As I pointed out in chapter 6, factory farming is inevitable in a flesh-advocating culture, because it is the only way to maintain and meet the demand for flesh products. Moreover, no matter where the animals to be slaughtered have been raised, it is the custom to withhold feed for the last twenty-four hours of their life. As the authors of Raising Pigs Successfully reveal: “Withholding feed is usually done for the sake of the butcher (less mess when the intestines and stomach are empty) and to save wasted feed. Some raisers don’t do it because they say that it upsets the animal to miss feedings and adds to the stress level on butchering day.”1 This is clearly abusive treatment.
By physical force, I mean specific actions that cause injuries, in this case death by violence. While raising an animal in a loving family-farm situation may mean that the conditions described above are not evident, this condition—that of force that injures or abuses—will always be present, because the animal does not become flesh food without being violently deprived of his or her life. This violence can come in one of three ways: death at the hands of the family farmer, death by a hired gun who comes to the farm, or, as with animals intensively farmed, death at a slaughterhouse. This last option requires the transporting of the animals—often the only time that an animal will travel—a strange, sometimes uncomfortable, and perplexing if not alarming experience. At the slaughterhouse, smells and sounds alert the animal that something frightening is happening.
Clearly, animals prefer to live rather than to die and when given the opportunity they tell us so.
As a child growing up in a small village, I lived down the street from the town butcher. He allowed us to watch him kill and butcher the animals. These animals did not go merrily to their deaths. Several times, rather than face his rifle, cows escaped from the truck and went running down the street. Pigs let out high squeals, moved frantically, and upon having their throats slashed, tossed and turned while being yanked heavenward so that bleed-out could begin.
The killing of animals is physical force that injures and abuses animals against their will.
Institutional Violence Requires a Series of Denial Mechanisms
Denial of the extent and nature of violence is an important protective device for maintaining institutional violence. It communicates that the violence that is an integral part of the existence of some commodity, some benefit, is neither troublesome nor severe. In the language of “meat” and “meat eater” the issues of animal suffering and killing are neutralized. This language reveals the difficulty of naming the violence. Why do we eat animals and yet, through language, deny that this is what we are doing? Adrienne Rich offers one answer: “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images. . . whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”2
The truth about raising and slaughtering animals is both unspoken and unspeakable. It is especially not to be discussed when animals’ bodies are being consumed. As a consequence false naming is a major component of institutional violence. Indeed, false naming begins with the living animals. Whether they are to be found on family farms or in factory farms, the advice is the same: Do not give animals to be eaten by human beings any names that bestow individuality. Family farmers advise: “If you’re going to eat it [sic], don’t give it [sic] a pet name. Try something like ‘Porky’ or ‘Chops’ or ‘Spareribs’ if the urge to name is too strong.”3
False naming means that we can avoid responsibility. False naming creates false consciousness. We communicate something different about our relationship to animals when we speak about “meat” than when we speak either about living animals who enjoy relationships or about the eating of slaughtered, cooked, and seasoned severed animal muscle and blood.
False naming enacts the structure of the absent referent. The structure of the absent referent is fulfilled in intensive or factory farming, but did not originate with it. Indeed in The Sexual Politics of Meat, I gave little attention to factory farming per se because I see the problem as the ontologizing of animals as edible, not any single practice of producing flesh foods.
False naming means that corpse eaters are people of the lie. They are lying about their actions, which, because of the screen of language, they do not even see as actions. Someone, in fact, must be acting as a perpetrator of violence for there to be someone else called “meat.” False naming announces that there is no call to accountability for the eating of animals. In the absence of accountability, abuse continues.
The lack of any direct involvement w ith or consciousness of the violence of the slaughterhouse keeps us unaccountable. Again, as the family farmers reveal:
We usually send our hogs out to be slaughtered simply because we don’t want the work of preparing the meat ourselves and because, emotionally, we tend to grow attached to the porkers. It is far easier to pat them good-bye as they leave in the truck and welcome them back in white paper wrappers. The act of killing something [sic] you have raised from a baby is not an easy task.4
Killing, except for the ritual of the hunt, remains distasteful to most consumers. Since the institutional violence of corpse eating requires killing, at the rate of at least nineteen million a day, a cloud of denial surrounds this.
Denial is enacted at the financial level as well. As I argued in chapter five, corpse eaters do not have to pay the true costs for the flesh that they eat. Federal government support of corpse production, for instance, of “welfare cowboys,” who are allowed to graze their cattle on federal land, perpetuates the cheapness of animals’ bodies as a food source. Consequently corpse eaters are allowed to exist in a state of denial. They are not required to confront corpse eating as a “pocketbook” issue. Federal support of an animal-based diet protects it from close scrutiny from budget-conscious households.
Institutional Violence Targets “Appropriate” Victims
I have referred to two different experiences I myself have had with the violence of corpse eating. In one, I watched with fascination and excitement as animals were slaughtered, bled, dunked into boiling water to rid them of their hair, skinned, disemboweled, and halved. In the other, I became upset by the death of my horse and connected that to the “hamburger” I was about to eat. How could I go home as a child from watching the bloody slaughter and contentedly eat flesh foods, but as a young adult, greet the recognition that I was eating animals as a contradiction? Several answers come to mind; they revolve around the notion of the appropriate victim. When cows and pigs were butchered, they had no names and no prior relationship with me. I had not affectionately combed their hair, bestowed attention upon them, recognized their individuality and personality, or felt that my individuality was acknowledged by them. While their deaths were very vivid, indeed, the reason for our attendance at this ritual of slaughter, they remained absent referents. Images construct pigs and cows as appropriate victims—their sociability denied, given neither a past, present, nor future upon which we base our knowledge of them. I had little other understanding of them, except that as pigs and cows they were meant to be killed and eaten. As children, my friends and I recognized this and accepted it. I honestly cannot remember meeting with any qualms the pork chops or T-bones served at home the same night as the butchering we had watched. At this young age I had already separated myself from identifying with or understanding these animals.
However, horses are not generally meant to be killed and eaten in US culture. As a child, I begged that dogfood made from horses be banned from our home.
Through my personal loss when Jimmy died, I came to see the meaning of institutional violence for the victims rather than the consumers. This painful experience allowed an ethics of inviolability to enter my consciousness. There were no longer any appropriate victims.
Ideology makes the existence of “appropriate victims” appear to be natural and inevitable. Everything possible is done to keep us from seeing term
inal animals as subjects of their own lives, and to keep us from seeing ourselves in any sort of relationship with a living, breathing, feeling, other-than-human animal. Such animals are objectified in life and in death. We ignore our radical biological similarity with these animals. The other animals become appropriate victims for corpse eating simply because they are not humans. Their inferiority established by a logic of domination that attributes moral significance to their differences from humans, they become subordinated to humans’ interests.
One pertinent difference between my arrogant-eye gaze upon the butchering of animals as a child and my loving-eye engagement with Jimmy’s death, was not only my age—in one I was a child and in the other a young adult—but my feminist consciousness that had for several years been alerting me to the function of “appropriate victims,” specifically, the making of women as appropriate victims for rape, battering, and sexual harassment. In addition, my relationship with Jimmy was what I referred to in the previous chapter as a second-person relationship. Because of this second person relationship and my feminist consciousness that questioned the construction of appropriate victims, I was enabled to see that just as there are no appropriate victims in sexual violence, so there were no appropriate victims in speciesist violence.
Unlike malestream thinking that seeks knowledge in order to control, deprives “objects” of study of the opportunity to speak for themselves, is reductive, and does not place the knowing subject as accountable to that which she or he is studying, this process of questioning corpse eating that I described above represented “second-person” thinking.5 This “second-person” thinking was possible because of my relationship with a nonhuman animal. Through friendship with a horse, hamburger was no longer an object, able to be possessed and controlled; it was the end result of a process of objectification. Through Jimmy, I began to imagine what the hamburger might say to me, so that I was prompted to consider that this object of consumption had had a voice and an identity. I began to restore the complexity of the individual animal rather than accept that which the dominant culture had reduced them to. And finally, I began to see myself as accountable to those who were being consumed.
Institutional Violence Has Identifiable Detrimental Effects on the Society as a Whole
Institutional violence is culturally protected and seen as beneficial, even though it is actually harmful in several ways besides the killing of billions of animals. There are three areas of concern here: the consequences to the environment, to the health of eaters of animals, and to the workers who produce dead animals for consumption.
Consequences for the environment As we saw in chapter five, corpse eating is a major contributor to environmental exploitation because of its immense demand on limited water supplies, its role in polluting water, causing the desertification of land, the loss of topsoil and habitat, deforestation, in contributing to the greenhouse effect, and the inordinate amoung of fossil fuels and other raw materials consumed.
Consequences for corpse eaters’ health Dr. Joan Ullyot in a book on women and r unning, ranked people according to their health. The healthiest were found to be vegetarian runners. Surprisingly, the second healthiest were not runners, but vegetarians who did not run. The third healthiest were runners who were not vegetarians.6 Numerous examples of the health benefits of vegetarianism can be found in the pages of the major medical journals these days.
The body is a locus of control and authority, of autonomy and independence, of pleasure and pain, of oppression and liberation. All of these are implicated in a discussion of the health consequences of corpse eating. In the light of increasing evidence of the healthfulness of vegetarian eating, we must speak of our own material reality, and of health of soul as well as of body: what happens when we take someone else’s flesh into our own? What is the relationship between flesh that we eat and our flesh? What is the conception of the self when we eat that which is like us, when we eat flesh?
Consequences for the workers who produce flesh foods With the institutional violence of slaughtering, the animal must be treated as an inert object, not as a living, feeling, breathing being. Similarly the worker on the assembly line becomes treated as an inert, unthinking object, whose creative, bodily, emotional needs are ignored. They must view the living animal as the “meat” that everyone outside the slaughterhouse accepts it as, while the animal is still alive. Meanwhile, as we saw in chapter four, they, too, are viewed as living meat by antiunion corporations.
The Final Condition of Institutional Violence Is That Consumers Are Manipulated into Passivity Regarding This Practice
This manipulation occurs in several ways. Children become convinced that eating animals is good and proper. Objections are quelled at the dinner table. Since the 1950s the four basic food groups have contributed to consumers’ passivity as beneficiaries of the institutional violence of corpse eating. Because of the four basic food groups and their emphasis on flesh foods and dairy products, many people continue to believe erroneously that they need to eat flesh to survive. Free recipes sent to newspapers around the country by the Dairy Council, the Egg Council, the Beef and Pork lobbies keep the idea of eating animals and their feminized products firmly in place, so firmly that many who perceive its deficiencies despair of changing their diet.
It may seem to be a tautology to say that if we believe some other beings are meant to be our flesh (the appropriate victims) then we are meant to be corpse eaters. Conversely, if we are meant to be corpse eaters then we also believe that someone else is meant to die to be our “meat.” These are interlocking givens, ontologies that become self-perpetuating and breed passivity. Either no problem exists; it is unchangeable; or it is changeable, but simply too difficult to do so.
Genesis and the Institutionalized Violence of Eating Animals
I have described the nature of institutional violence and demonstrated how it is that corpse eating is a form of institutional violence. With this framework established, we can now turn to the way that the Bible, specifically the early chapters in the book of Genesis, functions to sacralize animals’ oppression. In the context of the United States in which Christian interpretations have insinuated themselves into much cultural discourse, including ostensibly secular discussions, it is necessary for feminist ethics to acknowledge the way the early chapters of Genesis are appropriated to sanctify the institutional violence of eating animals. These chapters are invoked as an authorizing myth of dominance. Despite the secular nature of American culture, the early chapters of Genesis, mediated by a specifically Christian interpretation, offer a legitimization for the eating of animals that seems to let individuals off the hook. It functions as a myth of origins, explaining our nature as corpse eaters.
Feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza describes a hermeneutics of liberation that sees the Bible both as “a thoroughly patriarchal book written in androcentric language,” and “a source of empowerment and vision in our struggles for liberation.” This hermeneutics requires “a dialectical process of critical readings and feminist evaluations.”7 Such a dialectic is rarely engaged for understanding or interpreting our relationships with the other animals, especially that we eat them. The early passages of Genesis in which it is thought that God gives permission to dominate animals and nature in Genesis 1 and authorizes corpse eating in Genesis 9 are often uncritically accepted as a cultural myth.
The same passage that establishes that humans are in the image of God, appears to bestow legitimacy on the exploitation of the other animals. Genesis 1:26 reads: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ ” Genesis 1:26 is seen to be God’s permission to dominate the other animals and make them instruments for human’s interests, thus de facto allowing corpse eating. By interpreting dominion to mean “God gave
us permission to exploit animals for our tastes,” several denial mechanisms are enacted. We are deflected from concern about animals by believing that we are absolved from the decision that has cast animals as flesh. The comforting nature of this belief derives from the fact that the onus of the decision to eat animals is shifted from individual responsibility to divine intent. (Someone, but not me, is responsible for these animals’ deaths. If I am not responsible, I do not need to examine what I am doing and its consequences.) In this viewpoint, God as the author of and authority over our lives has created us as corpse eaters. In one act of authorization two ontological realities are simultaneously created: corpse eater and flesh. As Walter Bowie, the commentator in The Interpreter’s Bible, remarks on this passage: “Fish and fowl and animals have been his [sic] food.”8
This interpretation of Genesis 1:26 requires associating dominion and exploitation. Some believe that the clue to this association is found in the choice of words in this passage. Gerhard Von Rad opines that “the expressions for the exercise of this dominion are remarkably strong: rada, ‘tread,’ ‘trample’ (e.g., the wine press); similarly kabas, ‘stamp.’ ”9 But others see a less-harsh meaning to the concept of dominion. Because of the growth of environmental theology, a dialectical hermeneutic process is taking place that challenges the absolute claims to dominance associated with this passage. James Barr suggests that rada was ge nerally used about kings ruling over certain areas. “For instance in 1 King v. 4 the verb is used to express Solomon’s dominion (expressly a peaceful dominion) over a wide area.” He believes that kabas, “subdue,” refers not to animals but to the tilling of the earth.10 C. Westermann suggests that the use of rada (“have dominion, govern”) “can be compared with what is said in 1:16 about the sun and moon, which are to ‘govern’ the day and night.”11 According to this viewpoint, dominion carries no idea of exploitation, indeed, “man would lose his ‘royal’ position in the realm of living things if the animals were to him an object of use or of prey.”12
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