Lancet 374, iss. 9706 (2009): 2016–2025, http://www.thelancet.com/series/health-and-climate-change and Anthony J. McMichael et al., “Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health,” The Lancet 370, iss. 9594 (2007): 1253–1263, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140- 6736(07)61256-2/abstract. 38 Ibid. 39 The University of Chicago News Office, “Study: Vegan Diets Healthier for Planet, People than Meat Diets,” press release, April 13, 2006, http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtml. See also Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin, “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming” Earth Interactions 10, no. 9 (2006): 1. 40 The University of Chicago News Office, “Vegan Diets Healthier.” See also Eshel and Martin, “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming.” 29 farming presents a “major threat to the environment” with such “deep and wide-ranging” impacts that it should rank as a leading focus for environmental policy. The report concluded that “[t]he livestock sector is a major player [in climate change], responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.”41 Nor was the call for action at all hidden. As Henning Steinfeld,

Chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch and senior author of the report put it: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”42 And the chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr.

Rajendra Pachauri, has repeatedly suggested that people should decrease their consumption of meat in order to help offset climate change. As he recently stated, “In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity … Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there”43 All of this evidence caused Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to conclude that “the best solution would be for us all to become vegetarians.”44

Unfortunately, this near scientific consensus on the environmental effects of meat eating is not more well known because of something I term “meat eating denial.”45 I mean this analogy as a reference to the concept of “climate change denial,” that is, the

41 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi. 42 Ibid. See also United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock a Major Threat to Environment: Remedies Urgently Needed,” FAO Newsroom, November 29, 2006, http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html. 43 Juliette Jowit, “UN Says Eat Less Meat to Curb Global Warming,” The Observer (London, UK), September 7, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/07/food.foodanddrink. 44 BBC News. “Is It Time to Turn Vegetarian?” BBC Two, June 3, 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/newsnight/2008/06/is_it_time_to_turn_vegetarian.html.

30 concept that large-scale businesses with a specific interest in influencing public policy internationally misrepresent scientific studies, via a series of rhetorical strategies, in order to influence public opinion. This is not to suggest that all the information is “false,” but it does suggest that this information is presented to the media in an intentionally biased manner that, in turn, produces media coverage that effectively distorts public opinion on the issue. For example, according to the most recent Pew research, belief in climate change has been steadily eroding even as scientific support has steadily been growing. In

April 2008, 71 percent believed in climate change; by 2009, that number had fallen to only 51 percent, of which an even smaller percentage, only 36 percent, believe that climate change is caused by human activity.46 What changed was not the scientific consensus about climate change (which has only grown) nor individual reasons and ethics, but instead the creation of an effective and systematic attempt to distort public information based, in part, on claims that scientific assertions about climate change had been “debunked.” Likewise, a similarly successful pattern of supposed “debunking” of scientific studies was undertaken by the meat and dairy industry to confuse the public about the environmental effects of eating meat. It is in this broader sense that I make the analogy between “climate change” denial and “meat eating” denial.

Specifically in this chapter, I focus on the most effective form of “meat eating denial,” that of research by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, sponsored by animal agribusiness, as a representative example of the growing manner in which animal agribusiness has been able to utilize the strategies earlier used by climate change deniers in order to distort the debate on livestock production and its environmental effects. I focus on Mitloehner’s

46 The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming, Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, 2009, http://people- press.org/report/556/global-warming. 31 research in some detail because his supposed “debunking” of the link between animal agriculture and greenhouse gas emission has been the most effective and most widely reported example of “meat eating denial.” I argue therefore that environmental organizations should themselves begin to prioritize the issue of eliminating animal agribusiness as part of their attempts to protect the environment.

Comparing “Apples and Oranges”

In 2006, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) produced a report, entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow, which concluded that worldwide meat production produced 18 percent of all emissions relating to climate change, which the report went on to note was “a higher share than transport.” The response, particularly by livestock-based agribusiness, has been to emphasize minor errors in the report that do not dispute the essential claim linking animal agriculture to greenhouse gases but which at the same time, they suggest, “disprove” the report. For example, Frank Mitloehner, a researcher at the University of California, Davis agriculture division gave a presentation entitled

“Clearing the Air" before the 239th national meeting of the American Chemical Society

(ACS) criticizing the UN report. In this presentation, Mitloehner essentially made two arguments. The first one, which was not his main point, was that the number “18 percent” represents only a worldwide average and therefore does not directly say anything about the “carbon footprint” of any one particular country (see footnote for a full discussion of this point).47 This is true, although it does not in any way dispute the validity of the 18

47 A sub-point of this argument is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pegs current emission rates by the United States at only 3 percent, a claim that Dr. Mitloehner routinely cites as the “correct” estimate of U.S. emissions. However, the problem with this claim is that the EPA’s estimate is not, itself, a full “life-cycle” estimate. Specifically it leaves out issues such as using fuels to make , tilling soil to grow feed crops, and even transportation of meat to market. As Ralph Loglisci, the Project Director for the Johns Hopkins Healthy Monday Project , explains: 32 percent itself, and the UN is currently working on precisely this type of country-by- country break down.48 However, it was his second argument, which is both the main one he stressed and the one emphasized by all the media coverage of the presentation, that caught international attention. Namely, the report claimed that agriculture released more greenhouses gases than transportation; this statement was incorrect, not because it over- reported the amount of emissions by livestock, but instead because it underestimated the amount produced by the transportation industry. Specifically, he pointed out that the study had only focused on the amount of gases being released via transportation (that is, emissions) but had not included the entire “lifecycle” amount of transportation, that is, how many emissions went into, say, mining the materials to build the cars. As the press release from the event explained:

Mitloehner says confusion over meat and ’s role in climate change stems from a small section printed in the executive summary of a 2006 United Nations report, Livestock’s Long Shadow. It read: “The livestock sector is a major player,

A while ago I called up the EPA to find out why their numbers were so different. One researcher told me it’s because their figures omit many of the factors that Livestock’s Long Shadow takes into account. If you read the executive summary of the EPA’s 2009 U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory report you’ll see that, unlike Livestock’s Long Shadow, when EPA researchers determined U.S. agriculture’s contributions they were not looking at GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from fuel combustion or CO2 fluxes due to land use (Ralph Loglisci, “How Much Does U.S. Livestock Production Contribute to Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” (Baltimore: Center for a Livable Future, 2009), http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2009/08/how-much-does-us-livestock-production- contribute-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions/).

Therefore Mitloehner himself routinely employs exactly the same type of “apples and oranges” comparison (contrasting a lifecycle assessment from the UN against a report from the EPA that is not), which he claims is inherently misleading and detrimental to the scientific process. Further, this does not mention that the attempt to use only percentages of emissions (versus total emissions themselves) is itself completely misleading. The EPA statement of 3 percent of total emissions, even if that number was accurate, tells us little about our contribution to worldwide livestock emissions and instead shows us how polluting the United States is in other areas. As Loglisci again phrases it, “[I]ndustry groups are trying to confuse the American public by focusing on percentages rather than hard numbers. Even if the percentage is actually lower, that doesn’t mean that the total GHG emissions are any less. The fact that the U.S. spits out so much more GHG through its power plants, fossil fuel powered vehicles and factories than most other countries, it’s not surprising that the percentage number is lower. The U.S. is arguably the number one GHG emitter in the world.”(Ibid.) 48 Lisa Abend, “Meat-Eating Vs. Driving: Another Climate Change Error?” Time, March 27, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1975630,00.html. 33

responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” Mitloehner says there is no doubt that livestock are major producers of methane, one of the greenhouse gases. But he faults the methodology of Livestock’s Long Shadow, contending that numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed; animals’ digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But the transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport lifecycle-related factors. “This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue,” he said.49 Mitloehner’s point, as such, is accurate and has been conceded by the creators of the United Nations report. At the same time, the point is itself fairly irrelevant, as it has nothing to say about the actual rate of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. As one of the United Nations study’s co-authors, Pierre Gerber, explained, “[T]he comparability of the data does not challenge the estimate of 18 percent” since “[i]t has been endorsed by the scientific community,” and even “the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change) made reference to it.”50 In other words, Mitloehner’s presentation had nothing to say about the amount of greenhouse gases livestock actually emitted and only a minor correction of the amount produced by transportation which, in turn, had only been included for the purposes of comparison. As James McWilliams, a historian focused on the issue of food politics, writes in an insightful piece in The Atlantic:

On the grand scale of scientific errors, though, this one was relatively minor. What matters most is that the 18 percent figure—and the corresponding implication that reduced meat consumption would lower global warming— remained essentially untouched by Mitloehner’s report. Mitloehner’s only

49 “Eating Less Meat and Dairy Products Won’t Have Major Impact on Global Warming,” press release, American Chemical Society, March 22, 2010, http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222 &content_id=CNBP_024345&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=9de779de-950d-4077-bed8- ab31441ab33e. 50 Paul Armstrong, “Scientist: Don't Blame Cows for Climate Change,” CNN, March 24, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-24/tech/meat.industry.global.warming_1_climate-change-greenhouse-gas- emissions-meat?_s=PM:TECH. 34

complaint about the cattle emissions numbers was that they obscured regional variation in livestock emissions. A South American country actively clearing rainforests to raise cattle will make a much greater contribution to the 18 percent figure than a country such as the United States, which is not clearing land for livestock. It’s a good point. But Mitloehner’s debunking of the transportation comparison changes nothing about the overall impact of livestock on the environment.51 However, these fairly minor corrections, which did not, in any way, dispute the actual finding of the report concerning the connection of livestock and global warming were picked up and reported by numerous media organizations that claimed, without context, that Mitloehner’s research “disproved” and “debunked” the original FAO report.

This misrepresentation was clearly intentional. As earlier noted, the American Chemical

Society issued the original press release, inaccurately entitled “Eating Less Meat and

Dairy Products Won’t Have Major Impact on Global Warming,” which also began with the opening line “Cutting back on consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming—despite repeated claims that link diets rich in animal products to production of greenhouse gases. That’s the conclusion of a report presented here today at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.”52

The press release also included the quotation from Mitloehner that “[w]e certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk …

Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”53 The

Cattlemen’s Association, which in part had helped to fund the original research, followed quickly with a press release to the AG Network, titled “Meat Avoidance Cures Flat Feet

51 James McWilliams, “Carnivorous Climate Skeptics in the Media,” The Atlantic, April 22, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/04/carnivorous-climate-skeptics-in-the-media/39177/. 52 “Eating Less Meat and Dairy Products,” press release, American Chemical Society. 53 Ibid. 35

& Other Lies,”54 which claimed that Mitloehner had “disproven” the UN report.

Likewise, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), which, despite the positive-sounding name, is a lobbying group funded by the , also released a series of press releases to the same effect. As the CCF blog explains, “We felt yesterday’s news deserved a big audience, so we circulated a statement to the media … Perhaps one day the anti-meat activists at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and HSUS

(The Humane Society of the United States) will get the memo: We should be applauding eco-friendly American livestock farmers, not attacking them.”55 The result was that the story was widely carried through the news media but only in a completely inaccurate manner. No news agency reported that a minor correction to an otherwise entirely accurate report had been noted. Instead, universally, the story was reported as though the link between animal agriculture and greenhouse gases emissions had been disproven.

Unfortunately, this completely inaccurate claim was carried by news media around the world. For example, FOX News first seized on these findings with a headline

“Eat Less Meat, Reduce Global Warming—or Not” with the introductory line “Save the planet, eat less meat ... right? That's what the U.N. said, anyway, but one scientist has a grade-A beef with that claim.”56 The FOX story even included a caption with the claim that “Reducing consumption of meat and dairy products might not have a major impact in combating global warming despite claims that link diets rich in animal products to

54 Greg Henderson, “Meat Avoidance Cures Flat Feet, and Other Lies,” press release, AG Network, March 24, 2010. 55 The Center For Consumer Freedom, “U.N. Walks Back Meat and Climate Change Report,” The Center For Consumer Freedom, March 24, 2010, http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/4136-un- walks-back-meat-and-climate-change-report. 56 “Eat Less Meat, Reduce Global Warming—or Not,” FOX News, March 23, 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/23/eat-meat-reduce-global-warming/#ixzz1DxYE9tx5. 36 production of greenhouse gases.”57 Likewise, CNN carried a headline saying, “Scientist:

Don’t Blame Cows for Climate Change.”58 Time magazine covered it with the headline

“Meat-Eating Vs. Driving: Another Climate Change Error?”59 The Washington Examiner and The Washington Times ran the article under the headlines “Don’t Blame Climate

Change on the Cows”60 and “Meat, Dairy Diet Not Tied to Global Warming,”61 respectively. In Australia, the story was covered by both The Sydney Morning Herald and

The Age under the headline “Eating Less Meat ‘won't help climate’”62 and by The

Australian under the headline “Emissions Campaign Lacks Meat.”63 Maclean’s, published in Canada, ran the story under “Where’s the Beef: Scientist Takes a Second

Look at UN Numbers that Have Led Many Environmentalists to Forego Meat,” beginning with the line, “For those advocating for urgent action on the climate change, it’s been a rough few months … Now the latest: the notion, trumpeted by environmentalists and animal rights crusaders in Europe and in North America, that reducing our consumption of meat will help keep the planet cool [has been disproven]”64

The Toronto Sun covered the story, in a column piece, under the title “My Beef with

57 Ibid. 58 Armstrong, “Scientist: Don’t Blame Cows.. 59 Abend, “Meat-Eating Vs. Driving.” 60 Barbara Hollingsworth, “Don’t Blame Climate Change on the Cows!” Washington Examiner (Washington, DC), March, 25, 2010, http://dev.www.washingtonexaminer.com/topics/tags/?keywords=%20Dr.%20Frank%20Mitoehner#ixzz1 DyjBEbYS. 61 Jennifer Harper, “Meat, Dairy Diet Not Tied to Global Warming,” The Washington Times (Washington, DC), March 23, 2010, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/23/meat-dairy-diet-not-tied-to-global-warming/. 62 “Eating Less Meat ‘Won’t Help Climate’” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), March 23, 2010, http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/eating-less-meat-wont-help-climate-20100323- qrky.html. 63 “Emissions Campaign Lacks Meat,” The Australian (Sydney, Australia), March 24, 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/emissions-campaign-lacks-meat/story-e6frg6so- 1225844469145. 64 Nicholas Kohler, “Where’s the Beef? Scientist Takes a Second Look at UN Numbers that Have Led Many Environmentalists to Forego Meat,” Maclean’s, March 30, 2010, http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/climategate/. 37

Meatless Monday,” including the sentence, “Too bad that like so many other environmental fads, turns out to be mostly a waste of time and effort and could even do more harm than good.”65 In France the piece was carried under the headline “Eating Less Meat Won’t Reduce Global Warming: Study” with the lead reading, “Eating less meat will not reduce global warming, and claims that it will distract from efforts to find real solutions to climate change, a leading air quality expert said

Monday.”66 The BBC covered the story under the neutral headline “UN Body to Look at

Meat and Climate Link,” but still included, without comment, both the claim that

“[p]roducing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries,” and that

“[s]marter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat.”67 The Times of London carried the story under the title “Now It’s Cowgate: Expert Report Says Claims of

Livestock Causing Global Warming Are False.”68 But perhaps The Daily Mail in the UK had the most emphatic headline: “Veggies Are Wrong and Eating Less Meat Will NOT

Save Planet.”69 This headline was followed with the first sentence, “Calls to save the planet by eating less meat are based on an exaggerated UN report linking livestock to global warming, according to an analysis of the study.”70

65 Connie Woodcock, “My Beef with Meatless Monday,” Toronto Sun (Toronto, Canada), March 27, 2010, http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/connie_woodcock/2010/03/26/13374961.html. 66 “Eating Less Meat Won’t Reduce Global Warming: Study,” France 24, March 22, 2010, http://www.france24.com/en/20100322-eating-less-meat-wont-reduce-global-warming-study. 67 Richard Black, “UN Body to Look at Meat and Climate Link,” BBC News, March 24, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8583308.stm. 68 Gerald Warner, “Now It’s CowGate: Expert Report Says Claims of Livestock Causing Global Warming Are False,” The Times (London, UK), March 25, 2010, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100031389/now-its-cowgate-expert-report-says-claims-of- livestock-causing-global-warming-are-false/. 69 David Derbyshire, “Veggies Are Wrong and Eating Less Meat Will NOT Save Planet,” The Daily Mail (London, UK), March 22, 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259867/Veggies-wrong-eating-meat-NOT-save- planet.html#ixzz1DxcQdr1t. 70 Ibid. 38

It is true that the UN report included an admittedly unintentional exaggeration of the comparison with the transportation industry, which does count as an “error.” But what none of these stories adequately explains is that this error had nothing whatsoever ever do to with the actual point of the study, that raising animals causes significant environmental degradation, but instead involved a single sentence included only for the purposes of comparison. Instead, universally, the headlines for all of these stories suggest that

Mitloehner’s evidence “disproved” the claim that raising farm animals helps to cause global warming as well as frequently claiming that decreasing factory farming would somehow exacerbate world hunger, even though his study had nothing to say about world hunger. However, instead of trying to correct these misunderstandings of the science involved, Mitloehner has consistently been the major force trying to distort the importance of his own findings.71 In fact, Dr. Mitloehner cites, with approval, the large

71 To be fair, since Mitloehner has fallen under criticism, he has now recently claimed that he has been misquoted throughout the news and even in the original press release by the American Chemical Society. As he recently explained to the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR):

Some of the confusion seems to trace back to a press release from the American Chemical Society after a Mitloehner talk at one of its meetings. The release quoted him saying, “We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk. Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Mitloehner believes his original quote was slightly different, and his main concern is that the FAO’s flawed assertion that livestock accounts for more emissions than transportation will lead policymakers and consumers to make the wrong choices. “I didn’t say that there is no reduction in greenhouse gases associated with animal protein consumption, but that it is a relatively small contribution and that consumers can do other things that have greater impact on this,” he said in an interview (Curtis Brainard,“Meat vs. Miles: Coverage of Livestock, Transportation Emissions Hypes Controversy,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 29, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/meat_vs_miles.php.).

This may certainly be the case and indeed this chapter is equally concerned about the manner in which the news media frames issues of animal agriculture and climate change as it is about any comments Mitloehner may or may not have made. At the same time, I personally find it difficult to believe that Mitloehner has been universally misquoted, as these identical comments have been made multiple times in forms that he easily could have changed if he did not agree with certain phrases. For example, Mitloehner gave a presentation at the California Feed and Association over a year after his interview with the CJR, which described his work in nearly identical terms to the original press release and all of the subsequently cited articles:

39 amount of coverage his talk has received (including several of the sources already cited) when addressing industry groups as a way to show his direct benefit to their business. As he recently explained in an interview with “Capital Press,” which describes itself as the

“West Coast’s agriculture home page for news”:

Today, search for Mitloehner’s name on the Internet and the word “meat” and you’ll find some 11,800 entries. “Most of them just came out in the last month,” Mitloehner said. “You will see articles from all over the world—India, Finland, Chile, Britain, you name it. You'll find that this issue of meatless Mondays has been revisited because of our contribution.”72

Or as he explained in even more concrete terms at a convention of dairy farmers:

This is the equivalent of Newsweek in Canada, it is called Maclean’s. A year ago they said “Save the planet: Stop eating meat. The UN says so, and so do a growing list of school boards. Meet the new eco enemy.” The same journalist who wrote this article a year ago called me after my talk at the American Chemical

Clearing the Air on Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change by: Frank Mitloehner, Ph.D., UC Davis Despite oft-repeated claims, it is simply not true that consuming less meat and dairy products will help stop climate change, says a University of California authority on farming and greenhouse gases. “Smarter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat,” Mitloehner said. “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Frank Mitloehner will discuss his analysis in his presentation, titled “Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contributions to Climate Change,” published in October in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Agronomy. Co- authors of the paper are UC Davis researchers Maurice Piteskey and Kimberly Stackhouse (California Grain and Feed Association, “Clearing the Air on Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change,” convention program, California Grain and Feed Association 87th Annual Convention (CCFA Improving Your Odds), Las Vegas, April 14, 2011.).

And likewise, U.C. Davis released its own press release entitled “Don’t Blame Cows for Climate Change” which reads nearly identically to the ACS’s original press release, including the original paragraph, “Despite oft-repeated claims by sources ranging from the United Nations to music star Paul McCartney, it is simply not true that consuming less meat and dairy products will help stop climate change, says a University of California authority on farming and greenhouse gases.” Again, this source specifically quotes Mitloehner as claiming that “[w]e certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk … Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries” (UC Davis News Service, “Don’t Blame Cows for Climate Change,” press release, University of California, Davis, December 7, 2009, http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9336). It simply strains credulity that if these views did not reflect Dr. Mitloehner’s own that he could not change the press release of his talk issued by the ACS, the summary of his own talk in multiple forms, or even the press release issued from his own host institution. Instead, Mitloehner claims, when speaking to industry groups, that the large press attention to his work has been helpful in proactively shaping the debate in a manner that is useful to the industry. Such comments do not sound as though he has been misunderstood. 72 Tim Hearden, “UC Scientist Quietly Wins Worldwide Attention: Researcher Finds Dairies Contribute Small Portion to Greenhouse Gases,” Capital Press, May 6, 2010, http://www.capitalpress.com/california/TH-mitloehner-050710-photo--infobox. 40

Society and now says: “Where’s the Beef? Scientist Takes a Second Look at UN Numbers that Have Led Many Environmentalists to Forego Meat.” Totally different article written by the same journalist. Totally, totally different … These are the same journalists who say something very adverse to your industry and then turn around completely once they get the facts right … CNN put it out and it was listened to and read by twenty million people, you know, CNN will really have a major impact if you hit that … And if you think it is only a question in Europe or the United States it’s not ... Australia wrote about it, numerous articles, but it went much further than that. I always wanted to know how to spell my name in Chinese, now I know how to because it went there. It went to India. It went all over the world. It was Turkey and Argentina and China and Taiwan— everywhere in the world.73

“Proactively” Shaping the Debate

It is also important to note that virtually none of the newspaper articles included the information that Mitloehner has significant ties with the beef, pork, and dairy industries.74 As Mitloehner’s own university press release admits (a fact that is absent from the original press release issued by the American Chemical Society):

Clearing the Air is a synthesis of research by the UC Davis authors and many other institutions, including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. Writing the synthesis was supported by a $26,000 research grant from the Beef Checkoff Program, which funds research and other activities, including promotion and consumer education, through fees on beef producers in the U.S. Since 2002, Mitloehner has received $5m in research funding, with 5% of the total from agricultural commodities groups, such as beef producers.75

To be more concrete, the Beef Checkoff Program is administrated exclusively by the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which describes itself as follows: “The Cattlemen's Beef Promotion And Research Board, usually referred to as the Cattlemen's Beef Board or CBB, consists of 106 members, including domestic beef, dairy

73 Frank Mitloehner, “Staying the Course in Rough Terrain,” Sustainability in the Dairy Industry, Keynote speech given at the Vita Plus Dairy Summit, Minneapolis, MN, December 8, 2010. The presentation was given as the “Welcome & Opening Session” (12:00 p.m.), and the comment cited came in the “Media Response” section of his slideshow. 74 Time briefly comments upon it as well as Maclean’s. Maclean’s’ full coverage of the topic reads, “Mitloehner is transparent about funding he has received from organizations bankrolled by the beef industry, but downplays its importance, calling one industry source ‘such a small percentage that it is inconsequential’ (Kohler, “Where’s the Beef?”). 75 “Eating Less Meat and Dairy Products,” press release, American Chemical Society. 41 and producers, as well as importers of beef and beef products.76” The board, in turn, describes the Checkoff Program:

The checkoff is a producer-funded marketing and research program designed to increase domestic and/or international demand for beef. This can be done through promotion, research and new product development, and a variety of other marketing tools. The Cattlemen’s Beef Board and USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] oversee the collection and spending of checkoff funds. As mandated by law, checkoff dollars must be invested in programs to increase consumer demand for beef [emphasis added], and to create opportunities to enhance beef producer profitability.77

In other words, to be clear, the Beef Checkoff Program is administered by the beef industry itself for the exclusive purpose of increasing the consumption of beef. As their own website again explains, “The Beef Checkoff acts as a catalyst for change. ... The checkoff program was designed to stimulate others to sell more beef and stimulate consumers to buy more beef.”78 And this is not the only funding that from the livestock industry that Dr. Mitloehner has received. As Leo Hickman, writing in The Guardian documents:

And what about the “$5m in research funding” that Mitloehner has received since 2002? As is right and proper, Mitloehner freely publishes all the details on his website as a pdf document. Here we learn that, over this period, he has received $40,000 from the National Pork Board, as well as sizeable grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and something called the Agriculture Air Research Council (AARC), which, according to the Pork Checkoff website, is “an independent, non-profit organization … formed to oversee and manage the air emissions research. The AARC board of directors has two representatives from each participating livestock sector, including one member from the National Pork Board and one from the National Pork Producers Council.”

In other words, Mitloehner’s research over the past eight years has been significantly funded by representatives of the U.S. livestock industry and the

76 “Who We Are—Cattleman’s Beef Board,” Cattleman’s Beef Board, http://www.beefboard.org/about/whoweare.asp. 77 “Beef Checkoff,” California Beef Council, http://www.calbeef.org/beefcheckoff.aspx. 78 “Who We Are—Cattleman’s Beef Board.” 42

government department charged with overseeing this multi-billion dollar industry.79

Nor are these links purely monetary. Mitloehner published a version of his talk in

California Cattleman, the magazine of the California Cattlemen’s Association, which describes itself as a “non-profit trade association, formed in 1917, that represents

California’s ranchers and beef producers in legislative and regulatory affairs.”80 Under the “editor’s notes,” the article states that “Working with the California Cattlemen’s

Association’s Feeder Council, Mitloehner has also conducted research projects on feedlot cattle emissions, comparing feed intake with greenhouse gas (GHG) output … Once the data is available, summaries of those articles will also be published in future issues of this publication.”81 Such close ties with the industry that Mitloehner is, in essence, attempting to study are of concern since the California Cattlemen’s Association has been quite clear that their strategy is to “proactively” shape the debate in a manner that favors eating beef.

As Paul Cameron, the chair of the California Cattlemen’s Association, recently explained: “[T]he constant pressure from animal rights and environmental groups brings home the need to engage in telling the positive story of the beef business. Whatever the reason, cow/calf producers, stocker operators, feeders, calf feeders, market operators across the entire industry need to participate—one person at a time—on national, state and local levels to be protective and proactive.”82 He therefore urges his members to

“[s]upport the work our Beef Checkoff Program is doing to build demand and manage the

79 Leo Hickman, “Do Critics of UN Meat Report Have a Beef with Transparency?” The Guardian (London, UK), March 24, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/24/un-meat-report-climate- change. 80 “About Us,” California Cattlemen’s Association, http://www.calcattlemen.org/aboutus.html. 81 “Livestock’s Role in Climate Change: A Closer Look at Livestock’s Long Shadow,” California Cattleman, November 2009, 14. 82 Paul Cameron, “The Benefits of Being Involved: Why the Head-in-the-Sand Approach Doesn’t Work,” California Cattleman, February 2011, 6. 43 issues that impact us all.”83 Likewise, in fall of 2009, the beef industry created a new periodical, entitled Beef Issues Quarterly, funded, in part by the Beef Checkoff Program.

And this publication is even more open about the industry’s desire to “proactively” shape the debate via both public relations and “issue management.” As the first issue explained:

Welcome to Vol. 1, No. 1 of Beef Issues Quarterly (BIQ). This publication is designed to be a tool to support the industry’s identification and management of issues that can affect beef demand … The inventor of the term “Issues Management” and the first proponent of the discipline was W. Howard Chase, a former assistant secretary of commerce under President Eisenhower and later Eisenhower’s director of public relations. Chase later served in a number of prominent public relations roles for major corporations and coined the term “public issues management” in 1976 ... He defined the function and objective of issues management as being able to manage both profit and policy by disciplined process—not by visceral impulse—and to participate in the resolution of issues and formation of policy that affects an institution rather than being at the end of a crack-the-whip line dominated by external, and usually adversarial forces … That is the purpose of Beef Issues Quarterly. To help beef industry leaders look down the road a ways and identify potential problems—the slick spots, the accidents waiting to happen, but also opportunities that may be leveraged.84

Mitloehner published an article, entitled “Livestock’s Role in Climate Change,” that, in essence, made each of his environmental arguments already discussed, in this first issue of Beef Issue Quarterly.85

Mitloehner has similar ties to the dairy industry. For example, in 2011, Western

DairyBusiness named him the “Outstanding Dairy Industry Educator/Researcher,” an award presented at the “Dairy Profit Seminar.”86 As the name “Dairy Profit Seminar” would suggest, the stated purpose of this conference is to help the dairy industry to increase its profit and, like the California Cattlemen’s Association, to “proactively” shape

83 Ibid. 84 “Advisory Panel Outlook,” Beef Issues Quarterly 1, no. 1 (2009): www.beefissuesquarterly.com 85 Frank Mitloehner and Sara Place, “Livestock’s Role in Climate Change,” Beef Issues Quarterly 1, no. 1 (2009): www.beefissuesquarterly.com 86 Western DairyBusiness, “World Ag Expo: Dairy Profit Seminars,” conference program, Outstanding Dairy Industry Educator/Researcher, February 8, 2011, Tulare, CA. 44 the debate against both environmentalists and animal rights activists. For example, the press release for the award to Mitloehner begins with the statement, “Increasingly stringent environmental regulations have consumed the energy, time, finances, and in some cases the livelihood of dairy producers. All this in spite of the facts that Dr. Frank

Mitloehner has reported in his greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions research showing the industry’s carbon footprint has shrunk considerably over the past decades.”87

Furthermore, the award specifically thanks Dr. Mitloehner for making sure that “the dairy industry and agriculture in general are not needlessly over-regulated.”88

Mitloehner has defended himself against these accusations of bias by claiming that he is only being attacked by environmentalists and animal rights activists who are displeased by the results that science has achieved. As he phrases it, “What I really regret is that these individuals do not really argue the science but try to discredit the scientist instead (that is, conflict of interest discussion).”89 At the same time, having multiple close ties with the industry under study does raise concerns about objectivity, particularly when the organizations themselves consciously and repeatedly explain that their very purpose is to shape research to a predetermined conclusion that is favorable to their own economic self-interest. And Mitloehner himself ended a recent speech to the dairy industry in a nearly identical call to the beef and dairy industries’ own attempt to be

“proactive” in shaping the debate. As Mitloehner phrased it:

87 Ron Goble, “Mitloehner is WDB’s 2011 Outstanding Dairy Industry Educator/Researcher,” press release, Western DairyBusiness, December 24, 2010, http://dairywebmall.com/dbcpress/?p=9499. 88 Ibid. 89 Frank Mitloehner, April 2, 2010 (4:24 p.m.), comment on Jillian Fry, “Unsupported Claims About Livestock and Climate Change in the Media,” Center for a Livable Future (blog), March 29, 2010, http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2010/03/unsupported-claims-about-livestock-and-climate-change-in-the- media/. 45

So I think that there are many, many different areas, of course that play into sustainability, but the number one is your industry and other livestock industries have to take societal pressures seriously. You can’t say, in my opinion, we know how to produce milk, we do a good job, leave us alone. Because the public will not leave you alone. They are told by people on the other side that the way we produce animal protein is cruel, is polluting, is unsustainable, and, in my opinion, animal agriculture has to come out of the corner and stop being defensive. In my opinion animal agriculture has to be ahead of the curve … We have to be more proactive. We have to be ahead of the curve. And we need to start working on that.90

In the same manner that we might question a climatologist who received (and accepted) an award at an “Oil Profit Seminar” sponsored exclusively by the petroleum industry, particularly if it began by praising him for debunking climate change , so too I wish to suggest that we may be hesitant in accepting the claims of a scientist with identical ties to the beef and dairy industry, particularly when this researcher has, himself, made comments that both dairy farmers and researchers should be “proactive” along determined lines. As Gidon Eshel explained in an interview contrasting his own work, which is critical of the agribusiness, to Mitloehner’s:

Mitloehner’s study also had $5 million in underwriting, five percent of which came from the beef industry. Livestock’s Long Shadow was underwritten by “nobody whatsoever,” says Eshel. “I am not beholden to anybody, financially, morally or otherwise … “When you eat meat, you exert three times as much pressure on land demand and reactive nitrogen as you do with a -based diet.”91

World Hunger and Factory Farms as an Environmental “Model”

Furthermore, what Mitloehner seems to fail to understand is that the critique is actually not about the research itself. As earlier noted, the crafters of the report themselves agree on the two scientific critiques. It is instead a critique of the way in which he has chosen to

90 Frank Mitloehner, “Staying the Course in Rough Terrain.” The comment cited comes at the very end of the speech. 91 Ellen Kanner, “Meatless Monday: The Meat People Hit Back,” Huffington Post, May 17, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-kanner/meatless-monday-the-meat_b_576246.html. 46 phrase the significance of his research that is both biased and intentionally misleading.

For example, Mitloehner, in both the original talk and in many of the subsequent interviews on the topic, claims that reduced meat consumption would lead to world hunger: “[p]roducing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”92 Why people in other countries could not, say, eat the and currently fed to the animals is never discussed. As earlier mentioned, his own research has nothing to do with world hunger. Moreover, anyone who has studied this question has come to the exact opposite conclusion—not only would decreasing meat consumption of animals raised in factory farms not cause world hunger but it would, in fact, significantly help to alleviate hunger. As Jim Motavalli has written in a very clear summary of some of the work on this topic:

While it is true that many animals graze on land that would be unsuitable for cultivation, the demand for meat has taken millions of productive acres away from farm inventories. The cost of that is incalculable. As author Frances Moore Lappé writes, imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce . "Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked grains.” Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people.93

In other words, far from being an argument against ending factory farms, world hunger represents one the strongest arguments in favor of ending them. And, as with meat eating and climate change, virtually all major works on this topic support this idea. However,

Mitloehner simply makes the claim that decreasing factory farms would help to cause

92 “Eating Less Meat and Dairy Products,” press release, American Chemical Society. 93 Jim Motavalli, “The Case Against Meat: Evidence Shows that Our Meat-Based Diet is Bad for the Environment, Aggravates Global Hunger, Brutalizes Animals and Compromises Our Health,” E: The Environmental Magazine, December 31, 2001, http://www.emagazine.com/archive/142. 47 world hunger without any references to support it. As Jillian Fry wrote for Center for a

Living Future:

Professor Mitloehner … is quoted as saying that reduced meat production would result in more hunger in developing countries. Hunger is not addressed in the “Clearing the Air” report and it is not an issue researched by any of the report’s three authors. In fact, research has shown the opposite to be true. Some experts suggest that reducing meat production and consumption is one way to feed a growing human population.94

Let me give another example of what I mean. Dr. Mitloehner has repeatedly claimed95 that the confined feeding operations (CAFOs), or “factory farms,” are environmentally sound and should, in fact, be used as a “model” for the entire rest of the world. As he put it in a recent interview:

Mitloehner said the big picture is that U.S. agriculture is a model for the rest of the world to follow because of its growing efficiency and environmental … “My goal is to clear the air on cattle’s impact on climate change and air quality,” he concluded. And, Mitloehner’s commitment to sharing that message is making an impact. He encourages others to share the good news of U.S. agriculture and the environment with others, as well.96

He made the above statement even clearer in an interview with “Feedstuffs FoodLink”

(an agribusiness news show):

[Question:] What is it that you think you have gained most that should be recognized by the American consumer about the planet that we live in? [Dr. Mitloehner:] The most important thing that the consumers need to know is that the way we raise livestock here is really a model of how livestock should be raised. Because we can produce a certain amount of animal protein with the smallest possible environmental impact. And that is very important. We are a

94 Jillian Fry, “Unsupported Claims about Livestock and Climate Change in the Media,” Center for a Livable Future (blog), March 29, 2010, http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2010/03/unsupported-claims- about-livestock-and-climate-change-in-the-media/. 95 For example as Nicholas Kohler phrased it in the aforementioned Maclean’s interview: “Mitloehner argues the focus on reducing meat consumption is a dead end, one that distracts us from more significant sources of greenhouse gases (like that Hummer) and which may deprive hungry people in developing countries of a crucial food source—meat. He also believes more intensive livestock farming— more animals on less land—can reduce meat’s relatively small footprint even further, particularly in the developing world” (Kohler, “Where’s the Beef?”). 96 Amanda Radke, “Frank Mitloehner: Cattle and Air Quality,” Tri-State Livestock News, February 15, 2011, http://www.tsln.com/article/20110215/TSLN01/110219967. 48

model for the world with respect to how we raise cattle and pigs and chickens and so on. So that is one of the most important messages I think the consumer needs to have. Because they think eating a steak has a greater impact than driving their SUV’s or doing the other things they do in life and that is just not right. 97

Statements such as these read more like advertising than science. They are sweeping statements—not even supported by Mitloehner’s own scientific research. Mitloehner’s claim—that confined feeding operations or factory farms actually represent an environmental model that the rest of the world should attempt to emulate—is an extreme statement far outside of any mainstream discussion of the environmental effects of eating meat.98 As the Natural Resources Defense Council recently explained :

Factory farms—giant livestock farms also known as feedlots that house thousands of cows, chickens or pigs—produce staggering amounts of animal wastes. The way these wastes are stored and used has profound effects on human health and the environment … Some people hear the word “lagoon” and picture blue water, surrounded by palm trees, perhaps, or with mountains in the background. A visit to a factory farm would quickly erase this beautiful image from their minds. At factory farms, “lagoon” means an open-air pit filled with urine and manure. Lots of urine and manure—some lagoons are larger than seven acres and contain as much as 20 to 45 million gallons of wastewater. The waste is collected with scrapers, flushing systems, or gravity flow gutters, and then stored in lagoons. Opportunities for disaster abound. The lagoons can leak or rupture, for instance, or they can be filled too high. But even if none of these problems occur, the lagoons still release gases. Their horrible stench and toxic chemicals harm workers and nearby residents. Sprayfields are yet another threat. Manure is periodically pumped out of lagoons and sprayed on fields. Although manure can

97 “Don’t Blame the Cows!” YouTube video, 5:37, posted by Feedstuffs FoodLink, August 22, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf7ueqqQty8. 98 Ironically, Mitloehner primarily supports this view by citing the report Livestock’s Long Shadow itself. And it is true that the report does describe several problems with pasture-fed beef. However, what I see in these claims is a critique of “free-range” meat, not an endorsement of factory farms as an environmental model nor a repudiation of the idea that a decrease in the consumption of domestic meat could not help the environment. As Pierre Gerber, the co-author of the report, himself explained in the aforementioned Time article:

Already, Mitloehner’s finding is leading many to suggest that reducing meat consumption or using more sustainable livestock management systems won’t help mitigate climate change. But for the FAO’s Gerber, that’s just not the case. “You have to find a balance depending on local circumstances,” he says. “Maybe in Africa I need to improve meat and dairy production. But that in affluent countries, in places where each person on average annually eats 80-120 kilos of meat, a lot can be done to reduce emissions at the consumption level.”(Abend, “Meat-Eating Vs. Driving.”) 49

be an excellent fertilizer when it is applied at rates that crops can absorb, it must be safely—and sensibly—applied. But factory farms produce far more manure than their land requires, and they often overapply it to fields, causing it to run off the fields and into rivers and streams. Farmers may also spray when it is rainy or windy, or with little regard for adjacent property. In addition, the act of spraying wastes increases evaporation and vaporization of pollutants. The natural environment also suffers in many ways from factory-farming practices. Sometimes the damage is sudden and catastrophic, as when a ruptured lagoon causes a massive fish kill. At other times, it is cumulative—for example, when manure is repeatedly overapplied, it runs off the land and accumulates as nutrient pollution in waterways .Either way, the effects are severe. 99

Likewise, the Union of Concerned Scientists compiled a 68-page report entitled CAFOs

Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations. As the title would suggest, the report criticizes factory farms and echoes all of the critiques made by the

Natural Resources Defense Council. To quote only the section on water pollution (there are equal sections on air pollution, human health, climate change, and others):

Disposal of CAFO manure on an insufficient amount of land results in the runoff and leaching of waste into surface and groundwater, which has contaminated drinking water in many rural areas, and the volatilization of ammonia (i.e., the transfer of this substance from manure into the atmosphere). Several manure lagoons have also experienced catastrophic failures, sending tens of millions of gallons of raw manure into streams and estuaries and killing millions of fish. Smaller but more numerous spills cause substantial losses as well. Remediation of the leaching under dairy and hog CAFOs in Kansas has been projected to cost taxpayers $56 million—and Kansas is not one of the country’s top dairy- or hog- producing states. Based on these data, a rough estimate of the total cost of cleaning up the soil under U.S. hog and dairy CAFOs could approach $4.1 billion.

The two primary pollutants from manure, nitrogen and phosphorus, can cause (the proliferation and subsequent death of aquatic plant life that robs freshwater and marine environments of the oxygen that fish and many other aquatic organisms need to survive). For example, runoff and leaching from animal sources including CAFOs is believed to contribute about 15 percent of the nutrient pollution that reaches the Gulf of Mexico, where a large “dead zone”—

99 “Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health: Waste Lagoons and Manure Sprayfields—Two Widespread and Environmentally Hazardous Technologies—Are Poorly Regulated,” Natural Resources Defense Council, last revised on February 21, 2013, http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspills.asp. 50

devoid of fish and commercially important such as —has developed.100

Most categorically, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production conducted a two-and-a-half-year study of American animal agriculture. The executive summary explained, “The Commission heard approximately 54 hours of testimony from stakeholders and experts, received technical reports from academics from institutions across the country, and visited operations in Iowa, California, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Colorado, to gather information on each of the subject areas. In addition, each of the

Commissioners brought his or her own unique experiences and expertise to bear during

Commission deliberations.”101 The unanimous finding from all of its 15 members was that

[w]hile increasing the speed of production, the intensive confinement production system creates a number of problems. These include contributing to the increase in the pool of -resistant bacteria because of the overuse of ; air quality problems; the contamination of rivers, streams, and coastal waters with concentrated animal waste; animal welfare problems, mainly as a result of the extremely close quarters in which the animals are housed; and significant shifts in the social structure and economy of many farming regions throughout the country.”102

Again to quote just the section on water pollution (there were, again, equal sections on human health, air quality, resource usage, animal welfare, and other issues):

The annual production of manure produced by animal confinement facilities exceeds that produced by humans by at least three times (EPA, 2007). Manure in such large quantities carries excess nutrients, chemicals, and microorganisms that find their way into waterways, lakes, groundwater, soils, and airways. Excess and

100 Doug Gurian-Sherman, “CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations,”Union of Concerned Scientists, April 2008, 4, http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture/cafos- uncovered.html. 101 Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America (Baltimore: Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2008), 1. 102 Ibid., 3. 51

inappropriate land application of untreated animal waste on cropland contributes to excessive nutrient loading and, ultimately, eutrophication of surface waters.

IFAP runoff also carries antibiotics and hormones, pesticides, and heavy metals. Pesticides are used to control insect infestations and fungal growth. Heavy metals, especially zinc and copper, are added as micronutrients to the animal diet. Tylosin, a widely used antibiotic (macrolide) for disease treatment and growth promotion in swine, beef cattle, and production, is an example of a veterinary pharmaceutical that decays rapidly in the environment, but can still be found in surface waters of agricultural watersheds.103

To quote perhaps the two most important sentences from the entire report, “[T]he ratio of fossil fuel energy inputs per unit of food energy produced averages 3:1 for all U.S. agricultural products combined. For industrially produced meat products, the ratio can be as high as 35:1 (beef produced in feedlots generally has a particularly unfavorable energy balance).”104 Furthermore, the report also specifically addressed Mitloehner’s assertion that CAFOs should serve as an environmental “model” for the developing world. In a section entitled “The Global Impact of the US Industrial Food Animal Production

Model,” the report documented:

[M]ultinational corporations involved in the animal protein industry scour the world looking for countries with cheap labor and large expanses of land available to cultivate feed for food animals. When they find these areas, they bring along the production model that served them well in developed countries.

This all sounds well and good if the CAFO model allows a country to increase its level of development and feed its citizens, but often these countries are not equipped to deal with the problems that can be associated with CAFOs. For example, CAFOs produce large amounts of pollution if they are not managed and regulated properly. Even in many areas of the United States, we are barely able to deal with the harmful effects of CAFOs. In the developing world, governments and workers often do not have the ability or resources to enforce environmental, worker safety, or animal welfare laws, if they even exist. Or if a country does have the capacity, it often chooses not to enforce regulations in the belief that the economic benefits of a CAFO offset any detrimental impacts.

103 Ibid., 9. 104 Ibid., 29. 52

But unregulated CAFO facilities can have disastrous consequences for the people living and working around them. Rivers used for washing and drinking may be polluted. Workers may be exposed to diseases and other hazards that they neither recognize nor understand because of their limited education.

As the Commission looks at the impact of the industrial model in the United States, we must not forget that these types of operations are being built all around the globe, often on a larger scale and with less regulation.105

Mitloehner likes to claim, in both speeches and interviews, that he is a scientist merely attempting to interject scientific rigor into debates about animal agriculture and the environment against unscientific animal and environmental activists. For example, as

Mitloehner recently explained to an agribusiness-supported news outlet:

Mitloehner added he has noticed that the tone of coverage has changed for some media organizations that previously portrayed the beef and dairy industries as destructive to the planet. “Prior to our article, everyone said if you cut animal protein from your diet, this is the biggest contribution you could make to reduce global warming,” Mitloehner said. “I think we infused some science into this discussion. I don't think it was always all that scientific.”106

However, the reality is that it is Mitloehner’s claims—such as his comments about world hunger, his claim that decreasing domestic meat consumption would not help the environment, and particularly the claim that factory farms should represent an environmental “model for the world,”—that are deeply and fundamentally at odds with virtually all other mainstream science on the topic. In fact I cannot find a time when

Mitloehner cites, or even discusses, any of the reports I’ve mentioned, not the Natural

Resources Defense Council, not the Union of Concerned Scientists, not the Pew research study.

As such, it is difficult not to see Mitloehner’s research, itself supported and recognized by the beef and dairy industry, as intentionally biased, not in the sense that the

105 Ibid., 9. 106 Hearden, “UC scientist quietly wins worldwide attention.” 53 particular scientific findings themselves are false because the comparison with the transportation industry was indeed incorrect, but in the sense that the conclusions he attempts to draw from these findings are sweeping, unsupported, and inaccurately biasing to any conversation on the topic. What any reasonable listener would take away from

Mitloehner’s comment that the most important item affecting the planet is that consumers need to use factory farms as an environmental model for the world is not that the comparison with transportation is flawed, or that a global average cannot account for regional variation. It is instead intended to help engender the belief that American livestock production, including factory farms, is not harmful to the environment or to human health, which are demonstratively false beliefs. Therefore I believe that meat eating denial operates in a similar method as climate change denial, in which, a single and relatively minor error in reports are seized on as a way to “disprove” and “debunk” the reports as whole, as though one error, no matter how insignificant or unrelated, was significant enough to disprove an entire study. Likewise, research by a single scientist not even trained as climatologist,107 with questionable ties to the industry under study, is held up as superior to the broad-based consensus of numerous domestic and international researchers working on the same topic for many years.

In fact, this comparison, between meat eating “denial” and climate change

“denial” has been made by many of the journalists who reported on the story. For example, the same previously quoted FOX report concludes by stating that:

Numerous other mistakes [than the one in the FAO] in U.N. reports have been uncovered in recent months, following the leak of thousands of e-mails from a climate-science group in England, a scandal labeled “Climate-gate.” First, scientists in the United Kingdom were caught covering up data that showed global

107 Dr. Mitloehner is not a trained climatologist. His received his PhD in animal science from Texas Technical University in 2000. 54

warming has not occurred for the last 15 years. Then, the Copenhagen climate conference resulted in a standoff between the U.S., China, and the third world. More recently, U.N. researchers admitted that their forecasts of melting Himalayan glaciers, disappearing polar ice caps, and dwindling Amazon rainforests were based on shoddy evidence.108

Likewise, the Time article on the topic concludes with the statement that:

In the wake of the CRU revelations, a handful of errors have been discovered in the leading scientific literature on the subject. The IPCC report, for example, claimed that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 if the world continued warming at its current rate—a finding that is not only false, but turned out to be based solely on a speculative comment that one researcher made to a reporter.109

And both The Washington Times and The Times of London, as earlier mentioned, even chose to refer to the issue as “Cowgate” in an attempt to link the errors in the report to earlier controversy about climate change known as “Climategate.” As The Times’ opening sentence read:

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unraveling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming—one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate.”110

Climate Change Denial by Environmentalists

However, this meat eating denial is perpetrated not only by those directly associated with animal agribusiness, but also by environmentalists themselves who engage in meat eating denial. The primary form this denial takes is not an outright argument against the scientific consensus but instead a simple failure to comment on the topic at all. For example, An Inconvenient Truth ends with the words “Are you ready to change the way you live? The climate crisis can be solved. Here's how to start.” The film then follows

108 “Eat Less Meat, Reduce Global Warming—or Not.” 109 Abend, “Meat-Eating Vs. Driving.” 110 Warner, “Now it's CowGate.” 55 with a series of suggestions such as “change your thermostat,” “buy energy efficient appliances,” and “change your light bulbs.”111 It does not mention eating less meat or indeed, any dietary change at all, even though producing just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef emits more carbon dioxide than does going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home and consumes more energy than leaving a 100-watt light bulb on continuously for twenty days.112 Likewise, the Environmental Protection Agency, under its “Action Steps” for “What you can do to help prevent climate change” includes suggestions such as “change 5 lights,” “look for ENERGY STAR qualified products,” and “insulate your home.”113 There is no mention of dietary change or of eating less meat. Even under the section “More Tips,” which lists more than thirty additional suggestions to help the environment, including such suggestions of marginal environmental utility as “wear sunscreen,” there is still not the slightest mention of reducing meat consumption.114 In fact, the EPA even has a section titled “Agriculture and

Forest Land” that still manages not to mention agriculture at all and to only discuss carbon sequestration in forests.115 Nor is the EPA alone in this omission. Indeed, virtually all popular guides of what an individual can do to help the planet, such as “10 Things

You Can Do to Save the Planet,”116 created as a citizen guide by the Australian government, put forward suggestions such as “take a four minute shower” but mention

111 Albert Gore et al., An Inconvenient Truth, motion picture, directed by Davis Guggenheim (2006; Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures Corporation). 112 Ian Sample, “Meat Production ‘Beefs Up Emissions’” The Guardian (London, UK), July 19, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/19/climatechange.climatechange. 113 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Action Steps,” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/actionsteps.html. 114 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Green Tips,” http://www.epa.gov/earthday/podcasts/index.html. 115 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change—What You Can Do,” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/. 116 “Join the Sustainables Household Challenge—10 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet,” The Can Do Community Blog, June 29, 2005, http://www.pigswillfly.com.au/2005/06/join-the-sustainables-household- challenge-10-things-you-can-do-to-save-the-planet/. 56 nothing about eating less meat, even though a person saves more water by refraining from eating a pound of beef than she would by not showering for an entire year.117 To be clear, none of these organizations, nor the guides that they publish, in any way states that eating meat does not harm the environment; instead they simply avoid the topic, even while promoting multiple ideas that have far less environmental significance.

But perhaps this odd tension in the environmental community is most clearly demonstrated by the Sierra Club. For example, if one visits the Sierra Club’s website, it is nearly impossible to find any suggestion that there might be a link between eating meat and climate change, much less any suggestion that anyone should attempt to decrease .her consumption of meat. For example, under the header “Initiative to Limit Global

Greenhouse Gases,” there is a subheading titled “Choosing Sustainability,” which does not mention any change to diet at all (although it does include a picture of a new light bulb).118 This omission is remarkable, since the organization’s magazine, The Green Life, does mention eating less meat, even citing as true the claim that “18 percent of greenhouse gases come from industrialized livestock production,” as well as making the claim that “[i]f you refrain from eating meat just one day a week, you'll save as many emissions as you would driving 1,000 fewer miles this year,”119 a reference to a paper by

Carnegie Mellon researchers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews.120 Therefore it is

117 Motavalli, “The Case Against Meat.” 118 “Initiative to Limit Total Greenhouse Emissions” Sierra Club, http://www.sierraclub.org/carbon/. 119 Sierra Club, “Green Your 2010: Eat Fewer Animals,” Sierra, January 5, 2010, http://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2010/01/green-your-2010-eat-fewer-animals.html. 120 The Sierra club links to “Eating Less Beef Helps the Environment,” http://www.cit.cmu.edu/media/feature/2009/03_11_weber_matthews.html, which in turn links to the original publication of the story as “Diet Choices Can Help Environment,” Carnegie Mellon University, http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2009/winter/wheres-the-beef.shtml, although the content at both sites is nearly identical. The actual study is Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food- Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science & Technology 42, no. 10 (2008): 3508. 57 not the case that the Sierra Club, as such, does not believe in the overwhelming research linking meat eating to climate change. It is instead the case that despite this apparent belief, the website carefully avoids any mention of the issue. Likewise, the magazine, while mentioning the issue, always carefully phrases it in terms of “eating less meat” and never in terms of “vegetarianism” or “veganism.” This decision produces such odd articles as Faux Gras: A Carnivore’s Guide to Fake Meat, in which a so-called “panel of professional carnivores,” such as the rancher Bill Niman, discusses which meat substitute they most prefer. This is an oddly worded article since a “carnivore,” by definition, could not consume a meat substitute at all. The Sierra Club’s so-called “Mr. Green,” identified as Sierra magazine’s “answer guy,” penned an article that both claims that eating less meat is good for the environment and, at the exact same time, assures readers that he has no intention of going vegetarian himself or calling for, as he phrases it, “total abstention.”121 I would argue that the Sierra Club engages in a type of “meat eating denial”—it seems to raise the issue of eating meat while at the same time carefully avoiding and, at times, directly criticizing the logical culmination of its own advice— vegetarianism or veganism. The logical extension of the argument that it is environmentally beneficial to eat less meat is that what would be the best for the environment is to stop eating meat. This intentional omission is most clearly seen in the

Sierra Club’s reference to the conclusion of the study: “If you refrain from eating meat just one day a week, you’ll save as many emissions as you would driving 1,000 fewer miles this year.”122 What the Sierra Club chooses to leave out is the very next sentence of the exact same press release cited, which reads “Taking that a step further, they

121 Mr. Green, “Food for Thought on Meat,” Sierra, March 27, 2008. (This article is a reprint from January 2007.) 122 See note 114 for a link to the original study. 58

[Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews ] say that going entirely vegan would reduce the same amount of emissions as driving 8,000 miles less per year.123”

The reasons each of these various environmental spokespersons and groups avoids the issue of the connection between meat eating and the destruction of the environment are complex. On one level, they may in part stem from personal preferences or biases in which individual spokespersons may not want to give up meat (Al Gore, for example, is rumored to be particularly fond of steak)124 and therefore may choose to exclude those recommendations. On a policy level, organizations such as the EPA and

Australia’s State of Victoria Department of Sustainability and Environment may choose to avoid mentioning the environmental damages caused by the meat industry because of the significant political power such industries yield. As mentioned earlier, Britain’s own version of the EPA determined that actively decreasing meat consumption was the most important actions it could undertake to help try and reduce GHG emissions and, at the same time, made no such mention of this determination to the public, a determination we now know only because of leaked memos.125 And at the nonprofit level, there may be the fear of alienating potential new members. As Ezra Klein explains in a particular insightful article in The Washington Post,

The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council [the same group that issued the above-mentioned report critiquing factory farming but, at the same time, does not recommend eating less meat] has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can “fight global warming.” As you’d expect, “Drive Less” is in bold letters. There's also an endorsement for “high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in

123 Weber and Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts.” 124 “Al Gore’s Meat Diet Controversy,” Greenmuze, November 4, 2009, http://www.greenmuze.com/celebs/green/1769-al-gores-meat-diet-controversy-.html. 125 Avril Orms, “Government Says Eat Less Meat to Save Planet,” Reuters, May 30, 2007, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/05/30/uk-britain-methane-idUKL3044053120070530. 59

hybrids.” They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word “meat” is nowhere to be found.

That's not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn’t poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. “The Sierra Club isn’t opposed to eating meat,” was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. “So that’s sort of the long and short of it.” And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock. 126

Additionally, a particularly insightful article titled “Eating Less Meat is Critical to Our

Planet’s Future” interviews a range of experts on the topic who suggested other possible considerations. Dale Marshall, a climate-change policy analyst with the David Suzuki

Foundation, suggested that it could stem from a desire to avoid issues that are seen as

“too personal.” As he explained:

Food is something that’s very personal … I think there may be a reluctance to start talking about people changing what they eat. When you start telling people to sell their car and jump on the bus, that’s a little more out there. But when you start talking about diet and what they eat, that becomes even more personal. So that raises some difficulty in organizations not wanting to go there.127

Simon Donner, a University of British Columbia specialist in the effects of climate change, suggests that it might derive from a desire to avoid a certain “image.” As he phrased it: “Environmental organizations often and unfairly have this image of vegan or vegetarian hippies. … So if they were to come out and say ‘We don’t want you to eat meat,’ it might reinforce that image and not win over the people they want to win over.”128

126 Ezra Klein, “The Meat of the Problem,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), July 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072800390.html. 127 “Eating Less Meat is Critical to Our Planet’s Future,” Canada.com, October 21, 2008, http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/going_green/story.html?id=f4a35e4c-6eff-4533-a6cc- 6668b3f2801b. 128 Ibid. 60

However, I personally find all of these ideas, while helpful, not fully explanatory.

After all, it is not clear to me why the “image” of a vegetarian or a vegan is so substantially worse than the “image” of an environmentalist. Nor that it is necessarily more “personal” to suggest what someone should eat than it is to tell them how to design their home, travel, or even shower. Furthermore, environmental groups such as the Sierra

Club do make recommendations for dietary change, such as eating local, avoiding GMO products, and “going organic.”129 No, instead I wish to suggest that the primary motivation is the same as climate change “denial.” As the petroleum industry does with climate change, the meat industry, along with people motivated by certain ideological and/or religious ideals, intentionally works to distort and confuse the issue in order to make what is, in reality, a near scientific consensus seem as though the issue was entirely in debate. Hence the one claim from these extensive interviews that I find particularly persuasive is the issue of funding. As Dennis Cunningham, a project officer with the

International Institute for Sustainable Development, explains in the same interview:

He [Dennis Cunningham] explained that when environmental groups apply to governments or large corporations for money to produce an education program, the funding organization can dictate the priorities such a program should take. And no government wants to risk offending a powerful agriculture lobby by telling people to eat less meat—even if it’s good for them. “A lot of times an organization must respond to proposals that very clearly lay out the priorities the funder would like them to focus on,” Cunningham said. “And that hardly ever includes eating less meat.”130

129 Sierra Club, “Green Your Holiday Meals: Go Organic,” Sierra, November 23, 2009, http://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2009/11/green-your-holiday-meals-go-organic.html; Sierra Club, Michigan Chapter, “Local, Organic, Non-CAFO* Foods: Where to Find Organic and Non-CAFO Food,” http://michigan.sierraclub.org/takeaction/localfoods.html; and many others. 130 “Eating Less Meat is Critical to Our Planet’s Future.” 61

You Can’t Be a Meat-Eating Environmentalist

The reality is that the majority of the currently available scientific evidence suggests that people should reduce their consumption of meat to the point of vegetarianism or veganism. Furthermore, this evidence uses the same type of evidence standards that are currently used by those who wish to argue that climate change is happening, such as multiple peer-reviewed studies, reports from the United Nations, and the recommendation of the IPCC. It is therefore intellectually inconsistent to choose to believe in one body of evidence (climate change) and to, at the same time, choose to ignore a similar, if as of yet smaller, body of evidence (the environmental effects of eating meat). I have therefore suggested that anyone who does so in essence engages in

“meat eating denial.” Additionally, I have shown that this body of evidence concerning eating meat is not more widely known because, much as with climate change, industry groups opposed to the conclusions for economic reasons have successfully distorted the public discourse on the topic. Indeed these industry groups have engaged in similar rhetorical strategies earlier deployed against climate change, such as seizing on a single error in a report, unrelated to the conclusion of the report as whole, as evidence that the report had been “debunked” or “disproven.” Another technique is to hold individual scientists, not even trained as climatologists and receiving funding from the industry in question, as equal to, and indeed superior to, entire UN or governmental reports. Hence the standard set by industry groups for “proof” of either climate change or the environmental effects of eating meat is the impossible standard of creating completely flawless studies unanimously unopposed by any scientist in any field whatsoever. It is my hope that effects of both climate change and meat eating can be understood so that both 62 environmentalists and animal rights activists can be unified in a stronger struggle to end both forms of “denial.” As Peter Fricker, the communications director of the Vancouver

Humane Society, phrased it, “The science is clear about why reducing meat consumption will benefit the environment and slow climate change. … Now the head of the IPCC panel on climate change has had the courage to tell the world that’s what needs to happen. Environmental groups should quit dithering, follow his lead, and starting making this a priority.”

63

“Green” Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of Locavorism

The first thing I ask Salatin when we sit down in his living room is whether he’s ever considered becoming a vegetarian. It’s not what I had planned to say, but we’ve been in the hoop houses with the nicely treated hens, all happily pecking and glossy-feathered, and I've held one in my arms. Suddenly it makes little sense that this animal, whose welfare has been of such great concern, will be killed in a matter of days. Naive, I know, and Salatin seems surprised. “Never crossed my mind,” he says.

—Interview with Gaby Wood

64

In 2007, Oxford University Press chose “locavore” as the word of the year.131

Such a move, while purely symbolic, at the same time speaks to the movement’s growing popularity and emerging significance in any discussion on food policy, environmentalism, or animal ethics. The essence of the locavore argument is that because it is harmful to the environment to transport food over long distances (referred to as “food miles”), people should instead, for primarily environmental reasons, choose to consume only food that is grown or slaughtered “locally.” This idea of “locavorism” has been described and defended by a range of authors, including Barbara Kingsolver in Animal,

Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollan in his New York Times bestselling book The

Omnivore’s Dilemma, and promoted by farmers like Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface farms and a featured personality in both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the recent documentary Food, Inc. However, despite this popularity, there is much I find deeply troubling in the various rationales given for locavorism.

For example, part of Pollan’s main argument against “organic” meat is that it represents a false pastoral narrative, something produced by the power of well-crafted words and images yet lacking ethical consistency, reality, or ultimately an awareness of animals themselves. Reflecting on his experience walking down the aisles of a Whole

Foods supermarket, Pollan writes:

This particular dairy’s label had a lot to say about the bovine lifestyle: Its Holsteins are provided with “an appropriate environment, including shelter and comfortable resting area ... sufficient space, proper facilities and the company of its own kind.” All this sounded pretty great, until I read the story of another dairy selling raw milk—completely unprocessed—whose “cows graze green pastures all year long.” Which made me wonder whether the first dairy’s idea of an appropriate environment for a cow included, as I had simply presumed, a pasture. All of a sudden the absence from their

131 “Oxford Word Of The Year: Locavore,” Oxford University Press Blog, November 12, 2007, http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore. 65

story of that word seemed weirdly conspicuous. As the literary critics would say, the writer seemed to be eliding the whole notion of cows and grass. Indeed, the longer I in Whole Foods, the more I thought that this was a place where the skills of a literary critic might come in handy.132

While I agree with Pollan about the need for literary critics in Whole Foods, many locavore advocates, including Pollan, succumb to the same error of creating an unrealistic literary pastoral in their uncritical paean to the free-range organic farmer. Therefore, as a cultural critic, I hope to subject the locavore movement to the same critical scrutiny that locavores themselves have given to industrialized agriculture, in order to show how they themselves create an idealized, unrealistic, and, at times, distressingly sexist and xenophobic literary pastoral that carefully elides the violence being enacted against the animals themselves. My intention is not to discount the possibility of a more natural, environmentally sustainable food system—a goal I deeply support—but instead to reveal the potential dangers that focusing purely on the “local,” at the expense of the global, can contain for both the human and non-human animal alike.

132 Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 135–136.

66

“The Vegan Utopia”

One of the most forceful rationales for the environmental benefits of a “local” food system is expressed by Michael Pollan in a chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma titled “The .” Under the dismissive subheading “The Vegan

Utopia,” Pollan writes:

The vegan utopia would … condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places. ... To give up eating animals is to give up these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. The food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical , since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manures—would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.133

Pollan thus takes one of the animal rights’ movement’s most powerful arguments—the significant environmental degradation that the meat industry routinely produces—and inverts it.134 It is now because of the environment that one is justified in eating meat— indeed required to do so—since the only alternative given by Pollan is a polluting of large-scale food importation. The argument, if true, is even more powerful than quoted here. If eating locally slaughtered animals is the only way to prevent global warming, animal ethics itself might well dictate the necessity of eating meat because habitat destruction (in part fuelled by global warming) is already causing mass species extinction at unprecedented rates. Such an argument, therefore, represents a

133 Ibid., 327. 134 Of course, Pollan himself also indicates this same environmental degradation of factory farming, and his claim is that small-scale local farming will solve the problem. My point here is simply that Pollan inverts one of the most common claims made by animal rights’ advocates. 67 particularly powerful and nuanced refutation to veganism and vegetarianism that I fear few animal rights activists, or animal studies scholars, have yet adequately addressed.

Before I engage in a more detailed analysis of Pollan’s argument, I first want to note that it is simply factually untrue. What is most telling about the passage quoted above is that it lacks any form of citation or footnotes, forms of documentation that otherwise pepper Pollan’s books in other places of possible controversy. Pollan is not alone in this omission, for virtually every other locavore claim for environmental supremacy also lacks any form of documentation to back up repeated claims that being vegan is more harmful to the environment than eating locally slaughtered animals.

Instead, locavores almost universally rely upon the “common sense" logic that since transportation harms the environment, the further a commodity must be transported, the more harmful it must be to the ecosystem. However, recent studies have brought this common sense wisdom into question. For example, a study conducted at Lincoln

University in New Zealand shows that the way apples, lamb, and dairy items are produced in New Zealand makes them more energy-efficient to buy in the United

Kingdom than those same products grown on British soil. The study concludes:

Food miles are a very simplistic concept relating to the distance food travels as a measure of its impact on the environment. As a concept, food miles has gained some traction with the popular press and certain groups overseas. However, this debate, which only includes the distance food travels, is spurious as it does not consider total energy use, especially in the production of the product. 135

Indeed, the only study to date to focus on whether a local or vegetarian diet is more helpful in reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs), conducted by Christopher L.

135 Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber, and Greg Taylor, “Food Miles—Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry,” Research Report No. 285, Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit, Lincoln University, New Zealand (2006): 93. 68

Weber and H. Scott Matthews at Carnegie Mellon University, reached the following conclusion:

Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, is around 150% more GHG intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a -based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food. 136

In other words, shifting from beef to for even a single day a week would in fact be more helpful in reducing greenhouse gases than shifting the entirety of one’s diet to exclusively locally produced sources. This conclusion makes sense when we consider the finding of the United Nations that meat production contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation industry, including all automobiles, combined.137

In fact, recent research suggests that organic free-range animals may, in specific cases, be more harmful to the environment than animals raised “conventionally.” As the National

Audubon Society recently reported:

Ironically, data released in 2007 by Adrian Williams of Cranfield University in England show that when all factors are considered, organic, free-range chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming than conventionally raised broiler birds. That’s because “sustainable” chickens take longer to raise, and eat more feed. Worse, organic eggs have a 14 percent higher impact on the climate than eggs from caged chickens, according to Williams. “If we want to fight global warming through the food we buy, then one thing’s clear: We have to drastically reduce the meat we consume,” says Tara Garnett of London’s Food Climate Research Network. So while some of us Americans fashionably fret over our food’s travel budget and organic content, Garnett says the real question is, “Did it come from an animal or did it not come from an animal?”138

136 Weber and Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts.” 137Richard Black, “Shun Meat, Says UN Climate Chief,” BBC News, September 7, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7600005.stm. See also the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report Livestock’s Long Shadow.

138 Mike Tidwell, “The Low-Carbon Diet,” Audubon Magazine, January-February 2009, http://mag.audubon.org/articles/living/low-carbon-diet. 69

Lack of Land

While locavores imagine all factory farms eventually turning into more sustainable small-scale family farms, that ideal is simply not physically possible given the world’s current rate of meat consumption. According to the United Nations Food and

Agriculture Organization’s recent report Livestock’s Long Shadow, more than fifty-five billion land animals are raised and slaughtered every year worldwide for human consumption. This rate of slaughter already consumes 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface (approximately 3,433 billion hectares [more than 8,483 billion acres]) and accounts for a staggering 80 percent of the total land utilized by humans.139 Even when the land currently used for feed crop production is subtracted, as theoretically it might be in a fully local farm system, the total area currently occupied by grazing alone still constitutes, in the words of the report, “26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet.”140 And this number is only expected to grow as both human population and human consumption of meat and dairy continue to rise.141 Therefore, in addition to problems of sustainability, meat consumption also entails a massive loss of biodiversity which, ironically, would actually be increased by a shift to a locally based diet, as even more land would have to be set aside for free-range grazing. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, “306 of the 825 terrestrial ecoregions identified by

139 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi. 140 Ibid. 141 “Growing populations and incomes, along with changing food preferences, are rapidly increasing demand for livestock products, while globalization is boosting trade in livestock inputs and products. Global production of meat is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/01 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, and that of milk to grow from 580 to 1,043 million tonnes” (Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xx). To be fair, Pollan has himself, in his most recent work, started to make calls for people to decrease their meat consumption. However, these calls are both not stringent enough and not echoed in the wider movement. Given the exponential rate of projected increase for meat consumption, what is needed is a significantly long-term and across-the-board decrease of the number of animals raised and killed for slaughter, not tepid calls for minor decreases in individual rates of meat consumption. 70 the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) … reported livestock as one of the current threats.”142

Nor would it be possible to keep such farms small, tied to the community, or even

“local” in any meaningful sense of that term. As Joel Salatin himself admits to Pollan, in explaining why he primarily uses neighbors coming over to help kill the animals he raises: “That’s another reason we don’t raise a hundred thousand chickens. It’s not just the land that couldn’t take it, but the community, too. We’d be processing six days a week, so we’d have to do what the industrial folks do, bring in a bunch of migrant workers because no one around here would want to gut chickens every day. Scale makes all the difference [my emphasis].”143 I will return to Salatin’s comment about “migrant workers” later, but my point here is that locally based meat, regardless of its level of popularity, can never constitute more than either a rare and occasional novelty item, or food choices for only a few privileged customers, since there simply is not enough arable land left in the entire world to raise large quantities of pasture-fed animals necessary to meet the world’s meat consumption. And even if such a transition were physically possible, the resulting size of such farms would undo much of their supposed sustainability and community integration and hence their very purpose for existing in the first place. Unfortunately, this simple physical reality is ignored by many in the locavore movement, such as Barbara Kingsolver, who tells her children that they cannot have fresh during the winter but instead must consume meat because it is, purportedly, more sustainable.144

142 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxiii. 143 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 230. 144 Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 33 71

Belgian Chocolate

Reading this literature, one is left with the feeling that local food activists themselves must realize the impracticality and marginal environmental benefit of following locavore practices, since many of them fail to follow with consistency the very practices they themselves advocate. For example, in preparing his locally based meal from Polyface farms, Pollan admits, “I also need some chocolate for the dessert I had in mind. Fortunately the state of Virginia produces no chocolate to speak of, so I was free to go for the good Belgian stuff, panglessly.”145 While this line of reasoning might make sense in terms of other arguments for going local, such as preserving local economies, in terms of global warming and greenhouse gases, it is clearly not intellectually consistent.

Even if, for some unspecified reason, chocolate was essential for Pollan to have, it is not at all clear why that chocolate would have to come from Belgium instead of any of the more local sources of chocolate from within the whole of the United States (which also might be more effective in terms of preserving local economies). Indeed, most of the locavores mentioned continue to enjoy a variety of non-locally based such as coffee, tea, olive oil, and (in my favorite example from Kingsolver) non-locally produced

Budweiser.146

Nor do the business practices of Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface farms whom

Pollan holds up as a possible model, make consistent environmental sense. For example,

Salatin refuses to FedEx any of his meat since, he says, “I don’t believe it’s sustainable— or organic, if you will—to FedEx meat all around the country.”147 Instead, he tells Pollan that he will have to “drive down here” to Virginia to get it—all the way from

145 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 263. 146 Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 151. 147 Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 133. 72

California.148 But asking customers to drive to Polyface farms in individual cars is a significantly less efficient way to transport goods than using a centralized shipping and distribution network combined with multiple products carried on a single fully loaded delivery vehicle. Yet Salatin is, in fact, proud of how far individual people will drive in order to purchase his food. As he posts on his own website, as a positive review from a customer, “I drive to Polyface 150 miles one way in order to get clean meat for my family.” 149 Hence, romantic notions of face-to-face contact and perhaps even the great

American road trip seem to play a greater role in the Pollan-Salatin encounter than any environmental logic.

Indeed, one of the revealing ironies associated with all of the locavore proponents mentioned is the surprisingly large amount of driving, flying, and transportation they themselves regularly and apparently “panglessly” engage in. For example, Michael

Pollan travels all around the country, from Kansas to California, just within the pages of

The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Kingsolver is even more extreme, leaving by car from

Arizona so that that she can farm in rural Virginia, then driving all the way to Canada

(from Virginia) for a family vacation, which she particularly enjoys because she is now able to consume so many food products that otherwise would have been out of season. As she writes, “Like those jet-setters who fly across the country on New Year’s Eve, we were going to cheat time and celebrate the moment more than once. Asparagus season, twice in one year: the dream vacation.”150 Kingsolver and her family even fly to Europe, in part, to enjoy the local cuisine.151 And Joel Salatin, who was unwilling to ship his meat

148 Ibid. 149 http://www.polyfacefarms.com/story.aspx Last accessed April 1, 2001. 150 Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 158. 151 Ibid., 243. 73 to California, recently agreed to fly there himself for a talk at Stanford. Ironically, the talk was, in part, on the environmental benefits of a local economy. Perhaps a certain amount of irony and hypocrisy within the locavore movement can be justified by the argument that while still far from fully realized, it is on the path towards ever greater locavorism.

What is distressing is the manner in which violation of even the basic ideas of a locally based lifestyle occur “panglessly” and the manner in which the movement justifies itself via actions that are more harmful for the environment than the current food system, such as driving to purchase far away local produce or enjoying out-of-season food in Canada and Europe.

T-Shirts and DVDs

The one aspect of locavorism that most clearly belies the rationales given to justify the movement—not just in terms of the environment, but also in terms of protecting local businesses and protesting the abuses of globalization—is that it resolutely focuses only on the question of food. Neither Pollan nor Kingsolver, nor even

Salatin, is attempting to learn how to weave his or her own clothing, although cotton, as an agricultural commodity, raises many of the same issues as imported food. Yet as the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has recently documented, the environmental effects of the and the fashion industry are quite similar in terms of both pollution and worker exploitation. According to the authors:

Cotton, one of the most popular and versatile fibers used in clothing manufacture, also has a significant environmental footprint. This crop accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States, the largest exporter of cotton in the world, according to the USDA. … Much of the cotton produced in the United States is exported to China and other countries with low labor costs, where the material is milled, woven into fabrics, cut, and assembled according to the fashion industry’s specifications. China has emerged as the largest exporter of fast fashion, 74

accounting for 30% of world apparel exports, according to the UN Commodity Trade Statistics database. In her 2005 book The Travels of a T- Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at the McDonough School of Business of Georgetown University, writes that each year Americans purchase approximately 1 billion garments made in China, the equivalent of four pieces of clothing for every U.S. citizen.152

Hence, at least in terms of “miles,” cotton is actually a more egregious example of ecological waste than food. Nor is this the end of the “clothing miles,” as the United

States purchases so much clothing that domestic charity outlets simply cannot process all the used clothing.153 So the extra clothing is then shipped back to the developing world

(where in most cases it was originally manufactured). For some developing countries, used clothing actually constitutes the number one import from the United States.154 A single cotton T-shirt, then, comes from cotton grown in the United States, is sent to the developing world to be manufactured into clothing, then back to the United States to be purchased, and finally shipped to the developing country where the clothing is either donated or purchased. And what is true for cotton is equally true for almost every other product regularly consumed in the United States. Almost everything we buy today is both produced and consumed in a global marketplace and is therefore part of these exact same systems of production and distribution. In terms of shipping distance, it is just as significant to discuss “clothing miles,” “computer miles,” or even “cell phone miles,”

152 Luz Claudio, “Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 9, (2007): A450.

153 Ibid. “Only about one-fifth of the clothing donated to charities is directly used or sold in their thrift shops. Says Rivoli, ‘There are nowhere near enough people in America to absorb the mountains of castoffs, even if they were given away.’” 154 Ibid., A452. “Clothing that is not considered vintage or high-end is baled for export to developing nations. Data from the International Trade Commission indicate that between 1989 and 2003, American exports of used clothing more than tripled, to nearly seven billion pounds per year. Used clothing is sold in more than 100 countries. For Tanzania, where used clothing is sold at the mitumba markets that dot the country, these items are the number one import from the United States.” 75 many of which are actually transported far longer distances than food and are far more toxic in their results. And in terms of non-environmental concerns, working conditions for the production of many non-agricultural products may well be worse than for the more traditional rural labor of farming (excluding certain products such as coffee and chocolate).155

My point here is not to criticize locavores unfairly for minor hypocrisy or failures of judgment, neither of which undermine the logic of their argument as such. Rather, my concern is that a narrow focus only on “food” and “food miles” renders many other environmentally unsound practices invisible, whether they are conscious decisions to drive around in search of the best local food, or unconscious participation in the consumption of non-food goods with an environmental and human cost. For example, in

Salatin’s online “gift store,” in less than four lines he both states that, “We do not ship food items, anytime, anywhere, period” and, at the same time, advertises for non-food based collectibles like Polyface tote bags and DVDs156 and boasts that (for the latter),

“All shipping is free! Please allow 2–4 weeks for delivery.” There is no discussion of how, where, or by whom any of these other products have been made.

155 Ibid., A450. For example, in the case of clothing, “According to figures from the U.S. National Labor Committee, some Chinese workers make as little as 12–18 cents per hour working in poor conditions. And with the fierce global competition that demands ever lower production costs, many emerging economies are aiming to get their share of the world’s apparel markets, even if it means lower wages and poor conditions for workers.” 156 According to the Environmental Protection Agency, DVDs are a particularly egregious source of e- waste pollution since they derive from rare mined earth materials, are virtually impossible to recycle, leach into water supplies, and produce toxic results for both the environment and human health. Furthermore, as a flyer made by the EPA for school children tries to explain, “Once discs are packaged, they are ready to be sent to distribution centers, retail outlets, or other locations. Transportation by plane, truck, or rail requires the use of fossil fuels for energy, which contribute to climate change.” 76

Women in the Kitchen

In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the

Global,157 Ursula Heise illustrates how the emphasis on “the local” within the broader environmental movement as a whole can exhibit a deeply disturbing strain of conservatism, provincialism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The relevance of

Heise’s analysis is that it shows how an outspoken concern for the environment can also contain and support right-wing conservatism—against those viewed as alien to the speaker’s sense of his or her “local” community. In this connection, it is clear that many in the locavore movement are moved by a desire for a nonexistent literary pastoral, a nostalgia for a bygone age that never was. For example, Pollan invokes precisely this image in his description of his first local dinner at Polyface farms, when he writes,

“[M]uch about dining with the Salatins had, for me, the flavor of a long-ago time and faraway place in America.”158 However, the danger of this literary pastoral fairytale is not only that it is wholly misleading (the Salatins use ATVs daily to move around their cattle) but that it has the potential to mask the darker side of the nostalgic past, including narratives of exclusion and violence that an exclusive focus on the local elides.

For example, since locavores choose to focus only on the question of food transportation, that focus at times blends into the negative portrayal of women, particularly feminists, who are frequently faulted for having collectively abandoned the kitchen, that is, cooking meaningful and nutritious meals for the family. Such a claim naturally leads to another: a call for society to return to traditional gender roles of heterosexual men farming and ranching while heterosexual women cook and clean. For

157 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 158 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 203. 77 example, both Michael Pollan and the movie Food, Inc. specifically hold up Joel Salatin and Polyface farms as a promising paradigm for a locally based economy. But what

Pollan does not tell us is that Salatin believes so firmly in traditional gender roles that in the past he did not even accept women as workers or interns for the farm labor on his farm, although they could work in the kitchen.159 Salatin’s attitude—that the proper place for women is in the kitchen and that their role has somehow been “lost”—surfaced in a recent interview:

Hey, 40 years ago, every woman in the country—I’ll be real sexist here— every woman in the country knew how to cut up a chicken ... Now 60 percent of our customers don't even know that a chicken has bones! I’m serious. We have moved to an incredibly ignorant culinary connection.160

This critique of feminism presumably elicited no comment by Pollan because he shares a similar opinion. For example, in his review of Janet A. Flammang’s book The Taste of

Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, Pollan agrees with Flammang’s essential premise that “[i]n a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating ‘foodwork’—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal.”161 These comments merely replicated his earlier description of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as “the book that taught millions

159 “Is Back to Nature Farming Only for Men? The Two Faces of Polyface Farm,” Irregular Times, accessed May 1, 2009, http://www.irregulartimes.com/polyface.html. Note: This may be changing due to outside pressure. However, it was certainly the case when Pollan visited the farm. Indeed, Salatin’s website, while stating that they will accept six men and two women, still reads at the beginning, “An extremely intimate relationship, the apprenticeships offer young men the opportunity to live and work with the Salatin’s (emphasis added).” It is unclear how many, if any, women have been allowed to serve in the farm labor aspect of the apprenticeship. 160 Wood, “Interview: Joel Salatin.” 161 Michael Pollan, “The Food Movement, Rising,” The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/food-movement-rising/?page=3. 157 Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” The New York Times Magazine, 78 of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.”162

More surprisingly, Barbara Kingsolver, too, expresses explicit gender conservatism throughout Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, as when she describes feminism as

“the great hoodwink of my generation” because it wrongly removed the woman from hearth and home.163 Indeed, she takes great pride in transforming herself into the type of housewife who finally knows how to make her own cheese.164 As Jennifer Jeffrey has written in a particularly insightful article, “The Feminist in My Kitchen,”

Barbara Kingsolver took a year of her life to grow a garden to feed her family, and proceeded to write a beautiful book about the experience, but what if she had done the same thing twenty-five years ago, near the start of her writing career? My guess is that such a book (if it made it to publication at all, which is doubtful), might not have had such a receptive audience, but more importantly, all of that weeding and watering and meal-planning might have distracted her from the hard, lonely work of learning to write.165

“All American”

If the locavore movement seems to be a dubious ally of feminism, it also seems uncomfortably close to nativist strands in the American discourse of race and nationhood.

Consider, for example, the criteria that Joel Salatin uses to determine who will receive one of his now highly competitive internships on his farm. The very first requirement reads that the candidates must be “[b]right eyed, bushy-tailed, self-starter, eager-beaver, situationally aware, go-get-‘em, teachable, positive, non-complaining, grateful, rejoicing, get’erdone, dependable, faithful, perseverant take-responsibility, clean-cut, all American

July 29, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking- t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss. A version of this article also appeared in print on August 2, 2009, on page MM26 of the New York edition. 163 Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 127. 164Ibid., 126–127; 156. 165Jennifer Jeffrey, “The Feminist in My Kitchen,” Stalking Beauty and Courting Wonder in Words and Images (blog), June 26, 2007, http://jenniferjeffrey.typepad.com/writer/2007/06/one-day-during-.html. 79 boy-girl appearance characters. We are very, very, very discriminatory [my emphasis]."166 Such a list, of course, seems to reiterate gender conservatism (since it is hard to imagine that a woman who wears only male clothes would be considered a

“clean-cut all American girl appearance”). Nor, one imagines, would a man who wears women’s clothes, much less a homosexual or a transsexual, be considered an “all-

American” boy. In fact, it is odd that appearance is such an essential category of who

Salatin will, or will not, allow to work on a farm. Furthermore, we must ask what an “all

American” appearance even means in a nation of such vast racial and immigrant diversity as the United States? It is not reassuring that Salatin received his undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University, the extremely conservative, evangelical Christian university that prohibited African-Americans from attending until 1975 and prohibited interracial dating in the year 2000.167 Throughout its entire history, Bob Jones University has in fact prohibited, as official policy, all acts of homosexuality as perversion condemned by

God.168 And Salatin has not repudiated this relationship with Bob Jones University, which in 2009 recognized him as “alumnus of the year.”169 Salatin is also an outspoken critic of the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it caused, he believes, “reverse .” As he explained in his pro-locavore monograph Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:

At the risk of truly being branded an extremist, I’ll wade into even the civil rights movement … [A]s soon as the government became involved with the process, we ended up forcing and causing more harm than good. Does anyone really believe we have better race relations in America today than we would have had had the steady progress achieved during the 1960s been allowed to move no faster than society could metabolize it? Instead, we have reverse discrimination, forced

166 “Apprenticeships,” Polyface, Inc., accessed May 1, 2009, http://www.polyfacefarms.com/apprentice.aspx. 167 Bob Jones University, “Statement about Race at BJU,” accessed April 1, 2010, http://www.bju.edu/welcome/who-we-are/race-statement.php. 168 Bob Jones University, Student Handbook, (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University, 2005), 29. 169 “Headlines: Giving Due Honor: Accolades for Students and Grades,” BJU Review, 24, no. 3 (2009): 2, http://issuu.com/bjureview/docs/bju_review_winter_2009__vol._24_no.3, accessed April 1, 2010. 80

school busing, and as much if not more racial hatred today than in 1965. Every movement has its fringes, and the Klu Klux Klan certainly did not represent the average person during the civil rights awakening. Reverse discrimination now fosters resentment that never would have occurred had the movement been allowed to move forward without federal government heavy-handedness. 170

Salatin has described the extreme conservative talk show host Glenn Beck as

“agendaless” and “truth-seeking.”171 And, he regularly describes undocumented workers in a demeaning light. For example, in testimony in front of Congress on how to make a more transparent meat system, Salatin claimed that “[i]ndustrialized food and farming became aromatically and aesthetically repugnant, relegated to the offcasts of society—C and D students along with their foreign workers.”172 Indeed, an opposition to immigrants seems to underlie the main reason for Salatin’s support of a local food (and hence local labor) supply. As Salatin again explains in his book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:

Part of a viable local food system is a local infrastructure, which includes the labor. One of the characteristics of non-local food systems is an inherent need to find cheap labor from outside of the community. This influx of cheap labor can drastically change the social structure of a neighborhood. The resultant drastic increase in English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms and instructors, police protection, and translators at the courthouse can literally convulse and traumatize a community. This is not xenophobia; it is responsible social awareness.173

Such sentiments are not limited to Joel Salatin. As Kelefa Sanneh writes in The New Yorker:

170 Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2007.), 201. 168 Lewis McCrary, “Cultivating Freedom: Joel Salatin Practices Ethical Animal Husbandry—No Thanks to the Feds,” The American Conservative 8, no. 14 (2009), http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cultivating-freedom/. 169 After the Beef Recall: Exploring Greater Transparency in the Meat Industry: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 110 Cong., Second Session (April 17, 2008) (testimony of Joel Salatin). While I agree with the view the migrant workers are exploited in factory farming systems, it is unclear to me how grouping them intermediately with “C and D students” and referring to them as “social outcasts” helps to improve their working conditions.

173 Ibid. 81

Agrarianism, like environmentalism, hasn’t always been considered a progressive cause, and there’s nothing inherently liberal about artisanal cheese or artisanal bikes. … Rod Dreher, a National Review contributor and the author of Crunchy Cons, is ardently pro-organic and ardently anti-gay marriage. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea, is also the author of Mexifornia, about the dangers posed by immigration.174

In fact, farm worker unions attempting to use Food, Inc. as an organizing tool have been repeatedly removed from the screening of the film.175 To be clear, it is not my argument that all, or even most, locavores share all of these exclusionary ideas. However, it does seem clear that at least some are willing to support those who do. As even Michael Pollan stated in an interview with the anti-immigrant and anti-gay rights author of Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher, “I think there is an enormous amount of political power lying around on the food issue, and I am just waiting for the right politician to realize that this is a great family issue. If that politician is on the Right, all the better. I think that would be terrific, and I will support him or her.”176

It is therefore ironic that Pollan should on the one hand denounce the practice of harvesting organic produce using recycled biodiesel tractors as insufficiently progressive—because of the unfair treatment of Mexican farm workers in the process—while at the same time hold up Salatin, Dreher, and others as representatives of the future vanguard of a progressive and egalitarian food movement.177 As the British columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown recently argued:

Should good people be party to a vociferous movement which wants to refuse entry to “alien” foods? Look at the language used and you realize it is a proxy for anti-immigration sentiments: these foods from elsewhere come and take over our diets, reduce national dishes to third-class status … excite our senses beyond decorum, contaminate the identity of the country irreversibly.

Turn to the clamour for the west to cut imported foods and a further bitter taste spreads in the mouth. If we decide—as many of my friends have—not to buy foods that have been flown over, it only means further devastation

174 Kelefa Sanneh, “Fast Bikes, Slow Food, and the Workplace Wars,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/22/090622crat_atlarge_sanneh. 175 See multiple articles on the blog by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW): http://www.ciw- online.org/news.html. Of particular interest is also the manner in which Chipotle utilizes its use of meat from Polyface farms to ward off criticism of its treatment of migrant farm workers. 176 Rod Dreher, “Table Talk,” The American Conservative, June 20, 2008. 177 While it could be argued that Salatin’s comments about migrant labor only reflect concern about labor standards, Sanneh makes, I believe, an excellent rejoinder: “Proponents of homegrown food and (very) small business … sometimes talk about how artisanalism improves the lives of workers. But the genius of this loosely organized movement is that it’s not a labor movement; it’s a consumer movement” (“Fast Bikes, Slow Food). Although I have searched extensively, I can no evidence of Joel Salatin directly working with farm workers unions to improve their labor conditions. 82

for the poorest. These are the incredibly hard-working farmers in the developing world, already the victims of trade protectionism imposed by the wealthy blocs. It means saying no to Fair-trade producers too, because their products have to travel to our supermarkets. Are we now to say these livelihoods don’t matter because we prefer of a more fashionable kind? Shameful are the environmentalists who are able to be this cavalier. They could only believe what they do if those peasant lives do not matter at all.178

In fact, the locavore movement may possess within it the same potential for anti- immigrant sentiment that the earlier “Buy American” movement displayed in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s. For example, many of the same reasons now provided to support locavorism, including fears of globalization, support for union labor, critiques of exploitive labor practices in other countries, and calls to protect traditional American ways of life were earlier interwoven into a similar movement which, over time, degenerated into regional nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia. As

Dana Frank documents in Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism:

Popular “Buy American” advocates promised, nonetheless, to protect and to serve the American people; but the inward-looking protection of “us” against the threatening “foreigners” spiraled downward into narrower and narrower clubbishness. What began innocently at the border of Orange County, Florida, or the State of Alaska ended less innocently at an economic border drawn by race or citizenship.179

There is therefore ample reason to worry that a contemporary movement to prevent the importation of goods from other countries will eventually rely on or mobilize nationalistic and xenophobic fears of other nations and peoples. And this worry is perhaps all the more relevant when the boycotted product is food, due to the deep

178 Yasmin Alibhai Brown, “Eat Only Local Produce? I Don’t Like the Smell of That: The Language in This Debate is a Proxy for Anti-Immigration Sentiments,” The Independent (London, UK), May 12, 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-eat- only-local-produce-i-dont-like-the-smell-of-that-826272.html.

179 Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 243. 83 connection between a culture’s identity and the food it eats.180 Hence, to stigmatize a food purely because of where it comes from runs the extreme risk of stigmatizing an associated people as well. Diversity may also suffer as a result. As James McWilliams writes:

A final paradox: in a sense, any community with an activist base seeking to localize the food supply is also a community that’s undermining diversity. Although we rarely consider the market influences that make community diversification possible, a moment’s reflection reveals a strong tie between cultural diversity and market access. Critics of globalization argue (often with ample evidence) that global forces undermine the world’s range of indigenous cultures—wiping out vernacular habits, wisdom, and languages. They overlook, however, how the material manifestations of diversity are brought to us by globalization.

Localization, by contrast, specifies what is and is not acceptable within an arbitrary boundary. In this sense, it delimits diversity. Anyone who doubts this claim should imagine what the culinary map of would look like without open access to globally far-flung producers. It’s only because globally sourced distributors are able to provide specialized ingredients that Harlem, Chinatown, and Little Italy are such vibrant emblems of urban, culinary, and cultural diversity.181

Saving Souls

So far, however, I have ignored what is in fact the most chilling and disturbing aspect of the locavore movement—its naturalization and explicit justification of arbitrary and unnecessary violence against other animals. Here we return to Michael Pollan’s earlier claim, made in the context of pitting locavore against veganism, that what solely motivates veganism is a desire for absolute moral purity, even to the point of destroying nature, in order to save the vegans’ “souls.” Pollan continues this theme throughout his text, referring to vegetarians as self-righteous and even claiming that they are “Puritans”:

180 For a review of some of the recent literature on this subject, see Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 99–119. 181 James McWilliams, “Is Locavorism for Rich People Only?” Freakonomics (blog), October 14, 2009, http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/is-locavorism-for-rich-people-only/?pagemode=print.

84

“A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writing of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals’ animality too. They would like nothing better than to airlift us out from nature’s “intrinsic ”—and then take the animals with us. You begin to wonder if their quarrel isn’t really with nature itself.”182 However, the irony of this argument is that while Pollan routinely depicts vegans as self-righteous puritans, the only examples that both he and Kingsolver provide are people who, for religious reasons, feel no complication about killing animals because they see the latter as utterly lacking souls. As Pollan writes, “When I was at the farm I asked Joel how he could bring himself to kill a chicken. ‘That’s an easy one. People have a soul, animals don’t; it’s a bedrock belief of mine. Animals are not created in God’s image. So when they die, they just die.’”183 In fact, since non-human animals have no souls and are therefore wholly unrelated to humans, Joel Salatin encourages even young children to slit the throats of animals:

Interestingly, we typically have families come—they want to come and see the chicken butchering, for example. Well, Mom and Dad (they’re in their late-20s early-30s), they stay out behind in the car, and the 8-, 9-, 10-, 11- year-old children come around to see this. We have not found any child under 10 that’s the least bit put off by it. They get right into it. We’ll even give them a knife and let them slice some throats.184

Salatin’s callous disregard for the bodily integrity or being of other animals is in fact all too representative of the proponents of locavorism as a whole. The intellectuals at the forefront of that movement, particularly Pollan and Kingsolver, seek to re-inscribe the very speciesism that locavorism at first seems to draw into question. Indeed, it is hard to

182Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 322. 183 Ibid., 331.

184 “Annie Corrigan, “Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm: Stewards of Creation,” Earth Eats, March 26, 2010, http://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/joel-salatin-complete-interview/. 85 imagine how a locavore movement ever could translate into an actual improvement of animals’ lives, since many of its most famous proponents hold that animals lack souls and accept “man’s” domination and consumption of them as the very definition of our humanity. For example, both Pollan and Kingsolver claim, with no citations, a laundry list of increasingly esoteric human characteristics which, supposedly, only eating meat has produced in humans, including large brains,185 all forms of social interaction including the undefined “pleasures of the table,”186 human ,187 and even

“civilization” itself.188 In the most amusing example of this attribution of human traits,

Pollan suggests that the reason marijuana works on humans is because it mimics the effects of hunting within human brains. He writes:

Later it occurred to me that this mental state [while hunting], which I quite liked, in many ways resembled the one induced by smoking marijuana: the way one’s senses feel especially acute and the mind seems to forget everything outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort and the passing of time. … Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaption that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter.189

One of the oddest parts of the locavore literature, therefore, is that even as its proponents graphically and indeed poetically describe the abuses of the factory farms, at the same time, they remove any reason why anyone should be concerned at all. Since animals lack souls, we cannot understand what, or even if, they think or feel. Moreover, our domination of them represents the very essence of what defines us as humans. Joel

185 Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 291. 186 Ibid., 272. 187 Ibid., 297. 188 Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 222. 189 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 342. 86

Salatin has in fact repeatedly spoken out against so-called “Prop 2” ballot initiatives around the country sponsored by the The Humane Society of the United States to outlaw the worst abuses of factory farming such as battery cages and gestation crates.190 While

Prop 2 initiatives are themselves controversial within the animal rights community (since they result in larger cages rather than no cages at all), Salatin’s position is that people should be legally able to do whatever they want with farm animals. Hence, he actually argues for less oversight and control of how farmers raise their livestock. While less government oversight may or may not, as Salatin claims, help small farms who “process” animals to expand their operations, it would exonerate existing practices that cause the horrific suffering of farm animals who otherwise now enjoy at least some protection under the law, however minimal. As importantly, the locavore position effectively undercuts future efforts to protect animals, since it naturalizes the primary relation of domination upon which all forms of violence against other animals hinge.

I Am a “Locavore” (and a Vegan)

None of this is to deny that “locavorism” does have a point to make. For example, urban community gardening, farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture

(CSAs), and organic farms that eschew the use of crops and pesticides and treat their workers well are all important goals that locavorism helps to forward. The trouble with the locavore movement, however, is that it continues to articulate itself on the basis of a false dichotomy between “vegans and vegetarians” on the one hand and

190 For one example among many, see Mandy Henderson, “Joel Salatin—The Pastor of the Pasture,” Columbus Underground, February 28, 2010, http://www.columbusunderground.com/joel-salatin-the- pastor-of-the-pasture.

87 conscious food consumers on the other, as though it were impossible to be concerned about the welfare of animals, the environment, and the broader questions of food policy and food all at the same time. Perfectly reasonable arguments against monoculture crops thus morph into unreasonable attacks on vegetarians. However, the reality is that many vegetarians and vegans, having already taken the step to self-consciously control and direct their diet, are frequently more aware of the dangers industrial farming practices pose and are therefore more likely to seek out ethically grown fruit and vegetables— wherever in the world these may exist. As Pollan and others have pointed out, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or “factory farms,” are economically feasible only because of the massive subsidies that the government routinely provides to large-scale industrial farmers who grow vast acres of soy, wheat, and corn which in turn are sold to factory farms who are the largest consumers of such products in the United States. The question, therefore, is not whether we should end the movement for conscious consumption of all food products. Large-scale industrial agriculture really is deeply harmful to the environment, workers, and animals. Rather, the question is whether we can arrive at a new understanding and new articulation of the manner in which the locavore movement’s goals are expressed and understood. What matters more than the overly simplistic notion of “food miles” is the total carbon footprint of our foodstuffs, as well as the total environmental impact of any food purchase. Coming at the problem from such a broader perspective can only mean significantly decreasing the amount of meat human beings consume, in addition to cutting back on the whole array of services, including clothing and electronics, now marketed in the global marketplace. 88

Finally, it deeply matters how and why these calls for “locavorism” are framed. In this connection, as I have shown, the tendency of many in the movement to unfairly and inaccurately criticize feminists and immigrants as corrupting to an idealized, romantic state of a local community is both deeply troubling and potentially quite dangerous. As the Buy American movement, originally started by anti-sweatshop unions, demonstrates, initially “progressive” causes that nonetheless fail to consider the intersections of gender, race, class, and citizenship can devolve into nationalism or xenophobic localism. In sum, the false dichotomy between the vegan and the local can be ended, so that both animal rights activists and food policy activists can unite into a shared and, therefore, more effective movement. We must build on the growing consensus on the need for a more just diet, but do so in a way that addresses the full panoply of social justice issues that a truly just and “green” diet must entail.

89

Crocodile Tears, Compassionate Carnivores, and the Marketing of “Happy Meat”191

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes …

“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice, “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor .” “He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.” “That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.” “But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum. This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—”

—“The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Through the Looking- Glass, and What Alice Found There

191 I would like to thank all of the organizers and attendees of the Conscious Eating Conference at the University of California, Berkeley for their thoughtful and helpful feedback on the conference version of this piece. My friend and colleague Matthew Applegate was also kind enough to read over an earlier version. And I would also like to thank two of my students, Manuel Rodriguez and Rohisha Adke, who read through earlier versions of this chapter. Finally, I would like to thank the Culture and Animal Foundation, which provided funding for the writing of this chapter. All mistakes are, of course, my own. 90

The “ locavore” movement, promoted by authors such as Michael Pollan and

Barbara Kingsolver, and farmers such as Joel Salatin (the featured personality of both

The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the documentary Food, Inc.), helped to pioneer small, local farms as an ethical and sustainable alternative to the factory farm system. However, while mentioned, the issue of how much one should actually care for individual animals is a point of ambivalence. For example, within the pages of The Omnivore’s Dilemma,

Pollan quotes Salatin as saying that he doesn’t mind killing animals because: “That’s an easy one. People have a soul, animals don’t; it’s a bedrock belief of mine. Animals are not created in God’s image. So when they die, they just die.”192 In subsequent interviews,

Salatin explains that he allows children as young as eight or nine to come to his farm and

“slit some [animals’] throats.”193 Likewise, Pollan, while raising the issue of animal welfare, places greater emphasis on animals as a collective species than on individual animals and ends The Omnivore’s Dilemma with a story of killing wild pigs, which he enjoys so much that he compares it the experience of being high.194

There is, however, a new genre of texts which, while arguing for the same small- scale, pasture-based farms, and citing these earlier “locavore” works, do so primarily out of an explicit concern for the animals themselves. In the same manner that locavores attempted to invert the animal rights arguments in terms of the environment (by claiming that eating meat was the most environmentally sustainable action one can take), these related texts attempt to invert an even more basic idea of animal rights: That one should eat meat because they care about animals.

192 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 331. 193 Corrigan, “Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm.” 194 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 342. 91

Because these arguments focus on the suffering of animals, they have become popular and effective. This popularity is demonstrated in a host of newspaper articles, such as “Guess Who’s Coming As Dinner,”195 “Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat,”196

“To Abstinence and Back,”197 and “Veal to Love, Without the Guilt.”198 As these titles suggest, even former advocates for vegetarianism have started advocating for the purchase of “humane” meat. , the author of one of the most famous vegetarian cookbooks, , first explained to Newsweek: “I’m very happy that people can make the definition of ‘vegetarian’ be a positive statement about vegetables rather than a negative statement about meat—‘I don't eat this, and I don’t eat that.’ I’m sick and tired of the no’s.”199 She reiterated this point in an article from Food and Wine: “For about 30 years I didn’t eat meat at all … Lately, I've been eating a little meat. People say, ‘Ha, ha, Mollie Katzen is eating steak.’ But now that cleaner, naturally fed meat is available, it’s a great option for anyone who’s looking to complete his [sic] diet.”200

To try and understand the rationale behind the justifications for “humane” meat, in this chapter, I pay particular attention to one specific small-scale farmer: Catherine

Friend, along with her two books Hit by a Farm and The Compassionate Carnivore.

Friend is small-scale farmer who raises animals, primarily sheep, and claims to both love

195 Peter Rubin, “Guess Who’s Coming As Dinner?” Good Magazine, February 3, 2008, http://www.good.is/post/guess-whos-coming-as-dinner/. 196 Christine Lennon, “Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat,” Food and Wine, August 2007, http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/why-vegetarians-are-eating-meat. 197 Larissa Dubecki, “To Abstinence and Back,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), March 8, 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-and-bars/to-abstinence-and-back-20110307- 1bkvv.html. 198 Marian Burros, “Veal to Love, Without the Guilt,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 18, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/dining/18veal.html?pagewanted=all. 199 Karen Springen, “Part-Time Vegetarians,” Newsweek, September 28, 2008, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/09/28/part-time-vegetarians.html. 200 Lennon, “Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat.” 92 her sheep and at the same time to love eating them. As a both a writer and a farmer,

Friend provides a uniquely helpful insight into what “humane farming” actually entails.

However, to be clear, I focus on Friend only as a representative of a far larger movement, as each of the arguments I raise against her applies to other well-known advocates for either “local” or “humanely” raised meat.

“Meet Fluffy—She’ll Be Your Lamb Chop Tonight”

In contrast to the statement by Joel Salatin encouraging young children to “slit some throats,” or Pollan’s experience of masculine bonding in personally hunting pigs in

Santa Cruz, Friend’s writings are filled with constant remorse at the suffering and death of “her” animals. In the chapter “Meet Fluffy—She’ll Be Your Lamb Chop Tonight,”

Friend writes about the act of killing one of her lambs:

[T]he act of paying someone to kill our animals never ceases to briefly—and sharply—take my breath away … In one week this living, breathing, playful lamb would be dead—on purpose. … He couldn’t be a pet. He was already slated to be meat. I suddenly noticed his heart-shaped face, the black spots gently splashed across an ear, his perky tail. How could I pay someone to kill him? I tapped the lamb’s head one more time, then fled … I wanted to tap the lamb’s head one more time but was too embarrassed to show such affection in front of the man who would kill the lamb. I imagined it would make his job harder … I sat in the pickup and cried. My contacts blurred, my nose filled … I couldn’t stop crying.201

Friend appropriates the discourse of feminist care ethics, by such writers as Carol Adams and , but inverts the original meaning.202 It is now precisely because of an ethic of personal and identified care that Friend claims that one is required to raise and kill animal for human consumption. Friend even pens, unironically, an open “Letter

201 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 29–32. 202 Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (New York: Press, 2007). 93 to my Lambs,” which includes the sentence “I wish you a safe journey, and I honor your role in my life,”203 as her partner takes the lambs to the .

The manner in which advocates for humane meat, including Friend, try to make sense of this contradiction between a deep emotional connection to the animals they raise and their own active part in the animal’s death, is by arguing that buying humane meat represents a “buy-cott” or a way to “stay at the table.”204 In other words, they claim that paying to support humane meat—“buy-cotting,” instead of boycotting—represents the most effective means to protest against the mistreatment of animals in factory farms. As

Catherine Friend writes in a section entitled “A Seat at the Table”:

Some people believe the best way to help livestock animals is to stop eating them altogether. Yet despite the deeply felt and admirable sentiments behind these calls to vegetarianism, I’ve always wondered whether the act of becoming a vegetarian or vegan has any positive impact on . Instead, I believe that remaining “at the table,” if you will, is more effective than walking away.205

The essential argument is that by purchasing “humanely raised” or “happy meat” people can make more of a difference in the lives of animals than vegetarians or vegans.

Friend argues from the position of both animal ethics and personal care for animals themselves that the most important action someone can take is to buy humanely raised meat. Therefore, Friend takes particular aim at vegetarians and vegans because of their supposed failure to, in her words, “remain at the table.” As Friend explains in more detail:

People who remain at the table and support sustainable, responsible, and humane agriculture by purchasing meat from these farmers are sending a message to those

203 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 160. 204 This is not actually a word that Friend herself uses, but it captures the arguments that she makes in favor of eating meat. For a review of the history of the term, see Monroe Friedman, “A Positive Approach to Organized Consumer Action: The ‘Buycott’ as Alternative to the Boycott.” Journal of Consumer Policy 19, iss. 4 (1996), 439–451. 205 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 247. 94

farmers: “Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t stop. We’ll buy your product.” When consumers purchase our meat, it allows us, the small and sustainable farmers, to remain at the table, to grow and thrive and provide humanely raised meat to increasing numbers of people. Because farming is a business, there won’t be a product unless there is a demand. People who become completely vegetarian for the sake of animals are basically getting up from the table and leaving the room. Although they might work to help better animals lives through their words, those words won’t keep a sustainable farmer in business. Only dollars will.206

Friend concludes that, based purely on compassion for animals, not only should people who currently eat meat not choose to become vegetarian, but also that vegetarians themselves need to start consuming humanely raised meat: “[I]f there are carnivores who enjoy eating meat but are considering going veggie for ethical reasons, or vegetarians who’d like to become flexitarians and allow a little meat into their diet but feel too guilty, consider this: the more of us who remain at, or join, the table by seeking out and buying humanely raised meat, the stronger our numbers, and the more animals that will be raised in sustainable, humane systems instead of as widgets in a factory.”207

This is the essence of the argument for changing from a vegetarian or vegan diet to becoming an “ethical” or “compassionate” carnivore: Compassionate carnivores claim that they deeply love and care about animals and that their primary concern is animal welfare. They believe it is possible to create ethical, and sustainable, small-scale farms which promote animal welfare and the protection of the environment. They believe that neither vegetarianism nor veganism can make a difference, since these practices represent only a passive boycott, and not the active creation of a viable alternative (that is, vegetarians and vegans are simply “leaving the table”). In contrast, compassionate carnivores argue, purchasing “humane,” or “happy,” meat is a force that actively creates a separate, humane, way to raise animals. Therefore, they believe, each act of purchasing

206 Ibid., 248. 207 Ibid., 249. 95 humanely raised meat directly helps to end factory farming, save the environment, and improve the welfare of animals, while allowing customers to still consume meat.

However, despite the large, and growing, popularity of such claims, there are several significant problems with any argument for humanely raised meat.

It Is Not Physically Possible to “Humanely” Raise Animals on a Large Scale

The primary problem with the compassionate carnivore is the same as with the earlier “locavore” argument: It is not possible to raise the large number of “free-range” or

“pasture-raised” animals for which both groups advocate. As I phrased this same argument in the last chapter:

While locavores imagine all factory farms eventually turning into more sustainable small-scale family farms, that ideal is simply not physically possible given the world’s current rate of meat consumption. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s recent report Livestock’s Long Shadow, more than fifty-five billion land animals are raised and slaughtered every year worldwide for human consumption. This rate of slaughter already consumes 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface (approximately 3,433 billion hectares [more than 8,483 billion acres]) and accounts for a staggering 80 percent of the total land utilized by humans [for any purpose at all].208

Even when the land currently used for feed crop production is subtracted, as theoretically it might be in a fully local farm system, the total area currently occupied by grazing alone still constitutes, in the words of the report, “26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet.”209

My point is that it is physically impossible to raise the number of animals humans currently consume in the type of free-range pasture for which Friend and the other

208 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi. 209 For a further discussion of this point, please see the chapter “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of Locavorism,” first published in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8, iss. 1/2 (2010): 8–32. 96

“compassionate carnivores” advocate. There is literally not enough land left on the planet to do so.

Furthermore, meat consumption is projected to double by 2050. As the UN report explains, “Growing populations and incomes, along with changing food preferences, are rapidly increasing demand for livestock products, while globalization is boosting trade in livestock inputs and products. Global production of meat is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/01 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, and that of milk to grow from 580 to 1,043 million tonnes.”210 To make those numbers a little more comprehensible, currently the world’s population is approximately seven billion people, who consume more than fifty-five billion land animals a year. By 2050 the world’s population is predicated to grow to nine billion, and meat consumption is predicted to double as developing countries (such as China, India, and Brazil) become more wealthy and, consequently, can afford to eat more meat. As Karen Holmes explains in Earth

Trends:

A shift in global dietary patterns is taking place, one that will have far-reaching implications for international trade, the rural economy, agricultural land use, and the environment. Simply put, the world is eating much more meat than ever before … The experience of Japan [see Table 1 below] could provide a glimpse of things to come. As its economy expanded, meat consumption increased 360 percent between 1960 and 1990 (Shah and Strong 1999:19). 211

210 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xx. 211 Karen Holmes, “Carnivorous Cravings: Charting The World’s Protein Shift,” Earth Trends, July 2001, http://earthtrends.wri.org/features/view_feature.php?theme=8&fid=24. 97

Table 1. Historical Rates of Increase in World Meat Consumption

(in metric tons)

1961 2002 Growth

World 71,342,694 246,771,601 3x

Australia 1,097,602 2,229,695 2x

Botswana 15,691 48,294 3x

Brazil 2,083,936 14,530,350 7x

China 2,524,470 67,798,988 27x

Congo 12,340 48,298 4x

Cuba 213,964 363,364 1.7x

Egypt 308,338 1,589,690 5x

France 3,596,544 6,049,705 1.7x

Iceland 15,352 24,331 1.6

India 1,695,165 5,456,264 3.2

Israel 66,013 612,225 10x

Japan 724,197 5,595,697 8x

Peru 224,495 922,784 4x

Saudi Arabia 38,983 1,050,117 28x

South Africa 587,103 1,746,914 3x

United Kingdom 3,626,262 4,701,244 1.3x

United States 16,867,139 36,329,095 2x 98

Source: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, using figures compiled from the World Resource Institute.212

In other words, we have the dual problem of more people in total and people eating more meat. It is a physical impossibility to raise an additional fifty-five billion animals on open and expansive pasture land (coupled with an additional 2.2 billion people), particularly since the only way the current demand for meat and dairy is being met is through the increasing use of confined feeding operations (or CAFOs) worldwide. Therefore “free- range” meat can never represent more than a novelty item for privileged consumers since the primary impediment to worldwide consumption of pasture fed animals is not, as the proponents wish to suggest, market forces limiting supply and demand, but, instead, the limit of the amount of ice-free terrestrial land left on the entire planet.

Humanely Raised Meat Is Neither Sustainable nor Helpful to the Environment

Even if such a conversion were theoretically possible, the ecological effect would be devastating. Like the “locavores” before them, the “compassionate carnivores” routinely mention the ecological impact caused by “factory farms.” While these critiques are true, what compassionate carnivores fail to mention is that open free-range pasture feed production also causes many of the same ecological impacts. For example, in the chapter entitled “That is One Heck of a Hoofprint,” Catherine Friend makes the claim that “[l]ivestock emit about 18 percent of the world’s annual quantity of methane, one of the bad boys responsible for global warming. They produce this methane as part of their digestion process, and most of it comes out in burps … [W]e can solve the animal welfare and environmental issues surrounding meat by getting into grass [that is, animals

212 These figures are based on statistics collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and displayed online by EarthTrends, the World Resources Institute, from Meat Consumption: Total, in their Agriculture and Food Searchable Database. 99 raised on grass feed pastures].”213 Such statements are misleading. The source Friend cites for this indictment of factory farms is an article in the Christian Science Monitor entitled “Humans’ Beef with Livestock: A Warmer Planet,”214 which, in turn, reported the findings from the original United Nations report Livestock’s Long Shadow. However, neither the original report, nor the article cited, make the argument that Friend claims.

While it is true that livestock produces a large amount of methane, through burps and flatulence, this is not the primary reason the report cites for livestock’s effect on climate change, and it would still be the case, if not worse, if these cattle were raised in pasture, since the cattle still emit burps and flatulence. The report’s main critique, in terms of climate change, is against . Deforestation is caused, primarily, by attempts to clear forests to create pasture to raise exactly the type of free-range and grass fed animals for which Friend advocates. As the report states under the section entitled “Atmosphere

And Climate Change”: “The livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of anthropogenic

CO2 emissions. The largest share of this derives from land-use changes—especially deforestation—caused by expansion of pastures and arable land for feed crops.”215 The report further explains this point in the “Land Degradation” section:

Expansion of livestock production is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America where the greatest amount of deforestation is occurring—70 percent of previous forested land in the Amazon is occupied by pastures, and feedcrops cover a large part of the remainder. About 20 percent of the world’s pastures and rangelands, with 73 percent of rangelands in dry areas, have been degraded to some extent, mostly through overgrazing, compaction and erosion created by livestock action.216

213 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 247. 214 Brad Knickerbocker, “Humans’ Beef with Livestock: A Warmer Planet,” Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p03s01-ussc.html. 215 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi. 216 Ibid. 100

The same report suggests that meat and dairy from pasture-fed animals would be equally devastating in terms of biodiversity, which is decreased through the expansion of pastures for free-range grazing. The UN estimates that livestock production (including “free- range” and pasture-fed animals) represents the leading cause of species extinction. As the report explains:

We are in an era of unprecedented threats to biodiversity. The loss of species is estimated to be running 50 to 500 times higher than background rates found in the fossil record. Fifteen out of 24 important ecosystems services are assessed to be in decline.

Livestock now account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, and the 30 percent of the earth’s land surface that they now pre-empt was once habitat for . Indeed, the livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it is the major driver of deforestation, as well as one of the leading drivers of land degradation, pollution, climate change, overfishing, sedimentation of coastal areas and facilitation of invasions by alien species.217

As with climate change, the report suggests that in terms of biodiversity, pasture-raised animals, because of factors such as deforestation and wildlife destruction, actually cause more than factory farms. To be clear, it is not my argument that we should “exonerate” factory farms, since they have been determined to be grossly detrimental to the environment.218 It is my argument, though, that when advocates for either “humane” or “free-range” farms dismiss all environmental critiques of livestock production as only applying to “factory farms”, such claims are ill-informed. Issues of the carrying capacity of the earth cannot be addressed by switching to humanely raised meat.

The question of how to sustainably and ethically raise and kill fifty-five billion (much

217 Ibid., xxiii. 218 For examples, see Gurian-Sherman, “CAFOs Uncovered”; http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture/cafos- uncovered.html; “Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health”; and Pew Commission, “Putting Meat on the Table.” 101 less 110 billion) animals per year is simply a question without an answer. No strategy, not intensification, and not free-range, pasture-fed animals, satisfies the basic carrying capacity limits of our planet. As Lee Hall has previously argued:

Environmentalists warn that the chemicals and sicknesses which plague animal factories can also contaminate soil, water, animal products, and our own bodies. These concerns about factory farms are warranted. But ecological problems don’t stop there. A cow with access to fresh air and pasture is still a cow, and cows need plenty of water and food … The rumination of cows produces methane gas, which matches the global warming potential of carbon dioxide 21 times over. And the animal-based farm uses far more land than that taken by the growing of vegetable crops and the use of sloped areas for fruit trees. … Which brings us to another reason that we just cannot afford to waste any more time attempting to reform animal farms: the exigency presented by the biggest set of extinctions and the most ominous climate indicators in modern history. Designing campaigns around more space for animals destined to wind up on plates at trendy restaurants and pricey grocers is environmental malpractice. Joining their energies and educating relentlessly, the environmentalist and the animal advocate could effectively shield what little pristine environment is left in the world, and what freedom is still possible for animals who call it home. Thinking and working together, they could replace the fantasy of sustainable and humane animal farming with a plain- speaking movement that gets to the point: We just don’t need to buy what animal agribusiness is selling.219

Consumers (and Producers) of Free-Range Animals Still Support Factory Farms

Since it is not physically possible to produce the large amounts of free-range meat

American consumers currently demand, those who purchase meat, including the producers of “free-range,” or “humanely raised,” meat themselves, regularly consume meat from factory farms. As Jonathan Safran Foer puts it in Eating Animals, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the number of options available to most of us. There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of

Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the

219 Lee Hall, “Sustainable, Free-Range Farms and Other Tall Tales,” Dissident Voice, November 18, 2005. Reprinted online at , http://www.friendsofanimals.org/programs/vegetarianism/sustainable-tall-tales.php. 102 country ... Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.”220 Ninety-nine percent of all meat produced in the United States is produced on factory farms—a statistic agreed upon even by free-range farmers.221 This is true not only for meat but also for milk and eggs. As The New York Times recently explained, only 1 percent of eggs are even labelled “free-range.” Of this 1 percent, much of the advertised access to the outdoors is an illusion since the chickens have only

“phantom access.”222 Because of the paucity of humanely raised meat, compassionate carnivores must either primarily eat vegan (since dairy cows and laying hens are treated poorly) or consume meat, eggs, and dairy produced in factory farms.

Unfortunately, most compassionate carnivores choose the latter. Even Catherine Friend, who lives on a supposedly “happy meat” farm, and has written multiple books detailing the horrors of factory farms, routinely buys factory-farmed meat. Friend even quantifies for us how much factory-farmed meat she still eats: “Before I was a farmer, 100 percent of my meat came from a factory. After we started farming and eating our lambs, that figure dropped down to perhaps 90 percent. But since I have been paying and working to replace the factory meat, I’m happy to report considerable success. Most weeks, about 50

220 Foer, Eating Animals, 256. 221As Farm Forward, an organization that actually works to support “humane” farms, admits:

[T]he reality of meat is unambiguous. And at Farm Forward we don’t pull any punches when we face inconvenient realities: Most of the animals raised and killed for food (more than 99 percent, to be precise) come from unsustainable and cruel factory farms or, in the case of sea animals, other industrial operations. … Every person who adopts a vegetarian diet reduces suffering and environmental degradation and helps stretch the small supply of non-factory meat, dairy, and eggs currently available for those who choose to eat meat. As long as the demand for non-factory animal products exceeds the supply to this degree, it is best to avoid even these products. But whatever our approach to eating ethically, the important point to remember is that withdrawing our financial support from factory farming reduces the greatest barrier to a humane, sustainable agriculture: the wealth and power that the factory farm industry draws from the money we funnel to it daily (“Food Choices,” Farm Forward, accessed May 17, 2011, http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/food-choices). 222 “How Hens Are Confined,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/15/weekinreview/15marsh-grfk.html. 103 percent of my meals are made from happy meat, 25 percent are meatless, and 25 percent are from factory farms.”223 If someone who raises “happy meat” herself reports eating factory-farmed meat for at least a quarter of the time, it is hard to imagine that customers who have more limited access to such meat could do better.

Friend repeatedly assures her reader that he or she does not need to stop eating factory-farmed meat. For example, Friend lists, as possible goals for her readers: “The statement ‘I want to eat more humanely raised meat’ is so vague, you won’t know what to do next. Try something more specific, like ‘I want to eat one meal a month from animals raised humanely.’ Or ‘I will buy three dozen eggs a month that come from uncaged hens.’ Or ‘I will make four phone calls this month in search for happy meat.’ Or

‘I will find a source for pasture-raised .’”224 The problem is that the eating one meal a month from animals raised humanely will make no significant difference in either the lives of animals or the environment. Although setting the goal “I will never eat animals who have been raised in factory farms” would be just as “specific” as any of the goals which Friend lists, this is never one that she suggests or recommends, as even she herself does not follow this standard because she views it as too inconvenient and not

“compassionate” enough to herself. As , a long-time animal advocate, has phrased this same critique:

What does it say that the leaders of the “ethical meat” charge, like my friends Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and even the Niman Ranch farmers, regularly pull money out of their pocket and send it off to the factory farms? To me, it says that “ethical carnivores” is a failed idea; even the most prominent advocates don’t do it full-time. I have met countless people who were moved by Eric’s and Michael’s arguments, but none of them now eat exclusively Niman-type meat. They are either vegetarians or they continue to eat at least some factory-farmed animals. 225

223 Friend. 240. 224 Ibid., 199. 225 Foer, Eating Animals, 214. 104

To her credit, Friend, along with many other advocates for humanely raised meat, does raise the argument that she herself, or her readers, may wish to reduce their intake of meat. The problem is that it is discussed in exactly the same wholly tokenist manner, as though skipping meat for one meal per month will in some way undo the damage of regularly subsidizing factory farms. 226

We can, therefore, see that the purchasing of “happy meat” does not, necessarily, entail the more traditional boycott of factory farms. Instead, it seems to operate from the premise that the occasional consumption of a humanely raised meat product represents an effective form of activism that “off-sets” (like a carbon “off-set”) the cruelty and the environmental degradation that factory farms cause. Whether pasture-fed animals are, in reality, better for the environment or for animal welfare is an idea that should be questioned. But, even if they were, the minor dietary shifts called for by advocates of humanely raised meat would not represent a significant change in livestock policy. From an economic viewpoint, changing one meal a month from factory-farmed to humanely- raised meat, or finding a pasture-fed source for butter, may help individual small-scale farmers since they can subsist on a small volume and charge high prices. But such a change will have little impact on large-scale agribusiness. Reducing the consumption of factory-farmed meat to only 25 percent of a diet seems insufficient if the goal is of a boycott intended to leverage economic power on behalf of both animals and the

226 As Friend again writes on occasionally skipping meat:

I always remember my one rule about changing the way we eat meat, and that’s to be compassionate, first, toward yourself. That means that if you’re in a restaurant and hate all the meatless options, don’t flail yourself with a bamboo cane because you chose the factory meat ... Choosing the meatless meal over the factory meat may not amount to a large percentage of your diet, and that’s okay, but your choices will be more consistent with your values.” (Compassionate Carnivore, 238) 105 environment. A vegetarian, who purchases zero factory-farmed meat, or a vegan, who not only purchases zero factory-farmed meat but also purchases zero factory-farmed dairy or eggs, represents a more effective form of economic advocacy than a compassionate carnivore who gives a fourth, or more, of all of her “food dollars” to factory farms. The purchasing of humane meat suggests that occasional and ineffective changes can cause significant improvement. It appears that the net effect of the idea behind humane meat is to help individual consumers feel better about their continued consumption of factory- farmed flesh.

The Big Lie: “Humane Meat” Is Neither “Happy” nor “Humane”

Not only do compassionate carnivores still consume factory-farmed meat, but the way in which the animals are raised is far from what most consumers would consider

“humane,” or “compassionate.” In the chapter entitled “To Certify or Not to Certify,”

Friend provides a self-disclosed laundry list of actions she undertakes that prevent her from joining the “Animal Welfare Standards for Sheep.” For example, she uses herd dogs, does not allow her sheep to lie down comfortably during transport, does not provide continuous access to shelter, and most importantly “docks” (amputates) their tails without the use of anesthesia. Here is how she explains this last action:

To dock a tail, some farmers cut if off. Others slide a tight rubber band onto the tail, cutting off blood circulation to the tail so that it eventually atrophies and falls off. ... I keep finding books written by interviewing authors who pounce on farmers with this question: “And you do this procedure without anaesthesia?” The farmers never have a good answer, because the question doesn’t make any sense to them. We do occasionally cause animals pain or stress, but the expense and time of administering some sort of anaesthesia isn’t practical ... I’m basing my 106

opinions not on scientific research studies of whether an animal feels pain, or on how much, but on observation. The pain fades.227

While I am sure the Friend is correct that the pain does, in some sense, “fade,” nonetheless, I worry that her own personal observations, devoid of any reference to the scientific research on the topic, underestimate the suffering these practices cause. For example, Michael C. Morris has documented in the Journal of Agricultural and

Environmental Ethics that tail docking is an unnecessary practice, kept primarily out of tradition, that when done with the use of anesthesia can lead to a lifetime of “chronic post amputation pain.”228 In 2008, the Farm Animal Welfare Council in Great Britain compiled a report entitled “Report on the Implications of Castration and Tail Docking for the Welfare of Lambs.”229 This report came to same conclusion: tail docking is done primarily out of tradition, causes all sheep a great deal of pain, and, particularly when administered without anesthesia, causes a lifetime of “phantom limb pain.”230 Moreover, while she makes no mention of it in The Compassionate Carnivore, in her earlier book,

Hit by a Farm, Friend chronicles that she not only cut off her sheep’s tails but also castrated her male lambs without the use of anesthesia.231 If the majority of the scientific community believes that tail docking represents significant levels of pain, there is a

227 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 130-131. 228 Michael C. Morris, “Ethical Issues Associated with Sheep Fly Strike Research, Prevention, and Control.” Journal of Agricultural and 13, no. 3–4 (2000): 207. 229 Farm Animal Welfare Council, “Report on the Implications of Castration and Tail Docking for the Welfare of Lambs,” June 2008, http://www.fawc.org.uk/pdf/report-080630.pdf. 230 Ibid., 13. 231 While Friend has now moved on to a “band” method of castration, here is how she originally describes that procedure: Melissa gave each lamb a shot of vitamins, dipped the navel in iodine, attached a plastic numbered ear tag, felt for a fully belly to make sure it had been nursing, then checked for sex. If it was a male, she pulled out a nasty-looking tool called a burdizo, a silver, clamplike thing. She found the slender cords running to the testicles, slid the burdizo jaws over these cords, then apologized. We’d both grimace as she squeezed the jaws together, crushing the cords so the testicles would eventually atrophy. (Compassionate Carnivore, 118) 107 complete consensus that castration causes intense pain, and will also generate long- lasting, and long-term, chronic pain.232

Friend is no way unique in this omission of animal welfare. For example, Joel

Salatin practices similar animal cruelty including confinement, over-crowding, denying of food, and conventional slaughterhouses.233 Every farm that I can find that markets itself as “humane” still engages in many of the same practices as their “factory farm” counterparts. These include grinding up male chickens at birth, using animals who have been selectively bred into shapes that cause disease, suffering, and early death, forced and repeated pregnancies, separating family members for profit, and killing the animals in the same slaughterhouses and identically “inhumane” conditions.

Moreover, the only enforcement mechanism that Friend, Salatin, Kingsolver,

Pollan, and many other advocates of local or humane meat endorse is individually visiting a farm and trusting what the farmer self-reports as her standard of care. (Pollan refers to this practice as going “beyond the bar code.”) For example, in her chapter

“Visiting a Farm,” Friend includes twelve actions a consumer is supposed to take in order to visit a farm that concludes with: “Don’t argue with the farmer.”234 Even the section entitled “Ask Questions” warns:

When you ask questions, keep an open mind. You might learn something new about animals. Just because a farming practice isn’t sanctioned by a certifying body, or hasn’t been mentioned in this book, or hasn’t been written about in The New York Times doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong. Remember that farmers are fiercely independent, and most of us have very good reasons for doing what we do on our farms.235

232 Farm Animal Welfare Council, “FAWC Report,” 26. 233 , “Is Being a Vegetarian Important?” , accessed May 17, 2011, http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/vegimportant.html. 234 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 221. 235 Ibid., 222. 108

While such a system may seem the most desirable for farmers, it is less clear how such a solely self-reporting system can result in substantial improvement in the lives of animals.

Not only does such a standard make access to the already rare “humane meat” even smaller, since each farm must be individually visited by each consumer, but it also shifts the entire burden of determining animal welfare on to consumers, who are limited to rare, and non-confrontational, visits. How does even the most well-informed consumer know to ask whether the farmer engages in tail docking, and how many are confident enough to protest, when the farmer claims that such practices are necessary to protect the health of the sheep?

Friend undercuts even this already low standard of care by repeatedly assuring her readers that they should not hold individual farmers to too high a standard. In the chapter

“Finding a Farm,” she tells us to “[b]uild relationships with farmers. Give them a little leeway if their places aren’t perfect,”236 and in the chapter “ Get Real about Your Goals,” she concludes that consumers should “[a]void setting absolutes in what you will or will not accept in your happy meat.”237 In the same manner that she says it is acceptable for a consumer to purchase and consume factory-farmed meat, Friend argues that a consumer should not be that strict on the standards of the humane farms from which they do purchase their “humanely” raised meat. It is unclear how such a doubly tokenist system

(token consumption of “humane” meat from animals only tokenly more humanely raised) could ever result in an actual improvement in the lives of animals and represent an effective form of economic activism.

236 Ibid., 216. 237 Ibid., 198. 109

Profit and Marketability, or “Altruism Doesn’t Pay the Taxes”

The underlying reason that prevents the purchasing of humane meat to help animals is the failure of anyone in the movement to confront the reality that standards of care will be undercut in a system in which animals are raised and sold for profit. The most revealing aspect of Friend’s discussion of her animal husbandry practices is not the admitted practices of tail docking and castration but the fact that she never provides anesthesia for any procedures. Moreover, the only reason she suggests for never providing anesthesia is the cost—in other words, it would be cheaper, and easier, to dock tails without having to pay for anesthesia—even though, as earlier cited, this is the recommended practice from an animal welfare viewpoint. This represents the most significant problem of the entire argument that one should purchase “humane meat”—the manner in which it ignores the fact that animal agriculture gains a profit by steadily watering down standards for animal care. There is no acknowledgement that when animals are regarded as an agricultural commodity that must be routinely produced for sale, there exists a permanent and inherent contradiction between the welfare of the animals and the profit of the business, since lower animal standards (if unperceived) always result in increased profits. Let me give the clearest example of what I mean.

Friend and her partner Melissa are both committed feminists who claim that they began farming as way to combat traditional gender roles and heteronormativity. One would least presume that in formatting a “humane” standard of care, acts of forced female copulation would represent an area of particular ethical concern. However, for purely financial reasons, Friend and Melissa personally hold down a female goat and force her to have what is clearly undesired sex in order to effectively match their breeding 110 program. In a chapter actually entitled “Let’s Just Forget This Ever Happened,” Friend describes the practice:

At ’s, we led Ambrosia [Friend’s female goat] to the converted chicken house, into a building about twenty feet by ten feet, with bare board door, and Bozeman [the male sheep] came flying in, eyes wild, lip curled at the scent of Ambrosia. Our goat took one look at this creature and began running. I couldn’t blame her. Not only do intact bucks reek with an indescribable scent, but this guy’s head and neck were oily, greasy, and matted with something foul ... Ambrosia wasn’t buying it. Who could blame her? We watched Bozeman chase her in a circle for five minutes.

“Is this how goat sex usually goes?” I finally asked. “No,” Mary said. “Usually the doe stands still. Ambrosia must be near the end of her cycle. She can still get pregnant, but isn’t willing to stand still.” She sighed. “I’m afraid we have to hold her.” Groaning, we stepped forward. Melissa grabbed Ambrosia’s collar but she twisted away. Mary and I cornered her but she slipped past us. Finally it took all three of us to catch Ambrosia. Then, unbelievably, we restrained her head and torso while Bozeman, loopy with lust, flung himself on her and began thrusting his hips. No one said a word as Bozeman concentrated on the task at hand, and Ambrosia grunted indignantly. I held my breath to avoid Bozeman’s aroma. Finally I muttered, “Can I still call myself a feminist after this?”238

In this scene, what is so meaningful is not only the clear suffering the female goat

Ambrosia is undergoing, but also how Friend herself believes that she should not be supporting what is occurring. The only reason she does is for profit. It is not the case, as with tail docking and castration, that Friend wishes to disagree with the scientific consensus on the painfulness of these procedures, choosing to believe that “the pain fades.” In this scene, Friend herself believes that what is occurring is wrong, unpleasant, ironic, and unethical, but she still participates because it is necessary for her farm be able to run at all. As a for-profit business premised on breeding and killing animals for human consumption, even core values of animal welfare are, at times, sacrificed when it is perceived as necessary for profitability. And Friend is not alone in this prioritization of profit over animal care. Joel Salatin is even more open about his basic motivation being

238 Friend, Hit by a Farm, 146. 111 the maximization of profits, even if it conflicts with animal welfare. In an interview with the newspaper The Guardian, after railing (for some time) about the “ of Wall

Street,” Salatin is asked why he does not use “heritage” birds, (birds that have not been selectively bred for greater profitability, and consequently, live short, unnatural, and painful lives). Salatin explains:

I’m not opposed to heritage breeds. We have some heritage breeds. Here’s the problem though: marketability … We tried heritage chickens for three years and we couldn’t sell ’em. I mean, we could sell a couple. But at the end of the day, altruism doesn’t pay our taxes. And I’m willing to say: ‘You know what? I don't have all the answers and I pick my battles and compromises.’239

While they frequently deny it, both local and “humane” farmers are small-scale businessmen and women concerned, ultimately, with profit and marketability. As such, they have managed to “rebrand” their product in order to create a niche market in which animals are raised under marginally “improved” animal welfare standards for significantly higher profit. Hence, the emphasis throughout on the acceptability of making “compromises,” and the counterintuitive argument that it is fine if consumers

(and the farmers themselves) still purchase factory-farmed meat as long as they also purchase the small-scale farmer’s product. Likewise is the continued insistence that these supposedly improved conditions themselves should neither be too closely examined

(“don’t argue with a farmer”) or enforced. The emphasis is less on the reality of the animals’ actual lives (mutilations, castration, forced breeding, genetic breeding, and so on) and more on the “brand name” quality of the product as now, supposedly, both more

“local” and more “compassionate.” This is why the emphasis is on a “buy-cott” of

“happy” meat instead of a firm boycott of factory farms: The true goal is more to increase farmers’ own sales (buy more) than it ever is to actually decrease production, or

239 Wood, “Interview: Joel Salatin.” 112 consumption, of factory-farmed animals. As a business model, such a strategy has been remarkably successful. However, from the standpoint of concern for animals (or, for that matter, the environment), the benefit is significantly less clear. And, to be clear, these are structural problems inherent in the profit-based system of animal husbandry, which no amount of purchasing of humane meat, no matter how successful or widespread, can alleviate. It is not hard to imagine as small-scale farmers become larger, more removed from the animals they raise, and, most importantly, more known as a “brand name,” the animals will start to fare worse. This process is exactly what has already happened in the case of the largest and most well-known producer of humane meat, Niman Ranch.240 The original founder, Bill Niman, was forced out by shareholders who wanted to lower standards (while keeping the same name and price for the meat) in order to increase profitability. In fact, the new CEO of Niman Ranch justifies these actions via the identical argument that Salatin uses, stating, “I think idealism can pay … But it has to be couched with practicality.”241 Even if someone had visited Niman Ranch in the beginning and been satisfied by their level of animal husbandry, they would now be buying a product no longer raised, or even approved, by Bill Niman. In fact, Bill Niman no longer even eats Niman Ranch meat because of concerns over the care of animals.242 Therefore, in the best “test case” we currently have, the support of small-scale farms failed, ultimately, to significantly help animals, farmers, or the environment.

Conclusion: “Compassionate” Conservatives

Doug Wead, a former presidential advisor, was the first person to coin the phrase

“compassionate conservative.” He expanded upon this idea in books such as The

240 Finz, “Niman Ranch Founder Challenges New Owners.” 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid. 113

Compassionate Touch and speeches such as “The Compassionate Conservative,” which he famously gave at a charity dinner in Washington.243 The essential notion was that conservatives should feel the pain of the poor, even though they did not have to change any of their actual policies (for example, funding programs to help the poor.) This idea became one the key slogans of George W. Bush in his presidential election against Al

Gore. Despite the rhetoric, many critics of George W. Bush could not find any sustainable difference between his views toward the poor and those of any other conservative. As the admittedly biased former President Bill Clinton described it, in practice, compassionate conservatism meant only, “I want to help you. I really do. But you know, I just can’t.”244

A remarkably similar logic is at work in the new term “compassionate carnivore” and that group’s attempt to market “happy meat.” They, too, express frequent and powerful moments of concern for the welfare of animals, but, like the compassionate conservatives before them, they fail to translate this care into the real or systematic change that actual care for animals entails. Instead, like the compassionate conservatives before them, compassionate carnivores insist that the “free market” will solve all the ethical concerns confronting animals. However, as the example of Bill Niman shows, such faith seems unwarranted. It will always be in the economic self-interest of the farmer to water down his or her standard of care if the public cannot perceive the changes. As with Salatin’s decision not to use “heritage” birds, Friend’s failure to use anesthesia and her willingness to personally engage in forced female mating demonstrate that, when profit and animal welfare contradict, it is the profit consideration that

243 Doug Wead, The Compassionate Touch (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 1977). 244 Kristofer Cowles, “Revisiting Compassion from a Conservative Perspective,” American Writers, July 8, 2009. 114 triumphs. What is of greatest concern to me about the “happy meat” movement is not that it is physically impossible or ecologically infeasible. Or that most practitioners still regularly purchase factory-farmed meat. Or even that, universally, they still engage in a wide panoply of practices of animal husbandry, which are neither “compassionate,”

“happy,” nor “humane” and violate even the most deeply held views of the farmers and consumers themselves. No. What most concerns me is that these expressions of feelings of care for animals serve only to mask the simple reality that for the entirety of their lives, these animals live as only buyable and sellable commodities, who exist wholly at the whim of their “owners.” Such a view changes an issue of social justice (captured in the idea of animal “rights”) to one of mere charity, which, consequently, can be compromised or abandoned at will. Therefore, I wish to suggest that the “compassion” of the carnivore has less to do with the animal herself but instead is about the human feeling of guilt. Writing a letter to lambs “wishing them a safe journey” as they are being taken to slaughter does not make sense if we think in terms of the lambs themselves who, of course, cannot read, do not care about the letter, and will all soon be killed. It only makes sense if we think in terms of the humans: the human writing the letter and the humans reading it in reprint form.

However, my goal is not to dismiss the feelings of either Friend or any other

“compassionate” carnivore. These feelings of care, Friend’s inability to butcher the lambs herself, and her clear discomfort with the forced mating of her goat Ambrosia are all hopeful signs. What is needed is a transition from a profit-driven practice of advocating the purchasing of humane meat to advocating for vegetarianism and veganism. I believe that both compassionate carnivores and the idea of a “buy-cott” versus a boycott have 115 something important to teach us: While humane meat is an ecological and ethical impossibility, vegetarianism and veganism are not only a boycott of meat, but also a

“buy-cott” of meat-free businesses and practices. Vegetarians and vegans are not passively “leaving the table” (it is not as though we are ). Instead, we are self- consciously choosing to employ our food dollars to actively and affirmatively create a new system of diet and consumption. We are, in addition to the traditional boycott of meat, also actively creating (and supporting) vegan growers and providers, vegan items at a grocery store, vegan restaurants, and even vegan options at non-vegan restaurants.

These are all actions that make it easier and more convenient for people to choose the vegetarian or vegan option. A consumer deciding if she will purchase a “sustainable meat” entrée or a vegan entrée is not deciding between an “active” versus a “passive” force, but between visions of future dietary changes she wishes to help create. The claim that vegans are not taking an active stance on how animals are raised is simply factually untrue. What vegans are saying is that we not only reject the abuses of factory farms but also tail docking and castrations, medical procedures performed without the use anesthesia; forced breeding; the use of genetically modified or selectively bred animals so misshapen that their lives are both painful and cut artificially short; painful transport; and ultimately slaughter, as well as the basic idea that the only value of an animal life is as an agricultural commodity. We are therefore employing not a mere percentage but the entirety of our food dollars to help support and create a different type of food system. For, at the deepest level, while my opening quotation from Through the Looking Glass may seem overly dismissive of the emotional pain of those who called themselves

“compassionate carnivores,” this is not my intent. Instead, I hope that those who are truly 116 concerned with the suffering and death of animals can join with animal rights activists, not to promote “happy meat,” since such a goal is, in fact, an impossibility, but instead to help promote ending theconsumption of any kind of meat, eggs, or dairy. As Friend herself writes, “[b]ecause farming is a business, there won’t be a product unless there is a demand.”245

245 Friend, Compassionate Carnivore, 248. 117

The Judas Pig: How We Kill “Invasive Species” on the Excuse of “Protecting Nature”

Like the Pentagon facing an entrenched army, the Park Service is girding for an all-out war on pigs on Santa Cruz Island. There will be no prisoners taken in this campaign.

—Reporter’s description of the pig removal process on Santa Cruz Island246

246 Jo-Ann Shelton, “Killing Animals that Don’t Fit In: Moral Dimensions of Habitat Restoration,” IV, August 2004: 6. 118

Michael Pollan, in his bestselling text The Omnivore’s Dilemma, uses the example of invasive species (and, specifically, the killing of “feral” pigs in Santa Cruz) as proof that animal rights and environmentalism are incompatible. Pollan even proceeds to personally hunt and kill feral pigs in Santa Cruz; an experience he enjoys so much that he compares it to being high.247 Hence Pollan and others248 have drawn from this example of feral pigs in general, and feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island in particular, a supposed overarching argument that since feral pigs are clearly harmful to the environment and had to be killed on these islands, then animal rights and environmentalism must be inherently incompatible. In otherwords “invasive species” in general, and “feral” pigs on Santa Cruz

Island in particular, have become an overarching and symbolic touchstone for supposedly placing animals in competition with “nature.”

In contrast, I wish to argue that the removal of “feral” pigs from Santa Cruz

Islands was not motivated by environmental concerns, but, instead, by desires to create a marketable view of nature. Furthermore, I wish to argue that these animals were killed via technological approaches that are deeply opposed to any traditional understanding of nature or the natural. In other words, I argue this large-scale violence against both non- human animals and the “natural” world is perpetrated under a false rhetoric of “protecting nature” against supposedly “invasive” species. Instead, I believe that the concepts of the commodity fetish and of biopolitics represents the best way for us to understand the basis by which this active mass killing of species deemed cosmetically undesirable become

247 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 342. 248 Donna Haraway also references feral pigs on Santa Cruz within her text When Species Meet. Her treatment of the issues is a little more complicated than Pollan’s, which is my focus for this chapter. However, Haraway’s interest also speaks to the symbolic importance that this single incident has acquired in which multiple scholars are all using this single incident to examine a supposed tension between animal rights and environmentalism. 119 reimagined via a system of protective quarantine. And, as such, this killing helps to hide the reality that the most invasive and environmentally destructive animals on the planet are not pigs on a small island, but indeed, ourselves.

Of Pigs, Eagles, and Foxes

The environmental justification for the killing of the feral pigs by The Nature

Conservancy, the private nonprofit organization that, in large part, owns Santa Cruz

Island, is that it was necessary to protect biodiversity and endangered animals. The argument was the “feral” pigs had attracted golden eagles that in turn had started to prey on a type of endangered fox found on the island. As both the National Park Service website and a printed bulletin on the topic explain:

[F]eral pigs have played a pivotal role in the catastrophic decline of island foxes. Piglets provide a year-round food source for golden eagles, allowing these formerly rare or occasional visitors to expand their range and establish resident populations on the island that then prey on island foxes. Golden eagle predation has placed the fox on the brink of extinction on Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel Islands.249

It is this narrative (that the pigs had to be killed to drive off the eagles in order to protect the foxes) that underlies Pollan’s argument that animals’ rights are inherently in tension with environmentalism. As Pollan pens in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

As I write, a team of sharpshooters in the employ of the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy is at work killing thousands of feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island, eighteen miles off the coast of Southern California. The slaughter is part of an ambitious plan to restore the island’s habitat and save the island fox, an endangered species found on a handful of Southern California islands and nowhere else. To save the fox the Park Service and Nature Conservancy must first undo a complicated chain of ecological changes wrought by humans beginning more than a century ago.250

However, this simplistic narrative has widely been exposed as a marketing ploy. For

249 U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Restoring Santa Cruz Island,” http://www.nps.gov/chis/naturescience/restoring-santa-cruz-island.htm. 250 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 324. 120 example, Tim Setnicka, the former Superintendent of Channel Islands National Park, the original advocate for the pig removal program and the official responsible for the original environmental assessment report for the island,251 has come forward to admit that the primary motivations for the program were not environmental but aesthetic. As Setnicka explained:

To help sell the fox restoration program, for which we had no money, we came up with the media spin that one of the main reasons golden eagles reside on park islands was because of pigs. This would help vilify the pigs and help support the pig removal project. We didn't really remind folks that by 1991, we had shot all the pigs on Santa Rosa Island, so there were no pigs for eagles to eat. Of course, the golden eagles eat pigs, but they eat many more foxes, which are easier for them to catch.252

This confession in turn led Michael Markarian, the Chief Program & Policy Officer of

The Humane Society of the United States, to reveal that the suggestion of a contraception program to remove the pigs was simply dismissed. As Markarian explains:

All of this raises the question as to why the Park Service and The Nature Conservancy continue spending millions of dollars on what some park officials internally call their “mega kill, poison, and burn” plan. Even if we accept the premise that the Santa Cruz Island pig population really does need to be controlled or reduced, there are more humane and less draconian approaches. The Humane Society of the United States offered to help with a contraception program for pigs, using a vaccine developed by the Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center and approved for experimental use by the Food and Drug Administration. But the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy simply said no.253

What both Setnicka and Markarian claim motivated the killing of the feral pigs was not environmental concerns but instead a desire to exterminate animal species based solely on their ancestry. Or, as Markarian again phrases it:

251 U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Santa Cruz Island Primary Restoration Plan: Final Environmental Impact Statement (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2002). 252 Michael Markarian, “Pig Eradication Plan Out of Control,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), May 22, 2005, http://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Pig-eradication-plan-out-of-control-2668922.php. 253 Ibid. 121

In the face of such dismissive attitudes about a promising and humane technology, one cannot help but wonder if the desire to eradicate pigs, rats, eagles, swans, and other “nonnative” animals is based on their ancestry rather than on their alleged impacts. Wildlife agencies have adopted a certain zealotry in wanting to exterminate any animal species that hasn't been here for an arbitrarily determined amount of time.254

I spend such time quoting both Setnicka and Markarian because, incredibly, Pollan cites the very article that all of these quotations come from but simply ignores all of their claims.255 It is also likely that The Nature Conservancy is aware of these critiques, since

Setnicka used to serve as the former Superintendent of the Channel Islands National Park and was listed as the “Contact for More Information” on the Environmental Assessment

Report which The Nature Conservancy used as the basis for their removal of the feral pig population.256 However, as with Pollan, I find no mention of the criticism nor a response on any of The Nature Conservancy websites or publications.257 In other words, while demonstratively aware of multiple criticisms of the feral pig removal project, all criticisms are responded to only via selective omission. For example, Pollan even directly quotes the first part of the earlier-cited opinion piece without reproducing or responding to the entire rest of the article. As Pollan writes:

A spokesman for The Humane Society of the United States [Michael Markarian] claimed in an op-ed article [that is, the same one that included the confession by Tim Setnicka] that “wounded pigs and orphaned piglets will be chased with dogs and finished off with knives and bludgeons.” Note the rhetorical shift in focus from the [species] Pig, which is how the Park Service ecologists would have us see the matter, to images of individual pigs, wounded and orphaned, being hunted down by dogs and men wielding bludgeons.258

254 Ibid. 255 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 324. 256 U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Santa Cruz Island Primary Restoration Plan. 257 The Nature Conservancy, “California: Santa Cruz Island,” accessed April 11, 2014, http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/california/placesweprotect/santa- cruz-island-california.xml. 258 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 325. 122

There is no mention by Pollan that the former Superintendent of Channel Islands

National Park admits that the program had nothing to do with environmentalism; that The

Humane Society of the United States had offered a different approach of pig removal based on contraception use and sterilization; that previous efforts at species eradication on other islands had disastrous results; that various groups have claimed that the environmental arguments put forward by The Nature Conservancy were specious (all of which were contained within this same article). Instead, Pollan wrongly pretends that the only criticism by animal rights activists was based on a distinction between individual animals suffering and suffering of the animal as a species, even though it would have been impossible for him to read the part of the article that he reproduced without reading these other criticisms as well. In other words, Pollan chose to only take the first paragraph, completely out of context, in order to misrepresent the entire issue of The

Humane Society (and, by extension, all animal “rights” organizations). The actual argument by The Humane Society is not, as Pollan tries to suggest, between individual animals and collective species, nor for that matter, is it between the environment and animals rights. Instead, the argument that The Humane Society made—the claim that the pigs, who have lived on the island for more than 150 years, are an invasive feral species that must be killed—is used as an untrue smokescreen to (falsely) justify their killing without any truly supporting evidence. So, in essence, The Humane Society’s argument

(and that of many animal rights organizations) is not that individuals should outweigh the species or that the environment should outweigh animal rights, but instead that a rhetoric of protecting the environment is being strategically deployed not to protect any 123 animals at all but instead only to help hide the reality of the mass killing of feral pigs, which was undertaken purely for ascetic and marketing reasons.

Such omissions are unsurprising. As Jo-Ann Shelton,259 a professor in the environmental studies program at University of California, Santa Barbara, has documented, the purpose of The Nature Conservancy (on which Pollan bases his arguments) is not to achieve environmental balance but, instead, to eradicate all post-

Columbian plant and animal species regardless of the environmental realties involved. As

Shelton phrases it:

Despite its name, The Nature Conservancy planned not simply to conserve populations of pre-Columbian plants and animals, but to restore a pre-Columbian landscape. The two goals are similar, but not identical. Conservation allows for a possible co-existence of species; restoration is a type of biological cleansing, an “exorcism of the exotics” … that requires that all European elements be removed in order to recreate an archaic scene.260

Therefore, both The Nature Conservancy and Pollan, while aware of the critiques against the killing of the feral pig population, simply chose not to answer the claims that are made against them, as the criticisms undermine their predetermined environmental narrative.

“Fetishes”

However, while this narrative provided by both Pollan and The Nature

Conservancy is factually incorrect, there are a couple of fairly deep issues also at work here that I want to pause to unpack. While the science that was cited to kill the pigs was

259 I would like to highlight the blog “Say What, Michael Pollan?” by Adam Merberg, a PhD student of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to particularly thank Merberg for directing me to the article by Jo-Ann Shelton, which I might not have read if I had not come across his blog. Merberg also highlights the failure of Pollan to adhere to the meaning of the original op-ed piece on invasive species, a conclusion that we each arrived at independently. It is comforting that he also found Pollan’s omission of the rest of the op-ed by Markarian to be troubling. 260 Shelton, “Killing Animals That Don’t Fit In,” 5. 124 itself pseudo-science, the actual motivations were two-fold. First, there was a certain view of what constituted “wilderness”—“wild” animals, not “feral” pigs—and secondly, a certain speciesist bias against those animals used for domestic food consumption. There were in fact three different species originally left on the island by the Spanish about 150 years ago: horses, sheep, and pigs. None of the horses were killed (they were all removed and found homes); some of the sheep were killed, but then there were protests, so the sheep were all rounded up, not killed, and then sold to a food processing plant; all the pigs were killed in an extremely brutal manner. So, there was a clearly different value assigned to each of these equally “feral” species, not presumably based on the species itself (pigs are as intelligent as sheep) but because of their relative social value to

Americans in food consumption.

Indeed, the “overpopulation” of feral pigs was, in part, caused by the killing/removal of feral sheep that were early on considered the worst ecological problem. Once there were no more sheep to compete for resources, it helped to cause the feral pig “explosion,” that is, “managing” and killing off one species led to more managing and more killing.

Furthermore, because of the experience over outcry about the “feral” sheep, The

Nature Conservancy brought in private contractors from New Zealand (Prohunt

Incorporated). They are in essence a global for-profit animal exterminator. To kill the pigs they:

1. Erected fences across the entire island to turn it into manageable sections with

traps and shooting;

2. Employed dogs and guns to hunt down pigs; 125

3. Escalated to shooting pigs down from helicopters;

4. When that didn’t (fully) work, they went to injecting pigs with GPS locators.

Since pigs are inherently social creatures, they would seek each other out. As

soon as they did, the contractors would come and kill the pigs. So pigs’ very

socialness was turned into a weapon against them.

5. When even this didn't fully work, they went to (a) removing the reproductive

organs of the captured female pigs; (b) forced them, chemically, to be perpetually

in “heat” (c) injected them with GPS trackers, and then (d) used this to attract the

other pigs who were then killed. This strategy, described as “Judas pigs,” proved

to be highly effective and was the most widely used.261

In other words, two violations of natural occurrences (friendship and mating) were chemically, biologically, and mechanically exploited in order to supposedly

“protect” nature. Each of these actions taken entailed a significant environmental and ecological impact (helicopters, bullets, and fencing of an entire island) all of which received no consideration throughout the Prohunt report, The Nature Conservancy website, or the work by Pollan or any other advocate for the program. And, likewise, the suffering of the pigs themselves was given zero concern by anyone involved.262 In fact, ironically, the fear that some people might care about the animals was itself the justification for such complete brutality. They had to kill all the pigs before anyone could raise awareness of what was occurring. As the report by Prohunt International phrased it:

261 Macdonald and Kelvin Walker, “A New Approach for Ungulate Eradication; A Case Study for Success,” Prohunt Incorporated, February 2008. 262 Note: As previously discussed, before the project began, the National Park Service did commission an environmental impact report. However, since this report was commissioned before the project began, it omitted several of the main practices used by Prohunt International, including the use of “Judas Pigs” (U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Santa Cruz Island Primary Restoration Plan). 126

Because animal control is controversial, the likelihood of legal action against an eradication project is high ... Legal action could prevent project completion or public pressure can sway a land manager’s commitment to a project even if the eradication was considered the only solution to a conservation problem…To reduce these risks, eradication projects must operate efficiently, which requires intensive planning and commitment by the organization conducting the field activities.”263

In other words, animals had to be exterminated to protect animals, nature had to be violated in order to protect nature. Finally, there is fairly convincing evidence that the entire ecological arguments against the pigs were themselves (protecting endangered foxes, eagles, and so forth) either untrue, exaggerated, or could have been solved by other options.264 Instead, it seems likely that actual motivations were aesthetic—to remove those animals that appear unnatural to the visitors (feral pigs, sheep, and horses), that is,

“nature” represents, at least in this specific case, less a question of stable ecosystems and more an Edenesque myth of “untouched” and “unspoiled” wilderness. Producing the visible approximation of this romantic myth was achieved via chemically induced estrus,

GPS markers, and machine guns.265 What the example of the eradication of the feral pigs of Santa Cruz Island reveals is not the protection of nature as much as its production as a buyable and sellable commodity. The Nature Conservancy, while a nonprofit organization, is the wealthiest environmental organization (by sum of assets, endowments, and annual budget), listing more than sixteen different ways people can donate to support its work on its website.266 In fact, The Washington Post has described

263 Macdonald and Walker, “A New Approach for Ungulate Eradication.” 264 For discussions of other options, see Shelton, “Killing Animals That Don’t Fit In”; U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Santa Cruz Island Primary Restoration Plan; Markarian, “Pig Eradication Plan Out of Control”; and “Channel Islands National Park Ex-Chief Hits Cruelty of Killing ‘Invasive Species,’” Animal People Online, April 2005, http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/05/4/tsg.channelIslands4.05.htm. 265 Macdonald and Walker, “A New Approach for Ungulate Eradication.” 266 The Nature Conservancy, “Membership and Giving,” accessed April 11, 2014, http://www.nature.org/membership-giving/index.htm?intc=nature.tnav.membership. 127

The Nature Conservancy as “something of a corporate juggernaut,” based on its similarities and connections to for-profit corporations. As the Post documented in a lengthy three-part article on the Conservancy:

The Arlington-based Nature Conservancy has blossomed into the world’s richest environmental group, amassing $3 billion in assets by pledging to save precious places. ... Yet the Conservancy has logged forests, engineered a $64 million deal paving the way for opulent houses on fragile grasslands and drilled for natural gas under the last breeding ground of an endangered bird species. … Its governing board and advisory council now include executives and directors from one or more oil companies, chemical producers, auto manufacturers, mining concerns, logging operations and coal-burning electric utilities. Some of those corporations have paid millions in environmental fines. Last year, they and other corporations donated $225 million to the Conservancy—an amount approaching that given by individuals. Today, the million-member Conservancy itself is something of a corporate juggernaut, Big Green. It is also the leading proponent of a brand of environmentalism that promotes compromise between conservation and corporate America.267

Hence, I see in this production of nature a manmade product of consumption, a type of commodity fetish. This is a reversal, since we usually think of nature as the opposite of a manmade product, and indeed, this desire to sell a view of nature as

“untouched by human hands” apparently underlies part of the reason for and attraction of the slaughter of the Santa Cruz pigs in the first place. Since it operates as a type of meta- commodity fetish, it is precisely because of the desire to escape the confines of the manmade and consumerist culture to return to an idea of edenic wilderness that seems to underlie the desire to exterminate the pigs. In other words, ironically, the very product that is being sold is itself the desire to transcend the commodity fetishism of consumerist culture and return to a supposed earlier time of “realness” and “authenticity.” As such,

“nature” comes to operate as a product, but a product that must be perpetually managed

267 David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens, “Nonprofit Land Bank Amasses Billions,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), May 5, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062600803.html. 128 as a kind of “anthropocentric environmentalism” in which the human is perpetually kept at the center of the creation even as every effort is made to make her seem to vanish into a land supposedly untouched by human hands.

The second main point that I want to make is that this mass death, slaughter, torture, and killing of animals is justified only via reference to the need to “protect” both animals and the natural world. As such I want to read this supposed, if false, need to remove feral pigs in connection with locavorism or the practice of trying to eat from small local and humane farms within a limited geographic distance. As I have previously argued,268 the product that the locavore movement sells is itself the idea of a return to an earlier time of authenticity beyond consumerism and the commodity fetish. Indeed, this connection between feral animals and so-called humane or local meat is in fact right at the heart of Pollan’s work. He extends from the “symbiosis” of humans having to kill off pigs (to save the foxes) to his claim that there is a “symbiosis” of farmers raising animals for human consumption.269 As such, the argument about feral animals really serves as simply something of an aside to prove his essential argument about the “naturalness” of meat eating. Indeed, this discussion about the feral pig population occurs directly before his section entitled “The Vegan Utopia,” which takes up the majority of the chapter.270

This second argument is perhaps the essential argument for Pollan, in which he believes that there exists a type of unwritten social contract between “Man” and the animals whom he eats—we feed and take care of animals and, in return, are allowed to eat them. Hence his critique of “factory farming” represents not a call to end the eating of all animals but

268 See, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham?; and “Crocodile Tears” in this manuscript as well as Vasile Stanescu “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough: A Response to Kathy Rudy, Locavorism, and the Marketing of ‘Humane’ Meat,” The Journal of American Culture 36, iss. 2 (2013): 100–110; 269 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 325. 270 Ibid., 325–327. 129 only to fix the failure of “taking care” of the animals in the first place. His underlying argument and the manner in which he is able to segue from feral animals to humane farming is based on the second idea that I think underlies both of these arguments, that of biopolitics, the argument that humans have to manage life itself. In other words, the basic idea seems to be that “nature” cannot manage itself without our constant human

“intervention.” And yet at the exact same time, this “intervention” must itself be continually re-hidden. So, like the invisible hands of the markets which still require constant human intervention, these calls for both the removal of feral animals and the raising of humane meat seem to simultaneously call for and disavow the constant involvement of the human within the so-called “natural.”

To make sense of the removal of the pigs on Santa Cruz Island, we need to think of the commodity fetish and biopolitics in terms of each other. In the classical idea of the commodity fetish, the labor of producing an item must be concealed so that products attempt to appear as if no labor was involved, almost by magic. (Our new Apple computer advertises that it was “designed in California,” while being wholly built in

China by workers who had to sign contracts promising not to commit suicide.271) So too, the labor in producing this island, the efforts of Prohunt, the killing, and so on all have to vanish. But there is in classical consumer fetishism at least the idea that one is actually purchasing something; there is in fact a product being purchased, a commodity no matter how removed from the labor the production of that commodity the item has become (that is, we at least realize that we are purchasing a computer no matter how removed it is from

271 Daily Mail Reporter, “You Are NOT Allowed to Commit Suicide: Workers in Chinese iPad Factories Forced to Sign Pledges,” Daily Mail (London, UK), May 1, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- 1382396/Workers-Chinese-Apple-factories-forced-sign-pledges-commit-suicide.html; Leslie Horn, “Foxconn Employees Forced to Sign ‘No Suicide’ Pledge,” PC Magazine, May 2, 2011, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384763,00.asp. 130 the labor conditions that have produced it). However, in this new post-commodity fetishism, what is concealed is not only, or even most importantly, the labor aspect of the commodity but simply the idea that one is purchasing a commodity at all. Hence, the supposed edenic view of Santa Cruz Island, owned and privately managed primarily by

The Nature Conservancy, presents itself as not even being a product, but as simply appearing as a return to “nature.” Therefore the violence inherent in producing, maintaining, and refining these manufactured and marketed views must itself be inscribed into a natural, or in other words, a biopolitcal valence. Hence, the unending fiction that the technological violence endemic in the killing of the so-called invasive species is simply a return to nature, the claim being that The Nature Conservancy is not violating nature but instead undoing, almost atoning, for an earlier violation of nature by removing a feral species to return the island to its earlier condition. The logic of biopolitics (that man has to manage and protect life itself) serves as the justification to produce the commodity fetish, while the logic of the commodity fetish, and indeed now the now post- commodity fetish (nature simply appears as if by magic, not only not made by man but not even sold by man), hides the functions of the biopolitical management. The Nature

Conservancy can therefore claim, as it currently does on its website: “Once on the brink of ecological collapse, Santa Cruz Island now offers visitors a glimpse of what Southern

California used to be like hundreds of years ago.”272 The very product being sold is the ability to simultaneously travel through time before human intervention and control and atone for environmental damage produced by such human control not via less human domination and control, but via always more.

272 The Nature Conservancy, “California: Santa Cruz Island.” 131

The Human Burden

Finally, there is an even deeper level of disavowal and supposed atonement hiding behind this edenic façade, specifically, that the major drivers of both species extinction and biodiversity loss are not feral pigs but global meat consumption. As discussed in the last three chapters the United Nations has determined rising meat production to represent the leading cause of biodiversity loss as well as climate change, pollution and “invasion by alien species” 273

Hence, I want to see this discourse concerning the killing of feral animals in relation to the discourse about humane farming. In reality, animals on so-called humane farms are still genetically modified, grossly mistreated, and killed while still only babies in industrial slaughterhouses.274 But even if this were not the case, the practice would be virtually irrelevant, since 99.9 percent of all farmed animals are raised in factory farm conditions.275 As I have previously argued,276 the entire appeal or utility of the locavore product is to mask the near universal reality of the factory farm system, and more importantly, to mask the reality of the hard choice— that it is impossible to, in essence, have one’s meat and ethics too. In other words, that what consumers are purchasing at a premium is not the meat per se but a forgetting that a decision has to be made. As such, the few token animals that do live on these supposedly more human farms serve as kind of symbolic proxy of atonement, like the United States president’s odd practice of pardoning one turkey before Thanksgiving in which Americans will kill millions

273 Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxiii. 274 Stanescu, “‘Green Eggs and Ham?”; “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough”; “Crocodile Tears.” 275 “Food Choices,” Farm Forward. 276 Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stanescu, “What is ‘Critical’ about Animal Studies? From the Animal ‘Question’ to the Animal ‘Condition,’” in Kim Socha, Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), ix–xi. 132 turkeys277. Likewise, these farms act as type of symbolic pardoning of a few animals to atone for the approximately fifty-five billion animals who will soon be killed worldwide almost exclusively with factory-farm conditions.

The final lens through which I want to see this killing of pigs on Santa Cruz

Island is via a symbolic atonement and disavowal, like the locavore or human farming movement, to hide the reality that the single largest drivers of species loss and extinction are not pigs but humans, and specifically humans’ epic consumption of meat. Indeed, this disavowal works particularly well since it supposedly necessitates and justifies the killing of animals, when in reality it is the raising and killing of animals, such as pigs, that is itself helping to cause the very epidemic of species extinction for which these murders are supposed to atone. In perfect anthropocentric logic, the cause of eradication of species is shifted from humans to the animals themselves in which, via biopolitics and the community fetish, the human can now come in order to “save.” We have a term—“the white man’s burden,”278—and in this type of eradication, I think we can see a kind of

“human burden,” in which our domination continues now simply under a logic of protective care. We have to control the natural world in order to save it; we have to kill animals in order to protect them. Much like in the case of purchasing humane meat, the appeal of The Nature Conservancy eradication efforts is that one can simultaneously purchase one’s way out of the commodity fetish, kill one’s way out of the logic of biopolitics, and, somehow, dominate one’s way out of the anthropocentric paradigm.

277 Magnus Fiskesjö, The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy’s Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantanamo (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 278See , “‘Man’s’ Best Friend: Why Human Rights Need Animal Rights from the Philippines to Abu Ghraib,” in this manuscript. 133

Part II: One Struggle - Humans and Animals - Extermination by Means of Their Continued Existence

134

Introduction: What Is “Man” or Who Is Animal?

Each of us has to reach his or her own usage of “human” (or consciously avoid it), and I for one freely admit that in my own writings I have been inconsistent … My colleagues, I hasten to add, do not, by and large, do much better. Indeed, I would probably regard any of them who claimed to as unacceptable arbitrary and dogmatic. So perhaps we should just accept that humanity is to scientists much as pornography is to prosecutors: they know it when they see it, even if they cannot define it.

—Ian Tattersall, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History New York, NY279

In the history of knowledge, the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history. I would find it difficult to see in this a scientific concept.

—Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

279 Robert Proctor, “Three Roots of Human Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 2 (2003): 232. 135

I recently attended a talk by David Kirby on his new book, Animal Factory, which purports to be an exposé about the conditions of animals in confined feeding operations, or “factory farms.” Kirby began his presentation by reassuring the audience that he had no problem with killing and eating animals. His only concern was that they not be too mistreated beforehand. In the Q&A, I asked a question which has long confused me concerning the locavore and humane slaughter movement, namely: Why it was that he felt that animals counted enough not to be “mistreated” but not enough not to be killed?

He responded, “Primitive people around the world choose to eat animals. They could be vegetarians—there is plenty of fruit in the Amazon—but they do not. Are you going to call them savages? I certainly am not. I feel that the important thing is to be reverent to the animals that we kill—like Native Americans praying over the animals they have just killed. There is just something essential about eating meat in being human.”280 I found this answer confusing since both his talk, about the book Animal Factory, and my question dealt only with the issue of raising and killing animals for contemporary consumption within the United States. And yet, while unresponsive to my immediate question, I find it revealing that Kirby’s answer invoked people in other countries. Thus, I find it meaningful that Kirby, while eschewing the term “savages,” did not find it problematic to refer to people of other countries as “primitive”—a contradiction I believe is caused by his desire to suggest that the practices of people in other countries (such as, apparently, people in the Amazon and Native Americans) represent the original and essential nature of what constitutes the human, hence, his fairly inexplicable segue between his discussion of other people in the world and his claim that eating meat represents the essential nature of “being human.”

280 David Kirby, personal conversation with the author at Book Passage, April 8, 2010, San Francisco, CA. 136

In fact, this same idea, that eating meat represents the essential element of what, historically, defined the “nature of man” coupled with a discussion of how so-called

“primitive people” eat and live has been suggested by a large array of other scholars and popular writers. Michael Pollan makes the claim that eating meat caused larger brain size and created “us” as truly “human” throughout his bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma.281

Likewise, in The End of Food, which features a recommendation by Pollan across the front cover, Paul Roberts makes the same arguments about the relationship between brain size and eating meat, now complete with colonial adages. Hence, not only does he assure us that it was solely “the meat revolution” which “made us human”282 but also that

in all, meat provided more calories, and thus more energy, that could then be used for hunting, fighting, territorial defense, and certainly mating. Meat was also a more reliable food source; by shifting to meat, prehistoric man could migrate from Africa to Europe, where colder winters and lack of year-round edible vegetation would have made an herbivorous diet impossible.”283

Roberts reiterates this claim when he writes, “[I]t’s also clear that without more animal foods, their bodies and brains couldn’t have gotten larger. And without those bigger bodies and brains, they couldn’t have become the intelligent, tool-using, highly effective hunters who were able to spread so quickly from Africa to the Middle East, Asia, and finally Europe.”284 While Roberts is purportedly only discussing early human hominids, it is difficult to read these passages without hearing echoes of former colonialistic adages—that meat produced larger brains, tool use, and allowed certain and more evolutionarily “advanced” humans to leave Africa and to arrive “finally” in Europe.

281 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 272, 291, 297, ff.” In fact, Pollan even warns, based solely on the shrinking brain size of koalas, that he believes vegetarianism might cause humans’ brain size to shrink. (There is, of course, no evidence of this from actual humans.) . For an extended discussion of this tendency, see the chapter in section “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham (this manuscript) 282 Paul Roberts, The End of Food (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), xxiv. 283 Ibid., xxiv. 284 Ibid., 7. 137

Craig B. Stanford, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of

California, theorizes in his book The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of

Human Behavior, this same connection of meat eating, intelligence, and the production of the human in even more strikingly colonialist terminology. He begins his text with the claim that “[i]n this book I argue that the origins of human intelligence are linked to the acquisition of meat … the intellect required to be a clever, strategic, and mindful sharer of meat is the essential recipe that lead to the expansion of the human brain.”285 He in large part “proves” this contention by observing, like Kirby, that “primitive” people all, supposedly, hunt and eat meat. As he writes in his chapter titled “The Hunting People”:

In a few scattered pockets of the world, there are people who continue to live in intimate contact with the land, using only a relatively simple technology combined with their considerable environmental wisdom and intelligence. These societies, which we call hunter-gatherers or foragers, are nearly gone; the total population of foraging societies today numbers only in the tens of thousands. It includes people in the Canadian arctic, the Amazon basin, and the savannas and rain forests of Africa. These people have been widely used as portraits of what our ancestors may have been like. They teach us about the interaction between human behavior and environment, and in doing so inform us about the range of possibilities of social adaptations found in their, and our, ancestors. They gather plant foods, honey, insects, and many varieties of small animals from their habitat, and they also hunt. … In nearly all foraging societies that have been studied, men do most of the hunting and women do most of the gathering. They are, in a sense, humans living in their natural habitat.286

Such claims, by a trained anthropologist, are troubling on several levels. In the first place, they fetishize non-Western living as somehow both more “primitive” and more naturally

“pure” than Western society, a view which is both grossly ahistorical (such societies have existed, changed, grown and varied as much as any other) and trivializing. Likewise, these claims suggest that other non-Western societies’ primary utility is to serve Western

285 Craig B. Stanford, The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5. 286 Ibid., 137. 138 societies as a way to glimpse what Western people were like in their more “primitive state.” And perhaps most disturbingly, these claims ignore all issues of cultural difference. By asserting a lax generality—many cultures of the world occasionally consume some form of meat—all eating of meat is grouped together in order to suggest an ahistorical and acultural universal “truth” now, supposedly, applicable to all people in all times since the very beginning of unrecorded human history. Hence, precisely the most interesting questions, namely questions of the differences in the types of animals consumed and protected and the reasons behind these cultural decisions, become ignored in a monolithic judgment on the definition of the “human.” Finally, it is significant to note the implied biases against women such a view also holds. Not only does it trivialize non-Western people as only a living museum of what “our” ancestors looked like, but also, it subtly sanctions and supports and division of the genders. After all, Sander also writes, “In nearly all foraging societies that have been studied, men do most of the hunting and women do most of the gathering.”287 This claim unconsciously echoes and reproduces the supposed connection between diet, racism, and gender that fills much of the original colonial literature. Such claims represent a remarkably retrograde version of anthropological thinking—producing “conclusions,” only achievable because of lingering, and disturbing, colonialistic biases. As Anne McClintock wrote in Imperial

Leather:

[I]mperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearing the evolutionary logic of historical progress forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as historical across time.288

287 Ibid. 288 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40. 139

The “Greatest” Question of Philosophy

One of the arguments for this second half of this dissertation is therefore that the question “What is man?” is not a question that should be answered, but a power dynamic that should be studied and, when necessary, critiqued. For example, famously claimed that

[t]he field of philosophy … may be reduced to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is man? The first question is answered by Metaphysics, the second by Morals, the third by Religion, and the fourth by Anthropology. In reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last.289

And, likewise:

The plan I prescribed for myself a long time ago calls for an examination of the field of pure philosophy with a view to solving three problems: (1) What can I know? (metaphysics). (2) What ought I to do? (moral philosophy). (3) What may I hope? (philosophy of religion). A fourth question ought to follow, finally: What is man? (anthropology, a subject on which I have lectured for over twenty years).290

Hence, for Kant, the most important question in all of philosophy is, “What is man?” because it is only via answering this question that any other question in all of philosophy can be addressed. It is, according to Kant, impossible to know what man should do (moral philosophy) without first knowing what is man, since it is only by understanding the nature of man that a logical moral philosophy could ever be derived.

Likewise, it is impossible address the question of epistemology (that is, what can I know?) without first determining what is man, since, for Kant, that sets the very limit on the production of knowledge itself.

289 Immanuel Kant, Logic (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012), 29. 290 Immanuel Kant and Arnulf Zweig, Correspondence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 458. 140

In this text, I would like to start in an opposite direction and suggest that, in reality, the question “What is man?” is a question that can never be answered. Instead, each supposed attempt to define “What is man?” tells us less about the reality of the essence of the human (if, indeed, there is one at all) than it does about the one doing the defining. Such a critique has previously, and quite famously, been raised by the French thinkers Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and it continues to be raised by the contemporary Italian theorists Giorgio Agamben and

Roberto Esposito. However, I build on this previous work in two unique ways. In the first place, I argue that the critique leveled by these philosophers, that “man” as such can never be defined, has clear and immediate implications for our ethical treatment of other animals, including the requirement that we not display, kill, or eat them. Hence, while each of these philosophers discusses both the nature of man, and in that context, the care for animals, none of them is willing to see the intellectual question to its final end and reach the conclusion that if it is impossible ever to define “man,” then it becomes impossible to justifying the killing and eating of others who cannot (and should not) be defined as separate from the fictitious construct of “man” in the first place. It is Jacques

Derrida who comes the closest to raising these questions, particularly in a series of recently released lectures and interviews (The Animal That Therefore I Am, The Beast and The Sovereign, and others) but, as I will show, even Derrida ultimately fails to take his intellectual argument to its natural and logical conclusion and show that his own critique of leads to a practice of engaged veganism. This claim that this concept of “man” or “human” is less a scientific or taxonomical designation than a power dynamic of exclusion and control may strike readers unfamiliar with the broader field of 141 critical animal or posthumanist studies as a challenging and radical assertion. However, I will return to this concept throughout this text in precise and concrete detail. All I wish to show now is that the question “What is man?” has long stood as the defining question of philosophy. Therefore, when poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze bring this axiomatic idea into question, it must, almost by definitional necessity, possess ethical implications not only for humans but also for animals themselves and our conduct towards them.

Intersections of Oppression

The second argument I would like to make is to deepen the conversation within animal studies on the intersections of oppression of both humans and animals, particularly as they relate to attempts to “define” who is or is not human: a practice known in the field of critical animal studies as “intersectionality.” This concept of

“intersectionality” in critical animal studies borrows from the fields of critical race theory and feminism in the manner in which race, gender, and class can work synergistically to produce mutually reinforcing systems of suffering. So too, within the field of critical animal studies, there is a growing belief that the mistreatment of “animals” and the mistreatment of “humans” is interwoven along these same axes of gender, race, class, disability, nationality, and other factors. And, in part, such interrelationships of suffering occur because the distinctions between “animal” and “human” are interwoven and overlapping. Hence, “critical” animal studies hopes to suggest (and as with “critical race studies,” part of the meaning of “critical” is in the term) that we should be deeply concerned with the suffering of animals not only (but certainly also) because of the animals themselves, but also because of the suffering of humans and the belief that it 142 impossible to address one without addressing the other. This intersectional nature of suffering has been most famously suggested by Carol Adams in her book The Sexual

Politics of Meat, published more than twenty years ago. In this iconic text, Adams documents the interrelations between commodification of animal bodies and the commodification of women’s bodies, which she believes represent a shared dynamic of oppression—it is, in part, she argues, because animals are feminized that they can be killed and eaten. At the same time, she suggests it is in part because women have been and continue to be “animalized” that they, too, can be commodified, beaten, raped, and otherwise “consumed.” The quintessential expression of this interrelationship between sexism and speciesism is captured by the restaurant Hooters, where both the breasts of chickens and the breasts of women are mutually objectified and sexualized solely for male “consumption.”

I have already shown, in my chapters “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham,” and “Why

‘Loving’ Animals is Not Enough,” how the locavore movement is, in part, based on an anti-feminist position which, wrongly, blames feminism for removing women from hearth and home. In this second half, I continue to focus on the issue of animals and gender and examine an advertising campaign by Burger King, entitled The Whopper

Virgins, which intentionally feminizes other populations in the world. It is therefore, in part, my intention to directly follow from Adams’ own work of twenty years ago, and show how the intersection of the oppression of women and the oppression of animals continues to operate. At the same time, building on Adams’ work, I also argue that there is a connection between colonialism and imperialism and the exploitation of animals.

Hence, in parallel form to Adams’ discussion of how women can be oppressed in part 143 because they have been animalized, I show that colonized populations are, too, oppressed in part because they too have been “animalized.” Of course, these are not seen as two separate issues, animals and women and animals and the colonized, as colonization itself in part functions by feminizing the colonized population, a synergy of worldviews I will discuss through the concept of the “effeminate rice eater” in my chapter “The Whopper

Virgins.”

Thus, both of my intended unique contributions in this second half of the dissertation are designed to work synergistically together. In terms of critical theory, I hope to provide a series of specific examples, in both time and place, to highlight the manner in which critical theorists such as Michel Foucault can help us to understand the manner in which a belief in “human nature” is harmful to both animals and people. And, for the field of critical animal studies, I hope to make previous discussions of specific examples, such as Abu Ghraib, more complicated, via connections to critical theory, to suggest that what is at work is not a flawed nature of humanity that is inherently “cruel” to those less powerful, but instead, in part, embodied expressions of the question “What is man?”

What Holds for the Animal Holds for the Colonized

Raising the “intersectionality,” as I do, between oppressions of human animals and non-human animals and particularly between colonialism and animals, opens me up to critique particularly from both post-colonial scholars and animal scholars. There are scholars, from both fields, who have previously argued that attempts to elucidate the connections between a colonialized population and animals serves to denigrate colonialized people as animals as well as failing to advance the field of animal studies. I 144 would therefore like to address this critique head on to show specifically why I believe this discussion represents needed philosophical and literary work ultimately helpful to both fields. For example, Philip Armstrong argued against comparing the suffering of animals and the suffering of colonialized populations in the Society & Animals. He wrote:

Of course, not all peoples subjected to repressive regimes will necessarily want, and be able to, shed their distaste for “the dreaded comparison,” [between colonized humans and animals—a reference to a book title] even if this is only an attitude bequeathed to them by imperialistic humanism. Furthermore, although Native American cultures may consider some identifications with animals honorable, it cannot be presumed that all species of animal are accorded this value, nor that all other colonized cultures do the same. Ultimately, then, such equations between the treatment of animals and humans fail to advance either postcolonial or animal studies very far.291

This is a claim that leads him in the end of the article to the conclusion:

Just as post-colonialism has to try to remember the differences between systems of thought derived from Europe and those of the other cultures it seeks to understand, animal studies must respect animals for their differences from, rather than their similarities to, the humans with whom they have to live.292

To summarize, Armstrong’s objection against connecting the mistreatment of non-human animals and the mistreatment of humans appears to stem from at least three main sources.

In the first place, he suggests that some formerly colonized peoples do not wish to be

“compared” to animals since such comparisons are viewed as derogative or insulting (as they were during colonialism itself). Second, many indigenous cultures of the world engage themselves in some form of violence against animals, such as hunting, and therefore comparison between human and animal suffering may fail to take into account these cultural differences and/or indigenousness practices. And finally, Armstrong suggests that the motivation for certain practices of animal care (for example the attempt

291 Philip Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” Society & Animals 10, iss. 4 (2002): 414, doi: 10.1163/156853002320936890.

292 Ibid., 417. 145 to prevent dog eating) may themselves simply represent only a veiled form of neo- colonialism hidden under Western-centric rhetoric of protective care for animals. All such fears are valid, particularly since so much of colonialism has been premised upon rhetoric of “protecting” or “improving” human life.293 Furthermore, Armstrong is himself deeply concerned with the suffering of animals and, therefore, his thoughtful responses and fears derive not from a biased reaction of speciesism but instead from a deep appreciation and necessary humbleness in dealing with, as Armstrong chooses to phrase it, issues of “Otherness.”

However, I would like to help to open a space for an exploration of the historical interweaving of the oppression of animals and the oppression of the colonialized subjects

(along with issues such as gender, race, nationality, and sexuality) both historically and in contemporary examples. My own motivation for forwarding what remains a deeply controversial subject derives from two sources. In the first place, it strikes me as both intellectually incomplete and methodically flawed to conduct animal studies, particularly within any discussion of globalization, while choosing to exclude the historical reality of the interrelationship between animal and colonial oppression. In fact, Philip Armstrong, in his book What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, seems to finds it impossible to avoid, repeatedly employing the type of comparisons between colonialism and the mistreatment of animals which he, in turn, seems to suggest should not be made at all. In fact, to my best count, Armstrong invokes, positively, the same type of comparison,

293 For a fuller discussion of my thoughts on this topic please see my first book, Dying from Improvement: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the New Eugenics, currently under review. 146 between colonialism and animals, which he would seem later to criticize, more than twenty-two times in his own book.294

I am therefore unsure why Armstrong would choose to make connections between the objectification of humans under colonialism and, at the same time, pen an article which attempts to criticize exactly these same types of comparison. I suspect because he is attempting to critique the type of comparisons by Roberts and others as earlier discussed—that is, claims that the mistreatment of human and animals is unproblematically “the same.” When he critiques “the dread comparison,” this phrase is an allusion to a self-published book of the same title that attempts to link the treatment of animals and slavery as exactly parallel institutions. However, it is not, in any way, my goal to suggest that the suffering of humans and the suffering of non-human animals are morally identical, directly causal, or simplistically “the same.” It is instead to suggest, as

294 Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1998). For example, in his discussion of Robinson Crusoe, Armstrong writes:

This paradigm [of Crusoe selling Xury into slavery] of course is worked out first—or simultaneously—in the context of animal husbandry, as are other aspects of slaver ownership [my emphasis]. English travelers noted that the Portuguese marked slaves ‘as we do sheep, with a hot iron,’ and observed potential buyers inspecting them ‘as we handle beasts, to know fatness and strength.’ Meanwhile in England, slaves were given the same names as dogs and horses, while eighteenth-century advertisements offered ‘silver padlocks for blacks or dogs,’ or rewards for runaway slaves known by the collars around their necks. Thus, at the very best, slaves could expect only that partial and conditional granted to the domestic animals with whom they were routinely associated [my emphasis]. (42)

Armstrong even includes a chapter titled “Colonizing Animals” (32) in which he puts forward the perspective and underappreciated point that not only were colonized subjects viewed as animals, but also structurally animals were themselves deployed as tools of colonialism. As he again writes:

Seeding islands with livestock, however, represented only the first engagement of a much larger -processing machine. The dream of a civilizing mission, which offered a motive and alibi for European imperialism by promising enlightened cultivation of benighted races, was accompanied by an equivalent biological mission, which foresaw the domestication improvement of wild terrain through the importation of European life forms necessary to the reproduction of a colonial economy and social system. … This “grunting, lowing, neighing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche’ was crucial to the success or failure of various colonial investments [my emphasis]. (33) See also pages 26–58, 50–52, 59–62, 151–2, 179–80, ff. 147 already discussed, that both the mistreatment of animals and the colonialized human in part derive from a shared philosophical foundation, of the definition of human nature, which in turn can possess ethical insights for both groups.

For example, Achille Mbembe, in his signature text On the Postcolony, permeates his text with constant and reoccurring comparisons between the mistreatment of animals and the mistreatment of the colonized subjects. Since this issue remains so controversial,

I will quote several of these comparisons throughout the text, to illustrate how difficult

Mbembe finds it to even mention the topic of colonialism without, like Armstrong, contextualizing it back to the mistreatment of animals: “Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal [emphasis in the original].”295 “This [understanding of colonialism] requires distinguishing two traditions, each according a central place to an image of the colonized that made of the native the prototype of the animal [emphasis in the original].”296 “This entry [of the colonized] was, however, only possible after a process of grooming.”297 “That is what the language of the time gave the apparently distinct but actually interchangeable labels of ‘taming’ and

‘grooming.’”298 “What goes for the animal goes for the native. Of course, the colonized has a biological life, has desires, feels hunger and thirst. But from the standpoint of colonial epistemology, ‘We cannot properly feel ourselves into his nature, no more than into that of a dog.’”299 “What holds for the animal holds for the colonized, as what holds for the act of colonizing holds for the act of hunting.”300 “There is, then, a connection

295 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1. 296 Ibid., 26. 297 Ibid., 27. 298 Ibid., 31. 299 Ibid., 190. 300 Ibid., 193. 148 between the act of colonizing and the act of hunting [emphasis in the original].”301 And, perhaps most succinctly expressed, “But flesh is not transformed into meat only when it comes from an animal. Where power has a carnivorous aspect, killing a human being and killing an animal proceed from the same logic … At the end of the act of killing, what remains is, in all cases, practically the same.”302 Hence, I argue, taken either from the side of animal studies, or from the side of postcoloniality, we can witness a shared inability to theorize fully either the condition of the animal or the condition of the colonized subject without invoking near constant comparisons between animals and colonialism.

Unfortunately, these near constant comparisons currently only occur in a “disavowed,” or self-denied, manner, since both writers exclude any intentional discussion of why such continuous comparisons seem so necessary for their own writing. Therefore, the question

I wish to pursue in this book is less the normative one, “Should people compare colonialism and animals?” but more the ontological reality that from the very advent of colonialism itself such comparisons have been made and, as such, both animal studies and postcoloniality find it nearly impossible not to invoke such “comparisons.”

The Divisions Within Man

If this is the case, I wish to borrow my question and analogy from Armstrong and

Mbembe, yet take seriously the comparison that they raise only rhetorically, between “the animal” and “the native” and the “same logic” which condemns them both, and attempt to understand why it is that “what holds for the animal holds for the colonized.” For what

I find so meaningful in both Mbembe’s and Armstrong’s texts is not only the question that they raise but also the claim that they both propose that what in part drives violence

301 Ibid., 196. 302 Ibid., 200. 149 against the colonized and the animal is a rejection of the body. As Mbembe writes, “In the eyes of the settler, the native has no limits but his or her physical body. It is this body, these features, these muscles, that make up the sum total of the native’s ‘being.’ … In short, the colonized subject is an embodiment.”303 However, this rendering of “the native” as pure body at the same time renders it as lacking actual “being” since “[i]n the colonial principal of rationality, however, there is a clear difference between being and existing … From the standpoint of colonialism, the colonized does not truly exist, as person or as subject.”304 This claim, that what unifies the oppression of animals and colonialism, is also suggested by Armstrong even within the same essay in which he argues against making the comparison at all. He, likewise, writes:

A common antagonist can be recognized immediately in the continued supremacy of that notion of the human that centers upon a rational individual self or ego. This humanist self was fundamental to the practice of European Enlightenment colonialism as a “civilizing” mission, involving the pacification (and passivication) of both savage cultures and savage nature. ... It is no accident that postcolonial critics and animal advocates share an antipathy to Descartes, whose notorious refusal to allow animals the capacity to experience even the pain of their own dissection is the necessary counterpart to his equally famous inflation of the modern humanist and imperializing ego as that which exists only because it cogitates.305

Their shared claim is, therefore, the classical mind and body distinction, namely the natives are rendered as only body because they are viewed as not possessing rationality, and therefore must be ruled over, for their own benefit, by the colonizer. Furthermore, as both Armstrong and Mbembe document, part of the justification for this violence stems from the caesura in both law and ethics which excludes the animal. Hence if “natives” can be performatively rendered as animals, they immediately lose all standing in law,

303 Ibid., 187. 304 Ibid., 181. 305 Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” 150 ethics, or compassion for the simple reason that animals themselves possess no such standing. In fact, as I document throughout this book, the violence against the “native” itself becomes justified as a means to “train” and “domesticate” the natives into humans.

Or expressed differently, dehumanization itself becomes justified as a means to produce the human, the violation of “human” rights the ironic basis of inclusion in the performative human community.

Likewise, I suggest, because the human has historically been divided into warring

“rational” and “animal” components, only as an “animal rationale” does there exist a connection between the oppression of animals and the oppression of humans in both the historical and the contemporary forms. Hence, what each of these theorists helps us to understand is the philosophical critique of “humanism” and the ironic manner in which a rhetoric and value system premised entirely on the protective care for humans can also, from its very philosophical foundation, still contain within it the basis for new justifications and rationalizations of violence. For example, in his text The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben writes:

In our culture [that is, “Western” intellectual genealogy] man has always been thought of as an articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesuras? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.306

I will have a great deal more to say about this idea throughout the second half of the dissertation, but the essential point I want to make right now is the idea that “man” has

306 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16. 151 frequently been divided into (at least) two different component parts, a physical “animal” part, and a more socially contingent “human” part. In other words, this division between

“man” and “animal” is not only an external difference between humans and animals, but equally an internal distinction between the supposed “human” and the “animal” components within the human herself. Furthermore, it is precisely this artificial division between the supposed “animal” and “man” components within the human which has rendered the notion of the human such an unstable performative. Part of the reason practices such as factory farming are allowed to exist is because, as Foucault suggest with prisons, there is an aspect of the production of the human subject which is helped by the mass violence occurring against animals. And it is, therefore, the argument of this dissertation to chart how performative expressions of violence have been, and continue to be, interrelated with one another, the performatively visible violence against certain groups of people and the performative invisible violence against billions of animals, particularly as such performative violence is expressed in our age of globalization.

Dying from Improvement

In each chapter I attempt these same two projects: (1) to study a specific example of human oppression which, in part, is related to mistreatment of animals and, (2) at the same time, to document how such oppression in part justifies itself because of certain

“definitions” of humanity. For example, as already mentioned, I analyze a recent advertising campaign by Burger King, entitled The Whopper Virgins, which purports to travel to distant lands where people do not even have a word for hamburger into order to hold the “purest” taste test in the world. I argue (1) that this display both distorts and denigrates each of the cultures mentioned, and (2) that such displays are also tied to 152 certain lingering colonialist views that portrayed non-Westerners as effeminate rice eaters who because of their lack of consumption of beef were viewed, for dietary reasons, as not yet fully human. Likewise, in the chapter “Political Animal,” I examine the advent of

“human zoos” in both historical and contemporary examples. In a human zoo, colonialized or former colonized populations, predominately from Africa and Australia, are displayed in literal zoos or zoo-like settings, along with represented animals from these continents, via wholly stereotypical and inaccurate “African villages” or aboriginal

“cultural parks.” Again, as with The Whopper Virgins, I am attempting via these specific examples a two-part process: one, to analyze questions raised by the specific examples of humans displayed in zoos, and two, to illuminate a shared nexus in the manner that this question “What is man?” can help to oppress both animals and humans. In my chapter

“The University of Man,” I re-examine the much-discussed comparison of Abu Ghraib and the mistreatment of animals. But my goal is not to make universalized statements. It is instead to highlight contextually from very recently declassified documents the precise manner that some of the planners of Abu Ghraib wished to create a “state of exception” in the law because they did not feel that such “detainees” were themselves yet human.

My goal is to elucidate the claim suggested, but not fully articulated, by thinkers such as

Foucault and Agamben, that to define who and what is a human (and consequently who and what is not) can be harmful to both human and non-human animals alike. Hence, my discussion of The Whopper Virgins is meant not only to raise the question of the manner in which the video normalizes and excuses the imposition of fast food consumption against divergent domestic dietary practices, but also the manner in which the ads render invisible the poverty of the people shown who, the documentary suggests, are poor only 153 because they do not eat enough American-style meat. There operates, I believe, a connection between issues of diet, place, and the consumption of meat, issues that all become coupled with gender stereotypes and implicit discussion of whose lives do, or do not, count, which thereby helps to conceal and justify the suffering and death of both animals and humans throughout the third world.

Foucault and Agamben both argue that the panoply of human “rights,” such as the right not to be tortured, are ineffective precisely because what occurs is that the regime wishing to torture simply redefines the torture victim as no longer human and therefore as no longer protected. As such, these problems represent seemingly unsolved quandaries intrinsic to the very nature of liberalism for both Foucault and Agamben. Fair enough.

But what if the “right” not to be tortured was not, in any way, tied to being “human?”

What if instead torture itself was inherently viewed as ethically suspect for both humans and non-humans alike? Or in other words, what if this seemingly impossible “failure” of liberalism, which so concerns both Foucault and Agamben, has remained so enigmatic to both thinkers, not because it is in reality wholly unanswerable, but instead because of these thinkers’ own speciesist biases? To argue that the attempt to prevent torture against humans cannot operate in a society that allows for animals to be tortured may therefore not present an “unsolvable” philosophical/political problem but instead a possible solution by expanding beyond solely a “human” right not to be killed, raped, or murdered to the rejection of murder, rape, or torture for all animals (including humans) regardless of species designation. 154

Hence, to restate the same theme in slightly more academic terms, I am interested in articulating what I would term a “positive biopolitics.”307 In others words, for both

Foucault and Agamben, “biopolitics” is always a negative phenomenon in part because it always reduces man to the level of life itself, and it is precisely this designation as only

“bare life” that renders our political organizations irrelevant and our political protection permanently indeterminate. But what if as both scholars and activists we accepted, and re-appropriated, this designation as only “bare life” and zoe existence (itself, in part, the

Greek work for animal)?308 That instead of fighting for ever greater or more forceful articulations and definitions of our humanism, which at the same time, as both Foucault and Agamben show, also always represent who and what is not human, we instead chose to ground our political struggle on a shared, but now positive, biopolitical basis as only animals. In other words, what if our slogan became: “You cannot torture me—because I am animal”?

For example, the main character in Animal’s People continually asserts, even against an anthropological-type narrator and well-meaning nonprofits, that he is an animal, even at the very end insisting on his very right to continue walking on all fours.309

As such, the author of Animal’s People, Indra Sinha, is able to condemn the spill in

Bhopal, India, the largest chemical spill in world history, through a positive biopolitics: namely that as an environmental disaster, the spill by Union Carbide (now owned by The

Dow Chemical Company) was harmful to both human and non-human animal alike, and therefore, mutually affected and mutually harmed animals and that humans as animals,

307 Roberto Esposito uses this same phrase but his meaning is completely different from my own. 308 Technically zoe is the word for the natural life common to both man and animal, as opposed to bios, which is the socially recognized life. 309 Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). 155 deserved to be protected. Nor is Indra Sinha alone in this attempt, as a growing number of authors and activists, including J. M. Coetzee, on whom I focus in the last chapter, who protest mistreatment of humans not on the unstable performative of “What is man?” but instead on the assertion that they, as do all animals, deserve and require shared ethical care and consideration. The question I wish to suggest that we should therefore ask, as philosophers, literary scholars, and anthropologists is not “What is man?” but perhaps

“Who is animal?”

156

Political Animals, Human Zoos, and the “Man in the Monkey House”

Ever since Aristotle defined man as a “political animal” … modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.

—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

We’ve been rehearsing for 40,000 years to showcase our culture for you. —Advertising slogan for the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park

157

The most widely cited definition of “What is man?” is that of a “rational animal,” that is, a being who possesses reason, a definition which is nearly universally accredited to

Aristotle.310 The debates concerning if, in fact, Aristotle ever, actually ever defines man in precisely these terms are numerous and highly provocative (please see my footnote for an extended discussion of the topic) 311 but, in either case, whether Aristotle himself

310 For example, Michael O’Meara, in “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggarian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent, The Occidental Quarterly 6, no. 3 (2006): 43–61, assures us that “Aristotle was the first to see man as a special kind of animal—the rational animal (zoon logikon)” (54). Likewise, he informs us of the “Aristotelian concept of man as the zoon logikon” although he also goes on to explain that zoon logikon “could be translated as ‘the speaking animal’, for logos meant not only ‘reason’ but also ‘language’ or ‘word.’” Michael E. Zimmerman, in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), in a section entitled “A Critique of the Idea that Humans Are Rational Animals,” assures us that it was “Aristotle” who “first defined man as a rational animal (zoon logikon echon) (191). Neither provides any citation of where Aristotle, supposedly, actually makes this claim. 311 My view, after having extensively studied this topic is that in fact, Aristotle does not ever define man in precisely these terms. For example, as A. D. Nuttall, a former chair at Oxford, writes, “The central phrase, ‘rational animal’ (zoon logikon) occurs as far as I can discover only once, and in a most dubious manner. In a fragment of Aristotle which we owe to the Pythagorean Platonist Iamblichus (fourth century A.D.) we are told that among the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans was one which ran, ‘There are three kinds of rational animal: gods, men and beings like Pythagoras. It is hard to be sure, but it looks very like a joke” (A. D. Nuttall, “Gulliver among the Horses,” The Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 63). Likewise, this omission, I feel, is revealed in reviewing the original source material—the definition of man for Aristotle is not as a “rational animal” but as a “political one.” See Nicomachean Ethics, I097 b ii, I1 62 a 17, I1 69 b i8; Eudemian Ethics, 242 a 22-27, I245 a I -27; Politics, 1253 a 2, 30, 1278 b 20, etc., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). I have also discussed this question with a number of classic scholars, such as Reviel Netz, many of whom (although not all) concede that Aristotle does not seem to ever actually make this claim. It is my opinion that it was not until the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that man first becomes “defined” as a rational animal. Specifically, in his Moral Epistle On the God within Us, it is Seneca who first writes:

Praise in him that which can neither be torn from him nor given to him, that which is the Property of Man. You ask, what may that be? It is soul, and reason perfected in the Soul. For man is a rational animal [emphasis added]. And so the highest good is accomplished if he has filled the role for which he was born. And what is it that is demanded from him by this “reason” of which I speak? The easiest thing of all, to live in accord with his own nature (Epistulae Morales, 4I.8–9, in Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. R. M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (London, 1917–25), I, 276–78).

I believe this much later “definition” of man becomes rewritten back into Aristotle. In other words, while it is true that Aristotle does, repeatedly, describe “man” in terms of both reason and speech, I believe these descriptions are entirely subsumed within a political project that, for Aristotle, constitutes his actual definition of man. However, at least some classical scholars have disagreed with me, citing such passages as Politics 1253a 9–10, which says, “Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech,” and in 1332b 5 that “[m]an has reason, in addition, and man alone.” See 158 actually defined man in precisely these terms or if he were later interpreted to have defined him in these terms, this classical “definition” of essence of “man” has remained.

However, what I fear can become obscured in this claim—that for Aristotle man was defined as only “a rational animal” (zōon logikon or zōon logon echon, (ζῷον λόγον

ἔχον))—is that this description of man as a rational animal always stems from Aristotle’s other, and far more common, definition of man—as a “political animal” (zōon politikon(ζῷον πολιτικόν). In fact in the only places where Aristotle actually “defines” man as an “animal rational” is in Politics, when he writes that “man is the only animal who has logos ” [logon de monon anthrōpos ekhei tōn zōōn] (1253a9),312 which, taken out of context, can sound as though he is defining man solely in terms of reason.

However, the longer passage reads, “Now, that man is more of a political animal [[dioti de politikon ho anthrōpos zōon pasēs mellitēs kai pantos agelaiou zōou mallon, dēlon]: ] than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, [outhen gar, hōs phamen, matēn hē phusispoiei] and man is the only animal who has logos[logon de monon anthrōpos ekhei tōn zōōn .]”313 In other words, my point is that Aristotle’s description of man as a “rational animal” is immediately given a political valence. What matters for Aristotle about both human speech and reason

(compared to other “gregarious animals”) is not humans’ powers of speech or reason in an ontological vacuum, but precisely that we are able to give rise to political structures and groupings. Hence—and this is the key part I believe is obscured in discussions of the

Aristotelian definition of man—it is therefore for Aristotle only via the polis that “man”

Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works, 1988, 2114. I leave it to the reader to make her own determination.

312 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a9. 313 Ibid. 159 as such is recognized as a “man” and, as such, any beings who are excluded from the polis, whether animals, women, slaves, or barbarians, are not and cannot be considered

“human” regardless of how “gregarious” they may be.

Hence, the ideas first formulated by Aristotle help us to understand the later intellectual and philosophical basis for colonialism and its reflection on “barbarians” as animalistic. For example, Aristotle immediately extends his argument in Politics of the mind “ruling” the body to justify the ruling of man over animals and of masters ruling over their slaves. In fact, Aristotle’s concern in this section of Politics is not the issue of animals, nor even the “definition” of man, but instead the entirely practical question of how to justify slavery. Aristotle’s purpose in this section is to argue against those who wanted to “affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by convention only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.”314 It is precisely to counter this wholly political argument that Aristotle first raises in Politics the issue of the difference between the body and soul: “A living creature consists in the first place of soul and body, and of these two, the one is by nature the ruler and the other the subject.”315 In other words, Aristotle suggests, slavery is not something imposed by humans; rather, it is inherently natural—as the soul rules over the body, so too, the master rules over the slave. And, significantly, based on this belief of the naturalness of slavery, Aristotle puts forward, for the first time, a new justification for slavery, no longer based on temporary servitude, as for example a captive in war, but instead a status based on the laws of nature itself. As Aristotle argues, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not

314 Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 15. 315 Ibid., 16. 160 only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule [emphasis added].”316 It is, therefore, extremely important to note what a singular and radical shift this new justification for slavery represented. As

Robert Schlaifer documents in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, “The first theories of any political and social institution are to be found long after it has been first established, when its validity and justice are first attacked and then defended. To this rule slavery is no exception … There is, consequently, no systematic statement of the problem

[of justifying slavery] until the Politics of Aristotle.” 317 It is solely in order to help

“prove” this radically new notion, that some are marked by birth for slavery, that

Aristotle invokes man’s “natural” dominion over animals. As Aristotle further explains:

Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another's and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend a principle; they obey their instincts. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life [all emphases added].318

Hence, this original justification for the “naturalness” of slavery is specifically premised upon pre-existing and unquestioned biases concerning animals and reason. Aristotle is able, therefore, to “prove” that a slave should obey his master, because he and his presumed reader already know, accept and agree that animals are inferior to men in terms of rationality. Even more revealingly throughout the Politics, Aristotle solely justifies this domination in terms of protection and benevolent care:

316 Ibid., 16. 317 Robert Schlaifer, “Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 47 (1936): 165. 318 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 17. 161

The same [master ruling over slave] holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and female inferior, and the one rules, and other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.319

Violence via Protection

Therefore, there are two main themes in Aristotelian thought in the original

“definition” of man that, I believe, become inscribed in later thinkers. The first is that the exclusion of the slave, and later of the colonized, as biological inferiors is rendered possible in part because of these pre-existing caesuras in politics, ethics, and philosophy which simultaneously exclude animals, women, and slaves, based on their shared equation with the human body and supposed lack of “reason.”320 And second, this domination is justified via a rhetoric of care and benevolent protection. To be clear, these two points should not be seen as two separate ideas but as a single unified argument. In other words, for Aristotle it is because certain classes of living entities (animals, women, children, barbarians, and slaves) are all seen as less rational that it is necessary for them to be “protected” by the Greek male ruling over them, even if this “protection” by

319 Ibid., 17. 320 Nor should this Aristotelian emphasis on “the soul” distract from the genealogical continuity with the colonial emphasis on the “mind” and “rationality” as even in Aristotle’s own writings the question of the “soul” and the “rationality” are entirely interwoven in which the two come to stand in for each other in almost synonymous terminology. For example, immediately following his earlier equating of slaves, animals, and women, Aristotle comments:

For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason [logos] enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend reason [logos], they obey their passions. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life (Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 17).

162 supposed unfortunate necessity entails an inevitable degree of violence, control, and domination. Indeed this relationship between “protection” and “violence,” specifically in the form of slavery, is precisely the paradox that has so long confused classical scholars concerning Aristotelian thought. For example, Nicholas D. Smith recently wrote, specifically on the topic of Aristotle’s defense of slavery:

It is also puzzling that Aristotle would defend the of slavery by citing its accord with nature, only subsequently to advocate using emancipation as a reward (7.1330a32–33). If Aristotle is not thinking of natural slaves when he says this, then enslaving them in the first place would not be morally defensible, according to his own theory (1255a3–26). But if they are natural slaves, and nature provides sufficient moral grounds for enslaving them, then to free them would be wrong. Worse, if Aristotle is right in Book 1, the natural slave is benefited by being the slave of a proper master (1254b19–20, 1255b6–7, 12–14).321

However, this confusion by Smith and other classical scholars in part stems from their anachronistic rewriting of their own contemporary understanding of what constitutes the human—as a permanent and unchangeable category—back into Aristotle. However, while the slave may be, for Aristotle, a slave “by birth,” this does not mean that a slave can never achieve freedom. It instead means that his nature can only be changed or improved via the protective care of the master. In other words, like a child into an adult, for Aristotle, the slave represents a transitional human, a living entity of someone who is not yet human but through domination can be transformed into a human subject. Hence, there is in Aristotle an originary paradoxical claim, that freedom can in fact be produced via force and that therefore force, even to the point of slavery, is itself justified specifically because of a belief in the manner that it can help this eventual expression of freedom to occur. It is, therefore, by Aristotle’s logic, both “protective” to capture the slave when he or she is barbarian and, at the same time, wholly appropriate to release the

321 Nicholas D. Smith, “Aristotle’s Theory of Natural Slavery,” Phoenix 37, no. 2 (1983), 111. 163 slave once he or she has been transformed, via force, into the fully human. To be clear, in

Aristotle’s thought these should not be viewed as two different ideas—force produces freedom, the slave can become human—but instead as a single synergistic worldview; it is precisely because slavery represents the manner by which the animalist foreigners can be transformed into the human Greeks that such force is justified, “preserving” the slave not only in terms of her life but also in terms of the value of that “life” (animal versus human) at all.

Hence, it is important to note a second paradox that also fills much of Aristotle’s writing in Politics, namely his anxiety concerning all cases where reason does not seem to “rule” over the body. In fact, Aristotle writes directly after his claim that the soul and body distinction is “natural:”

But then we must look for the intentions of nature in things which retain their nature, and not in things which are corrupted. And therefore we must study the man who is in the most perfect state both of body and soul, for in him we shall see the true relation of the two: although in bad or corrupted natures the body will often appear to rule over the soul, because they are in an evil and unnatural condition [all emphases added].322

Thus, even as Aristotle is justifying slavery because of its “naturalness,” he is shown to be centrally concerned with its opposite, unnaturalness, and filled with an intense anxiety over the liminal markers—the human who seems, through disease or insanity, not to possess these same definitive characteristics. It is important to note how uniquely troubling is the reality for Aristotle that some people, who might otherwise be considered human, seem to lack reason because it represents a threat not only to the hierarchy of the mind over the body but also to the justification for all forms of control and social

322 Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 16. 164 hierarchy in Aristotle’s political system, since all of them stem from the belief that the adult, Greek-speaking male always possesses reason.

We can, therefore, see in Aristotle two very different dreams of nature. On the one hand, nature represents a loss of control, the absence of the human, and an unbounded wildness and freedom. On the other hand, there is an equal description of nature, indeed of “preserving” and “protecting” nature, which is a dream of complete control in which every aspect of life is forced to conform to the “natural” order of the rule of humans over animals, masters over slaves, men over women, and mind over body.

However, again, these two “differing” views by Aristotle should not be viewed as wholly separate or even in conflict. For in Aristotle’s logic it is precisely because nature is so wild, so lacking in reason and restraint, that it is “natural” that it must be constantly subdivided, compartmentalized, and classified by the only animal that has reason at all—

“man.”

Animals Create the Human Subject

To think through these inherent contradictions in Aristotle’s thought, between force and freedom and the idea of the human as a transitional concept, it is helpful to consult the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault. The central question of

Madness and Civilization is the manner in which the insane provoked anxiety for both the

Renaissance and the Enlightenment precisely because they seemed to represent man without reason, therefore raising the same fear they provoked for Aristotle—the reality that man himself continues to possess an animal nature. Foucault writes, in one of his first explicit mentions of animals:

[B]eginnings of the Renaissance, the relations with animality are reserved; the beast is set free; it escapes the world of legend and moral illustration to acquire 165

fantastic nature of its own. And by an astonishing reversal, it is now the animal that will stalk man, capture him, and reveal him to his own truth … Animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rages, the sterile madness and lies in men’s hearts.323

This fear of uncontrolled and unchecked “animality” serves again, as it did for Aristotle, as a preexisting caesura in both law and ethics to which the insane could be equated and therefore removed from the field of human care. More importantly, this quotation also speaks to the manner that, for Foucault, animals create the human subject. Or, in other words, Foucault wishes to suggest that the animal serves as the negative version of the human which the human must always be defined against. In other words, one of

Foucault’s contributions to the field of animal studies is the argument that in the West, man is defined not by a series of characteristics specific to the human herself (humans have bodies, feelings, eat, sleep, mate, and so forth). Instead, for the West, the human has only ever been defined in exclusively negative terms—What is an animal? And, immediately following—What then makes man unique?—that is, not an animal.

Therefore, having a body, which is an essential characteristic of the human, becomes excluded in the definition, not because having a body is not an important part of being a human, but only because animals also have bodies. Hence, Foucault suggests, the reason for this fear of the insane, in the age of reason, is because they seemed to call into question this original division, from Aristotle, between the mind and the body, which is also to say, between the human and the animal. As Foucault puts it (in slightly poetic terminology), “When man deploys the arbitrary nature of this madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth; the vain images of

323 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965), 21. 166 blind idiocy.”324 What Foucault means is that fear and violence which were inflicted on the insane did not derive from a fear of the insane themselves, per se, but instead from a fear that the insane call into question this classical division between human and animal.

Or, in other words, it was in order to continue to be able to justify man’s dominion over animals (as well as women and slaves), based on a supposed superiority in reason, that the insane had to be completely reduced to the level of the animal in order to remove thereby any threat they might possess. Again, as Foucault phrases it,

Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed. “I can easily conceive of a man without hands, feet, head (for it is only experience which teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet). But I cannot conceive of a man without thought: that would be a stone or a brute.”325

There is also a second point raised by Foucault in this same text that is also very helpful in understanding the manner in which the human subject has been, in part, created via a fear of animals. This second connection is what Judith Butler will later term

“performativity,” or, in other words, the manner in which the optical function of power

(who is shown, how they are shown) was utilized to show, performatively, that the insane were not, and could not, become human. As Foucault documents: “As late as 1815 … the hospital of Bethlehem exhibited lunatics for a penny, every Sunday.”326 The purpose

Foucault suggests for these displays of the insane as animals was to reassure the watching public that the insane could not draw into question the social hierarchy, based on a division between the mind and the body, by displaying regularly and to everyone that the insane were, in fact, only animals. In other words, these displays, of both performative

324 Ibid., 23. 325 Ibid., 70. 326 Ibid., 68. 167 debasement and violence, were in part motivated, Foucault claims, by a need to reassure the viewing public of the inherent linkage between “reason” and “human”—a human without reason, no matter his physical appearance, was not and could not be considered a human. Hence Foucault chronicles a series of dehumanizations regularly inflicted upon the insane.327 Foucault’s main point is that this level of violence and dehumanization was intended for a specific and productive purpose—like the displaying every Sunday—to demonstrate that anyone without socially recognized reason was only an animal and therefore was not entitled to the care of humans. Foucault’s claim is, therefore, that the symbol, idea, and motif of the animal was itself the motivating force behind the “de- humanization” and violent treatment of the insane. Hence the actions of being kept in cage, forced to sleep in straw, or forced to wear a collar were performed not for the insane themselves, who had already been permanently consigned to the sphere of the animal, but to those watching, engaging in, and condoning such violence. As Foucault puts it:

When practices reach this degree of violent intensity, it becomes clear that they are no longer inspired by the desire to punish nor by the duty to correct. The notion of a “resipisence” is entirely foreign to this regime. But there was a certain image of animality that haunted the hospitals of the period. Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast. Those chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy: as if madness, at its extreme point, freed from that moral unreason in which its most attenuated forms enclosed, managed to rejoin, by a paroxysm of strength, the immediate violence of animality. This model of animality prevailed in the asylums and gave them their cagelike aspect, their look of the menagerie … The negative fact that “the madman is not treated like a human being” has a very positive

327 Madwomen seized with fits of violence are chained like dogs at their cell doors … At the hospital of Nantes, the menagerie appears to consist of individual cages for wild beasts. … When Francois-Emmanuel Fodéré arrived at the hospital of Strasbourg in 1814, he found a kind of human stable, constructed with great care and skill “for troublesome madmen and those who dirtied themselves, a kind of cage, or wooden closet, which could at the most contain one man of middle height, had been devised at the ends of the great wards.” These cages had gratings for floors, and did not rest on the ground but were raised about fifteen centimeters. Over these gratings was thrown a little straw “upon which he madman lay, naked or nearly so, took his meals, and deposited his excrement” (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 72-73). 168

content: this inhuman indifference actually has an obsessional value: it is rooted in the old fears which since antiquity, and especially since the Middle Ages, have given the animal world its familiar strangeness, its menacing marvels, its entire weight of dumb anxiety … The animality that rages in madness dispossesses man of what is specifically human in him, not in order to deliver him over to the other powers, but simply to establish him at the zero degree of his own nature [all emphases added].328

Therefore, Foucault himself reflects upon this same genealogy that we have been attempting to chart, the manner in which, for the West, this Aristotelian notion of the animal as the site of non-reason interweaves with dehumanizing treatment of non-human animals and the raw performative violence such a designation entails. As Foucault further reflects in a series of rhetorical questions:

Why should the fact that Western man has lived for two thousand years on his definition as a rational animal necessarily mean that he has recognized the possibility of an order common to reason and to animality? Why should he have necessarily designated, by this definition, the way in which he inserts himself in natural positivity? Independently of what Aristotle really meant, may we not assume that for the West this “rational animal” has long been the measure of the way in which reason’s freedom functioned in the locus of reason, diverging from it until it constituted its opposite term?329

Foucault’s radical notion is that even though Aristotle purportedly defines man as zoon logikon, as a “rational animal,” Aristotle, and the Western tradition, meant not to include the human but to exclude the animal, and therefore the source of non-reason, from the realm of nature. As Foucault clarifies:

From the start, Western culture has not considered it evident that animals participate in the plentitude of nature, in its wisdom and its order: this idea was a late one and long remained on the surface of culture; perhaps it has not yet penetrated very deeply into the subterranean regions of the imagination. In fact, on close examination, it becomes evident that the animal belongs rather to an anti- nature, to a negativity that threatens order and by its frenzy endangers the positive wisdom of nature.”330

328 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 72–74. 329 Ibid., 77. 330 Ibid., 77. 169

Therefore, we can understand the seemingly counter-intuitive claim that Aristotle makes, that “tamed” animals are more natural than wild animals. The logic that a “tamed” animal can be more natural, Foucault implicitly suggests, is only because animalism is itself not considered part of nature, nature in the sense of a “natural order,” the “great chain of being”; hence, animalism itself is precisely that which threatens nature and therefore what nature must be defended against.

The Anthropological Machine

Foucault argues that when the Enlightenment is forced to include the animal as part of nature, in large part due the influence of Darwin, this original fear and hostility is both radically altered, and at the same time, persists and recreates itself in the form of a renewed and intensified emphasis on “anthropology.” So too Foucault is suggesting a similar substitution in regards to justification of violence. Hence, under classical and

Christian notions, the animal was considered outside “nature” as a site of uncontrolled freedom, which man must protect against, tame, and master by violent discipline and brutalization. However, even when the Enlightenment rejects this notion that the animal is the definitional other, against which man must inherently defend, he still re-justifies continued violence and mastery under the guise of “taming” and “improving” via a pseudo-scientific understanding of “evolution.” As Foucault phrases it, “From the moment philosophy became anthropology, [a reference to Kant’s “anthropology”] and man sought to recognize himself in a natural plenitude, the animal lost its power of negativity, in order to become, between the determinism of nature and the reason of man, the positive form of evolution.”331 Therefore as liminal, or almost men, the mad, the

331 Ibid., 78. 170 debauched, the diseased (and later the criminal and the colonized) can be “tamed” by violence precisely to turn them from “animals” into “humans.” In other words, reflecting specifically on the same passages of Aristotle that we already discussed, Foucault’s argument is that violence against the insane was justified because of its protective, benevolent, and transformative nature. Foucault’s point is that this original and highly visible violence of the Renaissance continues in the Enlightenment and the modern period (think shock treatment or frontal lobotomies); what alters is the justification for such violence. Therefore, as with the paradox of slavery for Aristotle, Foucault suggests that violence simply becomes re-justified in terms of an improving or protective model.

During the Enlightenment, Foucault documents, the insane could still be violently mistreated, and still mistreated because they are still viewed as not quite fully human, but the claim is that this violence is justified because it will transform them into “humans.”

Violence continues to operate but now it is necessary that it always be seen as

“beneficial,” “humanitarian,” or “progressive”—yet still centered on exorcising the feared “animal” from man, to turn the mad sane, the “debauched” into the moral, and to extend beyond Foucault for a moment, the colonized into the colonizer. Hence, the main idea I wish to extract from both Aristotle and Foucault’s commentary on Aristotle is of this central paradox of force producing freedom and the idea of “the human” as transitional—something that the polis can produce—and therefore any amount of violence becomes justified in order to “transform” the irrational almost-human (the slave or the insane) into the fully rational human.

And it is this exact same idea, which only occurs inchoately throughout

Foucault’s writing, that in turn underlies most of the writings by the current Italian 171 philosopher Giorgio Agamben. I will discuss how this paradox of force and violence used to produce freedom, and death used to protect life, work themselves out in Agamben in much more detail in the next chapter. Here I would like to just briefly comment on

Agamben’s study of the original taxidermical tracts which first attempted to “define” man in the modern age. For example, in one of his less commented upon books, The Open:

Man and Animal, Agamben references genealogically that in the seventeenth century, when “man” was first being “scientifically” and “taxidermically” defined—the role of the

“pygmie” presented a particularly troubling and contested area of “classification” He writes:

[T]he boundary between the anthropoid apes and certain primitive populations was also anything but clear. The first description of an orangutan by the doctor Nicolas Tulip in 1641 emphasizes the human aspects of this Homo sylvestris (which is the meaning of the Malay expression orang-utan); and we must wait until Edward Tyson’s treatise “Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie” (1699) for the physical difference between ape and man to first be posed on the solid ground of comparative anatomy. Though this work is considered a sort of incunabulum of primatology, the creature that Tyson calls a “Pygmie” (and which is anatomically distinguished from man by thirty-four characteristics, from apes and monkeys by forty-eight) nevertheless represents for him a sort of “intermediate animal” between ape and man, to whom it stands in a relation symmetrically opposite to that of the angel.332

What I believe is fruitful about Agamben’s analysis of seventeenth-century taxonomy texts is his linkage of this idea of performative separation of the animal from the colonialized population. As Agamben writes, in part:

On the one hand, we have the anthropological machine of the moderns. As we have seen, it functions by excluding as not (yet) human and already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the non-human within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man … The machine of earlier times works in an exactly symmetrical way. If … the inhumane produced by animalizing the human, here … the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the

332 Agamben, The Open, 25. 172

man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all, the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form.”333

Hence, Agamben makes an argument similar to Foucault’s, now tied to the support of taxonomical classification, and specific to the issue of slavery and foreigners, that both the “classical” and the “modern” view of the man/animal distinction, while directly opposite, are, at the same time complementary, symmetrical, and mutually reinforcing.

Thus the classical fear of the animal as not part of nature that man must defend against becomes a pseudo-scientific understanding of the theory of evolution, in which the animal is incorporated and yet still excluded (human evolved “from” animals but still are

“not” animal); yet in both the classical and the modern view, the performative act of the exclusion of the animals serves the function of excluding from human care, of placing outside of law, value, or rights the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, the very template for the original colonized subject.

333 Ibid., 37. 173

The Man in the Monkey House

Figure 1 Photo of Ota Benga, a captured pygmy, on display as "the missing link" between monkey and man in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo in 1906

A concrete and poignant expression of these theoretical discussions occurs in the form of the human zoo. A human zoo is a practice, still ongoing, in which colonized populations, primarily from Africa and Australia, are displayed in a zoo, much like the zoo animals, for the fascination and “education” of a viewing public. I would like to begin with a particular example of this overarching trend, the case of Ota Benga, a pygmy who was captured from the Congo, and displayed in 1906 in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo.

The plaque in front of Mr. Benga read, “The African Pigmy, ‘Ota Benga.’ Age, 23 years.

Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free

State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during

September.”334 As I will discuss in the next chapter, Ota Benga was not the first colonized subject to be displayed in a zoo-like atmosphere. However, I would like to

334 “Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 10, 1906. 174 begin by focusing on Ota Benga for a couple of reasons. In the first place, one of my main goals in this chapter (as well as this dissertation) is to suggest that what is occurring is not, in any way, only a historic occurrence divorced from contemporary events, as human zoos continue to operate quite successfully throughout the world. However virtually any book of human zoos or ethnographic displays treat them as though they were only an anachronistic and purely historical remnant of colonialism that society has now successfully transversed.. In the second place, Ota Benga has, compared to many other people displayed, received comparatively little scholarly attention, and, even more troubling, some of this attention has come from the grandchildren of the people who first put him on display. For example, the only published book-length manuscript focusing exclusively on Ota Benga, (entitled Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo: One Man’s

Degradation in Turn-of-the-Century America ) is co-authored by Phillips Verner

Bradford, the grandson of Reverend Samuel P. Verner, the very man who originally captured Benga and profited from his display. Hence, unsurprisingly, the book morphs quickly into a book more concerned with Verner than with Benga.335 Likewise, a similar bias operates in terms of articles written about the subject. For example, one of the articles on Mr. Benga, entitled, “Basest Instinct: Case of the Zoo Pygmy Exhibited a

Familiar Face of Human Nature,” was written by Ann Hornaday, the granddaughter of the zookeeper who originally displayed Ota Benga.336 It is a fascinating question why the

335 This is not suggest that this book possesses no scholarly value. As a work on what motivated Verner, it is extremely helpful and insightful, particularly as it draws on private documents belonging to Reverend Verner that were only available to his grandson, Phillips Verner Bradford. Therefore, I will occasionally draw upon it in attempting to understand Verner’s motivations and justifications. However, in terms of Ota Benga, it is hard not to see the only book which purports to critique Benga’s display as an update of these very same practices, in which the display of Ota Benga is discussed to sensationalize book sales for a manuscript that has virtually nothing to say about Ota Benga at all. 336 Ann Hornaday, “Basest Instinct; Case of the Zoo Pygmy Exhibited a Familiar Face of Human Nature,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), January 3, 2009. 175 grandchildren of the people who first captured and displayed Ota Benga feel themselves uniquely qualified to discuss Ota Benga, particularly as neither Phillips Verner Bradford nor Ann Hornaday are themselves qualified as scholars in any recognizable form. I therefore suspect that the reason Bradford and Hornaday are still allowed to speak for Ota

Benga is, in part, because of lingering exoticization of African pgymies—that as still not quite humans, Mr. Benga still needs his same, original, “caretakers” to speak for him.

There is therefore, particularly in the case of Ota Benga, the need for a new level of scholarship and critical appraisal of his display and the justifications offered by both

Verner and Hornaday.

I will, therefore, start in an opposite direction, and focus only on primary sources, the newspapers from the time period, to try and understand how it is that Ota Benga could have been displayed in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo as the recently discovered “missing link” of Darwinian science. Reverend Samuel P. Verner, the man who captured and transported Ota Benga from Africa, explained that his only motivation was to save Ota Benga from cannibals in Africa. As The Washington Post describes the event:

Ota Benga was brought to America by Samuel P. Verner, a noted American explorer and collector, who found him, in 1904, in the Kongo [sic]. The pygmy was a captive in the hands of a tribe of cannibals and had been fattened for banqueting purposes. Mr. Verner was invited to by the cannibals to take pot-luck with them, and in order to convince him that it was worthwhile to accept, the fat and shining pygmy was shown to him. Mr. Verner offered to buy him. The cannibals found it most distressful to relinquish such a dainty morsel, but Mr. Verner was firm, and that is how Ota Benga came to be on exhibition at the park.337

I will address this claim of cannibalism, and the idea that that Ota Benga was himself about to be served as meat, in the next chapter. My point here is simply that Verner’s

337 “Wonderful Pygmy,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), November 4, 1906. 176 claim is that his role was entirely protective—that he was only motivated to save Ota

Benga’s life. Verner then brought Benga back with him for the World’s Fair in Saint

Louis in 1904 as part of the “ethnographic” displays. Verner claimed that after the end of the fair he did not know what to do with Ota Benga and allowed, unintentionally, for him ultimately to be displayed in the zoo. Verner, in one of his very few printed interviews, describes how Ota Benga came to be displayed in the Monkey House of the zoo:

Soon after returning to New York I took … Ota Benga, to the Zoo, simply to show him the animals and other things. That’s how the whole trouble began, though when I took him there I had no idea of leaving him … When Dr W. T. Hornaday, the director of the Zoo, saw Ota Benga, he at once became greatly interested in him and said, “Let me keep him for you. I’ll give him a job here—he can take care of the monkeys, and particularly these young chimpanzees you have just brought us, and I have a room that is entirely separated from the monkey cages, and which until recently was occupied by a white keeper.338

Therefore, according to Verner, Benga came to be displayed in a monkey cage purely as a result of a comedy of errors with no original intent, certainly on Verner’s part, for him to be so displayed. It is impossible to fully confirm or deny Verner’s version of events since Ota Benga never provided a published account of the events himself and all of

Benga’s eventual writings have been lost. However, what is particularly revealing, even in Verner’s own defensive justification, is the colonialism and naked racism which repeatedly infuses every aspect of his account. These biases are unsurprising, since

Verner was himself the son of a former Southern slave owner. For example, the very next sentence of the same newspaper article reads: “The plan immediately stuck me as a good one, for I knew I had to spend quite a while in New York, and I also knew that under hotel etiquette in New York none of the first class hotels there, on account of Ota Benga

338 “Dr. Verner Talks about Ota Benga: The Pygmy Brought over by Columbia Explorer: How He Got into The Zoo,” The State (Columbia, SC), September 16, 1906. 177 being an African, would allow him to stay with me.”339 In other words, even in Verner’s own version of the events he decided to put Ota Benga in a monkey house in the zoo because otherwise Verner would not be able stay in the “first class” hotels in New York due solely to Verner’s belief in the “etiquette” of racial segregation.

In any event, regardless of what Verner’s actual motives may or may not have been, the resulting publicity of the event demonstrates, in distressingly concrete terms, each of the themes already touched upon. For example, this zoo-like performative quality which Foucault traces in the treatment of the mentally ill, who could be viewed like a curious animal for a penny on Sunday, here, two centuries later, has progressed from zoo- like, to the literal zoo itself, producing the largest draw to this present day for an exhibit in the entire Bronx Zoo’s history.340 The only people to complain were African

Americans, particularly a group of African American clergymen, who were, nearly universally, lampooned in the press as failing to understand how happy Ota Benga was and how all of this was simply both in good fun and a useful expression of Darwinian science. As one letter to the editor put it:

It is a pity Dr. Hornaday [the zoo curator] does not introduce the system of short lectures or talks in connection with such exhibitions. This would emphasize the scientific character of the service, enhance immeasurably the usefulness of the Zoological Park to our public in general, and help our clergymen to familiarize themselves with the scientific point of view so absolutely foreign to many of them.”341

The 1699 classification of the pygmy by Edward Tyson as an “intermediate animal” took on an even more concrete, if virtually unchanged, expression in 1906, where a pygmy

339 Ibid. 340 “From the Belgian Congo to the Bronx Zoo,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, (Washington, DC: National Public Radio, September 8, 2006), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5787947. See also “African Pygmy’s Fate Is Still Undecided,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 18, 1906. 341 M. S. Gabriel, letter to the editor, The New York Times (New York, NY), September 13, 1906. See also “Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy.” 178 was literally and physically displayed, still coupled with the orangutan, as the discovered

“missing link” between man and monkey. As the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote, “Ota

Benga … represents one of the links between the higher man and the chimpanzee.”342

The main “proof” of this claim, in addition to Ota Benga’s small stature and sharpened teeth (a common coming-of-age ritual in many Congo pygmy tribes) was Ota Benga’s supposed ability to “talk” to monkeys in the Monkey House coupled with his supposed inability to speak English or indeed a “real” language at all. As The Republican in

Springfield, Massachusetts, described it in 1906:

Ota Benga is a well-developed little man, with a good head, bright-eyes, and a pleasing countenance. He has already become quite “chummy” with the keeper of the monkey house, Englelhome, and has picked up nearly 100 English words, which he weaves with his own scanty native vocabulary of barely 300 distinct words, with a queer sort of pigeon English not unlike that heard on the Pacifica coast … Mr Verner has loaned him to the Zoo, and the keepers say he has a great influence with the beastes—even with the larger kind; including the orang outangs, with whom he plays as though one of them, rolling around the floor of the cages in wild wrestling matches and chattering to them in his own guttural tongue which they seem to understand. At any rate, they obey him, when he speaks to them, much better than they obey the regular keepers. Notwithstanding his influence with monkeys, he is unable to understand the white man’s ability to handle different kinds of animals and reptiles, particularly the latter, and in the spirit of his race, sets it down to witchcraft. To the same cause ascribes all the wonders of the Zoo, and is firmly convinced that his white friends are the best witchdoctors he ever saw.343

Here Ota’s own language is described as “scanty” since it is supposedly possesses

“barely 300 distinct words” and hence “guttural.” However, this very quality is also what, supposedly, allowed Ota talk to the monkeys who supposedly “seem to understand” and

“obey.” Hence, as the missing link between man and monkey, Ota can somehow learn a little of the zookeeper’s language while still retaining the ability to communicate with the monkeys. Superior language and superior control over animals serves to define the

342 “Tiny Savage Sees New York, Sneers,” Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, IL), September 23, 1906. 343 “Untitled,” The Republican (Springfield, MA), September 12, 1906. 179

Western control over Ota as well as to define the essence of the human. The irony behind all of these repeated claims is that Ota Benga’s ability to “command” the chimpanzees, as briefly mentioned in Verner’s version of events, was simply because they had been his

“pets” who came over with him from Africa. In other words, he was able to “control” and

“communicate” with them in his native language not, of course, because of any mysterious power, but in precisely the same manner that a Westerner might be able be able to talk to and command “her” dog more effectively than a stranger. However, this fairly obvious and well-known reality (it was, after all, part of the justification originally given for Ota Benga being placed in the Monkey House in the first place) was nearly universally ignored in all of the press coverage in which he came to possess “marvelous” power proving his animalistic nature. Hence, the metaphorical question Foucault asks about when “philosophy became anthropology” and Agamben’s “anthropology machine” are here again rendered literal. For, as will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter,

Ota Benga’s original capture and transportation from Africa was funded exclusively by anthropologists who had used Ota Benga for an early display (along with Eskimos and

Native Americans and other “primitives”) in the 1904 World’s Fair’s “extensive anthropological exhibits.” And, perhaps more fundamentally, Ota Benga is displayed to

“men of scientific bent” and “exponents of Darwin’s theory” in purely anthropological terms, as the “missing link” between human and animal.

All the coverage of the display, without exception, describes it solely in terms of care, protection, improvement, and benevolence linked with an idea of good-natured humor and fun. Hence, the notion first suggested by Aristotle, and commented upon by

Foucault and Agamben, that the wild animal, the slave, the mad man, and ultimately the 180 colonized subject must be “tamed” and “groomed” for his own good is again expressed in its ultimate distillation—hundreds of newspaper articles which assure the reader that the

“little pygmie” is having “the time of his life”, a knowledge gleaned not, of course, from an interview with Ota Benga—who, at the time of his display in the zoo, spoke almost no

English and, ultimately, tragically ended his life by suicide—but solely by assurances from the press and the zookeepers. For example, The Times of Trenton, New Jersey, reports of the exhibit in 1906:

Ota Benga, an African pigmy, exhibited in the same cage in the Bronx Park Zoo with an Orang-outang, is crowding William R. Hearst for the vantage point in the New York spotlight. The ministers of the city are up in arms against the “brutalizing” of Ota, while the colored population objects from the racial standpoint. Ota Benga has been in the cage with Dohong, the educated ourang outang, and according to Director Hornaday the little pigmy is having the time of his life. Do-hong also seemed pleased. Exponents of the Darwin theory and dentists in general were interested in the sight and pronounced it educational. The ministers, however, and the colored population declare that the educational side of the sights eclipsed the brutalizing influence of putting a man on exhibition in a city’s park alongside monkeys. The movement against the exhibition was led by Dr. MacArthur. Five colored Clergymen called on the mayor to protest at last the exhibition, but he sent out word that he was “too busy” with politics to discuss pigmys.344

Note the odd description in the article of the orangutan, and the orangutan alone, as

“educated,” which in context of the article means only that he is tame. Or, as Foucault had suggested in his genealogy of the display of the insane, the manner in which one might performatively move the “intermediate animal” of the “pygmy” into the realm of the human is via a similar process of domestication. Hence Verner’s much-repeated claim

(reproduced in the press as undisputed fact) that Ota Benga only came to the United

States because he was about to be eaten by cannibals and hence was first “protected” by

Verner in the very act of his purchasing and transporting him to the United States. Indeed

344 “Man in Monkey’s Cage Stirs City: Ota Benga Creates Almost as Much Excitement as W. R. Hearst,” The Times (Trenton, NJ), 1906. 181

Verner repeatedly puts forward the claim that “[A] great deal of my work in Africa is of a humanitarian character.”345 Likewise, Benga’s display in the zoo is only described in terms of protection and care. “[Verner] explained, the bushman required the care of persons who had some idea of how a person who was not fully responsible for his acts should be treated.”346 Of course, though, zoos do not have any idea of how to care for

“persons” at all but only for animals. Hence the repeated violence visited upon Benga, including capture, purchase, transportation, and even display in the monkey cage was justified, since, as Aristotle first suggested, “tame animals have a better nature than wild” and “all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man.” In other words, the reality documented in virtually every newspaper article of the event is not that Ota Benga was viewed as a “human” whose intrinsic rights were therefore temporally denied or suspended, but instead that he was never considered a human at all, but as an animal, the missing link between human and monkey, who, in order to “become” human had to be denied all rights, even to the point of being displayed in a monkey house, in order to turn him into a human capable of possessing rights at all.

“Cultural Parks” and “African Villages”

I am not only concerned with the historical reality of Ota Benga’s display and capture. Former colonized peoples, primarily Australian Aboriginals and people from

African, are still displayed in zoos—at, at times, even in the monkey house—in a wide variety of settings throughout the world.

345 “Negro Ministers Act to Free the Pygmy,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 11, 1906. 346 Ibid. 182

Figure 2 Ad for the Tjapukai "Aboriginal culteral park". Notice the difference in both race and dress. The text reads, "We've been rehearsing for 40,000 years."

For example, while attending a conference in Australia on animal studies, I came across “Tjapukai,” which describes itself as an “Aboriginal Cultural Park.”347

However, despite the positive sounding terminology, in reality it is a zoo-like structure displaying aboriginal peoples with numerous similarities to the display of Ota Benga.

This similarity to a zoo is perhaps most clearly expressed in the architecture of the park itself, which consists of a series of seven stages, on which aboriginal employees perform a variety of “traditional” activities that tourists can sit and watch before moving on to the next “exhibit.”348 Hence the aboriginal performers are, intentionally, exoticized throughout the park, shown wearing only traditional clothes (as though that is how most aboriginals still dress), and performing only “historic” skills such as throwing a boomerang, hurling a spear, and playing the didgeridoo. As with Ota Benga, there is the reoccurring suggested comparison between the advanced technology of the audience

347 See Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park, http://www.tjapukai.com.au/index.html. 348 A helpful video of one of the exhibits in the park is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmxHJPcpiqQ). 183 compared to the (false) suggestion of the low level of technology of the aboriginals. The brochure advertising the park invites, “Let us share our dream time legend with you in our Creation Theatre with holographic images and live performers on stage.”349 In other words, the theater splices relatively advanced technology, holographic images, which are literally projected against aboriginals dressed only in loin cloths, carrying a spear, and explaining their creation story while pounding on drums. While the “cultural park” showcases an aboriginal performing traditional songs on a didgeridoo, it avoids any discussion of the current growth of, say, aboriginal hip hop, reggae, and country music which fuse didgeridoo playing with a broad and globalized world of music. Instead, all discussion of aboriginal culture is as if it were no longer occurring or changing. Of course this is not to suggest that the aboriginal population is only passive “victims” or that they do not, themselves, subvert the very paradigm in which they are being shown. For example, to connect two divergent, but I think related, literatures, an entire body of work has grown up around the manner in which blackface minstrel shows of African

Americans themselves wearing blackface, while intended by their promoters as only clearly racist and exploitive were, at the same time, reworked and re-manipulated by the

African American performers themselves in a way that critiqued racism and projected their own individuality and power of performance. Tjapukai moments of “aboriginal face” in which, for money, aboriginals are recruited to “perform” their culture in inauthentic and exoticized ways seem similar. At the same time, I believe many of the performers at Tjapukai intentionally rework and subvert the minstrel-esque quality inherent to Tjapukai. And, moreover, I suspect part of this reworking occurs particularly in the area of animals, in with the performers reaffirm their connection to animals and

349 All quotations in this section are taken from the park’s advertising brochures unless otherwise noted. 184 that natural world, not as an omission of colonial oppression, but as an intentional refutation to a worldview which denigrated animals and natives. As Foucault goes to great pains to repeat throughout his work, no system of power is ever all encompassing, and, like the execution at the beginning of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,350 even moments of performative power possess within them the ability to transform beyond their original intent and, equally, serve as sites for the contesting of this power in the first place. In other words, to be clear, these performers are not only powerless victims but, at the same time, co-constructors and mediators with the entire system of performative interaction. In fact, this same argument, to a slightly lesser degree (since it is unclear how

“voluntary” was his placement in the Monkey House), could also be raised about Ota

Benga. At the very least, it seems clear that he was far from only a passive actor in his imprisonment, regularly asking for money in order to “perform” for his viewing public and even shooting, with a bow, his zookeepers. Hence to only re-inscribe, without commentary, the narrative of only “powerless” victims of colonialism oppression in its own ways tends to depersonalize these performers. .

At the same time, however, I feel it is important to remove the humanitarian and anthropological guise of the park established throughout the promotional material and note that the park itself was created as an only for-profit tourist attraction (the website refers to this blending of education and entertainment as “edu-taining”351). While the advertisements by park all imply, although never state, that the park was founded by the aboriginals themselves, who, in turn, simply wish to share their culture (“Let us share our” and so forth), this is, in fact, not the case. The park was actually founded by Don and

350 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 351 “Edu-taining guests is what Tjapukai is all about,” Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park, http://www.tjapukai.com.au/svmanager/corporate/index.php. 185

Judy Freeman, two white theater performers from New York City.352 The Freemans went on a trip to Australia and then recruited aboriginals whom they, in turn, taught how to perform and market a clichéd version of their culture for paying audiences. As the

Freemans’ own website explains, “Tjapukai is an incredible success story and the flagship for marketing Australia's Indigenous culture internationally.353” Hence, while it may be true, as the Freemans claim, that the cultural park provides employment and funds for the aboriginal population, and likewise, that the performers themselves may subvert this display to express their own power of self-creation and affirmation, it is also the case that the cultural park was created as intentionally performative by Western theater producers, for profit, from its very inception. Given this lineage, it is therefore not surprising that at least the “official” script of the entire park seems reminiscent of both

Kirby and Stanford’s claims about the utility of “primitive” culture showing how “our” ancestors lived years ago, in which the park, inaccurately, presents current changing and dynamic aboriginal cultural as an unchanging (if still entertaining) cultural relic. This concept is made explicit in the culture park’s own, much repeated, slogan: “We’ve been rehearsing for 40,000 years to showcase our culture for you.” In this single phrase, the park interweaves this explicit performance heritage with an the implication that the entire aboriginal culture exists, not for its own sake, but only for the education and amusement of the audience, who, the suggestion runs, can learn about these exoticized people by visiting the a zoo-like “cultural park” in which they are now displayed.

Tjapukai further blurs this line between a “cultural park” (whatever that may be) and a simple zoo by marketing itself along with an actual zoo. For example, Tjapukai

352 “Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park,” Freeman Productions, http://www.freemanproductions.com.au/tjapukai.html. 353 “Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park.” 186 offers an “Iconic Australia” combo package that includes admission to the nearly adjacent Cairns Tropical Zoo, including a “complimentary bag of Kangaroo food!” And while Tjapukai keeps the “cultural park” and the literal zoo at least slightly physically separate, several other zoos in Australia simply house both “attractions” within a single space. For example the “Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary” advertises a “Wildnight

Adventure” which showcases an “Aboriginal dance show and nocturnal animal discovery tour.”354 Moreover, as displaying Aboriginals in a wildlife sanctuary would itself suggest, all of the advertisements interweave descriptions of the aboriginals and the animals until they become a single and undifferentiated whole. For example, the brochure reads,

“Traditional culture and Australian animals at their very best” since “Our nocturnal animals come out to feed, hunt and play. And Australia’s indigenous people perform amazing traditional dance and music.” Or again, “You’ll get to touch some of our incredible creatures…Get close to the koalas. And watch spellbound, traditional performance by members of the Nyulejam Dance Troupe.” Hence the brochure presents the animals and the indigenous cultures in exactly parallel fashion; the animals hunt and play precisely as the aboriginals dance and play; both of which are indeterminably presented together as “some of the most amazing creatures of the Australian bush.”

354 All quotations in this section are from Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary advertising brochures unless otherwise noted. 187

Figure 3 Cardboard cutout of an unnamed and now faceless "aboriginal." Tourists put in their own faces to take pictures of themselves as “aboriginals.” Unfortunately, such performance may not strike one as surprising as an entire literature in the field of zoo studies has already grown up to highlight the connection between colonialism and zoos since their very inception. Both Randy Malamud’s

Reading Zoos and Nigel Rothfels’s Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo have provided excellent and precise genealogies of these connections.355 However, while

I am deeply indebted to both of these works, I believe these continuous and extremely popular displays of colonized people in zoo-like settings, or even in literal zoos, also suggest a deeper philosophical point, namely, that what constitutes a “human” is not a biological given but instead a moment of performative power in which part of the very appeal of such parks is the continuous restatement that such aboriginals displayed are not themselves fully people. Hence these “cultural” parks, under the guise of faux- anthropological knowledge and cultural “sharing”, that is, “edutainment,” remove the very “personhood” of all of the people shown. This emptying out of the personhood of the aboriginals is perhaps most poignantly expressed in the cut-outs of aboriginals

355 Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 188 throughout Tjapukai in which tourists can place their own heads into the cut-outs of aboriginals dressed in traditional clothes in order to take photos of themselves as

“aboriginals.” As with the slogan of “rehearsing” their culture for the enjoyment of a

Western audience, these cardboard face cutouts represent for the me the physical distillation of the worldview that the entire aboriginal culture is not a fully valid culture and that aboriginals themselves are not, or at least not fully, completely people.

Figure 4 Advertisement for the “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo in Germany Even more distressing, in 2005, the Augsburg Zoo in Germany (near Munich) brought over Africans who were displayed in a so-named “African village” both literally within the zoo and right beside the monkey house356. As The Telegraph in London

356 For a thorough discussion of this event, read Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea, and Markus Höhne, “African Culture and the Zoo in the 21st Century: The “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo and Its 189 reported, “Despite the firestorm of hate-mail, Augsburg Zoo, near Munich, proceeded with its African village theme last week, creating an artificial grassland between the baboon and zebra enclosures for performances by native drummers and dancers.”357 As the German newspaper Spiegel Online further documents, “The ‘African Village’ event is innocuous enough—it brings together food stands, traditional crafts, basket weavers and hair braiders for the kids. The problem this time, is that it is being held, of all places, in the heart of the Augsburg Zoo. Grass huts and ‘African’ culture are nestled between the monkey cage and the Savannah exhibit—an uncomfortable juxtaposition for many.”358

Of course even setting aside the display in the zoo (for a second), the entire idea of a display of an “African village” is itself both intrinsically wholly impossible and inherently misleading. Africa is, of course, a continent with a nearly indescribable array of peoples, practices, architectural structures, industries, and modes of dress. The idea of displaying a single “African” village is neither more conceivable nor implementable then displaying an “Asian” village or a “North American” village. Moreover this “African” village, as the name “village” itself suggests, made not even the slightest attempt to reveal the range and diversity of Africa, but instead included exclusively the reproduced stereotypical images of huts and grass skirts. Hence, as already noted in the case of the

Tjapukai “cultural center,” the entire complexity of other cultures is reduced to falsely uniform and marketable clichés. As Professor Norbert Finzsch, a specialist in German colonialism at Cologne University explains, “When I looked at the zoo website and the

Wider Implications” (Halle/Saale, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, 2005), http://www.eth.mpg.de/cms/en/people/d/mhoehne/pdf/zooCulture.pdf. 357 Bojan Pancevski, “German Zoo Sparks Outrage by Parading Africans Next to Baboons,” The Telegraph (London, UK), June 12, 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1491902/German-zoo-sparks-outrage-by- parading-Africans-next-to-baboons.html. 358 Charles Hawley, “African Village Accused of Putting Humans on Display,” Spiegel Online (Hamburg, Germany), June 9, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,359799,00.html. 190 promotional poster, there was the whole barrage of images that were used during the nineteenth century. Huts and animals, you name it.”359

As with the aboriginal displays, the purpose of such display is intentionally to exoticize the other cultures. Therefore, the display of the “African” village in the zoo by the baboon enclosure was neither coincidental nor unintentional. As the director of the zoo, Dr. Barbara Jantschke, explained in defense of the exhibit, "I think the Augsburg

Zoo is exactly the right place to provide just the right exotic atmosphere [emphasis added].”360 Hence, as with Ota Benga, in both the World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo, the display of the African in the village was meant to both complete the display of the

(other?) African animals while at the same time providing the necessary “exotic atmosphere” for the display of Africans who were themselves, via the display, rendered as “exotic.” So too, as with Ota, the entirety of the exhibit is exclusively justified by the same claims of paternalistic care and the promotion of pseudo-scientific knowledge. As

Dr. Jantschke further explained, “Our event aims to bring African culture and products closer to people. Of course, African people take part in it—and very gladly so … This event is intended to promote tolerance and international understanding as well as to bring

African culture closer to the people of Augsburg.” Again, as I have noted in both the case of Ota Benga and the performers of Tjapukai, there is some truth in Dr. Jantschke’s defense in the sense that it is the case that the performers agreed, for money, to perform. .

However, at the same time, an event which by its very definition reduces an entire continent, “Africa,” into a single wholly stereotypical “village” defends itself by citing the manner that it can promote both “tolerance” and “understanding.” And furthermore,

359 Ibid. 360 Ibid. 191 as with the assurance by the zookeeper that Ota Benga was having “the time of his life,” this zoo display likewise defends itself by the repeated, and unsubstantiated, claim that

Africans both want to participate and appreciate the display since we are reassured that

“African people take part in it—and very gladly so.”361 Despite these assurances, Tahir

Diller, head of the Initiative for Black People in Germany, described the event in terms that show the immediate connection with the display of Ota Benga: “It’s not the Africa festival per se that is the problem … Rather, the whole package presents an image of

Africans that one knows from the past. The nineteenth-century displays of Africans didn’t look all that different from what is going on here in Augsburg today.”362

Nor is this display of an “African village” by the Augsburg zoo in any sense unique. The Houston Zoo recently constructed a $40 million “African forest.” Along with

African animals, the “forest” will include an “African Marketplace Plaza,” a “Pygmy

Village and Campground,” “Pygmy Huts,” a “Storytelling Fire Pit,” and even a “Rustic

Outdoor Shower.”363 As the production material (asking for a charitable donation to support the African Forest) explains, “While the new African Forest will have its fair share of awe-inspiring animals, it isn’t just about magnificent wildlife and beautiful habitats. It’s about people, and the wonderful, rich cultures that we all can share … The

African Forest is more than an exhibit―it’s an immersive experience that will entertain and educate young and old alike. There’s simply nothing else like it.”364

361 Ibid. 362 Ibid. 363 Shannon Joyce Prince, “Is the Houston Zoo’s Exhibit Racist?” African American News & Issues, July 19, 2010. See also Shannon Joyce Prince, “Human Zoos, Conservation Refugees, and the Houston Zoo’s The African Forest,” Antropologi.info: Social Cultural Anthropology in the News Blog, http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/pdf/african_forest.pdf. 364 Houston Zoo, The African Forest, http://www.houstonzoo.org/africanforest/. 192

However, it is in no way my contention that “nothing has changed” since the display of Ota Benga approximately a hundred years before. It is instead to suggest that the exhibit of Ota Benga is not a historical anomaly but part of an ongoing nexus of the display of colonialized humans and the display of animals related to their shared supposed quality of “exoticness.” Or, in other words, the Houston Zoo is entirely incorrect when it claims that “there’s simply nothing else like it” in describing its display of “pygmies” within a zoo, and such comments are only possible because of a cross- cultural forgetting of the entire history of the display of colonized peoples in zoos and zoo-like settings. Moreover, and this is the key point, as the comments by Jantschke and others reveal, such displays are meant for an explicitly pedagogical purpose, not of an actual “African village,” which is itself a wholly invented construct, but the manner in which the human is socially constructed. These insights have been borne out statistically.

When a study was taken of views of participants after leaving the “African village,” the overwhelming views were ones linking Africans to animals. As the researchers report:

(5) When you think of Africa, what images come to mind? In response to this question, the majority of the people (79 percent) provided images of animals or nature. This is hardly surprising since they had just visited a zoo. Forty-eight percent of the respondents mentioned animals or some type of animals such as an elephant or giraffe and 32 percent used the word “nature” or “natural” or mentioned some aspect of the natural landscape such as desert or steppe.365

Hence, through the figure of Ota Benga, and the thousands of colonialized subjects who were displayed like him, we can begin to answer a rhetorical question long raised by scholars of colonialism such as Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe: Why is it that which holds for the animal holds for the colonized? This inclusion of Ota Benga was, ultimately, a performative act—he was displayed in a zoo, with an orangutan and a

365 Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea, and Markus Höhne, “African Culture and the Zoo.” 193 parrot, and “[e]xhibited each afternoon during September.” Yet, it is a violent performance of the “human” and the “animal” not, we can be sure, for Ota Benga’s benefit, but for the tens of thousands who came weekly to watch a performance whose

“productive” purpose was to foster in the viewers a certain type of subjecthood, a certain definition of what the “human” meant, where its limits lay, a performative act which instructed who was included, and who, simultaneously, and co-constitutively, was excluded. I wish to suggest that this now largely forgotten event at the Bronx Zoo displaying Ota Benga in the Monkey House speaks to the manner in which exclusion of the animal from law, ethics, and human compassion creates an original caesura in moral personhood to which “the Other” can be equated and thereby simultaneously removed from the human community. In essence, like race and gender, the definition of the human itself represents a socially constructed category produced by “performative acts” of human inclusion and animal exclusion. Therefore, the metaphors, motifs, and symbols of the animal can serve as a template to remove subaltern people from the definitional category of the human, and the pre-existing exclusion of non-human animals from any moral, legal, or political consideration whatsoever subsequently assures that both animals and peoples so categorized will only continue to suffer.

194

“Man’s” Best Friend: Why Human Rights Needs Animal Rights - from the Philippines to Abu Ghraib

The present war is no bloodless, opera buffa engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.

—The Philadelphia Ledger, discussing the war in the Philippines, 1901

Gen[eral] Karpinski said military intelligence took over part of the Abu Ghraib jail to “Gitmoize” their interrogations—make them more like what was happening in the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which is nicknamed “Gitmo.” She said current Iraqi prisons chief Maj[or] Gen[eral] Geoffrey Miller— who was in charge at Guantanamo Bay—visited her in Baghdad and said: “At Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have. He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.”

—BBC, discussing Abu Ghraib, 2004

195

In recent years, several thinkers in the field of animal studies have claimed that there is a linkage between the abuses in Abu Ghraib and the abuses of animals. This paper argues that these linkages are correct. Specifically, this chapter argues that the violence connects to the similar display of the captured Filipinos, and their forced eating of dogs, in the 1904 World’s Fair. In a broader sense, the chapter argues that a failure to include animal rights renders human rights indeterminate and ineffective. Therefore, the paradoxes inherent in human rights, such as the state of exception as outlined by Giorgio

Agamben, can only be solved if animal rights are included within this analysis. Hence, in the largest sense, both the Philippines and Abu Ghraib demonstrate that as long as

“animals” lack any rights or standing under law, human animals will also always be in danger of yet again being redefined as animals and may therefore lose any rights or standing under law.

Several texts in the field of animal studies have claimed that there exists a connection between the abuse that occurred in Abu Ghraib and the mistreatment of non- human animals. For example, Mark Roberts, in his book The Mark of the Beast:

Animality and Human Oppression, asserts:

Last … is the sub-animal treatment of prisoners, particularly those incarcerated in ultra-high-security units. They are neither compared overtly to animals nor treated as if they were animals, but rather, given no choice other than to become the lowest form of animal. Indeed, one can nowadays experience the persistence of such forms of penal degradation with Seymour Hersh’s breaking the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where Iraqi prisoners were not only routinely sexually humiliated and tortured, but in a sickening, highly publicized, remarkably visible instance, led around on a dog leash.366

366 Mark Roberts, The Mark of the Beast: Animality and Human Oppression (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 168. 196

Likewise, Kelly Oliver puts forward an even broader assertion in her book Animal

Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human:

Until we address the denigration of animals in Western thought on the conceptual level, if not also on the material economic level, we will continue to merely scratch the surface of the denigration and exploitation of various groups of people, from Playboy bunnies to prisoners at Abu Ghraib who were treated like animals as a matter of explicit military policy.367

Even Peter Singer, along with Karen Dawn, has made this same claim in an article entitled “Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouses.” As they write:

Last week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released an undercover videotape made at the Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse, which supplies KFC restaurants. … The sickening images echo the snapshots and videotapes that found their way out of another inhumane facility: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In both Baghdad and Moorefield, W. Va., a simple cruel dynamic was at work. When humans have unchecked power over those they see as inferior, they may abuse it..368

While I agree with the essential argument raised by all of these thinkers, the space they spend on the topic has tended to be quite brief—lasting little longer than the sentences reproduced here.369 In this article, I build on the work suggested by these theorists to attempt to understand, in more detail, how the mistreatment of animals might relate to the mistreatment of humans in prisons such as Abu Ghraib. Specifically, I argue that the violence to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib reflects a history of showing conquered subjects as wild animals who must, for their own protection, be “captured,” “trained,” and “domesticated.” And furthermore, I argue for a connection between the earlier display of the conquered subjects from the Philippines, who were forced to eat dogs for a

367 Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 38. 368 Peter Singer and Karen Dawn, “Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouse,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), July 25, 2004. 369 Both Mark Roberts and Kelly Oliver deal with the issue of Abu Ghraib in only a few sentences and do not refer to the concept anywhere else in either of their books. 197 viewing public, and the recent display of the conquered Iraqi prisoners who are shown treated as, and attacked by, dogs. My essential argument is that the belief that animals should be captured and trained serves as a caesura in law that allows captured (human) subjects to be mistreated, to the point of torture, in order to “turn” them into humans. Or, expressed differently, the idea of “the state of exception” within the nature of law, as charted by such theorists as Giorgio Agamben, stems from the unstable and performative division between “human” and “animal.” Therefore, it is only after the non-human animal herself becomes protected under law from at least the most grievous forms of abuse, such as torture and imprisonment, that the human animal will ever come to benefit from such protections.

Figure 5 Souvenir Igorot Village. St. Louis: Philippine Photograph Co., 1904. Held in the Special collections department, University of Delaware In the first half of this chapter, I consider the historical case of the capture and display of the Filipinos; in the second half, I explain how this historical antecedent can help us to understand what actually occurred in Abu Ghraib. The archival evidence stems primarily from original (and, for the most part, previously undiscussed) source material such as newspaper articles and diary entries (in the case of the Filipinos) and recently declassified memorandums (in the case of Abu Ghraib). As discussed in the previous 198 chapter, in 1906, a captured human, a pygmy from Africa named Ota Benga, was displayed in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo as the “missing link” between human and animal.370 Unfortunately, this exposition was a not an isolated incident, as captured people from throughout the colonized world had frequently been displayed in zoos, or zoo-like areas, since the advent of colonialism. For example, before being transferred to the Bronx Zoo, Ota Benga was displayed in 1904 at the World’s Fair in St. Louis along with representatives from throughout the globe, including the Inuit of Alaska, the conquered population of the Philippines, the indigenous populations of Japan, and members from all fifty tribes of Native Americans—a staggering estimated 1,200 people on display in all.371 The motivation for this display was twofold. On the one hand, the display of native peoples was meant to complement the display of non-human animals from these same regions, the “Carl Hagenbeck ,” which boasted “the largest representation of an animal paradise ever constructed”372 and thereby provide the spectator with a more complete view of the displayed regions (as they could at a single fair view both the non-human animal and the peoples of different places). Moreover, it was also meant to showcase the power of the recently developed science of

“anthropology.” For example, directing and supervising the capture and display of all of these native peoples was the most decorated and famous anthropologist of the early twentieth century, Dr. William John McGee, a former president of both the American

Anthropological Association (1911–1912) and the Society (1904–

1905), as well as the former director of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1893–1903).

370 Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (Melbourne: Bookman, 1993). 371 Ibid., 3. 372 Ibid., 5. 199

World’s Fair operators even went so far to refer to those involved in capturing

“specimens” from other countries as its own so-called “Anthropology Department.”373

The Fair cost $15 million to build, the same price that the United States had to pay for the

Louisiana Purchase in 1803.374As should be clear from the prestige of Dr. McGee, as well as from the cost of the fair itself, this display of humans was not a scandalous aberration but instead represented a clear expression of who did and did not constitute a human in the early twentieth century. The event was a display of immense size, time, and cost whose purpose was to demonstrate how modern the (voluntary) attendees had become, compared to the (involuntary) attendees on display.

For example, Dr. McGee’s instruction was to assemble “representatives of all the world’s races, ranging from smallest pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites” for the purpose of demonstrating “the lowest known culture” up to “man’s highest culmination.”375 And the largest and most well- attended exhibit of the entire World’s Fair was the forty-seven-acre “Philippine village,” which displayed one thousand Filipinos from at least ten different ethnic groups. The reason for this particularly large display was presumably because of the United States’ recent acquisition of the Philippines as a new colony. As a newspaper article from the

Missouri Republic, quoting the new American-appointed military governor, described the exhibit:

“It is good to have it this way, as the best way to keep an Igorrote [an aboriginal tribe in the Philippines] out of mischief is to keep him [sic] busy. They are not a bad sort at all. They are loyal, honest and trustworthy, even if they are good

373 Ibid., 5. 374 Virgilio R. Pilapil, “Dogtown U.S.A.: An Igorot Legacy In The Midwest,” first printed in Journal of Filipino American National Historical Society 2 (1992); reprinted in Heritage, 8, iss. 2, June 15, 1994, 15– 18.. 375 Bradford, Ota Benga, 5; Pilapil, “Dogtown U.S.A.” 200

fighters and good haters. They like Americans and them, and the best evidence of this that I can cite is the fact that these savages, none of whom had ever been ten miles away from home before, made this long voyage here on my assurance that it would be all right and that no harm would come of it,” said the official. Governor Hunt has been governor of Bontag Province since 1901. … He is the ruler of more than 300,000 savage souls. His Province has been remarkably free from disturbances. The secret of this, he says, lies in “getting your bluff in first,” and then treating them kindly and justly, punishing any infraction of the law with a stern hand.376

What is revealing in this editorial is the manner in which the clear colonialist domination of the Filipinos is presented only in the language of care. Hence, the colonial governor assures at the very outset that the “Igorrote” are not “a bad sort at all.” The most repeated ideas throughout the press interview are those of trust and protection, such as describing the Filipinos as “loyal, honest and trustworthy” who “like Americans and trust them” and

“agreed” to come over since Governor Hunt assured them “it would be all right” and “no harm would come to them.” And yet, underlying all this rhetoric of paternalist care is the only slightly hidden reality of violence and domination. This violence is perhaps most clearly displayed in the last line, that the secret for ruling such “savage souls” is the act of

“getting your bluff in first” and “punishing any infraction of law with a stern hand.”

Hence, rhetorically this interview with the governor of the Philippines perfectly interweaves and blends both violence and paternal care into a single synergistic whole.

376 “Governor Hunt and the Igorrote Visit,” Missouri Republic (St. Louis, MO), March 29, 1904. 201

Genocide and “Concentration Camps”

Figure 6 A photograph of a "reconcentrado camp" or "concentration camp," at Tanauan, Batangas, ca. 1900. Held at the University of Michigan. Governor Hunt’s comments become all the more disturbing when one considers that the Filipino-American War of 1899–1902 resulted in the death of an estimated

600,000 to 1.4 million Filipinos,377 or a death rate, even at the low end, of an estimated one out of every six Filipinos, a percentage so high that some scholars have argued that it should itself be considered an act of intentional genocide.378 For example, Luzviminda

Francisco, while avoiding the term genocide, chronicles what the editors of the volume in which the work appears described as “genocidal tendencies.”379 As Francisco documents:

377 For a detailed but conservative view of the quite lengthy debate concerning the number of deaths see: John M. Gates, “War-Related Deaths in the Philippines, 1898–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 53, no. 3 (1984): 367–378. While I appreciate Gates’ summary of the debate, I ultimately disagree with his overly conservative estimate, particularly his decision to discount the number of cholera deaths. 378 E. San Juan, Jr., “We Charge Genocide: A Brief History of US in the Philippines,” Political Affairs, November 28, 2005, http://politicalaffairs.net/we-charge-genocide-a-brief-history-of-us-in-the-philippines/. See also E. San Juan, Jr. “U.S. Genocide in the Philippines: A Case of Guilt, Shame, or Amnesia?” Selves and Others, March 22, 2005. 379 Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987). 202

The Balangiga massacre initiated a reign of terror the likes of which had not yet been seen in this war. General [“Howling Jake”] Smith, fresh from his “victories” in Northern Luzon and Panay, was chosen to lead the American mission of revenge. Smith’s order to his men embarking upon the Samar campaign could not have been more explicit: “Kill and burn, kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn, the more you please me.” It was, said Smith, “no time to take prisoners.” War was to be waged “in the sharpest and most decisive manner possible.” When asked to define the age limit for killing, Smith gave his infamous reply: “Everything over ten.” Smith ordered Samar to be turned into a “howling wilderness” so that “even the birds could not live there.” … All the inhabitants of the island (pop. 266,000) were ordered to present themselves to detention camps in several of the larger coastal towns. Those who did not (or those who did not make it their business to learn the existence of the order), and were found outside the detention camp perimeter, would be shot, “and no questions asked.”380

Nor were these actions hidden at the time. For example, a Republican member of

Congress, in favor of the war, who visited the Philippines during the summer of 1901, describes the war with the Filipinos in glowing terms:

You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon; and the secret of its pacification is, in my opinion, the secret of the pacification of the archipelago. They never rebel in Northern Luzon because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. The country was marched over and cleaned out in a most resolute manner. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and, wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino, they killed him. The women and children were spared, and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers in that part of the island.381

This massive death total in the Philippine War was, in part, the result of three technologies of warfare that were extensively deployed in the Philippines: the “scorched earth campaigns” (that is, entire villages destroyed); the deployment of the “water cure”

(simulated drowning) along with other forms of torture; and the utilization of, as the

United States itself referred to them, “reconcentrado” or “concentration” camps of

380 Luzviminda Francisco, “The Philippine-American War,” in The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, ed. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 8–19. 381 Quoted in “American Atrocities in the Philippines: Charges Proved: Ghastly Details.—‘The Duty of a Prussian Officer,’” in Concord: The Journal of the International Arbitration and Peace Association (May 1903). 203 civilians. While also termed “protection zones,” such a term is ironic, since the close confines and poor hygiene of these “protection zones,” along with the resulting famine and weak health caused by the scorched earth polices, resulted in massive levels of disease, particularly of cholera, taking even more lives than the actual combat itself.382 As the historian Andrew J. Birtle extensively details, the success of concentration camps in the Philippines made them a key part of United States military strategy until they were discredited, for moral reasons, after World War II.383 However, at the same time, while in reality the war was won almost exclusively by force, and primarily by the widespread deployment of concentration camps, at the same time military and political leaders wished to hide this aspect of the war and instead implied that that the victory was achieved purely via humanitarian grounds. As Birtle explains:

Thus the Army pacified Marinduque [a key island in the Philippines] not by winning the allegiance of the people, but by imposing coercive measures to control their behavior and separate them from the insurgents in the field. The Marinduque campaign indicates that one must approach with caution interpretations of the Philippine War that overemphasize the importance of the “policy of attraction.” Ultimately, military and security measures proved to be the

382 The difference between the number of deaths being counted as 600,000 or 1.4 million depends in large part whether the resulting disease is factored into the death totals or not. 383 Andrew J. Birtle, “The U.S. Army’s Pacification of Marinduque, Philippine Islands, April 1900–April 1901,” The Journal of Military History, 61, no. 2 (1997): 281–282. The article goes on to say:

Devastation had proven a powerful tool, but one that had to be managed discreetly lest it spiral out of control. When linked with concentration and other measures designed to secure and regulate the inhabitants, it produced quick results against a war-weary population … The success of these operations ensured that the technique would be incorporated into the Army’s pacification repertoire. Even Taft seems to have been impressed by concentration. In 1903, as governor of the Philippines, he signed into law a provision permitting the use of concentration, and during the four years that followed, American authorities imposed concentration in nearly a dozen provinces to help suppress postwar upheavals … The success of the Army’s “experiment” on Marinduque thus had an immediate effect on U.S. pacification operations over the next decade. Nor was this influence short-lived. As a result of the Philippine experience, the General Service and Staff College expanded its course on military government to include “guerrilla warfare” and “concentration,” while two influential postwar textbooks written by Army generals William E. Birkhimer and George B. Davis, endorsed concentration and the “laying waste [of] a portion of the territory of the enemy.” … Thus concentration remained a part of the Army’s counterinsurgency repertoire up to the eve of World War II, when preparations for the global conflagration to come pushed the study of “Small Wars” to the outermost periphery of Army thought. 204

sine qua non of Philippine pacification. Unfortunately, the reluctance of Taft and others to openly discuss the Philippine experience tended to obscure the degree to which coercion was responsible for America’s victory.384

Hot Dogs and Cannibalism

Therefore the Igorot represented a specifically powerful doubling of the colonial association of indigenous peoples with animals; they were viewed, treated and seen as non-human animals and, at the same time, their treatment of non-human animals was itself held up as part of the reason, and justification, for their capture and display. For example, a constant rhetoric that Filipinos were wild animals who must either be exterminated or “domesticated” fills virtually all of the writing and justification of the entire Philippine War’s slaughter and genocidal tactics. For example, in November 1901, the Manila correspondent of The Philadelphia Ledger reported, “The present war is no bloodless, opera buffa engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.”385 Likewise, another article on the World’s Fair, published the same year as the first, describes the Filipinos in terms of animalistic language:

The uncivilized section of the Philippine delegation will prove one of the most attractive features of the World’s Fair, for a stranger or more interesting people were never seen.

They come from the North Central section of Luzon, and, according to the Philippine statistician, there are about 500,000 of them. For hundreds and hundreds of years they have been living according to their own peculiar customs, undisturbed by the progress of civilization, working occasionally and fighting most of the time just to amuse themselves.

384 Ibid. 385 Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 308. 205

The mark of honor for a savage in Luzon is not a gold medal, won in an oratorical contest at college; not a bank account, gained by hard and conscientious labor in the commercial world; not a Governmental office secured by vote of a majority of the people; no, none of these count in uncivilized Luzon. It is the head hunter who finds heads that wins name and fame. One head secured in combat makes a savage eligible to the ranks of good society; more than one makes him a great man among his people. The American Indian used to take the scalp as a trophy of war; the barbarous Luzonian takes the entire head.386

The Philippines exhibit represents a particularly revealing area of the nexus between the workings out of the human and non-human animal and its occasion with colonialism. The largest draw of the entire fair was the Filipino tribe of the Igorots already mentioned by

Governor Hunt. However, what singularly interested the attendees was the Igorot practice of eating dogs. To quote just a small part of the numerous newspaper articles on the topic:

The two dogs which possessed the saving gift of good looks are a beautiful marked water spaniel and a fuzzy Skye terrier. The four yelping victims all belong to the great yellow mongrel family. Just now the latter present a gaunt and unappetizing appearance, but with tender care and careful feeding the natives hope to have them ready for the slaughter very soon. In the meantime the Igorrotes, men and women, old and young, big and little, are all in the seventh heaven of bliss over the promised feast, and at each sidelong glance directed toward their captive meat they lick their chops in unctuous anticipation.

When the dog feast will take place is a matter that governor Hunt will not divulge, but he says that it will certainly happen, whether the Humane Society will or no.

“We are 300 yards outside the city limits,” says the Governor, “and consequently the gratification of the Igorrote appetite with the beloved dog-meat is not a matter with which the Humane Society has any concern. The natives like their dog morsels as well as the members of the society like their lamb chops and beefsteak, and they shall have it.”387

386 “Philippines Present Unique Phase of Life,” Missouri Republic (St. Louis, MO), April 3, 1904. 387 “Six Victims Secured, Four of Which Will Be Served in Native Style. Wild Rejoicing Prevails Among Filipino Head-Hunters at Prospect of End to Prolonged Fast.” Missouri Republic (St. Louis, MO), April 11, 1904. 206

If one looks though the newspapers of the time, it is overwhelming the number not only of articles, but also of letters to the editor centered on this one practice; multiple

“concerned citizens” offered to provide dogs for only the “cost of freight” so that

Filipinos would not be deprived of their “choice delicacy.”388 In other words, they were animal-like “savages,” and part of the proof of this “savagery” was their treatment of animals loved by North Americans—namely dogs. To provide some context for how widely sensational this supposed practice of dog eating for the Filipinos actually mattered, the original area in St. Louis which housed the Igorot was later named

“Dogtown”389 because of the Fair, and even as late as 1936, the main high school in

Dogtown, Wydown High School, referred to their football team as the “Igorrotes.” In fact, part of the reason that in a roll became referred to as “hot dogs” was, in part, because of the St. Louis World’s Fair and the excitement over “dog eating.” As Dr.

Virgilio R. Pilapil, president of the Filipino American Historical Society, explains:

The hot dog, one of the most popular American foods, appears to be another legacy of the Igorot presence at the St. Louis World’s Fair … In short, the atmosphere in and around the Fair and in the newspaper media was saturated with the thoughts of the dog-eating custom of the Igorots. Their dog-eating activities at the Fair had been referred to as the “Bow-Wow Feast” and we may look at it now as the first “Bow-Wow Feast” in America by the Igorots, or perhaps even just the first “Bow-Wow Feast” in America. I have no doubt that the name “hot dog” was picked as a label for the -on-a-bun to attract the attention of potential customers at the Fair by riding on the popularity of the eating of dogs by the Igorots, which had inspired the creation of the name.390

388 “Letter Offering Dogs,” Missouri Republic (St. Louis, MO), April 12, 1904. 389 Pilapil, “Dogtown U.S.A.” For the view of how the residents themselves explain the name “Dogtown,” see Julie Blattner, “Dogtown U.S.A.—Clayton And Tamm Area,” Metro News (St. Louis, MO), June 27, (1978), and Shawn Clubb, “Men Think They Have Found True Origin of ‘Dogtown’ Name” South City Journal (St. Louis, MO), September 18, 2007. 390 Pilapil, “Dogtown, U.S.A.” To be clear, neither the idea of sausage in a roll, nor even the term “hot dog” originated with the fair itself. However, prior to the fair, the phrase “hot dog” was only rarely used and, most commonly, only as a term of insult (that is, implying that merchants were of such poor repute that they would include in their sausages). Beginning with the Saint Louis World’s Fair, and due in large part to the popularity of the Igorots’ spectacle of dog eating, enterprise promoters transformed an extant but relatively little-used term for the sausage in a bun into the novelty of selling a “hot dog,” which 207

Ironically though, despite the intense media attention applied to the idea that

Filipinos regularly, casually, and daily ate dogs, like an American might eat a hotdog, the eating of dogs for the Igorot is, in reality, an extremely rare and deeply ceremonial practice premised upon a deep reverence for dogs throughout the Igorot culture.391

I want to pause here for a moment to discuss the American fascination with this practice, specifically in the case of the Filipinos displayed in the St. Louis World’s Fair.

In the first place, I wish to suggest a connection between the first description of the

Luzon as uncivilized “head hunters” and the forced performative way in which the

Filipinos, at a million-dollar price tag, were brought to the United States so that, in large part, Americans from all walks of life could watch them eat dogs on a daily basis. What I believe motivated this massive interest (it was by far the most discussed part of the Fair) in Filipinos eating dogs was that it was meant to show, in symbolic form, the idea that

Filipinos were really cannibals in which the domestic dog (“man’s best friend”) was daily substituted for the supposed idea that the Filipinos were also eating humans as

“head hunters.” The assertion was not simply that the Igorot were “headhunters,” (to state what should perhaps be obvious: they were neither headhunters nor cannibals; almost all colonial accounts of “cannibalism” were completely spurious) but that, as the Missouri

onlookers could symbolically eat while the Filipinos were forced to eat literal “hot dogs.” Hence, while it is untrue that the term “hotdog” was first coined for the World’s Fair, as some have incorrectly claimed, it does seem to be the case that popularity of the Igorots did shift the word “hot dog,” a relatively obscure and insulting term, into the mainstream discourse for all sausage in bread products. See also Gerald Leonard Cohen, David Shulman, and Barry A. Popik, Origin of the Term “Hot Dog” (Rolla, MO: G. Cohen, 2004). 391 Greg Allen, “‘Living Exhibits’ at 1904 World’s Fair Revisited: Igorot Natives Recall Controversial Display of Their Ancestors,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio (Washington, DC: National Public Radio, May 31, 2004), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1909651. As National Public Radio documented for a 100-year anniversary of the World’s Fair, “Mia Abeya, a Maryland resident whose Igorot grandfather was among those on display, says Igorots ate dog only occasionally, for ceremonial purposes. During the fair, they were fed the animals on a daily basis. ‘They made them butcher dogs, which is really abusing the culture of the Igorots.’” 208

Republic claims, headhunting was the essential element of their society. Hence the

Missouri Republic not only claims that the Igorot were headhunters but specifically and repeatedly contrasts this “barbaric” practice against all forms of civilized society. To, therefore, just briefly repeat, “The mark of honor for a savage in Luzon is not a gold medal, won in an oratorical contest at college; not a bank account, gained by hard and conscientious labor in the commercial world; not a Governmental office secured by vote of a majority of the people; no, none of these count in uncivilized Luzon. It is the head hunter who finds heads that wins name and fame.”392 The “proof” of this assertion, that the Luzon were deeply uncivilized, could then be daily and performatively shown as they were forced to eat dogs, proving simultaneously their savageness, their propensity to eat humans, and hence, ironically, their own animalistic nature. Or, to put it in even more concrete terms, the Igorots’ treatment as dogs was justified by their supposed treatment of dogs.

To connect the discussion to Ota Benga for a second, I find it profoundly important that in both cases the colonialism of the Africans and Filipinos was based on their supposed “cannibalism.” For example, Reverend Verner, the person who captured

Ota Benga, gave the false claim that he was about to be fed Ota Benga as a captured animal by another African tribe, because such an explanation justified his own decision to display Ota Benga in a zoo on multiple levels. In the first place, such treatment could not be viewed as a “mistreatment” or “dehumanization” of Ota Benga, since he had already,

Verner claimed, been the most fully reduced to the level of animal, that is, he was about to be turned into meat. Likewise, it turns what, in reality, was a virtual enactment of slavery—purchasing an African for profit in the United States—into a caring act of

392 “Philippines Present Unique Phase of Life.” 209 disinterested humanitarianism (as of course the actual act of slavery was itself frequently justified). But perhaps most importantly, it re-inscribed this notion of Africans as

“cannibals,” as the type of people who would, potentially, eat other people. Hence, performatively Ota Benga becomes not only the unfortunate victim, but also a potential victimizer, and the type of person (in terms of both race and national origin) who might in fact attempt to “eat” a human if he were not protectively locked away—a point reiterated in the constant reference to Ota Benga’s “sharpened teeth.” In Verner’s retelling, Ota Benga’s display in the zoo becomes doubly protective; not only is Ota himself being ultimately protected from supposed hordes of cannibalistic Africans hungry to eat him, but the [white] viewing public itself becomes protected from a potentially furious Ota Benga who might himself attempt to attack and even eat the viewing public if he were not protectively kept behind bars. Therefore, under this shared rhetoric of animality and cannibalism, his display in a zoo became transfigured from a public debasement to a protective improvement.

So, too, I wish to suggest that this massive display of the Igorot population, and their daily eating of dogs, was meant to explain and justify recent near-genocide in the

Philippines under a performative rhetoric of protective care. Like with Ota (who we should remember was being displayed in the exact same Fair), tales of the Igorots’ supposed “cannibalism” were being invoked to justify the American treatment of the

Filipinos. The idea that the Filipinos were both primarily and exclusively “head hunters” and “cannibals” helped to justify the literal display of the Igorots as zoo animals since

“left in the wild” they might well themselves be eaten. Therefore, their literal display was not an act of domination but a protective one. As with Ota Benga, the Filipinos are cast 210 not only as victims but equally as potential victimizers, symbolized in their daily eating of dogs, whom the [white] spectating public are protected against. And in both cases, the

“danger” that necessitated that Ota and the Igorot must be colonized to protect against was themselves, their own “animalistic” natures.

State of Exception

To make sense of how all of the Filipinos’ human rights could be suspended, to the point of their being displayed as exotic animals in a zoo, all under a rhetoric of benevolent protection and care, it is again useful to review the work of Giorgio Agamben.

One of the key juridical and philosophical ideas that motivates his theorization is the idea of a “state of exception” within the law. This state of exception is both a central concept of his most famous text, Homo Sacer, and the title of one his entire books, State of

Exception (which Agamben refers to as the second book in his Homo Sacer series).

Agamben borrows this term, “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand), from the work of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, specifically from Schmitt’s text Political Theology

(Politishe Theologie). Schmitt’s claim, at least as understood by Agamben, is that all political systems have within them the possibility of legal rights being voided for the purpose of “protecting” legal rights.In other words, in times of emergency, constitutions must be legally violated in order to “protect” the very constitution that is being voided.

This paradoxical idea—democracy must be violated to protect democracy—is most clearly expressed by one of Schmitt’s contemporaries, Clinton L. Rossiter (and cited by

Agamben), when he writes in relation to Schmitt’s idea of a “state of exception”: “No 211 sacrifice is too great for our democracy, least of all the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself.”393

Agamben’s specific interest in this notion, which both he and Schmitt trace back to ancient Rome, is to make sense of the legal basis of the concentration camps. As I discussed in great detail in Dying from Improvement, the discussion of a specifically legal basis for the camps has been misunderstood by many scholars as a more sweeping holistic and totalizing discussion meant to explain the totality of motivation of all forms of anti-Semitism and the “Holocaust.” However, Agamben’s actual project is far more limited and specific than some of his critics suggest. Agamben wishes only to take seriously the idea of a state of exception from the leading legal Nazi theorist, Carl

Schmitt, exclusively to understand the legal justification for the concentration camps and his worry that a similar legal framework continues to operate after the end of such camps.

Agamben’s repeated insight and claim is that the camps were in fact legally “justified” via an idea of a state of exception contained within the Articles of the Weimar

Constitution. Agamben’s question is not, “How could the Holocaust have come about?” which is its own separate question, but only, “How legally did Nazi jurists attempt to justify the suspension of law necessary for the camps to operate, and what is the continuing relevance of this proof of the radical indeterminacy of law to contemporary issues such as poverty in the third world?” For example, as Agamben states in State of

Exception:

Let us take the case of the Nazi State. No sooner did Hitler take power (or, as we should perhaps more accurately say, no sooner was power given to him) than, on February 28, he proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the Articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal . The decree was never repealed, so that from a juridical

393 Clinton L. Rossiter, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 9. 212

standpoint the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years.394

However, while explicitly based on the theorization of Schmitt and others on the juridical basis of a state of exception, Agamben’s claim builds on this original idea—rights suspended to protect rights—into an explicitly biological dimension by combining the idea of a state of exception with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of

“biopolitics.” In other words, Agamben is attempting a theorization of two shared but differing theories of paradoxical “protection”; democracy suspended in order to “protect” democracy (Schmitt/state of exception) with life suspended in order to protect life

(Foucault/“biopolitics”). As Agamben explains on the very first page of State of

Exception: “If the law employs the exception—that is the suspension of law itself—as its original means of referring to and encompassing life, then a theory of the state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abounds the living being to law.”395 It is this dual suspension of both rights and life itself that underlies Agamben’s theorization of the legal basis for the birth of the concentration camps. For Agamben it is equally important that Hitler not only paradoxically legally suspended law (the state of exception) but also that he did so solely for the purported reason of protecting life. Hitler’s original creed legally authorizing the camps was named the “Decree for the Protection of the People and the State”—law suspended to protect law and a people “suspended” (that is, killed) to protect “The

People.”

394 Agamben, State of Exception, 2. 395 Ibid., 1. 213

The Benevolence Proclamation

Hence, although Agamben fails to note or comment upon the use of

“concentration camps” in the Philippines, even though the event predates the German concentration camps by thirty years, I believe his dual theorization of a state of exception and “biopolitics” can help us to understand how both such camps were legally justified based on a division between human and non-human animal. To be clear, it is not my claim that the “concentration camps” of the Philippines and the “concentration camps” of the Third Reich are in any sense morally comparable, but only that they were both legally justified by a similar paradoxical rhetoric of the need to suspend both law and life in order to “protect” it. For example, the official title of the act that authorized the conquest of the Philippines was named “McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation.” The actual text—I will reproduce the majority of the proclamation for the sake of context— read:

In performing this duty the military commander of the United States is enjoined to make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that in succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing the former political relations, and in establishing a new political power, the authority of the United States is to be exerted for the securing of the persons and property of the people of the islands and for the confirmation of all their private rights and relations. It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, co- operate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity, so far as possible. … Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfillment of this high 214

mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States. (All emphasis is original.)396

In legal theory, the “Benevolence Proclamation” represents what Agamben would term a

“state of exception,” that is, the rule of law is suspended explicitly in order to “protect” the rule of law. Indeed the explicit claim was, again, specific to democracy and the idea that by denying the Filipinos any form of democratic self-government or personal rights, they could be trained in the manner of democratic rights which they would, later on, be able to exercise. Or in other words, what contemporary political discourse would refer to as “human rights” had to be suspended precisely because human rights were of such an absolute moral value that absolutely anything became justified in order to “protect” them, even their own suspension in which military rule, boarding on the genocidal, was enacted to implement to replace “the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”

In other words, to return to Agamben’s terminology, in the case of the

Philippines, the “state of exception,” of human rights suspended to protect human rights and the “biopolitical” argument on the performative separation of humans and animals work together in a synergistic whole. The very basis of the “benevolence” of the benevolence proclamation is the idea that the Filipinos themselves are not fully human, as animalistic cannibals, and as such require the intervention of the United States military, to the point of near genocide, in order to domesticate them into full humans. So, too, I believe that we should understand the “concentration camps” of the Philippines during

396 William McKinley, “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation,” in The Statutes At Large of the United States of America from March 1897 to March 1899 and Recent Treaties, Conventions, Executive Proclamations, and The Concurrent Resolutions of the Two Houses of Congress, Volume XXX (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899). 215 the war and the “Philippines village” after the war, to a certain degree, in parallel terms.

In both cases there is a shared logic of protective quarantines, that the Filipinos are being protected (even if such protection involves the reality of death) not only from the supposed headhunting cannibals that would otherwise kill and eat them, put primarily

“protected” from themselves, from their own supposed animal natures which can only be benevolently assimilated via violence modeled on the form of coercion justified via other exotic animals—beating, killing, habitat destruction, and zoo-like display. We can see in concrete terms the working out of the paradox originally suggested by Aristotle, that man is defined as a “political animal” and therefore only becomes a human via recognition of the polis, and that acts of violence, including slavery, can be justified precisely because violence possesses, as in the case of transforming a wolf to a dog, the potential to transform the savage into an accepted member of “civilization” who can only earn freedom after he has been “transformed” from a non-human animal into a human.

Part II: Animals and Abu Ghraib

Figure 7 Photograph of the "water cure" by Corporal George J. Vennage. Held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Special Collections department, Ohio State University 216

Certain elements of this same biological state of exception, of human rights suspended in order to “protect” the human, continue with us to the modern day, specifically in

the example of Abu Ghraib.397 In fact, these linkages between William McKinley’s

Benevolent Proclamation of the Philippines and the justification of the Iraqi war based on

“spreading” democracy were made explicit by George Bush himself. On October 18,

2003, then-President George W. Bush landed in the Philippines as part of his Asian tour.

In his speech, Bush claimed, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the

Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.

Together we rescued the islands from invasion and occupation.”398 He then went on to draw an explicit analogy between America’s former attempt to create democracy in the

Philippines and its current attempt to likewise create a democracy in Iraq, which the

United States had just recently invaded, stating, “Democracy always has skeptics. Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia.”399 Hence for George Bush, the “test case” of the Philippines served as the historical proof and justification for the war in Iraq since, according to the logic of the speech, both countries could be “benevolently” rescued from an oppressive rule (Spain and Saddam Hussein) and transformed into free democracies that requested individual rights, even if this transformation in freedom and self-determination could

397 To be clear, it is not my goal to fully theorize Abu Ghraib, a topic that would require its own essay, if not its own book. My goal is simply to show connections between past events that might, mistakenly, be thought of wholly separately from contemporary examples and to suggest that certain logical and political caesurae continue with us after the end of the World’s Fair and the Philippine War. 398 George W. Bush, quoted in John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, (New York: Scribner, 2004), 1. 399 Ibid., 1. 217 only occur via coercion and (neo)colonialistic control. Even the practice that has become the most famous example of the United States’ propensity to justify torture, waterboarding, was itself regularly and routinely deployed throughout the Philippines and was known simply as the “water cure.”400 Far from a simple coincidence, in both the

Philippines and Iraq, the practice of waterboarding served a remarkably similar purpose, a way in which individuals could be tortured into cooperation without such torture leaving any marks on their body, since the justification/rationalization for the torture itself was one of benevolent assimilation. While the practices are identical, I think that the name “water cure” was a more revealing title, as the torture itself was seen to “cure” the Filipinos of the same problem as the benevolent assimilation of the Iraqis was intended to cure—a resistance to the rule by Americans.

Only a Matter of Perception

There is another equally important aspect unique to the idea of a state of exception. What is so singularly important to this idea for Agamben is that the state of exception represents a unique time in law, which is neither lawless nor lawful. For example, think of the paradigmatic example that Agamben suggests—that of the legal structure of the concentration camp. The space of the camp, and everything that occurs in the camp, happens outside of any classical understanding of the nature of law—torture, murder, rape, medical experimentation on humans, and so on. And yet, at the same time, it would be inaccurate to describe the camp as a space that was completely “lawless” in the sense of anarchy. Indeed, if anything, the camp is the space in which life becomes the most tightly regulated, regimented, and disciplined, in which each moment of life is

400 Paul Kramer, “The Water Cure: Debating Torture and Counterinsurgency—A Century Ago,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/25/the-water- cure#ixzz0iMw9pDo. 218 controlled and prescribed. The state of exception represents, paradoxically, the moment and space which is the most fully within the realm of law (the tight regimentation of the camp, the complete control of the individual by the state) and, at the same time, the site is most outside of any version of legal discourse (all legal protections, while still theoretically in effect no longer apply—anything at all can be done to the inmates of the camp). As Agamben writes in his section “Force of Law” (with an “X” over “law”), again quoting Schmitt:

“Because the state of exception is always something different from anarchy and chaos, in a juridical sense, an order still exists in it, even if it is not a juridical order” (Schmitt 1922, 12/12). The specific contribution of Schmitt’s theory is precisely to have made such an articulation between state of exception and juridical order possible. It is a paradoxical articulation, for what must be inscribed in law is something that is essentially exterior to it, that is, nothing less than the suspicion of the juridical order itself (hence that formulation: “In a juridical sense, an order still exists,…even if it is not a juridical order”).401

Therefore, the state of exception represents a double paradox: Law still exists (the constitution of the Weimer republic is still in effect, at least in legal theory, for the entire rule of the Third Reich) but has no effect, and, at the same time, the force of law still occurs although wholly divorced from any legal basis (the camp is both the site where life is the most tightly controlled and the moment in which, legally speaking, “anything goes”).

Agamben repeatedly asserts that this state of exception represents the legal basis by which we should understand the paradigmatic examples of both Abu Ghraib and

Guantanamo Bay. For example, immediately after his discussion of the camps, Agamben writes, “The immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension

401 Agamben, State of Exception, 3. 219 emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on

November 13, 2001, which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’”402 However, while a highly evocative claim, such assertions have remained remarkably vague, inaccessible, and both unprovable and non-disprovable. Do the “abuses” of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in fact match the indeed quite technical and precise definition of a state of exception, a space both inside and outside of law?

While these questions were perhaps unanswerable when Agamben first wrote

State of Exception in 2003, the recent declassification of several files related to Abu

Ghraib by Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, including the meeting notes, which defined the legal parameters of the both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, reveal the precise manner in which a state of exception can exist within a “democratically” functioning country.403 What is revealed throughout these files is the precise, methodical, and deliberative manner in which the element of torture was debated, articulated, and ultimately justified. I have included a copy of the “Counter

Resistance Strategy Meeting Minutes” of October 2, 2002, which shows a discussion between Lieutenant Commander Dianna E. Beaver (the Staff Judge Advocate) and with

John Fredman (the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center):

402 Ibid., 3. 403 Since many of these only declassified documents are still relatively unknown I have included photocopies of a few of the most pertinent documents within this dissertation. For media coverage on the release of these documents see: Warren P. Strobel, “Documents Confirm U.S. Hid Detainees from Red Cross,” McClatchy, June 17, 2008, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/17/41394/documents-confirm-us-hid- detainees.html#ixzz1FxlQYuFn and Philippe Sands, “The Green Light,” Vanity Fair, May 2008, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805?printable=true¤tPage=all; All documents were released as part of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, “INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY” November 20, 2008.

220

There are at least two key sections from this discussion that are particularly relevant: The first is the statement concerning torture: “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong,” followed by the claim: “Any of the techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual.

Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents.”404 Hence we can

404 Counter Resistance Strategy, Meeting Minutes, October 2, 2002, 3. Released as part of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, “INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY” 221 witness, in the literal minutes of the meeting in which torture was legally justified, the odd and paradoxical manner in which one of the most extreme forms of violence imaginable, torture, is interwoven with a rhetoric of protective care. As with the water cure and waterboarding (which this meeting was itself intended to discuss), the point is that violence can occur as long as it is not seen as too obviously violating the rhetoric of

“benevolence”—“detainees” can be tortured, virtually without restraint, but not killed; waterboarding represents the best form of torture since it leaves no marks; the medical staff are literally to be there during the torture itself, not to protect the torture victim but instead only to guarantee the absence of death in case of any “accidents.” In other words, as Elaine Scarry has previously argued in the The Body in Pain,405 medical personnel, whose sworn duty is to protect life, become completely interwoven with the reality of death and pain, whose difference becomes, as the memo itself claims, only one of

“perception.”

The second key point I wish to focus on is the final rejoinder that LTC Beaver provides, after Fredman’s lengthy description of justifications for torture, namely: “We will need documentation to protect us.”406 This single line, set off from the rest of the discourse, reveals to me precisely the danger that the system of a “state of exception” can occur even within countries that still nominally believe in “human rights,” a possibility that Agamben is attempting to warn us against. This phrase represents a key moment in the thousands of memos I have read (of which I have only reproduced a small fraction) in which the law itself becomes only a series of documentary steps, not a series of ethical or

November 20, 2008. 405 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987). 406 Counter Resistance Strategy, 3. 222 moral questions, but only a procedural number of bureaucratic hurdles which must be overcome. I include these documents, therefore, to provide some small idea of just how much documentation sanctioning torture by the United States was required and produced.

For what we witness in the state of exception expressed in both Abu Ghraib and

Guantanamo Bay is not only the actions of a top-level executive, George Bush’s lone sovereign decision to suspend the law (although that is also certainly true), but also a plethora of low-level memos, briefs, meetings, email exchanges, studies and counter- memos (Foucault’s term for this diffused notion of sovereignty is “governmentality”) in which literally hundreds of people all cooperate to enact this sovereign exception into law, and in which, as Schmitt suggests, “an order still exists, … even if it is not a juridical order.”

At the same time, while the normal explanation is that the events in Abu Ghraib only represent the both unintentional and disallowed actions by a few low-level deviant soldiers, many within the military command structure have claimed, repeatedly, that the actions of Abu Ghraib, including torture, nudity, and the use of dogs, as well as the photos themselves, were intentionally fostered by higher-level commanders as a way to encourage confessions of the detainees while still being able to disavow legal responsibility after the fact. To be clear, this is not a conspiracy theory suggested by those opposed to the war, or outside of the military, but the accusation made by military leaders themselves such as Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the general in charge of

Abu Ghraib during the entirety of the abuse. For example, in a June 15, 2004, interview with the BBC:

Gen[eral] Karpinski said military intelligence took over part of the Abu Ghraib jail to “Gitmoize” their interrogations—make them more like what was happening 223

in the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which is nicknamed “Gitmo”. She said current Iraqi prisons chief Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller—who was in charge at Guantanamo Bay—visited her in Baghdad and said: “At Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have.” “He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.”407

It is not Karpinski’s claim that there was ever a direct and written order to the military police to treat the prisoners in the manner that they did, since such a direct order would itself undo the need for “protective” documentation. Instead, it is Karpinski’s repeated claim, one echoed by the Stanford psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, the author of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment,408 that conditions and innuendo were intentionally utilized in order to help to foster these precise conditions.409 As Karpinski further explains, “"I know that the MP [military police] unit that these soldiers belonged to hadn’t been in Abu Ghraib long enough to be so confident that one night or early morning they were going to take detainees out of their cells, pile them up and photograph themselves in various positions with these detainees.410” Law professor Charles Brower documents :

Thus, when viewed in a broader factual context, it becomes clear that, since the first days of Ambassador Bremer’s tenure in Baghdad, the United States received a steady flow of credible information regarding the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners. To their credit, Bremer and Secretary of State Powell discussed such allegations in meetings with Secretary Rumsfeld, President Bush, and the White House staff. After receiving the Pentagon’s assurances that it was “on the case,” however, the White House “did nothing” to follow up. Thus, while parts of the “system” swiftly identified and responded to allegations of inhumane treatment, other parts of the system plainly—perhaps even criminally—failed. … Thus, even a casual review of disconnected facts casts substantial doubt on official descriptions regarding the scope of abuse at Abu Ghraib. By the same token, a

407 BBC News, “Iraq Abuse ‘Ordered from the Top,’” June 15, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3806713.stm. 408 Philip G. Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment, http://www.prisonexp.org/. 409 CNN, “It's not bad apples, it's the barrel,” Friday, May 21, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/05/21/zimbarbo.access/ 410 BBC News, “Iraq Abuse ‘Ordered from the Top.’” 224

broader and more systematic examination strongly suggests that the mistreatment constitutes an inevitable result of policy decisions to place an ever-growing number of detainees ever farther beyond the protection of the law.411

This accusation has seen increased support via these same recently declassified files. In the same released minutes, coming immediately before the claim that torture is, in essence, only a matter of perception, Lt. Commander Beaver restates the paradoxical formulation suggested by both Schmitt and Agamben of the need to create a “controlled chaos”.412

While on the one hand, this phrase “controlled chaos” is meant to signify the perspective of the prisoners, that they are made to feel that the camp is in chaos, while in reality it is tightly controlled, at the same time it demonstrates the manner in which Abu Ghraib itself was created as a site of “controlled chaos” operating outside of law while still within a juridical order. This point was clearly expressed in the contention that such practices as sleep deprivation will have to be ended whenever the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) comes for inspection, since such actions as sleep deprivation “officially it

411 Charles H. Brower II, “The Lives of Animals, the Lives of Prisoners, and the Revelations of Abu Ghraib,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 37, 1353 (2004). 412 Counter Resistance Strategy, 3. 225 is not happening. It is not being reported officially.” The recently released memo includes descriptions and suggestions for most of the actions against prisoners which occurred at

Abu Ghraib, including forced nudity, the use of hoods, and even the fear of dogs. For example, the October 11, 2002, memorandum JTF-J2 includes the following list of suggestions:413

Text reads:

4. Interrogating the detainee in an environment other than the standard

interrogation booth.

5. Deprivation of light and auditory stimuli.

6. The detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during

transportation and questioning. The hood should not restrict breathing in

any way and the detainee should be under direct observation while hooded.

7. The use of 20-hour interrogations.

8. Removal of all comfort items (including religious items)

9. Switching the detainee from bot rations to MREs.

10. Removal of clothing.

11. Forced grooming (shaving of facial hair, etc.)

12. Using detainee’s individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress

413 JTF-J2, Joint Task Force 170, “Memorandum for Commander, Joint Task Force 170, Subject: Request for Approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, October 11, 2002), 2. Released as part of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, “INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY” November 20, 2008.

226

Display of the Conquered (Again)

Therefore, as discussed in the first half of this chapter, the earlier and intentional display of the Filipinos as conquered subjects, in degrading and animal-like settings, should give us pause in making sense of Abu Ghraib and its display of the recently conquered Iraqis in forced nudity and attacked by dogs. To return to Professor Brower:

Most discussions of Abu Ghraib focus, in one way or another, on the images and vocabulary of sex: “sexual humiliation,” “pornography,” “perversion,” and the special offensiveness of these concepts to Arabs raised in the Islamic faith. Virtually no one has recognized that the images and descriptions of Abu Ghraib equally recall the treatment of animals in stockyards, in kennels, and on safaris.

Consider the accounts of prisoners brought, hooded, into the cellblock where the abuses occurred. Guards used open blades to cut away prisoners’ jumpsuits, from their necks to their thighs. This action represents a symbolic slaughter that created a sense of mortal terror among detainees. Having obscured their faces and removed their clothing—eliminating two highly distinctive human characteristics—guards “branded” the prisoners like cattle, drawing words and symbols on their legs or buttocks. According to several accounts, guards forced prisoners to crawl like dogs on their hands and knees, to bark on command, and to follow their captors on leashes or strings. At other times, crawling prisoners 227

served as “donkeys” or “riding animals,” forced to bear fellow prisoners or guards on their backs … To maintain discipline, guards reportedly placed “unruly prisoners” in “shipping containers used to house prison dogs.” In other cases, guards left prisoners in their cells for days without clothes or bedding, “as if [they] were dogs.” … Even when placed in a broader context, the collection of photographs suggests that the guards viewed their prisoners like animals … In all cases, the photographs seem not to record criminal violence committed against the possessors of legal rights. To the contrary, they appear to represent trophies, however eccentric, taken on the equivalent of a modern-day safari.414

For example, consider these originally leaked photos of Abu Ghraib.

Figure 8 Still from the original reporting on Abu Ghraib.

414 Brower, “The Lives of Animals.” 228

Figure 9 Cell phone photo taken from Abu Grahib 229

Figure 10 Hunting Image

Figure 11 Hunting Image #2 230

The humans (while still alive) are fully reduced to the level of captured and killed animals piled on top of another, in a scene rendered all the more eerie by the smiling faces that look on over the conquered pile of Iraqis. Now compare it to these recent photos of safari hunters in Africa.415

There occurs the same odd juxtaposition of a corpse, or corpse-like conquered body, and a group of smiling onlookers facing toward the camera in a kind of victory in hunting pose. So, too, other photos not only included attacks by dogs but also included the Iraqi prisoners treated themselves as dogs, forced to be naked, to crawl on all fours, and even to wear dog collars. There are of course hundreds (that we know of) of each of these photos. What we are witness in these photos therefore is the same as the display of the

Filipinos in the World’s Fair—a conquered population triumphantly displayed in an animal-like setting in order to justify the recent war. It is suggested, via such displays, that these “animalistic” savages had to be conquered in the first place.

One Struggle, One Fight

In other words, I wish to suggest that Abu Ghraib represented a state of exception, a zone or space where law both did and did not apply and in which guards, intentionally, felt free to do anything to the prisoners at all that they wanted. Moreover, this state of exception, the system of governance, both within and outside of law, is precisely how we should understand the legal basis for rule in the colonial and neocolonial space—law both does and does not apply. Furthermore, this very division is rendered possible because of the idea of the human as only an unstable performative, as a political animal, that the

415 Photo associated with “Africa Wildlife Safari Tours & Safari Trips In Africa,” Real Adventures, http://www.realadventures.com/g3204_africa-wildlife-safari-tours.htm and “Tours and Safaris,” The Africa Guide, http://www.africaguide.com/travel/index.php?cmd=9&page=1&specials=16. 231 state can choose to include or to disallow. In other words, the reason that the law both does and does not apply in the space of the camp, and the colony, is because of a division of who is considered human, and therefore still retained within the protective boundaries of law, and who is not. Therefore, each of these performative displays of subjugation that occur after conquest, of the Philippine village and the Filipinos forced to eat dogs, or

Iraqis attacked and treated as dogs, must be, in part, connected with one another. Not because they are in some manner the same occurrence—they are not. But because, they represent, I believe, connected points in time in which the intentional display of conquered subjects reoccurs as a triumphal display meant to express who is included in the performative community of the “human” and who is considered still only an

“animal.” Therefore, as long as “animals” lack any rights or standing under law, human animals will also always be in danger of yet again being redefined as animals (which, of course, they are), therefore losing any rights or standing under law. In fact, there is a popular slogan in the animal rights community which reads “One struggle, one fight, animal liberation, human rights.” What the theory of the state of exception teaches us is that this chant is, if anything, even more correct than the chanters themselves may realize.

For no matter how perfectly “human” rights are enshrined into law, as long as the animal is wholly excluded, such rights will remain radically indeterminate since, as demonstrated in both the Philippines and Abu Ghraib, humans can, at any time, be reduced to the level of animals and therefore lose any rights or standing under law. For what we see in both the Philippines and Abu Ghraib is not that there was a group, perceived as human, whose rights were deprived, but instead that the oppressed group was seen as not being human, and therefore, automatically, lost any standing under law. 232

Consequently, no matter how perfectly new “human” rights are enshrined into law, they will not translate into actual protection for anyone, for the failure is seldom in the absence of legal rights (the Articles of the Weimer Republic were in legal effect for the entirety of the Third Reich, the United States Constitution for the entirety of the Philippines War, and the Geneva Convention for the entirety of Abu Ghraib), but the absence of the belief that the oppressed group is, in fact, “human” at all. Therefore, it is only after the non- human animal herself becomes protected under law from at least the most grievous forms of abuse, such as torture and imprisonment, that the human animals will ever actually enjoy such protections. Until then, the speciesist rhetoric of human (only) rights discourse will fail to protect not only all animals but also the human animal herself.

233

The Whopper Virgins: Hamburgers, Gender, and Xenophobia

“The hamburger is a culinary culture, and it’s actually an American phenomenon.”

—Opening lines to the documentary The Whopper Virgins

234

Figure 12 Still from the “Whopper Virgins” Advertisement

In 2008, Burger King began a new advertisement campaign entitled The Whopper

Virgins, which purported to go to the “the most remote parts of the world” to discover people who “did not even have a word for hamburger.”416 The purpose for these travels was purportedly so that they could conduct the “purest taste test in the world.”417 The ads were filmed in Thailand, Greenland, and Romania.418 This ad campaign was one of the most successful in Burger King’s history, receiving multiple awards, significant web traffic, widespread media attention, and correlating with the largest increase stock price in in Burger King’s history. 419

416 Crispin Porter + Bogusky, The Whopper Virgins, 2008, accessed January 16, 2010, http://www.whoppervirgins.com. 417 Ibid. 418 Ibid. 419 Carroll Trosclair, “Burger King’s Controversial Whopper Virgin Ads: BK Campaign Raised Cultural and Nutritional Issues for the Industry,” Suite101.com, accessed January 1, 2009; and Bryson York, “‘Whopper Virgins’ Rivals Online Success of ‘Freakout,’”Advertising Age, January 12, 2009, http://adage.com/article/digital/whopper-virgins-rivals-online-success-bk-s-freakout/133721. 235

In this chapter, I argue that the success behind this campaign was not tied to a taste test as the ads claimed. Instead, I argue, the advertisements were effective because of the linkages they made between the consumption of meat from Western-style fast food restaurants and the stereotype of “the effeminate rice eater,” which has a long history of being deployed as a rhetorical means to naturalize colonialism and xenophobia. This chapter focuses specifically on the ads of “Transylvanian farmers” which were filmed in my family’s homeland of Maramureş, Romania. The point of this chapter is that such a campaign worked because the stereotypes between meat eating, gender, and xenophobia continue to have relevance with a broad section of the public in the United States. These ads mask the hunger and poverty of the so-called “third world” in a naturalized discourse based on supposed deficiencies in diet. Consequently, The Whopper Virgins refigures the imposition of the Western-style fast food diet from a neoliberal imposition into an act of

“humanitarian” assistance.

“The Purest Taste Test in the World”

In 2008, Burger King began a new advertisement campaign entitled The Whopper

Virgins.420 The ad campaign consisted of two parts: first, a series of television commercials, each beginning with the claim, “We traveled to the most remote parts of the world, to people who did not even have a word for hamburger, and we asked them to compare the Whopper and the Big Mac for the purest taste test in the world!” and second, a “documentary” produced by Burger King, which revealed the results of the

“experiment.”421 Each of the nearly identical ads started with images of the peoples of

Thailand, Greenland, and Romania shown in traditional clothing and living an

420 Crispin Porter + Bogusky, The Whopper Virgins. 421 Ibid. 236 agriculture-based lifestyle removed from technology.422 Burger King then flew the individuals to a modern boardroom where the taste testers offered them two burgers (a

Whopper and a Big Mac). Many of the people were shown not being able to figure out how to eat a hamburger.423 The ads informed the viewers that the majority chose the

Whopper. In the second half of the documentary, the film crew flew back into the

“villages” of the participants, who were provided with free Whoppers.

“A God-Given Right to a Juicy Hamburger”

The Whopper Virgins represented an influential, highly effective, and award- winning advertising campaign with deep and emotional resonance to large sections of the

American public. The New York Daily News interviewed Sharon Akabas, the associate director of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, concerning her outspoken criticisms of the advertisement.424 She claimed in this interview that she received thousands of letters directed against her by consumers in the United States because of her criticism of the ads.425 One letter attacked Akabas for depriving other people in the world from their “God-given right to a juicy hamburger.”426 Statistics also demonstrate that Burger King’s The Whopper Virgins represented a uniquely successful advertising campaign. Between December 3 and December 31, the month of the ad campaign, Burger King’s stock rose from $18.78 to $22.82, an increase of 21.5

422 Ibid. The end of the documentary lists them as “The Hmong of Baan Mon Kghor and Baan Khun Chang Kian, Thailand. The Inuit of Isortoq and Kulusuk, Greenland. The Villagers of Budesti, Romania.” The names are only provided at the “credits” section of the documentary and do not appear in the advertisements. 423 Ibid. 424 Emily Bryson York, “Controversy Is Just What BK’s ‘Whopper Virgins’ Is After,” Advertising Age, December 8, 2008, http://adage.com/article/news/controversy-burger-king-s-whopper-virgins-133063/. 425 Ibid. 426 Ibid. 237 percent427—one of the largest stock increases in the company’s history. (To provide a comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial average rose only 2.1 percent in that same period.)428 Likewise, during a single month, the Burger King advertising campaign generated over one million views of the online documentary. 429 Based on these results, the advertising campaign garnered multiple top awards for effective advertising, including the Cannes Lions, the Webby, and the London Advertising Award.430 Paul

Caiozzo, the associate creative director for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency that created The Whopper Virgins, documented on his website:

The highlights from Paul’s three years at Crispin include … Whopper Virgins, a controversial campaign discussed on CNN, praised by National Geographic, and parodied on Saturday Night Live. After this run, Burger King was named marketer of the year, Crispin was named Agency of the Year, and Paul was named one of the top creatives in the world.431

The point is that these ads worked. While controversial, they appealed to people, they garnered media attention, they won awards, and they increased both stock prices and revenue for Burger King.

“Transylvania Farmers”

“We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.”432

427 Trosclair, “Burger King's Controversial Whopper Virgin Ads.” 428 Ibid. 429 York, “‘Whopper Virgins’ Rivals Online Success.” 430Paul Caiozzo, personal website, accessed June 1, 2012, http://paulcaiozzo.com/awards.html. 431 Ibid. 432 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Melbourne: Brolga, 2012). 238

Figure 13 Still from Whopper Virgins Advertisements #2

The advertising campaign included scenes from people in Greenland, Iceland, and

Romania, all of whom are equally ethically relevant. However, in this chapter I focus on

Burger King’s portrayal of “Transylvanian famers,” as this ad was filmed in my family’s ancestral homeland of Maramureş, Romania.433 The penultimate episode of the series of ads begins, “What happens if you take Transylvanian farmers who have never eaten a burger and ask them to compare Whopper versus Big Mac in the world’s purest taste test?”434 To state perhaps the obvious, there is no country called “Transylvania;”

Transylvania simply refers to a forested region of Romania. “Transylvania” translates as

“across the forest” and represents the middle, and heavily forested, region of Romania. It has no connection with the traditional myths of “vampires” or the historical figure of

“Dracula.” The caption of the ad clarifies that the name of the town is “Budeşti” but

433 However, to be clear, I do think these same colonial and patriarchal stereotypes operate in these other non-Western contexts, and it is, in part, my hope that this essay will help to inspire others who can speak about these others areas as I can speak about Romania . 434 “The Whopper Virgins,” YouTube video, 0:15, posted by Suzanne Chambers, December 1, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqmck0PU4KU&feature=related. 239

Romania contains over a dozen villages, towns, and communes known as “Budeşti,” none of which lie within the “Transylvanian” region of Romania. Furthermore, the traditional Romanian clothes shown in the film—clothing rarely worn in Romania— suggests that the piece was actually filmed in Maramureş, which has retained much of its original cultural heritage due to its enclosure by the Eastern Carpathian mountain range. I particularly suspect this is the case because there is a commune in the county of

Maramureş called “Budeşti,” which is also the site of the wooden church of Saint

Nicholas built in 1643 (A UNESCO World Heritage Site). In the wake of the controversy over the ads, Burger King attempted to justify their actions by contending as part of their

“humanitarian assistance” that that “[t]he company helped fund restoration of a 17th- century church in Romania.”435

I take this time in discussing where Burger King would have had to film the piece in order to make the point that the ad’s concern was to exoticize Romania—by splicing together the traditional dress and architecture of Maramureş with the fantastical sound of “Transylvania,” even though Maramureş and Transylvania are in completely different parts of Romania. The fact that the documentary exoticized the location is a clear indication that other claims by the documentary were equally incorrect and exoticized, including the claims that no one in “Transylvania” (Romania? Maramureş?) owned a television, had ever seen an advertisement for either Burger King or

McDonald’s, or had ever eaten (or seen) a hamburger. I do not believe any of these claims because, thanks to grants from Stanford University and the Institutul Cultural

Român, I visited and studied in the Maramureş region of Romania from which my family

435 Burger King Corporation, “The Whopper Virgins,” press release, 2009. 240 emigrated. And while it is true that Maramureş is a predominately agricultural area, many people own a television, know all about McDonald’s and Burger King, and have regularly eaten hamburgers. All of these contentions would also be true throughout the

“Transylvanian” region of Romania, as well as the rest of the country. For example,

McDonald’s has been in Romania for more than fifteen years and operates more than sixty-one restaurants across the country, which have served more than five hundred million customers.436 (While those numbers may seem conservative by American standards, it is important to remember that Romania is only about the size of the state of

Tennessee.) And, McDonald’s specifically operates multiple restaurants throughout the regions of both Maramureş and Transylvania (depending on where we wish to believe that the ad was actually filmed).437 There were also, at the time of the ad campaign, eight

Burger King restaurants in Romania. Burger King even released a press release less than a year before The Whopper Virgin ad celebrating the fact that they were “increasing the

Burger King brand throughout Romania.”438

The inaccuracies between the claims in the ads and the reality of Romania would have been obvious to everyone making the ad—the film crew would probably have driven past multiple McDonald’s or Burger Kings, as well as ads for both of them, in the process of filming the documentary. However, despite the ensuing controversy, Burger

King has refused to admit that their claims concerning Romania were false. Russ Klein,

436 “McDonald’s Romania celebrates 15th anniversary,” Business Review. June 21, 2010, http://business- review.ro/news/mcdonald-s-romania-celebrates-15th-anniversary/9432/. See also “McDonald’s Romania invests EUR 9m in Q1 to spread tentacles in the field,” Doing Business in Romania, May 19, 2009, http://www.doingbusiness.ro/en/business-news/11742/mcdonalds-romania- invests-eur-9m-in-q1-to-spread-tentacles-in-the-field. 437 McDonald’s Romania, http://www.mcdonalds.ro/, accessed June 1, 2012. 438 Burger King Corporation, Burger King: a deschis restaurantul cu numărul 8, press release, http://www.burgerking.com.ro/. The literal text reads, “Remus Tiucăă, General Manager Atlantic Restaurant System a spus: “Suntem foarte bucuroşi căă reuşim săă contribuim la creşterea brandului Burger King în Romania” (translation my own). 241 the president of global marketing strategy and innovation for Burger King Corporation, defended The Whopper Virgins campaign by stating, “During a time when consumers are craving it most, honesty and transparency are the heart and soul of this campaign.”439

“Effeminate Rice Eaters”

During the 1800’s, the “effeminate rice eater” represented a widespread and well

known colonial stereotype based on the argument that it was the eating of meat that

helped colonizers to become the more masculine, and therefore, the more dominant,

power in the colonial age, versus the supposedly “effeminate” rice and corn eaters of

the recently colonized countries. This trope filled the research of the nineteenth century

and helped to justify colonialism under a scientific ideal based on the supposed failure

of non-Western nutrition and particularly the argument that these other people did not

consume enough and/or the right type of meat as their Western counterparts. For

example, J. Leonard Corning, a well-respected medical researcher and doctor,

composed a monograph in 1884 entitled Brain Exhaustion, in which he argued that the

colonial population lacked the “intellectual vigor” of the English, not for racial reasons,

but because they did not eat the enough of the right types of Western meat. As he wrote

in a passage representative of his work as a whole:

Thus flesh-eating nations have ever been more aggressive than those peoples whose diet is largely or exclusively vegetable. The effeminate rice eaters of India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen ... But by far the most wonderful instance of the intellectual vigor of flesh eating men is the unbroken triumph of the Anglo-Saxon race. Reared on an island of comparatively slight

439 Burger King Corporation, press release, 2009. 242

extent, these carnivorous men have gone forth and extended their empire throughout the world.440

What is important to understand is that such ideas did not represent discredited or fringe ideas of the scientific establishment; and neither were such ideas understood by their practitioners as explicitly racist or colonialist. Indeed, quite the opposite. The motif of the

“effeminate rice eaters” instead was regarded as an intelligent argument in nineteenth century Europe—an idea that reiterated the ideas of colonialism and sexism under a supposedly non-racist and non-colonialist worldview based on the mutable characteristic of diet instead of an immutable genetics.441 Part of the very appeal of the notion of the

“effeminate rice eaters” is that it represents an area of possible change and improvement in contradistinction to the notions of the colonial subject found in treaties on genetic racism that could not be changed. The idea of nutritional deficiency tied to meat seemed to offer the colonialist scientists a “solution”—colonized populations could be “helped” if they were simply provided the right kinds and amount of Western-style meat. As Rachel

Laudan has chronicled in some detail:

For many scientists, politicians and writers, this democratized power diet of white bread and beef, rather than climate or heredity for example, explained the West’s industrial prowess, intellectual achievements, and above all its overseas empires. Sarah Hale [an influential American writer and editor] reminded her readers that the “portion of the human family, who have the means of obtaining [animal] food at least once a day … hold dominion over the earth. Forty thousand of the beef- fed British govern and control ninety millions of the rice-eating natives of India.” Edwin Lankester, a British science popularizer, baldly stated that “Those races who have partaken of animal food are the most vigorous, most moral, and most intellectual of races.” A well-known Australian doctor assured the readers of his dietary text that “Rice is, from an economical point of view, a wretched article of

440 J. Leonard Corning, Brain Exhaustion, with Some Preliminary Considerations on Cerebral Dynamics (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), 196–197. 441 Ibid. 243

diet … We might expect to find rice-eaters everywhere a wretched, impotent, and effeminate race, and such is the case.”442

Moreover, these claims about meat eating, gender, and race operate not only in expansionist forms of colonialism but also internally against immigrant groups within the

United States and particularly against the Chinese. Meat eating itself became articulated in the nineteenth century as an example of “white privilege” that differentiated American workers from the immigrant Asians who were, again, cast as “effeminate rice eaters.” In other words, racial and diet stereotypes, the colonial justification of European paternalism, and an internal hostility to immigrants became interwoven into a single worldview which viewed all immigrants as both biologically limited and threatening to white, American manhood, because they did not eat enough and the right types of

Western-style meat. As E. Melanie DuPuis documented:

The working class responded [to immigration and cuts to wages] by defending its right to eat meat, as a privilege of white citizenship. The locus of this conflict became race, specifically [targeting] the Chinese. In a report supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, titled “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism, Which Will Survive?”, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) expressed the union’s views on Chinese immigration in terms of ingestion: “He underbids all white labor and ruthlessly takes its place and will go on doing so until the white laborer comes down to the scanty food and half-civilized habits of the Chinaman.” The newly organized and newly vocal working class saw Chinese immigration as an attack on their meat-centered diet. White working class men deployed nativist anti-Chinese arguments in their demands for a living wage that would support their meat eating. Rejecting nutritionists’ arguments that a meat-heavy diet was bad for them, the representatives of the newly established workers’ organizations struck back, on behalf of meat [consumption] and [non-immigrant] working class jobs.443

442 Rachel Laudan, “Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism and Nutritional Crisis: The Origins of the Globalization of the Western Diet.” Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis. February 3, 2001, http://www.history cooperative.org/proceedings/interactions/laudan.html, paras. 4–6.

443 E. Melanie DuPuis, “Angels and Vegetables: A Brief History of Food Advice in America,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 7, no. 3 (2007): 40. 244

DuPuis claims that it was not coincidental that the colonialism, nativist union sentiment, and the decrease in the cost of meat occurred simultaneously. Instead, she suggests that they forged a mutually beneficial relationship in which eating meat—a large amount of meat and the right type of meat—became a symbolic proxy for the issues of class, gender, colonialism, and race privilege as they impacted the displaced white, male, middle class worker. Therefore, market forces helped to allay working class fears not by improving real wages or conditions for workers but simply by providing them with ever- greater amounts of increasingly cheap meat. As she writes, “Workers did not exactly win the fight over wages, but they did win the fight to eat meat, if not in the way they had imagined. Meat became exceedingly cheap, a political bargain between farmers growing grain and workers desiring the tasty marbling of grain-fed beef.”444

Whitewashing Xenophobia

I believe The Whopper Virgins exoticized contemporary populations in order to recreate these xenophobic justifications for eating Western-style meat and justify their imposition of fast food restaurants as their own type of pseudo-humanitarianism. In the case of the ads featuring Thailand and Greenland, the linkages to earlier discourses on

“rice eaters” seems clear, since the earlier stereotypes focused primarily on colonialized people of color and, particularly, those of Asian descent. What is less immediately clear are the linkages to the “Transylvanian farmers” from Romania. Indeed, at first glance,

Romania would seem to have nothing to do with the original stereotype of the effeminate rice eater in that Romanians are usually coded as “white” in the West and Romania, and, as part of Eastern Europe, is not generally considered a colonialized country. However, I

444 Ibid., 43. 245 suspect that Romania was chosen for particularly for these reasons, as a type of “white cover” to hide behind. The ad attempts to immunize itself against charges of “racism” and “colonialism” by including stigmatized and mocked white “exotic” groups (that is,

“Transylvania farmers” who, in fact, have nothing to do with Transylvania).

Media creators feel free to redeploy all of the traditional exotic stereotypes of colonialism, racism, and xenophobia, in which people from other cultures were displayed as unindustrialized, exotic, ignorant, and thus, comedic. And yet, these oft-repeated tropes are now “hidden” since some (although not all) of the people being mocked are

“white.” Indeed, the ads deploy all of the traditional and stereotypical, minstrel, and carnival motifs documented in texts such as Bernth Lindfors’ Africans on Stage,445 Jan

Nederveen Pieterse’s White on Black,446 and the edited collection Inside the Minstrel

Mask,447 including claims of education, cross-culture communication, derogatory humor, and exoticism redeployed to an at least partly “white” group. The change itself is not such a large alteration, as the original minstrel shows themselves frequently included derogatory portrayals of multiple of ethnicities and races, including those who would now be coded as “white.”448

I think we can witness this same technique of “white cover” most clearly in the movie Borat. As with The Whopper Virgins, the movie Borat was a wide success.449 And, as with the Whopper Virgins, part of this success seems premised on archaic and

445 Bernth Lindfors, Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 446 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 447 Annemarie Bean, James Vernon Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 448 Ibid., xiii. 449 Bronwen Low and David Smith, “Borat and the Problem of Parody,” Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 11, no. 1 (2007), 31. 246 stereotypical views of Eastern Europeans as backward, ignorant, uneducated, and, therefore, comedic. For example, Borat is shown as not even knowing how to use a toilet and, therefore, brings down a bag of his own excrement to the dinner host.450 While

Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie is a multilayered critique/exposé of the prejudicial views held by the people “Borat” interacts with, at the same time, it is not entirely clear if the major humor and appeal stems from laughing with Borat as much as a laughing at

Borat.451 This supposed ignorance (not being able to figure how to eat a hamburger, not being able to figure out how to use a toilet) is so extreme that it seems a (re)deployment of the minstrel themes, rendered socially appropriate, by their application to now “white” characters. I want us to see The Whopper Virgins as engaging in “whitewashing” for its minstrel show themes. As such it attempts to hide the (ongoing) stereotypical and comedic exoticization of people of color by also criticizing people coded as white while, at the same time, the “white” populations of Romania are presented only via the traditional racist characters of the comedic minstrel show. The United States has a very long history of showing the conquered subject from wars in a demeaning manner for the public’s enjoyment (for example, the display of people of the Philippines in human zoos following the Philippines War). Following the United States’ “victory” in the Cold War, media products such as Borat and The Whopper Virgins seem to trade in an similar intentionally demeaning of the “conquered subject” of the now fallen Eastern European who can be artificially surveyed, exoticized, and mocked.

450 Sacha Baron Cohen, et al., Borat, motion picture, directed by Larry Charles (2006; Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD. 451Bronwen Low and David Smith make almost this identical argument, claiming, “Part of the problem of reading Borat as straight satire is that it is hard to separate those moments where we are (critically) laughing with Cohen, as Borat, at bigoted North Americans and North American culture and our own implication in this bigotry and culture, and where we are laughing at Borat as himself” (Low and Smith, “Borat and the Problem of Parody,” 31).

247

Within Eastern Europe, I think The Whopper Virgins focused particularly on

Romania because of its relative poverty. For example, Borat purports to be from

Kazakhstan. However, Borat’s supposed “village” was actually filmed in the Romanian village of Glod (instead of Kazakhstan) because the filmmakers claimed that they could not find a village in Kazakhstan poor enough to match the stereotypical images they desired for the beginning of the movie. In fact, as in the case of The Whopper Virgins, the

Romanians in Borat were told that they were being filmed for a documentary when, in reality, they were being filmed purely for comic value.452 The point is that these minstrel white performances do not simply show white stereotypes; they always show poor white performances.

As Anikó Imre and Alice Bardan have argued (reflecting on Borat, The Whopper

Virgins, and the Folgers ad that showed Romanians unable to even figure out how to make coffee):

These examples identify Romania, more than any other postsocialist country, as a site of dark television and movie tourism, the last vestige of grit and shock on which Western media producers and audiences can draw to reinvent the horrors of the Cold War as commercial docu-kitsch, which, at the same time, is the authentic condition of a strange, primitive people descended from a vampire count. The arrogance of such representations is in disavowing their own roles in forcing locals to perform the pitiful primitive to attract international attention and revenue. As in the aftermath of Borat, Romanians’ outraged, and, in some cases, traumatized reactions to such representations rarely left Romania. The feelings of betrayal that the shows and ads caused or the state’s letters of complaint to the respective production companies hardly made international news.453

As DuPuis earlier makes clear, the stereotype of the “effeminate rice eater” has always operated on race as well as particularly along class lines. DuPuis’ argument is that

452 BBC News, “Village ‘Humiliated’ By Borat Satire,” October 26, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7686885.stm. 453 Anikó Imre and Alice Bardan, “Dracu-fictions and Brand Romania,” Flow 11 (2010), http://flowtv.org/2010/02/dracu-fictions-and-brand-romaniaaniko-imre-and-alice-bardan-university-of- southern-california/#discussion. 248 white class anxiety was articulated (and then waylaid) via rhetoric of meat, class, and masculinity. I believe the very effectiveness of The Whopper Virgins relies on the same logic. The sort of implicit argument seems to be that even white men (like the white, working class men before them) run the risk of becoming “effeminate [Asian] rice eaters” if they do not learn to consume enough Western-style meat. Carol Adams has discussed, in some detail, how modern-day fast food advertisements for meat rely on (and, in turn, help to further create) anxiety about masculinity among their viewers. For example, in a different ad, Burger King appropriated the lyrics from the traditional feminist anthem, “I

Am Woman”; replaced them with “I Am Man,” and linked the theme with eating enough

Whoppers.454 A similar logic is deployed in The Whopper Virgins concerning white anxiety about manhood, race, nationality, and class.

All of these insights are unscored by the linkages to “Transylvania” and, hence,

“Dracula.” Katrien Bollen and Raphael Ingelbien argue that the image of the “vampire” has also always been about the fear of exotic otherness, immigrants from Eastern Europe, racial “passing” and, most of all, fear of the resulting “blood mixing.”455 Dracula physically emigrates to Britain; he “mixes his blood” with the population in a way that poisons the population, and Dracula’s plan for achieving his conquest of Britain is based on “polluting” its women. There is also the possibility of a certain level of anti-Semitism in the reference to “Transylvanian farmers.” As Sara Libby Robinson has argued, while

Dracula was generally based on a fear of white racial “passing,” it particularly focused

454 Burger King Corporation, “I Am Man,” YouTube video, 1:00, posted by Feety’s Movies, January 26, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGLHlvb8skQ; see also Candy Sagon, “He Eats, She Eats,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), June 7, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/06/06/AR2006060600304.html. 455 Katrien Bollen and Raphael Ingelbien, “An Intertext that Counts? Dracula, The Woman in White, and Victorian Imaginations of the Foreign Other,” English Studies 90, iss. 4 (2009), 403–420. doi:10.1080/00138380902990226. 249 on a fear of the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe.456 As Allan Nadler, building specifically on Robinson’s work, put the same argument:

Dracula’s features are “stereotypically Jewish ... [his] nose is hooked, he has bushy eyebrows, pointed ears, and sharp, ugly fingers.” As for his behavior, Robinson situates Dracula in the realm of fin-de-siècle national chauvinism, which viewed non-Anglo-Saxons—and Jews in particular—as dangerous interlopers loyal only to their alien tribe. “Like many immigrants, Dracula has made great efforts to acculturate himself to his new country and to blend in with the rest of the population, through studying its language and customs ... [his] greatest concern is whether his mastery of English and his pronunciation would brand him as a foreigner.” Likewise, Stoker mines anxieties over Jewish dual loyalty. “The one identified person whose aid Dracula enlists in escaping Britain is a German Jew named Hildesheim, ‘a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep,’ who must be bribed in order to aid Stoker's heroes.”457

The Whopper Virgins’ popularity represents a domestication (and mockery) of the

“Asian,” “Eastern European,” and, possibly, “Jewish” “threat.” On the one hand, the

(presumably Anglo-Saxon Protestant) audience is reassured, as the documentary shows the so called “model minorities” as being so unintelligent that they cannot figure out how to eat a hamburger. In the second place, this supposed deficiency is remedied by their

“conversion” to a diet of Western-style meat and fast food. Like the idea of the effeminate rice eater before it, what the advertisement The Whopper Virgins actually does—and what I believe is the source of its extreme popularity—is to waylay fears of immigration and cultural interaction via the argument of dietary change. If the people of the world, the documentary seems to argue, will simply eat like “Westerners,” then they will “become” Westerners.

456Sara Libby Robinson, Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011). 457 Allan Nadler, “Imaginary Vampires, Imagined Jews,” Jewish Ideas Daily, July 11, 2011, http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/921/features/imaginary-vampires-imagined-jews/. 250

“The Guy Who Gave Kevin A Coat”

The widespread appeal of The Whopper Virgins to an American audience lies in the continuation of an argument, formerly made during colonialism, that non-Western countries lack appropriate levels of “masculinity,” virile “willpower,” and technological innovation because they do not eat enough Western-style meat. This stereotype of the

“effeminate rice eater” held that a lack of “protein” stunted the cognitive development of nations that did not consume enough animal flesh, causing them to lack not only appropriate levels of “masculinity” but also technological “progress.”

For example, the Burger King ad series repeats the tropes of the “effeminate rice eater” in its implicit commentary on the evolving relationship between humans and animals in terms of globalization and technology. In the first place, the documentary

(exclusively produced and aired online) only becomes possible because of emerging technologies in which television advertisements do not so much serve the purpose of advertising a product as of introducing much longer ads that can then be watched online.

Taken alongside with the rise of “reality television” and the rising popularity of documentary movies, Burger King’s ad campaign seems to represent the rise of

“documentary/reality television” commercials, in which the tension between information and profit that has always existed in any commercial have now (via the inexpensive production and distribution costs of releasing a “film” via the internet) taken on a more complete blending. How many Americans now believe that there is a country called

“Transylvania” where people wear strange clothes and do not know how to eat a burger?

More importantly, The Whopper Virgins offers a message that interweaves “technology” and “eating hamburgers” into a single and supposedly unique, Western phenomenon, 251 contrasting this with an archaic, romanticized, and grossly exaggerated image of a technologically deficient “Other.”

While it is clear that all of these cultures are themselves omnivorous (a reality revealed in the closing statement about the better taste of ), the documentary as a whole still invokes the odd and scientifically unsubstantiated claim that it was meat eating which evolutionarily “created” humans by causing both humans’ larger brain capacities and the advent of tool usage—a view nearly universally connected to the supposed practices of “primitive people.”458 By juxtaposing those people who are supposedly “completely off the grid” with the viewer who is now watching this film, The

Whopper Virgins documentary conveys the not-too-subtle suggestion that there exists some unspecified linkage between “technology” as a whole and eating of the “uniquely

American” burger. This contrast is most clearly expressed in the images of people

(largely produced, it appears, via selective film editing) not even being able to figure out how to eat a hamburger. In this movie, the hamburger itself becomes mechanized as almost a type of machinery and technology that the hopeless “Whopper Virgins” cannot operate until the Western filmmakers graciously explain its “operation.” This argument is remarkably counter-intuitive because to believe that someone would not be able to figure out how to eat a hamburger, we also have to suppose that that this person had never even seen a sandwich (or any of its culturally related correlates) before. Yet, while counter- intuitive, what this movie does is elevate the hamburger to become precisely the opposite

458 Patricia McBroom, “Meat-eating Was Essential for Human Evolution, Says UC Berkeley Anthropologist Specializing in Diet,” news release, University of California at Berkeley Public Information Office, June 14, 1999, http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-14-1999a.html. See also Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Roberts, End of Food.

252 of what in reality it represents; instead of a symbol of cultural homogenization and uniformity, it becomes uniquely American, the essence of “our” shared culture. At the same time, instead of representing the homogenous practice of imposing American dietary habits throughout the entire world, the hamburger becomes a site of inter-cultural sharing and an object that is (we are told by the filmmakers) uniquely desired by the isolated communities who “want to meet new people and try new things.” And instead of a ubiquitous and uninteresting remnant of technologically produced uniformity, the burger (via the lens of the documentary) becomes itself exoticized as a fascinating and complicated foreign food which people throughout the world have never seen before and could not even comprehend.

The documentary The Whopper Virgins additionally exploits the cultural stereotype linking technology and masculinity through its very name—The Whopper

“Virgins”—which, in a single term, masterfully interweaves sexual inexperience, meat- eating (which, as Carol Adams has shown, is itself already highly sexualized),459 and the connotations of incompleteness and supposed desire for the new, a theme of virginity which the documentary underscores with its continual repetition of “purity,” that is, “the purest taste test in the world.” Hence, the peoples of Romania, Thailand, and Greenland are simplified and romanticized into a state of child-like innocence, purity, and virginity, as the supposed inability to eat a hamburger renders adults of other countries into clumsy children for American viewers. The documentary filmmakers may, at times, even claim to appreciate this sense of purity and Eden-like bliss. For example, in one scene, an unnamed man in Romania gives the filmmaker a coat that we are told took a month to

459 Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat. 253 make in return for no compensation.460 And yet, at the same time, in these dual images of

“virginity” and childhood there remains the suggestion that these peoples and their cultures are incomplete. Hence, like a virginal child, the film invites us to appreciate the people of other cultures and dietary practices as sweet, cute, and gratuitously generous in a childlike manner and yet, in a very real sense, still lacking in personhood. For example, although we are told the names of multiple members of the documentary crew, not a single person from any of the non-Western countries is ever named. This produces such strange moments as the documentary credits thanking “[t]he guy in Budesti [sic] who let us run an extension cord from his house and loaned us a hammer to fix the propane tank,”461 and even, “[t]he guy who gave Kevin a coat.”462 The documentary suggests they are incomplete people: incomplete in terms of technology, incomplete because of their social isolation and, ultimately, incomplete in their dietary practices.

460 Crispin Porter + Bogusky, The Whopper Virgins. 461 Ibid. 462 Ibid. 254

An Un-Happy Meal: Fast Food as Humanitarian Assistance

Figure 14 Still from “The Whopper Virgins” Advertisements #3. Note the similarity to humanitarian relief missions. The filmmakers clearly suggest this idea of incompleteness, as well as the solution of eating Western-style meat, when, after the taste test, the filmmakers take burgers into the villages themselves. I find this part of the film the most disturbing because it clearly belies the claim that the actual motivation was a taste test, or even a publicity stunt tied to a taste test, since no taste testing occurred in these villages at all.

Instead these actions cinematographically take on, I believe intentionally, all of the trappings of a humanitarian relief mission.

For example, we are shown the man who grilled the burgers, after being flown in by helicopter, using a large forest-covered netting to give away food.463 The scene is drawn from the set of images in which food drop-offs are almost universally displayed— an iconography of humanitarianism that is underscored by the repeated scenes of

463 Ibid. 255 suggested “poverty,” contrasted with the repeated actions of the filmmakers. The filmmakers further blur the line between humanitarian relief and commercial exploitation in that Burger King undertook actual humanitarian actions right alongside the “sharing” of the burgers, such as giving away free toys to children. After all, is not the coupling of hamburgers and “free” toys for children the essence of the appeal of the “happy meal”?

Hence, the press release after the event can interweave the giving of the burgers and the giving of toys into a single “giving back to the community that Burger King always shows.”464

There is a final dimension to each of these displays which Burger King uses to shelter this production from any criticism—that of humor. The implied suggestion is that what we are watching is supposed to be funny. Hence, the documentary is both a

“documentary” and at the same time, via an unspoken implication, understood not to be a

“real” documentary. As media-savvy viewers, we are simultaneously supposed to believe in the research that we are seeing and understand that what we are seeing is a little funny, a little tongue in cheek, and that it is this humor, along with the humanitarianism, that is supposed to ward off all criticism. To criticize this documentary, particularly in a methodical and precise academic manner, is therefore to suggest that somehow we failed to “get the joke.”465

464 Burger King Corporation, “The Whopper Virgins,” press release, 2009. 465 This view, apparently, includes academics. When I sent off an earlier version of this paper for possible publication, one of the reviewers rejected it, stating that the ads were intended to be funny and that I needed to learn how to “take a joke.” It is still hard for me to know what to make of that comment. 256

Figure 15 Still from Saturday Night Live ‘s parody “The Whopper Virgins” This pseudo-humanitarian assistance, coupled with the implied humor, is what I find most distressing; many, if not all, of the communities shown (and certainly

Maramureş) suffer from real poverty, including hunger, and could in fact benefit from actual, sustained food relief. Instead their poverty is displayed as only a form of amusement and profit. We are invited, quite literally, to laugh at these diverse peoples of the world; their different dietary practices, clothes, and cultures; and their inability to understand “complicated” American manners and food. The ads present a carnival or fair-like atmosphere of both amusement and fake information in which people from around the world are displayed solely for profit. This humor and its questionable ethical implication were underscored by the Saturday Night Live skit parodying these same advertisements.466 In one scene, a woman explains via a supposed “translator,” “She says

466 “The Whopper Virgins,” Saturday Night Live, season 34, episode 12, original air date January 10, 2009, http://www.hulu.com/watch/53099/saturday-night-live-whopper-virgins. 257 she is not a virgin … It was her uncle,” or, in another scene, “He says he will agree to say anything you want if you will let him bring this food home to his village.”467

It is in this context that I would like to reconsider the final scene of The Whopper

Virgins ad, the scene of the helicopter arriving as a humanitarian relief mission bringing hamburgers. I believe, and the comments of the fans of the ad support, that the giving of not just food, but American meat, was itself the “humanitarian” aspect of the mission that was supposed to help transform the intermediate and childlike Romanians into full humans capable of enjoying “human” rights. What concerns me here is the suggestion that what the Romanians (as well as all other starving peoples of the world) most need is meat, and specifically hamburgers. This claim is of such particular concern because the world’s overconsumption of meat is the single largest contributor to global world hunger.468 As such, The Whopper Virgins campaign recasts one of the largest causes of world hunger (excessive consumption of meat) as one of the “solutions” to the problems.

It is my claim that we can observe certain continuities in terms of gender, xenophobia, and diet between the stereotype of the “effeminate rice eaters” of the nineteenth century and The Whopper Virgins of the twenty-first; both are portrayed as lacking adequate levels of Western-style meat, which in turn is used to suggest that they lack appropriate levels of masculinity and therefore complete personhood. These stereotypes are then used to naturalize the poverty of the third world, not as derived from, say, market forces instituted by Western countries, but instead as derived only from the diet, and hence the culture, of the people themselves. Each of these aspects of Burger

King’s project works intentionally and synergistically together. It is because the

467 Ibid. 468 Motavalli, “The Case Against Meat.” 258 documentary portrays the people of Maramureş as suffering from a lack of exposure to

Western dietary practices, specifically the hamburger, as the reason for their lack of technology and relative “poverty” that taking the hamburgers into the villages themselves becomes, within the logic of the documentary, the logical solution and ultimate act of humanitarian assistance, in which the very actions of which fast food franchises are most guilty—worldwide standardization and destruction of all forms of dietary and cultural diversity—become normalized as humanitarian assistance. Thus, the proposed “solution,” both in the historic and contemporary example, is not one of redistributive justice or a need to globally restrict the current exponential increasing levels of meat consumption but only pseudo-humanitarian aid in the paternalist form of complete cultural assimilation to the Western norm of excessive and cheap meat consumption. After all, as the letters to

Sharon Akabas made clear, Burger King is simply defending everyone’s “God-given right to a juicy hamburger.”

259

Exterminated by Means of Their Continued Existence: J. M. Coetzee, Animals, and the Question of Biopolitics

Birth of Biopolitics

The term “biopolitics” was first popularized469 by Swedish philosopher Rudolf

Kjellén in his 1916 book Staten som Lifsform (The State as Form of Life).470 As the name suggests, Kjellén’s idea was that the state should be considered as a single living entity, as a type of metaphorical animal in which each person should exist as only an "organ" of the collective state body. Kjellén also coined the term “geopolitics,” for which he is most well known, which in turn helped to inform part of the underlying doctrine of a “living space” (Lebensraum) that infused much of the later theorization of the expansionistic foreign policy of the Third Reich. Indeed Kjellén himself at times deployed the phrase

“national socialism,” although for Kjellén it possessed only its literal positive connotation of a completely socialized nation.471 Since its original popularization, the concept of biopolitics contains each of the themes I hope to touch on in this chapter: a valorization

469 Roberto Esposito claims that Kjellén was the first to coin the term. This is incorrect. As I have previously argued, the term “bio politics” was first coined in December 1911 by G. W. Harris in a publication entitled “The New Age.” This clarification is important, as the term was originally used even more eugenically focused than when Kjellén used it five years later. However, Esposito is correct that Kjellén was one of the people to first popularize the term. 470 Rudolph Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform (Stockholm: Hugo Geber, 1916). Also translated into German in 1917 as Der Staat als Lebensform (S. Hirzel at Leipsig, 1917), it is this German translation which will directly influence the Third Reich. Roberto Esposito was the first to note Kjellén’s use of the term “biopolitics” in Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16. 471 Två olika fokhem- en jämförelse mellan Kjelléns och Per-Albin Hanssons idéer På seminarium vid Högskolan i Karlstad Fredrik Sandberg, 1996 Handledare: docent Mats Dahlkvist. Sandberg writes in part: När vi i uppsatsen stöter på begreppen en nationell socialism och nationalsocialism är det nödvändigt för en korrekt tolkning av texten att vi betänker följande. När exempelvis Kjellén förespråkar nationalsocialism som en ”räddning” för Sverige må vi betänka att Kjellén hade ”lättare” att använda detta begrepp än vad Per-Albin Hansson hade. I den kontext Kjellén var verksam betydde detta inget annat än en socialism som omfattade en hel nation (Section 1.4 Metod och avgränsning, 5.) Sandberg’s essential point is that Kjellén meant national socialism only in terms of a fully socialized nation, equivalent, in a certain sense, to the English phrase “a welfare State.” 260 of life for an exclusively competitive worldview, an intellectual connection with the

Holocaust, and a connection (via metaphorical references) to both animals and animality.

This same philosophical idea of “biopolitics" has influenced a progressive array of French and Italian poststructuralist philosophers including Michel Foucault, Antonio

Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. However, I believe what has not received enough attention in the reception of these later philosophers is precisely this original animal notion of biopolitics. What is at stake in biopolitical regimes is the raising and treatment of humans as animals—their breeding, control, manipulation, and, ultimately, eradication. Therefore there is always a “bleed-over” effect of our treatment of animals into the treatment of humans, for the simple fact that humans are themselves always animals, and, as creatures of flesh, the same technologies, strategies, and machines first deployed to process non-human animal bodies always possess within them the potentiality to be deployed against human bodies as well. Hence, I believe the concept of biopolitics can help make sense of the comparison most famously made by Coetzee’s fictitious character Elizabeth Costello—between the factory farms and Treblinka—by revealing a connection, not of moral equivalence, but of historical and philosophical genealogy.

Eternal Treblinka

In 1997 the novelist J. M. Coetzee presented a Tanner Lecture on the issue of ethical consideration for animals sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. However, the lecture given was not presented by Coetzee in his own voice but instead presented via the persona of a fictitious sixty-seven-year-old woman named Elizabeth Costello who, likewise, was theoretically presenting a speech at 261 an award ceremony in her honor. This original speech by Coetzee was then commented upon by an interdisciplinary range of intellectuals including political philosopher Amy

Gutmann, religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist

Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer in a volume entitled The Lives of

Animals. In 2003, the same year that he won the Nobel Prize in literature, Coetzee published an entire novel titled Elizabeth Costello, which, while keeping the original lecture on the lives of animals intact, broadened the focus to include such issues as the role of censorship and the nature of evil. Finally, in 2008, Cary Wolfe edited a volume titled Philosophy & Animal Life in which an even broader range of intellectuals, including Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, and Ian Hacking all in turn reflected upon not only Coetzee’s original lecture and the longer novel Elizabeth

Costello, but on each of the previous secondary commentaries, as well as, in turn, critiquing each other’s commentaries. Hence from this single Tanner Lecture on the ethical care of animals, we are presented with a dense palimpsest of interdisciplinary reaction and dialogue, in which, for example, a Wittgenstein scholar, Cora Diamond is, fairly uniquely, put into dialogue with a primatologist, Barbara Smuts.

However, throughout this multilayered and multiple-year conversation, the one issue which has steadfastly received both the greatest scholarly attention and the most controversial reaction has been Elizabeth Costello’s claim that the treatment of animals in factory farms is “comparable” [more on that word in a moment] to the treatment of humans in Treblinka. For example, in both The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, the character Costello states:

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed 262

dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been—pardon the tastelessness of the following—to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with [emphasis added].472

The reaction by many prominent scholars to this “comparison” has been negative. For example, Cora Diamond chooses to avoid the issue, stating, “I do not in this essay try to judge, or even to examine what would be involved in trying to judge, Elizabeth Costello’s use of the imagery of the Holocaust.”473 Likewise, Stanley Cavell describes it as “an inherently indecorous comparison, not to say offensive, and perhaps deliberately a little mad; fervent news from nowhere.”474 Donna Haraway (in both The Companion Species

Manifesto475 and When Species Meet476) and Michael Pollan477 have likewise referred to

Coztess/Costello’s use of Holocaust imagery as prima facie, “absurd,” “ludicrous” and, again, “offensive.” Indeed, the primary reaction by many secondary scholars, including not only Stanley Cavell but also Peter Singer, has been simply to decide to that Coetzee could not even have meant the comparison . For example, Stanley Cavell writes:

I rather imagine (but this is not essential to my reflections) that Coetzee … in effect [meant] to ask whether such a view [linking the food industry and death

472 J. M. Coetzee et al., The Lives of Animals, ed. and introd. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 65–67. 473 Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 81 (footnote 7). 474 Ibid., 112. 475 Donna Jeanne Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, (Chicago: Prickly Paradign, 2003). 476 Haraway, When Species Meet, 80–81. 477 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 309. 263

camps] is credible coming anywhere but from an old artist, tired of and sickened almost to death by the responses she receives late in her life of words, crazed by their reality to her together with their loss of interest, to others and jarred or compelled by her imagination into welcoming the offense she may cause … I find it illuminating to think of Elizabeth Costello, in her exhausted way, as screaming.478

Indeed, this view that Costello represents a “crazed” and “exhausted” old lady is repeated by many of the secondary scholars, such as, for example John McDowell, who refers to Costello as “not quite sane”479 and “unhinged.”480, 481 While not proven or supported in any of these texts, these purely pejorative (as well ageist and sexist) terms do allow the authors to sidestep the discussion of what a comparison by a Nobel-prize- winning author, who has previously written poignantly on the issues of apartheid and colonialism, might mean by relating the Holocaust to factory farming. Now, to a certain degree, I can sympathize with this view, as Coetzee does undermine the character

Elizabeth Costello in a variety of ways throughout the text. For example, Coetzee also creates a separate fictitious character, Abraham Stern, who critiques Elizabeth Costello within the novel itself. Stern pens a letter stating, “If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead.

It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.”482 However, even if there is a certain degree of difference between Costello’s and Coetzee’s own views, the essential argument that at least some level there exists a connection between the Holocaust and factory farming has been made multiple times not only by the character Elizabeth

Costello but also by J. M. Coetzee himself under his own name and in his own voice. For

478 Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life, 113. 479 Ibid., 131. 480 Ibid., 134, 136, 137. 481 Ian Hacking also comments on these points made by McDowell in Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life, 151. 482 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 94. 264 example, Coetzee, himself a committed vegetarian, gave a speech for the organization

Voiceless: The Animal Protection Institute, an animal rights organization that Coetzee supports, where he made the following remarks:

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late nineteenth century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came to us so loud and clear that it you would have thought it was impossible to ignore it. It came when in the middle of the twentieth century a group of powerful men in Germany had the bright idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter—or what they preferred to call the processing—of human beings. Of course we cried out in horror when we found out about this. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!483

Coetzee, far from retracting these comments despite the ensuing controversy, then agreed to have them published in an editorial to The Sydney Morning Herald in nearly identical, if indeed slightly more emphatic, language.484 Therefore, I wish to suggest that Abraham

Stern, far from representing Coetzee’s “true view,” as Cavell and others have argued, instead represents an expression of the misunderstanding that Coetzee fears. Instead, I believe Coetzee includes the character to refute the type of simplistic comparison between the Holocaust and factory farming, in terms of moral equivalence, which, ironically, is precisely how Cavell misreads Coetzee’s argument.

483 J. M. Coetzee, “A Word From J. M. Coetzee—Voiceless: I Feel Therefore I Am” (lecture, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, Australia, for Voiceless: The Animal Protection Institute, February 22, 2007). 484 J. M. Coetzee, “Exposing the Beast: Factory Farming Must Be Called to the Slaughterhouse,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), February 22, 2007, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/factory-farming-must-be-called-to-- slaughterhouse/2007/02/21/1171733846249.html. 265

For, with the exception of Ian Hacking, who only mentions Reviel Netz's recent work in Barbed Wire,485 and Peter Singer who very briefly mentions Isaac Bashevis

Singer,486 what every secondary commentary misses is the long genealogy of Jewish intellectuals who have attempted to link anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to mistreatment of animals. For example, Theodore Adorno makes a similar comparison to Coetzee’s

(between anti-Semitism and indifference to animal suffering) in Minima Moralia. In a section titled “People Are Looking at You,” Adorno writes:

Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, ‘dirty’, dago-like. This throws as much light on the crimes as on the spectators. Perhaps the social schematization of perception in anti-Semites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all. The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repeals his gaze—‘after all, it’s only an animal’—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal’ because they could never fully believe this even of animals.487

Moreover Coetzee/Costello’s repeated invocation of Kafka is not accidental, as

Kafka was himself both a vegetarian and drew in his fiction and letters repeated comparisons between cruelty against animals and cruelty against Jews as well as repeated negative portrayals of and meat eating. So too Coetzee/Costello’s invocation of

“Treblinka” as the solely mentioned site of the Holocaust specifically references Isaac

Bashevis Singer, whose own mother, along with most of the rest of his extended family, died in Treblinka. Singer, himself a Nobel Prize winner in literature, famously wrote in

“The Letter Writer”:

485 Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life, 156. 486 Ibid., 86. 487 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), 105. 266

In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who because of him, had left this earth. "What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world— about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.488 And, Singer’s grandson has even written to defend the use of his grandfather’s message by animal rights activists and to explain that it represented his grandfather’s actual views:

Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family—those who stayed behind—were killed in the concentration camps. My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses. He realized that the systems of oppression and murder that had been used in the Holocaust were the systems being used to confine, oppress and slaughter animals … The Holocaust happened because ordinary people chose to ignore the extraordinary oppression and abuse being inflicted on innocents by the Nazis. Millions of people went about their daily lives, knowingly turning a blind eye to the suffering of those they didn’t relate to, those who were deemed “unworthy of life.” My grandfather often said that this mind-set, whether it manifested itself as the oppression of animals or of people, exemplified the most hideous and dangerous of all racist .489

These comparisons continue today; for example, Helmut Kaplan, a professor at the

University of Salzburg, has controversially claimed, “Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.490” Likewise, Reviel Netz, professor of the philosophy of science and classics at Stanford University, argues that while anti-Semitism certainly would have

488 , The Séance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 270. 489 Stephen R. Dujack “Animals Suffer a Perpetual ‘Holocaust,’” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), April 21, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/21/opinion/oe-dujack21 490 Quoted in Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 221. 267 occurred, neither the Holocaust nor the Soviet gulag would have been technically feasible if it had not been for the earlier utilization of barbed wire on animals.491

However, perhaps the most powerful comparison of all was made by Edgar

Kupfer-Koberwitz. Kupfer-Koberwitz was imprisoned in Dachau for his pacificist including, in part, his commitment to vegetarianism. While in Dachau, despite starving, he continued his vegetarian practice by dividing his meat rations with the other prisoners. While within Dachau itself, Kupfer-Koberwitz wrote:

I think that men will be killed and tortured as long as animals are killed and tortured. So long there will be wars too. Because killing must be trained and perfected on smaller objects, morally and technically, I see no reason to feel outraged by what others are doing, neither by the great nor by the smaller acts of violence and cruelty. But, I think, it is high time to feel outraged by all the small and great acts of violence and cruelty that we perform ourselves. And because it is much easier to win the smaller battles than the big ones, I think we should try to get over first our own trends towards smaller violence and cruelty, to avoid, or better, to overcome them once and for all. Then the day will come when it will be easy for us to fight and to overcome even the great cruelties.

But we are still sleeping, all of us, in habitudes and inherited attitudes. They are like a fat, juicy sauce which helps us to swallow our own cruelties without tasting their bitterness. I have not the intention to point out with my finger at this and that, at definite persons and definite situations. I think it is much more my duty to stir up my own in smaller matters, to try to understand other people better, to get better and less selfish. Why should it be impossible then to act accordingly with regard to more important issues? That is the point: I want to grow up into a better world where a higher law grants more , in a new world where God's commandment reigns: ‘You Shall Love Each Other.’492

Extermination by Means of Their Continued Existence

However, the key point of the original Costello quotation on which I want to comment and that I believe has been universally missed in the secondary reaction is “her”

491 Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 492 Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachau Diaries, Box 5, Folder 11, Special Collections Research Center (Chicago: University of Chicago Library).

268 claim that what insulates the meat industry from criticism is the belief that it is

“ultimately devoted to life.” This point was recently reiterated by the intellectual of

Jewish descent who has written in the closest refrain to Coetzee—Jacques Derrida.

Derrida, in his recently released work (composed the same exact same year as The Lives of Animals) titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, makes the same powerful argument as Coetzee/Costello in seeing a connection between the Holocaust and factory farms, a connection that he likewise suggests becomes obscured because the Holocaust is solely viewed in terms of “producing death” while meat is viewed as in support of life, or as

Derrida phrases it, “exterminated by means of their continued existence”:

This [subjection] of animals has occurred by means of farming and regimentalization at the demographic level unknown in the past, by means of genetic experimentation, the industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat, artificial insemination on a massive scale, more and more audacious manipulation of the genome, the reduction of the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, etc.) of meat for consumption, but also all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of man. All this is all too well known; we have no need to take it further.

However one interprets it, whatever particle, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequence one draws from it, no one can deny this event— that is, the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal. Such a subjection whose history we are attempting to interpret, can be called violence in the most morally neutral sense of the term … No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting and misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed a process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize 269

the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continuously more numerous and better fed, they could be destined to always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs.493

Hence I wish to suggest that what all secondary commentary misses in both Coetzee’s and Derrida’s comparison between factory farms and Treblinka is the biopolitical dimension of the comparison—that both the Holocaust and factory farms are justified via the necessity to “protect life.” Approximately sixty billion land animals are killed every year for food production. However, as already documented, this production of death is frequently justified in terms of “saving life.” This false rhetoric of “saving life” functions on a variety of levels. First, as Coetzee suggests, killing these animals represents saving life in that they are turned into food that is consumed in order to provide life to people.

And secondly, it is rendered as saving life, indeed the animals’ own lives, in that as both

Coetzee and Derrida argue, factory farming justifies itself by pointing out that it is continually “raising” new animals who simply would not have been alive at all if it were not for the factory farms. Hence, we see that Foucault’s articulation of the rationale and justification for the Holocaust—that death itself becomes re-imagined as a protection of life—has now in the same manner been deployed to justify factory farms in order to hide and dissimulate this reality from each of us. However, this articulation that “factory farms protect life” masks death in at least two dimensions—first it masks the death of the animals themselves, both their ultimate literal death wherein a living pig becomes merely dead “pork,” but also the reality that for the entirety of these creatures’ so-called “lives,” animals in factory farms experience nothing that aligns with even the most basic

493 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louis Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 25–26. 270 dimension of actual animal life. Take for example, the gestation crates in which they cannot move, lie down, turn around, or as babies even sleep in a normal fetal-like position. Indeed, they cannot even mate; as Ian Hacking points out, turkeys have now been genetically engineered to be so grotesquely proportioned that they cannot even copulate normally and instead must be artificially inseminated by, ironically, a turkey baster.494 In other words, focusing purely on the animals’ statistical life (precisely how life is understood in a biopolitical regime) misses the lived reality that mere survival is different than actual life—an experience of fully lived embodiedness that

Coetzee/Costello refers to as the experience of “joy:”

To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case, human being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy. ... [and]it is on creatures least able to bear confinement … that we see the most devastating effects: in zoos, in laboratories, in institutions where the flow of joy that comes from living not in or as a body but simply from being an embodied being has no place.495

Moreover, as both Coetzee and Derrida suggest, the focus on the steady production of a statistical animal existence also masks the production of species extinction of all other animals not utilized for human consumption. Hence, as Jeremy Rifkin documents in

Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, the of the plains were deliberately exterminated precisely to make room for cattle to produce the marbled textured beef the British Empire so desired.496 Extinction like this is still fostered by factory farms, which represent the greatest harm to the environment releasing, according to the United Nations, more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire

494 Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life, 147. 495 Coetzee et al., Lives of Animals, 78–79. 496 Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992). 271 transportation industry (including all automobiles) combined.497 Hence the sole focus on one type of mere survival, or “bare life,” masks the denial of true life of both the confined and genetically mutated animals in the factory farms themselves and the totality of animals remaining in the wild. Indeed, both Coetzee and Derrida suggest, in the parts of their essays I have not quoted,498 that the justification for factory farming is even more directly biopolitical than even this—that at a fundamental ontological level, Western philosophy from Aristotle to Aquinas to Descartes has strictly viewed animals as the ultimate “other” as the group for whom society as a whole is at war against. In fact,

Derrida refers to them as “prisoners of war.” As such, each murder, indeed each extinction, represents in a certain disavowed manner a perceived victory for “ourselves.”

In a competitive biopolitical worldview, more death for “them” equals, in theory if not in practice, more “life” for us.

The Anthropological Machine

The final way I believe that we can make sense of Coetzee’s comparison between

Treblinka and factory farms occurs on the level of “empathy.” As Coetzee/Costello writes:

The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, “It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.” They did not say, “How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?” They did not say, “It is I who am in that cattle-car.” They said, “It must be the dead who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.” They did not say,

497 Gowri Koneswaran and Danielle Nierenberg, “Global Farm Animal Production and Global Warming: Impacting and Mitigating Climate Change,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 5, (2008): 578– 582, doi: 10.1289/ehp.11034. 498 See, for example, Coetzee et al., Lives of Animals, 25. 272

“How would it be if I were burning?” They did not say, “I am burning, I am falling in ash.”499

As Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben has recently argued—and here I am thinking of

Homo Sacer, State of Exception, The Remnants of Auschwitz, and particularly The Open:

Man and Animal500—this failure of empathy for victims of the Holocaust relates again to the issue of the animal. For, to a certain degree, both authors argue that it is was because there was a pre-existing caesura in both law and ethics of the animal that allowed for an ever growing number of groups to be equated with animals and thereby likewise to lose any standing under either law or ethics. For example, as Roberto Esposito documents:

Garland E. Allen notes how American eugenics, which was the most advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century, had its start in agriculture … Moreover, the periodicals born in that context, in particular The American Breeder’s Magazine, The Journal of Heredity, and Eugenical News, ordinarily published works in which one moved from the selection of chickens and pigs to the selection of humans without posing the question of continuity between them … In 1892, Charles Richet, vice president of the French Eugenics Society and future Nobel Prize winner (in 1913), prophesized that quite soon “one will no longer simply be content to perfect rabbits and pigeons but will try to perfect humans.” When, some decades later, Walther Darre, Reich Minister for Nutrition will advise Himmler to “transfer his attention from the breeding of herbs and the raising of chickens to human beings” Richet’s prophecy will be realized … If “positive” eugenics was directed to the source of life, negative eugenics (which accompanies the positive as its necessary condition) rests on the same terrain.501

Hence, it is not only a case of analogy—Nazis did not sympathize with the Jews, we do not sympathize with animals—but also of historical genealogy. It is, in part, as Agamben,

Esposito, and I would argue and Coetzee and Derrida suggest, because animals had no standing in either law or ethics, that a state of exception was created (in Agamben’s radical re-appropriation of Schmitt’s notion) within law itself, in which a site of bare life

499 Coetzee et al., Lives of Animals, 34. 500 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2000). 501 Esposito, Bios, 131. 273 could be created. Moreover, as the quotation from Esposito documents, this caesura was again directly tied to the issue of biopolitics. The notion of “breeding animals,” of

“perfecting them,” a discourse solely concentrated on the issue of producing life and creating health, was appropriated and re-applied to the question of “breeding” humans, a production of “healthy life” which Agamben and Esposito suggest required the destruction of the “unhealthy organs,” to return to Kjellén, of the body politic.

To return to Coetzee/Costello, I wish to suggest that, opposed to a simplistic comparison of moral equivalence—“the Holocaust is the same as factory farming”—he, along with poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Agamben, is suggesting that in a certain sense the difference between the human and the animal is both arbitrary and purely performative (think of Kafka’s Red Peter, the talking ape who learns to behave as a human). We all possess a shared embodiment, a joy that transcends simple numerical survival. Therefore, I believe he suggests that anytime we attempt to exclude from all care, all empathy, and all compassion “the animal,” compassion itself is, in effect, rendered moot. The solution for this dilemma is produced not by yet another fictitious extension of what constitutes the human (now perhaps the great apes) but instead a radical rethinking and questioning of this very question and divide itself, an ethics and an ontology based on a shared expression of embodied joy.

274

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