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Introduction: Fleshing Out Invisibilities
Abstract
This chapter introduces the themes of the book by providing a historical and theoretical overview of the increasing invisibility of the modern abattoir and the animals slaughtered within. Relying on a broad selection of theorists to cover physical concealment as well as psychological avoidance of abattoirs, the chapter eventually turns to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia. The slaughterhouse as a heterotopia creates the illusion that the rest of society is free from the violence and the animals that are found within, and which deviate from society’s purported norms. The chapter proposes that literature can help lift the abattoir out of invisibility by arguing that in fiction, what may be conceived as hidden or inconsequential space in the real world can become place as its perceived neutrality and liminality are eroded and it is (re)connected with values, emotions, and living presences. The chapter ends with a brief description of the other chapters of the book.
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Animals at Work considers the ways in which humans make meaning from their interactions with non-humans in a range of organizations. This is done through ethnographic research in a number of workplaces, from farms and slaughter-houses to rescue shelters and veterinary practices.
In this article I explore the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society's origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement — both real and imagined — have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article examines how prison space has been represented in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the complex cultural landscapes of punishment. Old Prisons Before the eighteenth century imprisonment was only one, and by no means the most important, form of punishment. The old prisons were very different places from the new penitentiaries replacing them later in the century. Until then hanging was the principal penalty, with transportation abroad the main alternative, while whipping remained a common punishment for petty offences. The defining features of the old prisons are summarized 2 as follows: At mid-century in England, petty offenders were hanged or transported for any simple larceny of more than twelve pence or for any robbery that put a person in fear. The typical residents of eighteenth-century prisons were debtors and people awaiting trial, often joined by their families … Most prisons were not built purposely for confinement, but all were domestically organized and the few specially constructed ones resembled grand houses in appearance (e.g. York Prison, c. 1705). Prisons were temporary lodgings for all but a few, and the jailer collected fees for prisoners for room, board, and services like a lord of the manor collecting rents from tenants.
Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.
© 2008 Association for Psychological Science.
With the relatively recent advent of the factory farming industry (or corporations that confine, breed, fatten, and slaughter nonhuman animals using modern industrial methods), an assortment of corporate strategies have ensued that construct an image of a benevolently beneficial industry. Far from benign, however, factory farms are responsible for a tremendous amount of environmental damage, and although the concerns are significant, the controversy surrounding factory farms and activists’ strategies have rendered little, if any, change. Part of the reason for this ineffectiveness is the immense power of the discursive strategies constructed to support the industry. This article focuses on two codependent corporate strategies: (1) the widespread use of “doublespeak” to describe particular processes internal to the industry, and (2) the creation of “speaking” animals in advertisements to sell the products of those industrial processes. The author argues that these discourses help construct how US Americans think about animals in ways that—tacitly and oftentimes unintentionally—endorse industry practices even in the face of serious concerns raised by environmental and animal advocates.
British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of London's private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsman's workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.
Animal production, especially pork production, is facing growing international criticism. The greatest concerns relate to
the environment, the animals’ living conditions, and the occupational diseases. But human and animal conditions are rarely
considered together. Yet the living conditions at work and the emotional bond that inevitably forms bring the farm workers
and the animals to live very close, which leads to shared suffering. Suffering does spread from animals to human beings and
can cause workers physical, mental, and also moral suffering, which is all the more harmful due to the fact that it is concealed.
The conceptual tools used to conceal suffering (“animal welfare,” stress, pain) suggest that the industrial system can be
improved, whereas for farmers it is by definition incompatible with animal husbandry.
KeywordsPork production–Suffering–Human-animal relationships–Animal husbandry–Animal welfare–Work conditions
According to linguists, the discourse of animal production uses metaphors, pronouns, and definitions that consistently represent animals as objects, machines, and resources instead of as distinct, unique individuals. Thus, it is argued that genuine concern for animal welfare is either obscured by financial concerns or circumvented entirely, which permits animals to be kept and treated in ways many people would otherwise find objectionable. Substituting euphemisms like crops, units, and harvest for herds, animals, and slaughter, respectively, which are more likely to evoke images of grape plucking than of killing animals for food, might indeed seem disingenuous, especially given the common industry refrain that the public needs to be better educated about food production. However, the implication that the animal industries deliberately use such techniques is debatable. What is clear is that the semantic obfuscations rampant in the language of modern farm animal production reflect underlying ambivalence about transparency relative to many standard industry practices. First, consumers are unlikely to want full disclosure of all aspects of animal production. Second, there is real risk that certain realities of animal production would be aversive to consumers, who might consequently refuse (as is their right) to purchase particular products, thus potentially causing significant short-term industry losses. Yet, the reluctance of animal industries to come clean in public education efforts raises another problem-that adopting innocuous terminology and withholding information deemed likely to be unpalatable to the public may be morally questionable in itself. Moreover, this provides an avenue for opponents of animal agriculture to exploit, because it may appear that the industry is hiding something. In truth, animal extremists are currently in a position to reveal facts about livestock production that might not only disturb consumers but also cause speculation about the failure of the industries to be forthcoming. As a matter of professional ethics and viability, animal industry members should objectively and aggressively evaluate the discourse of farm animal production to ensure that what is conveyed is accurate and intended.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is Carol Adams’ inspiring and controversial exploration of the interplay between contemporary society’s ingrained cultural misogyny and its obsession with meat and masculinity. First published in 1990, the book has continued to change the lives of tens of thousands of readers into the second decade of the 21st century.
Published in the year of the book’s 25th anniversary, the Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a substantial new afterword, including more than 20 new images and discussions of recent events that prove beyond doubt the continuing relevance of Adams’ revolutionary book.
In literary analysis as in real life, the visual holds a privileged position as the experience most often intellectualized and/or aestheticized. However, increased analytical focus on the phenomena of sound and smell often open up new perspectives on the experiences of literary characters and on the nature of experience as such. This is especially compelling in the case of texts in which humans encounter nonhumans (and vice versa). Through a focus on encounters with animal markets and slaughterhouses in texts from the nineteenth century onwards, this paper attempts to theorize the literary experience of the sounds and smells of nonhuman animals. Hence, it is argued that a heightened focus on other senses than the visual opens up different potential and allows for reading experiences that are perhaps more emotive and intuitive, rather than rationalized, and which can highlight nonhuman agency. In particular, reading scenes of slaughter through the senses in this way may lead to a heightened awareness of the distance or proximity of slaughter in readers’ lives.
Michel Foucault’s writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cell examines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists’ explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.
The capacity of a work of fictional literature to elicit (some) emotional responses is part of what is valuable about it, and having (relevant) emotional responses is part of appreciating it. These claims are not very controversial; perhaps they are even common sense. But philosophy rushes in where common sense fears to tread, raising questions and looking for explanations.
Are the emotions we have in appreciating fictional works of art, what I call art emotions, of the same sort as those which occur in ‘real life’? Which emotions are appropriate to the work, and why: what justifies having one emotion rather than another? And why should we think emotionally responding to fiction is desirable, something which should be respected and encouraged, rather than looked at as a little weird or a waste of time?
This paper traces the development of the slaughterhouse as a specialized institution through three major periods. The first began with increasing concerns about animal slaughtering in the eighteenth century and resulted in "public slaughterhouse" reforms, which marked the beginning of the concentration of animal slaughter and its movement away from the gaze of the public. Second, slaughterhouses became industrialized, as exemplified by the development of notorious Union Stockyard in Chicago during the late nineteenth century. Finally, during the latter part of the twentieth century, slaughterhouses in the United States were relocated to small rural communities, which began to exhibit negative consequences. This paper represents a modest step in developing an historical understanding of the slaughterhouse as a unique institution and moving towards an understanding of the consequences of modern slaughterhouses in what Bulliet (2005) refers to as "postdomestic" societies.
Animals are disappearing, vanishing, and dying out-not just in the physical sense of becoming extinct, but in the sense of being erased from our consciousness. Increasingly, interactions with animals happen at a remove: mediated by nature programs, books, and cartoons; framed by the enclosures of zoos and aquariums; distanced by the museum cases that display lifeless bodies. In this thought-provoking book, Arran Stibbe takes us on a journey of discovery, revealing the many ways in which language affects our relationships with animals and the natural world. Animal-product industry manuals, school textbooks, ecological reports, media coverage of environmental issues, and animal-rights polemics all commonly portray animals as inanimate objects or passive victims. In his search for an alternative to these negative forms of discourse, Stibbe turns to the traditional culture of Japan. Within Zen philosophy, haiku poetry, and even contemporary children's animated films, animals appear as active agents, leading their own lives for their own purposes, and of value in themselves.
This book is a broad-ranging and provocative study of the human passion for meat. It will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered why meat is important to us; why we eat some animals but not others; why vegetarianism is increasing; why we aren't cannibals; and how meat is associated with environmental destruction.
Modernity's predominantly carnivorous culture ensures the unquestioning reproduction of its values and practices through transformations of social space and its associated habitus. Klaus Eder argues that these transformations include the development of an industrial food culture and a gastronomic culture both of which represent modernity's attempt to distance humanity from animality. Today, industry and gastronomy combine to make farm animals little more than a standing reserve of meat products ready for consumption. The abattoir epitomises these modern transformations in its organisation, practices and routines. But, because it is here that the key transformation from living animal to dead meat takes place, the slaughterhouse also remains a site of potential moral danger and conflict for contemporary cultural logic. In the abattoir we risk coming face to face with the animals themselves as self-expressive entities and sometimes, in their final moments, their voices can awaken us from our ethical apathy.
Nonhuman animal farming, by its fundamental nature, involves a greater or lesser degree of ill treatment and oppression. Definitions of abuse or cruelty in relation to nonhumans, however, are inconsistent and ambiguous. People support nonhuman farming by purchasing its products, but the majority of people do not themselves mistreat nonhumans. How can this incongruity be explained? Any account is likely to be complex, but work in experimental psychology has identified a number of conditions that can contribute toward individuals becoming morally disengaged from abusive acts. This paper shows that a number of these conditions are embedded in the nonhuman animal farming industry, thus providing some insight into why consumers may be disconnected from the mass abuse carried out by an industry they support. Recognizing this process can help advocates for nonhumans take steps to counter this disengagement and so allow consumers to examine their ethical choices more clearly.
Human attitudes about killing nonhuman animals are complex, ambivalent, and contradictory. Th is study attempts to elucidate those attitudes through a linguistic analysis of the terms used to refer to the killing of animals. Whereas terms used for killing human beings are highly specific and differentiated on the basis of the motivation for the killing, the nature of the participants, and evaluative and emotional content, terms used for killing animals are vague and interchange-able. Terms for animal-killing often background aspects of the act, making it more palatable to humans. When a term is extended from use with humans to use with animals, it lends a con-notation of compassion and mercy to the killing. When a term is extended from use with ani-mals to use with humans, it gives the killing a connotation of brutality. Th ese findings reflect assumptions about the human "right" to take animals' lives while serving to ameliorate the negative feelings such killings evoke.
The huge growth of London in the first half of the nineteenth century projected the city’s financial and cultural dominance; but celebrations of ‘improvement’ coexisted with unease over the social effects of laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the ubiquitous exploitation of animals in London, a direct effect of commercial competition and intensive building, acquired great symbolic force in the imagery of illustration. While efforts to end cruelty to animals apparently testified to the humane and civilizing impulses of the time, their relative failure suggested a fundamental barbarity in capitalism itself, in its heartless commodification of both men and animals.
Conflicting impressions of human–animal relationships in nineteenth-century London are exemplified through a range of publications, from the Illustrated London News to George Cruikshank’s books and the journals of the anti-cruelty groups themselves. Animals and their treatment could evoke, at one extreme, the vital energy and aggressively competitive spirit of the capital, at the other its endemic cruelty and alienation from nature and God. The varying conventions of pictorial representation are shown to have had a crucial role in these constructs, particularly in the underlying imagined antithesis between ‘city’ and ‘country’.
Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film
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Slaughterhouse Smell Repels Toronto Condo Dwellers. thestar.com
- Eric Andrew-Gee
The End of My Tether
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The Midnight Meat Train
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An Enquiry into the Present State of Smithfield Market and the Dead Meat Markets of the Metropolis
- John Bull
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Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships
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The Angel and the Outcast
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1850. The Heart of Mid-London
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Animal Equality: Language and Liberation
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