"If you see something that's wrong, you've got to do something about it" - Henry Spira

On April, 15, 1980, the New York Times ran a startling full-page advertisement. In the middle of the page was a picture of a white rabbit with bandages over both eyes, next to two glass laboratory flasks. Across the top of the page three lines of heavy black type asked a single question: "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" The text began under the picture:

Imagine someone placing your head in a stock. As you stare helplessly ahead, unable to defend yourself, your head is pulled back. Your lower eyelid is pulled away from your eyeball. Then chemicals are poured into the eye. There is pain. You scream and writhe hopelessly. There is no escape. This is the Draize Test. The test which measures the harmfulness of chemicals by the damage inflicted on the unprotected eyes of conscious rabbits. The test that Revlon and other cosmetic firms force on thousands of rabbits to test their products.

The advertisement gave precise figures for the number of rabbits Revlon used. It quoted scientists who said that the test was unreliable and that alternatives to it that did not use animals could be developed. Then it asked readers to write to Revlon's president and report that they would not use Revlons products until Revlon funded a crash program to develop nonanimal eye irritancy tests.

Roger Shelley was Revlon's vice president for investor relations on the day the advertisement appeared. Later he said,

I knew the stock was going down that day, but more importantly I knew the company had a very significant problem that could affect not just one day's stock price trading, but could cut to the core of the company. In fact if it weren't really well handled, it would have such a deleterious effect that it could theoretically wipe Revlon off the face of the counter in drugstores and department stores.

Shelley was soon put in charge of the unenviable task of handling the problem. A smooth-voiced, immaculately groomed, and elegantly dressed representative of a corporation that prides itself on its refined image, he soon found himself talking to Henry Spira, a bushy-haired New York high school teacher who spoke with a broad accent that came from years spent on ships as a sailor in the merchant marine and on General Motors assembly line in New Jersey. Shelley saw that Henry's clothes were crumpled, that he rarely wore a tie, and that when he did, he seemed incapable of getting it to meet his collar. But that wasn't all that Shelley noticed: "There was not one ounce of product on his body that was produced by an animal, and that included his belt, that included shoes, that included everything...Here was a man who did what he said he would do."

Does living according to your beleifs help you to win a battle with a billion-dollar corporate giant? Could there be a more unequal contest than this one, which pitted a high school teacher working out of his own apartment agianst the flagship of the cosmetics industry? Those who had studied Henry's past record, however, would not have dismissed his prospects of success. They would have known that he had already tackled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, corrupt union bosses buttressed by hired thugs, the august American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the New York state legislature. If he had not always got what he wanted, his record was improving. So it was to prove in this case. Before the year was over, Revlon agreed to donate $750,000 to Rockefeller University for a three year research project aimed at finding nonanimal alternatives to testing cosmetics on the eyes of rabbits. It was the first step toward putting the words "Not tested on animals" on cosmetic products.

For more than a century, anti-vivisection societies had been campaigning against animal experiments without having the slightest impact. They were dismissed as cranks. While they put out their strongly worded leaflets condemning animal experimentations, the nunber of animals used in research grew from a few hundred a year to an estimated 20 million. Yet in his very first campaign, Henry brought to an end a series of experiments that involved examining the sexual behavior of mutilated cats. From there he went on to tackle such organizations as Revlon, Avon, Bristol-Myers, the Food and Drug Administration, and Procter&Gamble. Turning them to the even more intractable problem of suffering of animals used for food, he targeted the chicken producer Frank Perdue, several major slaughtering companies, the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and McDonald's. In twenty years, his unique campaigning methods have done more to reduce animal suffering than anything done in the previous fifty years by vastly larger organizations with millions of dollars at their disposal.

From the Preface to Ethics into Actions - Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, New York.

Overlooked

Overlooked

Slaughterhouse under Scrutiny

Slaughterhouse under Scrutiny

Livestock Abuse

Livestock Abuse

Report from the Seal Slaughter

Report from the Seal Slaughter

do livro A Vida dos Animais - J. M. Coetzee

"Quem diz que a vida importa menos para os animais do que para nós nunca segurou nas mãos um animal que luta pela vida. O ser inteiro do animal se lança nessa luta, sem nenhuma reserva. Quando o senhor diz que falta a essa luta uma dimensão de horror intelectual ou imaginativo, eu concordo. Não faz parte do modo de ser do animal experimentar horrores intelectuais: todo o seu ser está na carne viva.

"Se não o convenci foi porque faltaram às minhas palavras, nesta ocasião, o poder de despertar no senhor a inteireza, a natureza não abstrata e não intelectual do ser animal. É por isso que o incito a ler os poetas que devolvem à linguagem o ser vivo, palpitante; e se os poetas não o comovem, sugiro que caminhe lado a lado com o animal que está sendo empurrado pela rampa na direção do seu carrasco.

"O senhor diz que a morte não importa para um animal porque o animal não entende a morte. Isso me lembra um dos filósofos acadêmicos que li para preparar minha palestra de ontem. Foi uma experiência deprimente. Despertou em mim uma reação bastante swiftiana. Se isso é o melhor que a filosofia humana pode oferecer, eu disse a mim mesma, eu preferia ir viver entre cavalos.

"É possivel, rigorosamente falando, perguntava o filósofo, dizer que o bezerro sente falta da mãe? Será que o bezerro pode se dar conta do significado da relação com a mãe, do significado da ausência materna?

"Um bezerro que não domina os conceitos de presença e ausência, do eu e do outro - assim prossegue na sua argumentação - não poder se dizer, rigorosamente falando, que sinta falta de nada. Rigorosamente falando, para sentir falta de alguma coisa seria preciso primeiro frequentar um curso de filosofia. Que tipo de filosofia é essa? Joguem isso fora, eu digo. Que falta fazem suas distinções insignificantes?

"Para mim, um filósofo que diz que a distinção entre humanos e não-humanos depende de você ter a pele branca ou preta, e um filósofo que diz que a distinção entre humanos e não-humanos depende de você saber ou não a diferença entre sujeito e predicado, são muito semelhantes entre si.

"Em geral sou cautelosa quando se trata de excluir alguém. Eu soube de um importante filósofo que simplesmente afirma não estar preparado para filosofar sobre animais com gente que come carne. Não sei se chegaria a esse ponto - francamente não tenho essa coragem - , mas devo confessar que não faria a menor questão de conhecer o cavalheiro cujo livro venho citando. Especificamente, não faria nenhuma questão de me sentar à mesa com ele."

J. M. Coetzee, A Vida dos Animais, tradução: José Rubens Siqueira, Companhia das Letras, 2009, São Paulo, p.78-79

We are all animal now

© Copyright Charles Green 2007. All rights reserved. Deposited to the University of Melbourne ePrints
Repository with permission of the author .

We are all animal now
Charles Green

A version of this essay appeared as Green, C. (2007). “We are all animal now,” in
Voiceless: I feel therefore I am, curated Charles Green, exh. catalogue, Sherman Galleries,
Sydney, 2007: 3-4.

If there seems to be a sudden spate of exhibitions about animals and art, then there are good reasons that have been simmering on the cultural backburner for a long time. Like climate change, the need to reformulate our ideas about animals has arrived very quickly in the wider public consciousness. But like climate change, the theories, the ethics and the research surrounding the reformulation of our relationship to animals have been emerging for a much longer time. As good early warning systems, artists have been fast to pick up on this. We are, all of us artists, involved in catch-up. There are several things that this exhibition is not. ‘Voiceless: I Feel Therefore I Am’ is not an advertisement for the noble work of Voiceless; each work is drawn directly from the artists’ ongoing projects and is not motivated by this occasion. It is not a collective artistic indictment of the lack of compassion with which animals are treated, including by most artists, as part of the so-called food chain; that task is better managed by the legislative and educational work that Voiceless empowers. Even so, particular artists, especially painter Peter Booth, have been dedicated voices against cruelty to animals for decades.But quite deliberately, there are no protest images of slaughterhouses here. It is not an investigation of ourselves (whoever that collective Australian ‘we’ might now be after a grim decade of eroded institutions and entropic ethics) through the relationships we have with animals, though inevitably those relationships (pets, private totems, tokens of exchange) are depicted in the exhibition, as in Chayni Henry’s confessional panels. This young artist’s quite wily self-representation as feckless pet owner is effective precisely because she has already profiled her middleclass viewers’ own moral inconsistency, just as Simon Cooper’s half-human, half-animal votive figures, best hand-held, are deceptively ingenuous. At least one work in the exhibition contains no animal imagery at all, suffused with the same Darwinian perspective as Madeleine Kelly’s painting of a herd of humans. That same trompe l’oeil work, Sam Jinks’s double portrait of himself and his father, shows the underlying continuity between human and animal existence (which is, of course, death and the condition of the body as meat, a condition much examined by philosophers). ‘Voiceless: I Feel Therefore I Am’ has been assembled as both a tribute to the work of the Voiceless organisation and as an index of the artists’ reconsidered ideas about animals. These centre on reflections about the connections between us and other species in the light of the widespread human use of animals and the cruelty surrounding our dealings with them. They come with an immediate corollary: the half-guilty desire to distinguish between cross-species empathy and anthropomorphic sentimentality – a tension evident in both Madeleine Kelly’s paintings (even when animals do not appear in her works, the liminal human figures slide into atavism) and Zhang Huan’s photographic documentation of human-animal physical contact. The difference is very blurry; sentimental anthropomorphism may never have existed except on the neo-liberal,Scrooge-ruled side of the brain. We are coming to understand the concept of a far more developed animal capacity for pleasure and creativity than could ever have been imagined, as Darwinian theory is updated and artists such as Cassandra Laing read Nature as willingly as Artforum.
Ornithological fieldwork suggests that art and music may ultimately prove to be the tie that binds the species of planet earth together rather than distinguishing us from our avian and animal cousins. Second, we are beginning to accept that we might comprehend animals as more than projections of our desires and feelings, however primal or conditioned, compulsive or freely chosen, these may be. Kate Rohde’s crazed fake-fur beasts in creaky, faux-Victorian display cases are far from inconsistent with her belief that: ‘One thing I know about my work is that it comes from believing in nature’s power and beauty.’Animals are more than instruments or machines. They might be communicated with, though we think we can understand other humans better (that pet owners would disagree is not as frivolous as it sounds). This involves the simultaneous acceptance of commensurability and difference, rather than the privileging of either, which is as troublesome across cultures as it is across species. Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s Middle Eastern goat doesn’t quite fit any obvious photographic genre. It is not exactly National Geographic photojournalism, nor Thomas Ruff-like false index, nor straightforward archival recording, though it impersonates each of these so precisely it holds the artistic function at a simultaneously symbolic and forensic distance. Janet Laurence’s animal images are layered, archival and formally beautiful; their indecipherability is familiar to any scientist, or, more particularly,zoologist and ornithologist, which is why her semi-transparent panels have been so genuinely welcomed in natural-history museums. At the risk of sounding like an academic cultural theorist (which I am not) I want to suggest that one of the things that artists do well is to manage the simultaneous acceptance of commensurability and difference, and, in the process, to unmask ideology. To parse this in less clunky fashion, many artists worldwide are unpacking the self-serving obliviousness that humanity accepts in its dealings with animals and the environment. To make this sound even less of a mystification, take Philip Brophy’s eloquent statement about The Kingpins – ‘woman as vessel, container, well and vial, ready to take any culture jism going and able to expel it back as a reconverted figure’ – and substitute the word ‘animal’ for ‘woman’. In a similar substitution, Louise Weaver’s ultra-feminised crocheting and embroidery over animal objects amounts to a renunciation of metaphor, which is overrun by creeping texture and monochromatic dematerialisation. Obliviousness is not sustainable. First, it is blinding. It elides our own affective contribution (and hence accumulating,complicit indebtedness within a moral ecology that tends towards entropy) to the Hobbesian ferocity of existence, whose churning is encompassed in the image of a Wheel of Life by Buddhists. It elides that we are as much subject to that Wheel as animals, and as subject to the laws of its dynamic equilibrium and re-adjustment. This accumulative, neo-Darwinian logic underpins the otherwise Magic Realism of James Morrison’s acid-gentle National Parks panoramas, Lyndell Brown’s & Charles Green’s hyper-allegorised Painters’ Family, and Guan Wei’s polyptych panels. The late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, described obliviousness to the cruel subjection of animals in the following way: No one can deny seriously, 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 organise on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence. Second, this blindness is corrupting. In The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee’s fictional writer Elizabeth Costello replies to a sceptic: You say that death does not matter to an animal because the animal does not understand death. I am reminded of one of the academic philosophers I read in preparing for yesterday’s lecture. It was a depressing experience. It woke in me a quite Swiftian response. If this is the best that human philosophy can offer, I said to myself, then I would rather go and live among horses. We might polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves, as body theorist Donna Haraway once observed, but even this is no longer enough.

1 See Peter Singer’s seminal 1975 work, Animal Liberation, Harper Perennial, New York, 2001;more recently, see Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Allen & Unwin, New York, 2005; and Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000. Curators’ interests in defining animal-human interaction long predate 2007: see the Canadian art journal Parachute’s special issue, ‘Le Bestiaire: Endangered Species’, no. 72, October 1993; more recently, see the 2006 Melbourne Festival’s substantial visual art program, ‘Animal – Unsettled Boundaries’, which focused on the
‘symbiotic relationship between humans and animals’: Jane Scott, Introduction, ‘Animal – Unsettled Boundaries’, Melbourne Festival, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 4–5.
2 Booth was a driving force behind the encyclopaedic exhibition, ‘100 Artists against animal experimentation’, Deutscher Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne, 1990.
3 See Jonathan Balcombe, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good,
Macmillan, London, 2006.
4 For an overview of extraordinary ornithological research into birdsong and creativity, see David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Bird Song, Basic Books, New York,2005.
5 Kate Rohde, artist statement, in Some Kind of Empire, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces,Melbourne, 2006.
6 Philip Brophy, ‘The Kingpins: Dragging wild angels, fat hogs & cycle sluts down to hell’, in Rhapsody Happens: The Kingpins, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas, Artspace, Sydney, 2005, pp. 1–5, 5; this is more or less the argument in Steve Baker’s excellent, The Postmodern Animal, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
7 James Morrison notes, ‘By reworking and labouring over the surfaces, the original stories get pushed to the back but still resonate or taint the final product’; see ‘Excerpt from a conversation between James Morrison and Sandra Bridie’, in James Morrison: Port Davey, Tasmania, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2002.
8 Jacques Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 2002, pp. 369–418, 394.
9 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999, p. 65.
10 See Donna J. Haraway, ‘The past is the contested zone: Human nature and theories of production and reproduction in primate behaviour studies’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 21.

The Neglected Question

A sense of unreality often blocks our attempts to understand our moral relations with animals. The whole question is hard to fit into our ethical system. Arguments for taking it seriously tend to be dismissed rather than met, to be stigmatized wholesale as perverse, sentimental, emotive, childish, impractical, superstitious, insincere - somehow not solid. They do not, however, go away; if anything, they become more pressing. Now this kind of upsetting clash always deserves serious attention. The first thing to be said about such clashes is that they arise on plenty of other topics as well as about animals. We get a similar unnerving sense of double vision, of hovering between dream and reality, whenever we are confronted with any unsatisfactory and difficult corner of our moral scene. It happens both when principles collide, and when principle merely collides violently with practice. Ethics is pratical. If standards conflict, or if they are so high and so general that we cannot see easily how we could act on them, we feel dazed. Still more, if it seems that what we ought to do is something that no reasonable person would consider doing, we get sceptical; we suspect fantasy and confusion. We know that morality does actually need remote and general standards, and must sometimes demand actions which no reasonable person at the time would consider. We know that a morality which never shocks anybody dwindles into etiquette. The history of past reforms, like the abolition of slavery, shows this. All the same, ideals which nobody can translate into action are wasted. This tension is a quite general difficulty of life. (To look at it another way, it is a general factor in making life interesting.) In trying to embody remote general ideals - freedom, equality, love - in what we must hastily do under deplorable conditions at a particular time, we have to work out subsidiary, detailed principles of interpretation. These commonly give us much more trouble than the general and remote ones, because they involve clashes which are simply invisible from the prophetic distance.

I mention this general problem in order to point out that the animal issue is not really an isolated one. It is an aspect of morality like any other. Actually, by working on it, we shall find useful insights which can help us over everyday issues which everybody recognizes to be central.

by Mary Midgley in Animals and Why They Matter, p. 9 , The University of Georgia Press, 1983, Athens, Georgia.

From Powers to Commodities

Domestic animal husbandry brought economic advantages, but it also brought about an unsettling of very old and deeply held ways of seeing animals, human beings, and the natural world. The unsettling process took centuries, of course, but it eventually destroyed the older, primal view of the living world that held animals and natural forces in awe.

The primal worldview saw people in partnership with, and having respectful views of, animals and nature. Animals were admired for their cunning, power, speed, ferocity and elusiveness. They were seen as ancestors, as kinsfolk, as having souls like people. Animal life animated and ensouled the world, gave meaning to its mystery and order to its chaos.

After centuries of manipulative animal husbandry, however, men gained conscious control over animals and their life processes. In reducing them to physical submission, people reduced animals psychically as well. Castrated, yoked, harnessed, hobbled, penned, and shackled, domestic animals were thoroughly subdued. They had none of that wild, mysterious power that their ancestors had when they were stalked by hunter-foragers. Domestic animals were disempowered - made docile - by confinement, selective breeding, and familiarity with humans. They gradually came to be seen more with contempt than awe.

In reducing domestic animals, farmers reduced animals in general, and with them the living world that animals had symbolized. Farming in general helped reduce the animal/natural powers because crop-conscious farmers saw more and more species as pests, more and more natural elements as threats. But it was animal husbandry in particular that nudged people form seeing animals as powers to seeing them as commodities and tools. It was husbandry that dratically upset the ancient human-animal relationship, changing it from partnership to master and slave, from being kin with animal-nature to being lord over animal-nature.

This reduction of animals - the soul and the essence of the living world to the primal mind - reduced all of nature, creating, in the agriculturalist's mind, a view of the world where people were over and distinctly apart from nature. Animal reduction was key to the radically different world-view that came with the transition from foraging to farming, for more than any other agricultural development, it broke up the old ideas of kinship and continuity with the living world. This, more than any other factor, accelerated and accentuated human alienation from nature. It originated in the West's first agricultural center, it found its legs there, and then it spread to the other centers of civilization. Husbandry was, I think, the more influencial side of farming that led, ultimately, to the agrarian world-view that we still hold today. As that worldview began to emerge thousands of years ago, wrote University of California historian Roderick Nash, "for the first time humans saw themselves as distinct from the rest of nature."

From the book: An Unnatural Order: The roots of our destruction of Nature by Jim Mason, p.145-146, Lantern Books, 2005, New York.

Peter Singer and Tom Regan

The contemporary philosophical arm of the animal rights or liberation movement effectively began in 1975 with Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation. In this work, and in subsequent development of its ideas, Singer argues that the moral theory known as utilitarianism can be used to justify and defend moral claims of non-human animals. According to utilitarianism, a morally good action is one which promotes or produces the greatest amount of pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction of desires, and Singer argues, quite forcibly, that such promotion requires abandoning such practices as animal husbandry, and experimentation upon animals for scientific or commercial purposes. Singer's case for animal liberation, then, is anchored in his adoption of a utilitarian moral theory.

In 1983, Tom Regan published his important work The Case for Animal Rights. Rejecting Singer's utilitarianism, Regan argued that many sorts of non-human animals possess moral rights because they possess what he refered to as inherent value. In virtue of this, Regan argued, we are morally obligated to treat them in ways that respect this value. And, for Regan as for Singer, this requires us to abandon such practices as animal husbandry, vivisection, and so on. Inherent value for Regan is an objective property, and whether or not an individual possesses it does not in any way depend on whether he, she, or it is valued by others. Whether or not a person possesses inherent value depends only on their nature as the type of thing they are. And this places Regan, at least in one important respect, in the tradition constituted by the doctrine of natural rights. Or, at least, it makes him an important intellectual inheritor of this doctrine.

From the book Animal Rights by Mark Rowland, p.1 Palgrave Editions, 2009, New York