Animal Encounters

Human-Animal Studies

Editor
Kenneth Shapiro
Animals & Society Institute

Editorial Board
Ralph Acampora
Hofstra University

Clifton Flynn
University of South Carolina

Hilda Kean
Ruskin College, Oxford

Randy Malamud
Georgia State University

Gail Melson
Purdue University

VOLUME 6
Animal Encounters

Edited by
Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
Cover image (top): Allison Hunter, Untitled (camel), detail (2008).

Cover design: Wim Goedhart

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Animal encounters / edited by Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini.

p. cm. — (Human-animal studies ; v. 6)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-16867-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Human-animal relationships. 2. Animals—Psychological aspects.
3. Anthropomorphism. I. Tyler, Tom, 1968– II. Rossini, Manuela. III. Title. IV.
Series.

QL85.A49 2009
179’.3—dc22
2008045750

ISSN: 1573-4226
ISBN: 978 90 04 16867 1

Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission
from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill

provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance
Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... ix
List of Contributors .................................................................... xi

Introduction: The Case of the Camel ..................................... 1

Tom Tyler

PART ONE

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS

Chapter One If Horses Had Hands . . . ................................ 13

Tom Tyler
Chapter Two Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and
the Problem of Writing Wildly ............................................ 27
Pamela Banting

PART TWO

MEDIATE ENCOUNTERS

Chapter Three Post-Meateating ............................................ 47

Carol J. Adams
Chapter Four Americans Do Weird Things with Animals, or,
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? .............................. 73
Randy Malamud

PART THREE

EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS

Chapter Five Affect, Friendship and the “As Yet Unknown”:

Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research ......... 99
Robyn Smith
vi contents

Chapter Six Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and

Response in Experimental Laboratories .............................. 115
Donna Haraway

PART FOUR

CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS

Chapter Seven Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance

Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism ................................. 137
Laurie Shannon
Chapter Eight Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the
Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century ............... 159
Jonathan Burt

PART FIVE

DOMESTIC ENCOUNTERS

Chapter Nine Fellow-Feeling ................................................. 173

Susan Squier
Chapter Ten “Tangible and Real and Vivid and
Meaningful”: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats ........ 197
Steve Baker

PART SIX

LIBIDINAL ENCOUNTERS

Chapter Eleven The Predicament of Zoopleasures:

Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations .............................. 221
Monika Bakke
Chapter Twelve ComingTogether: Symbiogenesis and
Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues ... 243
Manuela Rossini

Index ........................................................................................... 259

 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.1 David Lynch, ‘Eat My Fear’ (2000) .............. 49

3.2 PETA, ‘Got Beer?’ (2000) ............................. 62
3.3 PETA, ‘Got Prostrate Cancer?’ (2000) ......... 63
3.4 Playboar, ‘Ursula Hamdress’ ........................... 68
4.1a, 4.1b, 4.1c Pinar Yolacan, ‘Perishables’ (2004) ............... 78
4.2 Bruce Weber, ‘Tai and Rosie in Dior’ (2005) 83
4.3 Sketch for a fashionable elephant (2004) ...... 84
4.4a, 4.4b Petpics.com, Kittens in boxes ........................ 86
4.5 Cassius Coolidge, ‘A Friend in Need’
(c. 1870) .......................................................... 93
7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (1543) .................................................. 147
9.1 The Back Garden Hen (1917) ............................ 174
9.2 Miss Nancy Luce and two beloved hens ...... 180
9.3 Linda Lord on the Killing Floor (1988) ....... 187
10.1 Lucy Kimbell, One Night with Rats in the
Service of Art (2005) ......................................... 197
10.2 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail
(2004) .............................................................. 200
10.3 ‘Rat Beauty Parlour’, Lucy Kimbell’s Rat
Fair (2005) ...................................................... 207
10.4 ‘Is Your Rat an Artist?’, Lucy Kimbell’s Rat
Fair (2005) ...................................................... 207
10.5 Jenni Lomax judges drawings at Lucy
Kimbell’s Rat Fair (2005) ............................... 208
10.6 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail
(2004) .............................................................. 212
11.1 Greek two-euro coin ...................................... 233
11.2 Andres Serrano, A History of Sex (Red Pebbles)
(1996) .............................................................. 235
11.3 Oleg Kulik, from the series Family of the
Future (1997) ................................................... 237
11.4 Oleg Kulik, sketch for ‘Family of the Future:
Kamasutra’ (1998) ......................................... 238
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank all those who helped with the prepara-
tion and publication of this volume. Tom Tyler would especially like to
express his gratitude to Mohamed Mahmoud who provided valuable
assistance and advice concerning Arabic translations and the Qur ān,
and to those who helped with the German translations, including
Julian Kücklich and Jens Spillner. Monica and Richard Tyler and Jane
Harris provided, as ever, invaluable advice concerning both style and
substance, and Jan Shirley and Jo Akers afforded their usual sterling
library support. Manuela Rossini’s special thanks go to Ivan Callus,
Bruce Clarke and Stefan Herbrechter, for encouraging her animots and
thus supporting a posthumanist approach that takes the animal ques-
tion seriously, and to Donna Haraway, her partner Rusten Hogness,
and her canine companions Cayenne and Roland Dog for a warm
welcome at their house in Santa Cruz in December 2005 and training
me in ‘encountering well’.
Several of the contributors to this collection presented early versions
of their essays or similar ideas in the stream ‘Companion Species:
Ecology and Art’ at Close Encounters, the 4th European meeting of the
Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA), organised by
Manuela Rossini in Amsterdam, June 2006. We thank the SLSA for
providing a home for Animal Studies in all its diversity.
Thanks are also due to the individuals and organisations who kindly
granted permission for the reproduction of images. Our sincere apolo-
gies if, for any of the images, we have failed to provide credit where
it is due.
Chapter One, ‘If Horses Had Hands . . .’ by Tom Tyler is a revised
version of an essay first published in Society & Animals 11.3 (2003),
pp. 267–81. Chapter Six, ‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and
Response in Experimental Laboratories’, is a slightly different version
of Chapter 3 of When Species Meet, published by the University of
Minnesota Press, 2008 (copyright 2008 by Donna J. Haraway). Our
thanks to Brill and to the University of Minnesota Press for permission
to republish these pieces here.
Finally, our thanks to Ken Shapiro and to the staff at Brill for all
their work on the Human-Animal Studies series, and for including
Animal Encounters within it.
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Carol J. Adams is a feminist writer and activist (USA). She is the

author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
(1990), Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994),
Living Among Meat Eaters (2001), and The Pornography of Meat (2004), and
editor of Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1994) and The Feminist Care Tradition
in Animal Ethics: A Reader (2007) among other books. She has published
widely in both popular and academic journals on animals and feminism,
and is a regular speaker at universities and colleges across the USA
and the world. She has also developed a series of books of prayers for
animals based on children’s encounters.

Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of

Central Lancashire (UK), and a founder member of the UK Animal
Studies Group. He is the author of The Postmodern Animal (2000) and
Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (1993), and one of
the authors of the Animal Studies Group’s Killing Animals (2006). His
work on contemporary artists’ engagement with the more-than-human
world has been published in numerous exhibition catalogues, artists’
monographs, and edited collections including Representing Animals (2002),
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003), The Animals Reader: The
Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (2007), and Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric,
and Nature (forthcoming). His forthcoming book has the working title
Art Before Ethics: Animal Life in Artists’ Hands.

Monika Bakke is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Adam Mickie-

wicz University, Poznan (PL) and an art critic. She writes on contem-
porary art and aesthetics with a particular interest in cross-cultural,
gender and posthumanist perspectives. She is author of the book Cialo
otwarte [Open Body] (2000), co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness
(1998), and editor of Estetyka Aborygenow [Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics]
(2004) and Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006). Since 2001 she has
worked as editor for the Polish cultural magazine Czas Kultury [Time of
Culture]. She has edited the reader Zoo-filozofia [Zoo-Philosophy] (forthcom-
ing), and is currently working on a book on postanthropocentric issues
in contemporary art.
xii list of contributors

Pamela Banting is an Associate Professor in the English Department,

University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Body Inc.:
A Theory of Translation Poetics (1997) and editor of the anthology Fresh
Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape (1998). Her research centres around
exploring the relationship between language and materiality, and she has
published widely in this line including articles on the body as pictogram,
the postcolonial, the grammar of bear-human interactions, geography
as intertext, deconstructing the politics of location, and cultural and
biological diversity in Canadian literature. Her current interdisciplin-
ary project explores questions of language, agency and epistemology
regarding wild animals in the creative nonfiction of Canadian writers
who are also naturalists, park wardens or biologists.

Jonathan Burt is an independent scholar and freelance writer (Cam-

bridge, UK). He is a founder member of the UK Animal Studies Group
and has published widely on animal history. He is the author of Animals
in Film (2003) and Rat (2004), the General Editor of the Reaktion Animal
book series, and a review editor for the journal Society and Animals. He
is currently writing a novel entitled A White Elephant in Corsica.

Donna Haraway is a Professor in the History of Consciousness

Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA). Her
passion is animals and everything that touches them—sciences, inti-
macies, politics, joys, disasters. She is the author of When Species Meet
(2008), The Haraway Reader (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,
People, and Significant Otherness (2003), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse(tm): Feminism and Technoscience (1997), Sim-
ians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Primate Visions:
Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), and Crystals,
Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental
Biology (1976). In 2000, she received the J.D. Bernal Prize, a lifetime
achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.

Randy Malamud is a Professor and Associate Chair in Modern

Literature, Ecocriticism, and Cultural Studies in the Department of
English at Georgia State University (USA). His publications include
Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998) and Poetic Ani-
mals and Animal Souls (2003). He is part of the editorial board for the
Brill book series Human-Animal Studies, and editor of A Cultural History
of Animals in the Modern Age (2007).
 list of contributors xiii

Manuela Rossini holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of

Basel (CH). She is Project Manager at the forum td-net (Network for
Transdisciplinary Research) of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sci-
ences in Berne. She has published in the fields of early modern studies,
gender and feminist studies, critical theory, and cultural studies of sci-
ence. Her forthcoming book project, Science/Fiction: Imagineering the Future
of the Human, deals with configurations of the posthuman as a human-
animal-machine compound in literary, scientific and philosophical texts.
She is co-editor of the Rodopi series Experimental Practices: Technoscience,
Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Editorial Board member of the book series
Critical Posthumanisms, also with Rodopi. In addition, she is one of three
Co-Creative Directors of the international network e-text+textiles, and
Executive Board member of SLSA Europe, the European branch of
the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts.

Laurie Shannon received her JD from Harvard Law School in 1989

and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1996. She taught at
Duke University and is now Wender Lewis Associate Professor of Eng-
lish at Northwestern University. Her research and publications concern
early modern literature and culture, especially topics in Shakespeare,
political thought, natural history/animal studies, gender and sexual-
ity, and medicine. Her first book, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship
in Shakespearean Contexts (2002), and her forthcoming manuscript, The
Zootopian Constitution: Animal Agency and Early Modern Knowledge, both
explore historical experiments in constitutional thought. She lives with
one human and one Airedale terrier.

Robyn Smith holds postdoctoral fellowships from the Max Planck

Society and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada
at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her
current research investigates the emergence of vitamins as bio-political
objects in British biochemistry during World War One.

Susan Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies, English and

Science, Technology and Society at the Pennsylvania State University
(USA). She has published widely in the fields of cultural studies of
science and medicine, feminist studies, and modernism. Her most
recent publication is Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of
Biomedicine (2005), and she is currently working on a new book, An ABC
of Chickens. She is Editorial Board member of the Journal of Medical
xiv list of contributors

Humanities and Executive Board member and past President of the

Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Tom Tyler is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Culture at Oxford

Brookes University (UK). His research concerns pre- and post-humanist
modes of thought and perception, particularly with regard to epistemol-
ogy, animals, and technology, and he has published widely on animals
in philosophy and critical theory. He edited the special issue of Parallax
entitled Animal Beings and his book CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers is
forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.
 INTRODUCTION

THE CASE OF THE CAMEL

Tom Tyler

In the second of his Just So Stories, ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’
(1974), Rudyard Kipling recounts that, when the world was new and
the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, the Camel refused
to play his part, and went instead to live in the Desert where he ate
thorns and milkweed and prickles. One after another the domesticated
beasts came to the Camel, the Horse with a saddle on his back, the Dog
with a stick in his mouth, and the Ox with a yoke on his neck. Each
implored the Camel to lend a hand with Man’s work, and to each the
Camel uttered but a single word: “Humph!” Man explains to the Horse
and the Dog and the Ox that, due to the Camel’s willful idleness, they
must all work harder still. The three hold a pow-wow, discontented as
they are with their lot. The Djinn of All Deserts takes pity on them,
however, and resolves to compel the Camel to contribute. After one
“humph” too many the Djinn casts a Great Magic and there appears
on the Camel’s back a large, lolloping humph, or ‘hump’ as it is known
today. Sustained by this hump, the Djinn explains, the Camel will now
be able to toil for three days without eating, and thus make up for the
work he missed. For all that, however, Kipling tells us that the Camel
“has never yet learned how to behave” (p. 25).
Kipling’s tale presents us with a number of animal encounters, all
different in tone. That between the three domesticated creatures is
harmonious, a meeting of like minds, albeit one prompted by their
disgruntlement with the camel. The conference called by Man, mean-
while, is directive and serves to steer the conduct of horse, dog and ox.
Finally, the encounters between the camel and each of his would-be
interlocutors are discordant, even quarrelsome. The camel has long
been portrayed as an irritable, ill-tempered creature, whose relations
with others are fractious and antagonistic. Foucault highlighted the
distinction, however, between antagonism and agonism (2001, p. 342). He
characterised the antagonistic encounter as “a face-to-face confronta-
tion that paralyzes both sides”, a standoff that serves only to suppress
2 tom tyler

each adversary. The agonistic relationship, on the other hand, is one of

“mutual incitement”, a “permanent provocation” that has the potential
for reciprocal stimulation.1 In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, for instance, the
Israelite champion initially endures an antagonistic impasse with his
Philistine captors, but his agonistic encounters with successive prison
visitors spur him ultimately to spectacular and terrible action.2 We might
choose to consider the camel’s conduct, then, at least prior to the Djinn’s
despotic intervention, as rousing rather than merely resistant.
The fast-growing field of Animal Studies, to which this collection
contributes, is a varied domain. Encounters with animals have encour-
aged collaborations between researchers and writers within the arts,
humanities, and social sciences, that have been every bit as wide-rang-
ing as those between Kipling’s creatures. In coming together to discuss
other animals there has been agreement and convergence amongst some,
as well as considerable divergence amongst others. With researchers
arriving to the field pursuing dissimilar objectives and preoccupations,
employing different disciplinary tools and methods, how could it be
otherwise? The name of the field itself is contested: should it be ‘Animal
Studies’ (Shapiro 1993), ‘Human-Animal Studies’ (Shapiro 2008),
‘Anthrozoology’ (Rowan 1987), or something else again?3 Indeed, no
consensus exists even regarding the nature or bounds of the object—or
subject—of study, ‘the animal’ (Ingold 1994). These varying, even con-
flicting approaches that characterise the field are a strength rather than a
weakness. They denote a genuine and entirely healthy multidisciplinary
engagement, by which diverse disciplines bring to bear unique contribu-
tions to the question of animal encounters (Wolfe 2009). As an open,
contested field, with no clear canon, Animal Studies is a meeting point
where different species of researcher gather. The agonistic encounters
that inevitably result demonstrate precisely the mutual incitement and
productive provocation suggested by Foucault.

1
In pharmacology an agonist is a chemical that triggers a response in a cell, whilst
the antagonist has the effect of inhibiting such reactions. Similarly, in physiology ago-
nist muscles effect the movement of a body part, whilst antagonists work to restore a
limb to its initial position.
2
On the complex classical and Christian meanings which inform the title of Milton’s
poem see Krouse (1974, pp. 108–118).
3
Consider also ‘zooanthropology’, after zooantropologia (in the Italian collection of
that name; Tugnoli 2003) and ‘anthropozoology’, after anthropozoologie (in the French
journal Anthropozoologica, established 1984).
 introduction: the case of the camel 3

The essays that make up Animal Encounters reflect this variety, both in
terms of the disciplines and subject areas from which they are drawn,
and the relations that pertain between the field’s contributors. There
are essays from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropol-
ogy, ecocriticism and environmental studies, art history and aesthetics,
gender studies and feminism, philosophy and critical theory, science and
technology studies, history and posthumanism. An encounter is a meet-
ing between discrete parties, which ceases at the moment they combine
or separate. The nature of such a meeting, which precludes both uni-
fication and partition, is captured typographically by those compound
terms that retain capitals mid-word, such as CinemaScope, McLuhan,
PlayStation, et al. These terms, in which the words meet but preserve
their individual identities, are called ‘camel case’, or CamelCase, since
they simulate camels’ characteristic humps.4 The essays that comprise
this volume meet in a series of encounters not only between animals,
human and otherwise, like the characters in Kipling’s story, but also
between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and
ethical positions. They seek neither concord nor dispute, but effective
interchange. There are six such encounters, each of which represents
a key arena of agonistic engagement that has attracted researchers
within Animal Studies.
The first section concerns Potential Encounters. When Kipling’s camel
repeatedly “humphs” at those who would engage him, the question
of interpreting his utterances becomes pressing. But are the Horse,
Dog and Ox right to construe his grunts as expressions of an idle or
cantankerous nature? Does the powerful, interfering Djinn appreciate
what he is really about? Or are these socialized creatures cut off from
the camel by their own expectations and assumptions? Is a genuine
engagement with the camel, on his own terms, precluded by cultural
chasms, or species barriers, that prevent each party from understand-
ing the other? Is the potential for a true encounter foreclosed from the
outset? This section addresses the difficulties and objections that have
been raised to the very possibility of authentic encounters with animals.
The essays consider obstacles alleged to exist, as necessary conditions of
engagement with the natural world, that prevent not only transparent

4
CamelCase, also called ‘medial capitals’, has been employed in brand names since
the 1950s, and became a computer programming convention from the late 1960s (New
Scientist 2007).
4 tom tyler

interaction between human and more-than-human creatures, but also

adequate accounts of those experiences. In his essay ‘If Horses Had
Hands . . .’, Tom Tyler examines the contentious notion of anthropo-
morphism, arguing that far from being unscientific and demeaning, as
many researchers have argued, or inevitable and even productive, as
others have suggested, the concept itself is in fact misjudged and liable
to prejudice our investigations. At the same time, drawing on the nature
writing of Andy Russell and Sid Marty, Pamela Banting reminds us in
her essay ‘Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem
of Writing Wildly’ that humans are by no means the only creatures
adept at reading signs, or even the most accomplished.
The camel has, in Arabic tradition, long been called ‘the ship of
the desert’ (safīnat al-barr or safīnat al- a rā ).5 The metaphor invokes an
image, perhaps, of a dependable dromedary forging through a vast sea
of sand. It implies, too, a particular conception of the place of camels
in human society: as a means of transport, certainly, but more broadly
as something to be used, a technology or tool that serves to facilitate
human endeavours.6 The depiction of camels, in language, literature
and discourse, as well as in other forms of culture, correlates with an
understanding of the appropriate uses to which they can be put. Whilst
the previous section dealt with the very possibility of encountering
animals, Mediate Encounters is concerned with the consequences of the
fact that, for many people today, the majority of their encounters with
animals are not immediate but rather mediated. Whether through televi-
sion and movies, digital games and online entertainment, art and design,
radio and photography, novels, newspapers and magazines, we meet
most animals by means of representations. The authors contributing to
this section argue in different ways that the estrangement engendered
by this mediation makes it all the easier for humans to dominate,
subject and mistreat other animals. Carol J. Adams suggests in her
essay ‘Post-Meateating’ that, despite postmodern theory’s potential to
reformulate how we think about individuals and their experiences, the

5
See for instance Ad-Damīrī’s medieval bestiary (1906, I, p. 27). The phrase is
perhaps even implicit in a verse of the Qur ān (Arberry 1964, XXIII:22, p. 344). On
the widespread, early use of this image in Arabic literature and poetry see Goldziher
(1890).
6
Richard Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel (1990) provides an excellent account of
the role of camels in human culture, which might be characterised a “technological
history” of the varied means by which societies have sought to “harness the animal’s
energy” (p. 3).
 introduction: the case of the camel 5

contemporary preoccupation with cultural representations ultimately

undermines any challenge to the human exploitation of other crea-
tures. Randy Malamud, meanwhile, argues that ‘Americans Do Weird
Things with Animals’, citing as evidence the bizarre and manipulative
creations of several artists, photographers and entertainers who have
chosen to work with, or on, animals.
Camels’ ability to survive for weeks without water, despite extreme
desert temperatures, is legendary. In the 1950s, for the first time, a group
of scientists working from a research station in southern Algeria under-
took to investigate camels’ unique adaptive physiology. Experimental
procedures included depriving camels of water, preventing them from
urinating, catheters, prolonged exposure to the sun, shearing, and
more (Schmidt-Nielsen et al. 1956). Investigative experiments on living
animals date back at least to the time of Aristotle, and it has been
estimated that between 50 and 100 million creatures are now used
annually in experimental research around the world (Orlans 1998,
p. 400). Commercial and governmental laboratories, alongside many
universities, carry out experiments on specially bred animals, captured
wild animals, and even former pets. The range of procedures, as well
as the variety of animals involved, are as broad as the purposes for
which the experiments are conducted. Pure research, such as that into
the development or behaviour of different animal species, is carried
out in pursuit of the ‘advancement of knowledge’. Applied research,
for instance by means of genetic modification or induced pathologies,
is undertaken to discover the etiology or evolution of diseases and
disorders. Toxicological testing into the harmful effects of food and
medication, pesticides and cosmetics, household products and their
ingredients, is carried out, meanwhile, on healthy animals. Writers
and researchers within Animal Studies have had to engage with the
conceptual, practical, and above all the ethical questions raised by
these Experimental Encounters. In her essay ‘Affect, Friendship and the “As
Yet Unknown”: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research’,
Robyn Smith examines the ways in which the components of an
experimental system—rats and scientists, diets and metabolisms, dura-
tions and desires—meet and intertwine. Donna Haraway suggests in
‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response in Experimental
Laboratories’ that in order to address the complexity of these wicked
activities which may also be good, we need not a discourse of calcula-
tion—who should or should not be killed—but an appreciation of the
incalculable responsibility involved.
6 tom tyler

Camels’ accommodation to the desert climate is due, in fact, to

a number of different physiological adaptations. They do not, as is
sometimes believed, store water in their humps, nor anywhere else.7
Rather, camels conserve water by producing only small quantities of
urine and by passing dry faeces; their nostrils include cavities in which
air is cooled before exhalation, thereby reducing water loss; they have
an unusually high tolerance for dehydration and weight loss; their fur
provides insulation against the heat; and their blood temperature can
rise significantly without ill effect, allowing them to absorb heat (Wilson
1984, pp. 72–78; Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg 1981, pp. 59–77; Bulliet
1990, p. 31). A camel’s body is, in short, an extraordinary evolutionary
success. In the fourth section of the collection the authors consider the
significance of Corporeal Encounters. The question of animal intelligence
or mind has been much contested within psychology and the behav-
ioural sciences, but new interest has increasingly been taken within the
wider field of Animal Studies in the remarkable, brute materiality of
animal bodies. Such corporeal encounters hold the twin fascinations
of that which exposes the spectacularly alien and that which reveals
recognizable commonality with a human form. The status of cross-
species comparison, both in early modern medical research and in the
evolving conception of the human body that it produced, is dissected
by Laurie Shannon in her essay ‘Invisible Parts: Animals and the
Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism’. Jonathan Burt,
meanwhile, turns to more recent but nonetheless neglected animal
encounters in his ‘Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of
Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century’, taking as his principal case
study the disturbing work of primatologist Solly Zuckerman.
The long process of camel domestication began, most likely, in and
around southern Arabia, some time between 3000 and 2500 BC or
earlier.8 Richard Bulliet (1990) has traced the historical development
of the integration of camels into Middle Eastern and North African
societies. He argues, in fact, that dependence was so thorough during
the medieval period that it occasioned the abandonment of the wheel
for purposes of transportation. The impact of this substitution was
far-reaching, affecting trade, military practice, road use, and urban

7
In reality the hump stores fat, at least when food is abundant, diminishing in size
when it is not (Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg 1981, p. 71; Wilson 1984, pp. 72–73).
8
See Bulliet’s detailed discussion of the available evidence (1990, pp. 28–56).
 introduction: the case of the camel 7

topography (pp. 216–236). The taming and assimilation of animals, on

which human societies, both sedentary and nomadic, have depended,
has much concerned Animal Studies. Domesticated species have sup-
plied meat and milk, eggs and honey, silk and wool, leather and hair,
fur and feathers, whilst beasts of burden have provided transportation
and brute labour. Animals have been kept as pets and companions,
have furnished bone and pearl ornaments, and have been subject to
scientific experimentation. The fifth section of this volume addresses
Domestic Encounters. Both essays suggest, in very different ways, that
encounters with particular domestic animals prompt us to reconsider
conventional modes of calculation and explanation. By tracking changes
in the American chicken farming industry, Susan Squier argues that we
should return to Adam Smith’s notion of ‘Fellow-Feeling’, reclaiming
it as a fundamental part of social and economic relations and integral
to the multiple forms of exchange between humans and other animals.
In his essay ‘ “Tangible and Real and Vivid and Meaningful”: Lucy
Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats’, Steve Baker examines the artist’s
“aesthetic experiments”, suggesting that knowledge—about art, about
animals, about the more-than-human—derives always from a state of
perplexity whose productive possibilities must be acknowledged.
The final section of the volume concerns Libidinal Encounters. The
sexually aroused camel is a notoriously unmanageable creature, becom-
ing restless, ardent and even aggressive (Wilson 1984, p. 91; Novoa 1970,
pp. 8–9). Despite their zealous behavior, it is common in domesticated
settings for humans to assist with penetration at mating (Wilson 1984,
p. 94). The essays that convene in this section concern desires, and the
movement toward change that they prompt or foreshadow. They explore
a good deal more than the untamed, uncontrollable, animal appetites
characterized by Socrates as dominant when human reason is absent or
in abeyance (Plato, IX: 571c–d). Animal pleasures and passions, shared
by and between creatures of diverse species, including humans, can be
a good deal more complex and affirmative than such a portrayal allows.
Where the opening section of the volume discusses the very possibility of
encounters with bird and beast, these closing essays explore the wildest
and most promising prospects for continuing animal encounters. They
look to the future, and the radical potential of Animal Studies. In ‘The
Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations’,
Monika Bakke examines the far-reaching implications of the fact that
commonalities between humans and other animals extend to forms of
sexual pleasure, and calls for a conceptual shift from abusive ‘bestiality’
8 tom tyler

to open, exploratory ‘zoosexuality’. Finally, in the concluding essay of

the collection, ‘ComingTogether: Symbiogenesis and Metamorphosis
in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues’, Manuela Rossini suggests
that the novel’s many transgressive, posthumanist becomings—animal,
sexual and otherwise—invite us to imagine new ways of conceiving
human life and identity.
The function of an introduction is to bring together two parties, to
lead in one to the other (from the Latin intro-ducere). It is, in fact, to
facilitate an encounter. The Greek ‘agon’ (άγών) denoted a gathering or
assembly to see the games, as well as the arena where the contest took
place, deriving originally from ‘ago’ (άγω), meaning to lead, or fetch, or
bring people along. In leading prospective readers to six arenas within
Animal Studies, in which the contributors to this volume gather, the wish
has been that new assemblies, new encounters, might result. It is to be
hoped that these encounters will not be antagonistic, like that between
the Djinn and the Camel, although at the same time it is perhaps too
much to expect them to be entirely harmonious, like that between
the Horse, Dog and Ox. Animal Encounters will have served its purpose if the
paired essays, and the agonistic encounters they prompt, prove for the
reader to be provocative and stimulating, and perhaps even incitement
to further action, like Kipling’s consistently challenging camel.

References

Ad-Damīrī, Mu ammad ibn Mūsā. 1906. ayāt al- ayawān (A Zoological Lexicon).
Translated by A.S.G. Jayakar. London: Luzac.
Arberry, Arthur J., trans. [1955] 1964. The Koran Interpreted. London: Oxford University
Press.
Bulliet, Richard W. [1975] 1990. The Camel and the Wheel. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. [1982] 2001. ‘The Subject and Power.’ Part 2 translated by L. Sawyer.
In Power. Edited by James D. Faubion, The Essential Works, 3 Vols, III, 326–48.
London: Allen Lane.
Gauthier-Pilters, Hilde and Ann Innis Dagg. 1981. The Camel: Its Evolution, Ecology,
Behavior, and Relationship to Man. Photographs by Hilde Gauthier-Pilters. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Goldziher, Ignaz. 1890. ‘Das Schiff der Wüste’. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen
Gesellschaft, xliv: 165–67.
Ingold, Tim, ed. [1988] 1994. What Is An Animal? London: Routledge.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1974. Just So Stories for Little Children. Illustrated by the Author.
London: MacMillan.
Krouse, F. Michael. [1949] 1974. Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition. New York:
Octagon.
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Milton, John. [1671] 1968. ‘Samson Agonistes.’ In The Poems of John Milton. Edited by
John Carey and Alastair Fowler, 330–402. London: Longmans.
New Scientist. 2007. ‘CamelCase.’ New Scientist 196 (2627), p. 58, 27 October 2007.
Novoa, C. 1970. ‘Review: Reproduction in Camelidae.’ Journal of Reproduction and
Fertility 22: 3–20.
Orlans, F. Barbara. 1998. ‘History and Ethical Regulation of Animal Experimentation:
An International Perspective.’ In A Companion to Bioethics. Edited by Helga Kuhse and
Peter Singer, 399–410. Oxford: Blackwell.
Plato. 1871. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: C. Scribner’s
Sons.
Rowan, Andrew N. 1987. ‘Editorial.’ Anthrozoös 1 (1): 1.
Schmidt-Nielsen, Bodil, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, T.R. Houpt and S.A. Jarnum. 1956.
Water Balance of the Camel. American Journal of Physiology 185 (1): 185–94.
Shapiro, Kenneth J. 1993. ‘Editor’s Introduction to Society and Animals.’ Society and Animals
1 (1): 1–4. http://psyeta.org/sa/sa1.1/shapiro.html (accessed 2 February 2008).
——. 2008. Human-Animal Studies: Growing the Field, Applying the Field. Ann Arbor: Animals
and Society Institute.
Tugnoli, Claudio, ed. 2003. Zooantropologia: Storia, Etica e Pedagogia dell’Interazione Uomo/
Animale. Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Wilson, R.T. 1984. The Camel. London: Longman.
Wolfe, Cary. 2009 (forthcoming). ‘“Animal Studies,” Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Huma-
nities.’ In What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 PART ONE

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS

Any sustained examination of animal encounters must first take up the

question of the kinds of engagement and experience that might be had.
The essays in this section address the nature of the encounters that are
possible between humans and other animals: they consider the potential
that exists for understanding and comprehending more-than-human
creatures. It has often been suggested that the worlds of other animals
are forever closed to human beings, due to the necessarily anthropocen-
tric modes of perception and awareness that we bring to any encounter.
Human faculties and categories, the structures of mind or language,
are determinants, it is argued, from which we cannot escape, ensuring
that relations with other creatures are never genuinely reciprocal, and
precluding authentic encounters with animals ‘in themselves’. The
authors of these two essays argue, on the contrary, that this perspective
assumes and imposes a limitation that need not be the case. We should
not start from the proposition that other creatures are closed to us, or
that the processes of comprehension and signification we employ are
exclusively human.
In his essay ‘If Horses Had Hands . . .’, Tom Tyler examines the
contentious and confused notion of anthropomorphism, the inappropri-
ate attribution of distinctively human characteristics to other entities.
Beginning with an overview of the term’s historical and current uses,
he goes on to consider the work of contemporary writers and thinkers
who have explicitly addressed the practice. On the one hand many
researchers believe anthropomorphism to be unscientific and demeaning
to both human and animal. On the other, there are those who contend
that it is an inevitable and useful pragmatic strategy for understanding
the minds and behaviour of other animals. As Tyler demonstrates,
however, Heidegger raises the more serious objection that it is not
at all clear what is even meant by the charge of anthropomorphism.
Elaborating his argument with examples drawn from evolutionary theory
and elsewhere, Tyler concludes that use of the term ‘anthropomor-
phism’ commits one to an undesirable anthropocentrism that shackles
thought concerning the relationships that are possible between human
12 potential encounters

and animal beings. As such, those who pursue or describe potential

animal encounters would do well to recount their endeavours without
recourse to this problematic and prejudicial category.
In ‘Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem of
Writing Wildly’, Pamela Banting considers the claim, often made by
contemporary theorists, that texts in the broadest sense refer not to
the real world but always and only to one another. She seeks both to
extend and to problematize the conclusion that ‘nature’ is thus a social
construction, fashioned from the signs and representations to which we
are exposed. Banting examines the work of two Canadian writers of
so-called realistic wild animal stories. Andy Russell reconstructs and
recounts tales of the grizzly bear ‘Sage’, ‘The King Elk’, and ‘Kleo’ an
amorous young cougar, based on his expert ability to read their tracks
and marks, assisted all the while by his dogs Kip and Seppi. Sid Marty,
meanwhile, interprets and retells nature’s inchoate messages, attuning
himself to the voices of the vast wilderness around him. There are,
Banting argues, more varieties of visual and verbal signification than
those written by human beings. At the same time, other animals fre-
quently exceed humankind in their ability to read the signs recorded
in the natural world, depending as they do on this comprehension for
their very survival. (TT)
 CHAPTER ONE

IF HORSES HAD HANDS . . .

Tom Tyler

But if horses or oxen or lions had hands

or could draw with their hands and accomplish such
works as men,
horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar
to horses,
and the oxen as similar to oxen,
and they would make the bodies
of the sort which each of them had.
—Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragments, p. 251

The term ‘anthropomorphism’, Greek in origin, initially referred to the

practice of attributing human form or traits to the deities. Xenophanes’
fragment is usually taken to be a wry criticism, aimed principally at
Homer perhaps, of this fanciful tradition. Characterising the divine as
an assortment of capricious and petulant individuals is, Xenophanes
seems to be suggesting, risible. His contention that cattle or lions or
horses, given the opportunity, would project their likenesses in a similarly
parochial fashion is in effect a kind of reductio ad absurdum.2 The Christian
anthropomorphite heresies of the fourth and tenth centuries were simi-
larly condemned for their overly literal reading of certain passages in the
Old Testament (“His all-seeing Eye”, “His everlasting Arms”, etc.) and
for their ensuing attribution to God of a corporeal form (Herbermann

1
Bertrand Russell once made a similarly sardonic observation regarding not animals
but the psychologists who study them: “Animals studied by Americans rush about
frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired
result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve
the solution out of their inner consciousness.” (Russell 1927, p. 33).
2
See Holtsmark (1994, p. 6B). Hume has Philo, in a similar spirit of gentle mockery,
imagine a parallel scenario in which, on “a planet wholly inhabited by spiders (which is
very possible)”, the idea that the world is spun from the bowels of an “infinite spider” is
taken seriously (Hume, p. 51). For a more cautious reading of Xenophanes’ tantalising
fragment, however, see Lesher in Xenophanes 1992, pp. 24–25, 89–94.
14 tom tyler

et al., 1907–14). It wasn’t until the mid nineteenth century that the term
‘anthropomorphism’ moved closer to its contemporary meaning and
began to refer to the practice of attributing human characteristics to
entities other than deities, such as abstract ideas or “anything imper-
sonal or irrational” (OED, ‘anthropomorphism’). This came to include
animals, and one of the earliest recorded uses in this sense occurs in
George Henry Lewes’ Sea-Side Studies, first published in 1858, in which
the author warns against attributing ‘vision’ or ‘alarm’ to molluscs (pp.
255, 341).3 “As we are just now looking with scientific seriousness at
our animals, we will discard all anthropomorphic interpretations”, he
says. Lewes’ caution, and his use of the term ‘anthropomorphic’, was
the beginning of a particular kind of vigilance that has endured, and
indeed flourished, both in scientific and philosophical discourse.
Today the term ‘anthropomorphism’ is used in any of three distinct
ways. With decreasing regularity it is employed in its very literal sense
to refer to the practice of attributing physical human form to some non-
human being, as did the Christian anthropomorphite heretics. Secondly,
it refers to the over-enthusiastic ascription of distinctively human activi-
ties and attributes to real or imaginary creatures, a practice frequently
encountered, for instance, in children’s stories. Rupert Bear and his
chums, anthropoid one and all, invariably dress in carefully pressed
jerseys and blazers, and enjoy flying kites, foxing dastardly pirates, and
solving all manner of seemingly impenetrable mysteries. The third use
is the one most frequently encountered in scientific and philosophical
literature, and refers to the practice of attributing intentionality, purpose
or volition to some creature or abstraction that (allegedly) does not have
these things. This particular charge of anthropomorphism is frequently
levelled at doting animal behaviourists or sloppy evolutionary theorists
who are careless in the terminology they employ. The suggestion that
a particular aspect of a species has been ‘designed’ by nature, or that
evolution has been teleologically ‘working toward’ some ideal type, fall
under this heading.4
It has tended to be those intent on what Lewes called “scientific seri-
ousness” who have most objected to anthropomorphic language in the
discussion of animals. The entomologist John Kennedy, a vocal critic

3
This text is cited in the OED, and briefly discussed in Midgley (1983, pp. 128–9).
4
For an engaging discussion of evolution and ‘design’, which meticulously avoids
this pitfall, see Dennett (1995, especially Part I).
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 15

of anthropomorphism, has objected to it precisely because it is, he says,

unscientific (1992).5 Amounting to a kind of modern day animism, or
vitalism (pp. 3–4, 9, 13–14, 157, 159), anthropomorphism assumes more
than it explains by unthinkingly attributing all manner of mental states
to animals (self-awareness, thought, purpose, mental images) without
demonstrating that these states exist (pp. 157–60). In short, Kennedy
argues, when looking at animal behaviour anthropomorphism con-
fuses function with cause (p. 166). As such, it is a fatal mistake for any
enquiry (p. 31) and a drag on the study of the true mechanisms behind
animal activities (p. 5).6 Even beyond any narrowly defined scientific
endeavour, there is a sense in which anthropomorphism is always seen
as a mistaken approach. Implicit within the very concept of anthropo-
morphism is the idea that uniquely human traits are being attributed
to creatures or beings to whom (or which) they do not belong. Indeed,
if it were believed that the traits in question might possibly be shared,
if God or molluscs might have that particular quality or characteristic
in common with humanity, there would be no need to draw attention
to this state of affairs with such a unique and highly specific term:
the inquiry would instead be an open question concerning degrees of
commonality (we will return to this in a moment). Anthropomorphism,
as the reckless assignation of human traits to the brutes, is a projec-
tion, a kind of fetishism that is entirely inappropriate in any genuinely
analytic enterprise. The very suggestion that a theory or approach is
‘anthropomorphic’ is, implicitly, always an accusation.
There appear to be two distinct hazards here. On the one hand
such anthropomorphism is in danger of demeaning humans by fail-
ing to appreciate their unique traits. The psychiatrist and psycho-
therapist Willard Gaylin detects just this tendency in the animal rights
movement:
The purpose of the people in this movement is not to diminish Homo
sapiens but to protect the beast. They do so by elevating animals, often
endowing them anthropomorphically with features the animals do not
possess. Their purpose is noble—to protect helpless creatures from unnec-
essary suffering—but one untoward consequence of this decent enterprise

5
Kennedy seems unsure whether anthropomorphism is best characterised as a
virus in need of a cure (pp. 160 and 167) or vermin that should be driven underground
(p. 157), but by all accounts his antipathy is unequivocal.
6
The claim that animals are conscious, for instance, is not a scientific one, Kennedy
asserts, because it cannot even be tested (p. 31).
16 tom tyler

is a reduction of the distance between the nature of people and that of

animals. Animal rights advocates constantly emphasize the similarity
between the human and the subhuman in a worthy attempt to mitigate
our abuses of the subhuman. But in so doing they seriously undermine
the special nature of being human (1990, p. 11).7
Leaving aside the question of Gaylin’s incautious use of the term “sub-
human”, does anthropomorphism risk ignoring the “special nature”
of being human? Does it misrepresent what is distinctive and perhaps
even superior in humanity? The flying of kites, or wearing of blazers,
are hardly the only areas in which humans have excelled over their
animal kin, after all.
On the other hand, it might be argued that we are not doing any
favours to the animals either. By focusing on that which the animal
shares with the human we are in danger of missing all that is peculiar
and proper to it.
We try so hard to show that chimpanzees, or monkeys, or dogs, or cats,
or rats, or chickens, or fish are like us in their thoughts and feelings; in
so doing we do nothing but denigrate what they really are. (Budiansky
1998, p. 194).8
An oft-recounted equine example furnishes a good illustration. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, in Berlin, one Wilhelm von Osten,
an elderly schoolmaster, presented to the public and scientific commu-
nity a horse who, he claimed, possessed extraordinary mental abilities
approaching those of a human being. Clever Hans, as he was known,
communicated with von Osten, and with anyone else who cared to

7
Gaylin’s book, Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human, styles itself
as a “necessary corrective” to the lack of confidence that the human species currently
has in itself, and is an attempt to “reaquaint ourselves with our nature” (inside cover
and p. 10). See especially the Prologue, ‘What’s So Special About Being Human’,
which, one should notice immediately, is not a question but a declaration (pp. 3–19).
The penchant for ignoring the specific concerns of animal rights activists by focusing
instead on the purported effects for humans, or on the alleged motives of the human
activists themselves, is common amongst those unsympathetic to their views. For an
instructive discussion of this “denial of the animal”, see Baker (1993, pp. 211–217).
8
Note that this objection to anthropomorphism on the grounds that it demeans
animals, is not quite the same as those which are often directed at chimps’ tea par-
ties or similarly degrading instances of performing animals. Such protests, necessary
and well-founded though they are in their own terms, do not constitute an argument
against anthropomorphism per se, since they fail to apply to performances which do not
so obviously demean an animal (cinematic representations of faithful collie dogs adept
at child rescue, for example). For an illuminating discussion of chimps’ teaparties, see
de Waal (2001, pp. 1–5).
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 17

make his acquaintance, by tapping his right forehoof an appropriate

number of times, or by nodding or shaking his head to indicate yes
and no. Amongst his many feats were the ability to pick out coloured
cloths, to tell the time, solve complex mathematical equations, iden-
tify musical intervals and scores, read and spell (though admittedly in
German only), and even answer questions about European politics
(Pfungst 1965, pp. 18–24).9 A hoax was suspected, but a committee of
thirteen respected professionals—including a psychologist, a physiolo-
gist, a veterinarian, a director of the Berlin zoo, and a circus man-
ager—certified that Hans was not responding to cues, intentional or
otherwise, from his trainer or any other person (Rosenthal, in Pfungst,
p. x). Incredible though it seemed, Hans appeared to possess a power
of abstract thought uncannily close to that of humans, and pretty well
educated humans at that.10
After extensive and meticulous experimentation by Oscar Pfungst,
the psychologist charged with the task of undertaking a serious scientific
inquiry into Hans’ abilities, it was eventually found that questioners
were, by means of their body language, unconsciously providing subtle,
almost undetectable cues, to which Hans was responding. As Hans
tapped his hoof observers tended to tense up very slightly in anticipation
of the correct answer, and then, when he reached the right number of
taps, they relaxed, or provided other inadvertent cues which he noticed.11
This finding was taken to indicate that Hans was exhibiting none of
the complex cognitive faculties that had been claimed for him, and the
case has been considered a cautionary tale for animal behaviourists ever
since. This rather perverse conclusion ignores the fact, however, that
Hans was actually demonstrating a fantastically keen ability to read the
attitudes and behaviours of those around him, an ability far exceeding
that of the trained human scientists conducting the experiments. In fact,
Hans was so good at this that even when Pfungst had discovered his
secret, and intentionally tried to suppress his own cues, Hans was still
able to ascertain the correct answers (Rosenthal, in Pfungst p. xii). The
anthropomorphic attitude shared by Hans’ enthusiasts and detractors

9
For brief discussions of both Hans and Pfungst, see Budiansky (1998, pp. xxx–xxxv)
and Griffin (1992, pp. 24–26).
10
“Experienced educators” declared his development to be equivalent to that of a
human child aged about 13 or 14 (Pfungst 1965, p. 24).
11
Pfungst actually constructed an elaborate instrument to amplify the questioner’s
head movements and measure their respiration (Rosenthal, in Pfungst, p. xii).
18 tom tyler

alike blinded them to his truly impressive talents. Hans was ‘clever’,
after his own fashion, and the error had been to characterise his abili-
ties in terms of human faculties. The objections to anthropomorphism
which argue that it demeans either human or animal suggest, then,
that significant differences between the two are being ignored. Jacques
Derrida, the philosopher who, above all others, has sought to highlight
diversity and heterogeneity, has suggested that flouting such differences
amounts to “blinding oneself to so much contrary evidence”, and is, in
fact, just “too asinine” (bête) (Derrida 2002, p. 398). Anthropomorphism,
it seems, is a disservice both to man and to beast, and an affront to
true scientific or philosophical thought.
There have been two main responses to these attacks on anthropo-
morphism. First, it has been argued that discussion of animals will inevi-
tably involve anthropomorphism, and that it is therefore not something
about which we should complain too loudly. Interestingly, Kennedy
himself has emphasised this point. He suggests that anthropomorphic
thinking is “built into us”, and that we could not abandon it even if
we wanted to:
It is dinned into us culturally from earliest childhood. It has presumably
also been ‘pre-programmed’ into our hereditary make-up by natural selec-
tion, perhaps because it proved to be useful for predicting and controlling
the behaviour of animals. (1992, p. 5)12
Stephen Budiansky too suggests that anthropomorphism is a hardwired,
evolved trait, arguing that
Natural selection may have favoured our tendency to anthropomor-
phize . . . Being good at thinking “what would I do in his position” can
help us calculate what our rivals may be up to and outsmart them . . . (O)ur
tendency to anthropomorphize the animals we hunt may have given us
a huge advantage in anticipating their habits and their evasions. (1998,
p. xviii).13

12
See also pp. 28–32.
13
Kennedy and Budiansky get themselves into something of a pickle here. On the
one hand they are both inclined to suggest that the predisposition to anthropomorphize
is ‘hardwired’ (genetically determined). Kennedy even calls it “human nature” (p. 155).
On the other, though, they are both of the opinion that we should try our damned-
est to transcend this decidedly unscientific inclination (see Kennedy pp. 160–68 and
especially Budiansky pp. 192–94). They are rather vague as to precisely how we might
engage in this literally superhuman overcoming, however, a point that the primatolo-
gist Frans de Waal delights in pointing out (de Waal 2001, p. 68). The contradiction
here seems to arise from a clash between competing objectives. As serious-minded
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 19

This explanation of the inevitability of anthropomorphism, and

the evolutionary advantage that it bestows, suggests a second potential
defence of the practice.
The psychologist Gordon Burghardt has suggested that “anthropo-
morphism can be a pragmatic strategy” which “aids in formulating
testable hypotheses” (Burghardt 1985, pp. 916, 905). Excessive rigour in
avoiding potentially misleading terminology produces, he suggests, rigor
mortis in attempts to devise pertinent research questions, and so inves-
tigators should feel perfectly free to ask, for instance, “ ‘Well, if I were
a rat faced with this problem what would I do?’ or ‘Does that monkey
want his rival to think there is a leopard in that tree?’ ” (p. 916).14 The
data used in formulating working hypotheses should arise, he argues,
from all manner of sources, including one’s own prior experience,
anecdotes, imagining being the animal, insight from observing one’s
maiden aunt, etc. (p. 917). Burghardt calls this “critical anthropomor-
phism”, and suggests that it is both useful and healthy for the purpose
of speculative enquiry just so long as we remember that we are not
seeking to verify postulated characteristics or attributes, but using this
strategy as an exploratory, investigative tool (pp. 916–18). Variations on
this pragmatic approach are recommended by the primatologist Frans
de Waal (who calls it “heuristic anthropomorphism”)15 and the phi-
losopher Daniel Dennett (who calls it “the intentional stance”; 1987).16
Even Kennedy and Budiansky, who call it “mock anthropomorphism”
(Kennedy 1992, pp. 9, 158–59; Budiansky 1998, pp. 33–36), consider
it a useful “metaphorical” mode of thinking about the development
of particular species, or of the processes of evolution. All these writers
issue stern warnings about the dangers of conflating anthropomorphic
language with anthropomorphic thinking, however.17

scientists they find themselves obliged to provide a plausible (i.e. evolutionary) explana-
tion for humankind’s evident and persistent anthropomorphism, but as card-carrying
humanists they also feel bound to assert the possibility that humans can transcend this
genetic programming (in order the better to pursue the goal of scientific objectivity, of
course). Kennedy encapsulates this tension when he suggests that the anthropomorphic
disease “cannot be cured completely” but, with the right treatment, “need not be fatal”
(pp. 167, 160).
14
Burghardt’s rigor mortis quip (p. 908) is borrowed from Griffin (1981).
15
deWaal identifies three types of anthropomorphism: “animalcentric”, “anthropo-
centric” and “heuristic” (2001, pp. 74–78). See also pp. 37–42 and pp. 320–21.
16
See also Dennett 1996, pp. 35–54.
17
The psychologist Randall Lockwood has also discussed this constructive method,
which he calls “applied anthropomorphism”, including the important safeguards that
20 tom tyler

Both the objections to anthropomorphism (that it denigrates human

and animal) and the responses they have elicited (that it is inevitable
and informative) are superseded, or rather preceded, by a more fun-
damental question. This concern, which renders problematic the very
notion of anthropomorphism, has been articulated most clearly by
Heidegger. During his second lecture course on Nietzsche, Heidegger
points out that, in order even to raise “suspicions” (Bedenken) concerning
anthropomorphism, one must assume that one knows “ahead of time”
what human beings are (Heidegger 1984, pp. 98–105).18 To be able to
claim that a characterisation or representation of some being assigns
to it a quality or state that is actually distinctively human, one would
need to know just what it is about human beings, in themselves, that
makes them the kind of being they are. But this question concerning
the nature of human beings, the question “Wer ist der Mensch?” (who is
man?), is one that, according to Heidegger, is rarely even properly asked,
and has certainly not been answered satisfactorily. Without posing and
answering this question, any suspicions concerning “humanization”, as
well as all refutations tendered, do not even make sense. They amount,
says Heidegger, to mere “idle talk” (Gerede), to “superficial and specious
discussion” (p. 102).19 Heidegger is right to argue that the very claim
that anthropomorphism is a potential danger for philosophical enquiry
depends on far more than has been adequately established. This is
true of anthropomorphism both as a term and as a concept, if we can
separate the two for a moment.
There can be no doubt that there are certainly cases when behaviour
that might usefully be described as distinctively human is attributed

he believes must be set in place in order to prevent it from becoming an anthropo-

morphism of a less benign kind (Lockwood, 1989). Kant himself takes a similarly
pragmatic approach, suggesting that it is beneficial to study nature (or the Author of
the world) as if it had systematic and purposive unity (desires, volitions, understanding,
etc.). This “subtler anthropomorphism” (subtilerer Anthropomorphismus), as he calls it, is a
useful regulative principle of speculative reason, provided we remember that we are
only applying an idea of such a being, not establishing knowledge of it (Kant 1964,
A700–01/B728–29/pp. 568–69). See also his discussion of “symbolic anthropomor-
phism” (symbolischer Anthropomorphism) (1953, §57–58/pp. 123–28). On the varied uses
to which self-consciously constructive anthropomorphism has been put, see Mitchell
et al. (1996) and Daston and Mitman (2005).
18
Heidegger uses the terms Vermenschung and Vermenschlichung, translated by Krell as
‘humanization’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ respectively.
19
Interestingly, this does not stop Heidegger from levelling precisely this accusation
of anthropomorphism at Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power. See Ansell-Pearson
(1997, pp. 109–117).
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 21

to animals. Rupert has already helped establish this much for us. It is
unfortunate, however, that a special term—‘anthropomorphism’—has
been appropriated to describe this practice. There is an asymmetry in
place here that renders the expression prejudicial. What of those occa-
sions when behaviour characteristic of bears is erroneously attributed
to humans? Or to wolves? Or fish? How often does one encounter
accusations of ‘arktomorphism’?20 The very fact that there are no
equivalent terms for other species seems to imply that there is some-
thing rather special about humans, bursting as they are with a host of
unique qualities that we can’t resist attributing to other beings. If occa-
sion arises when it seems important to point out that bears don’t really
indulge in the kinds of activities practiced by Rupert, it would perhaps
be more informative, and less hasty, to draw attention to these errors
in their specificity (“hold on, real bears don’t wear clothes!”), rather
than unnecessarily entangling the revelation in loaded terminology. My
suspicion is that simply by employing the term ‘anthropomorphism’ one
has already adopted a set of unexamined assumptions about human
beings, and begun to engage in Heidegger’s Gerede.21
The objection here is to more than just the terminology, however.
We can, in fact, go further than Heidegger’s claim that we have not yet
adequately answered (or even asked) the question ‘who is man?’. The
designation of any quality or attribute as distinctively human, a designa-
tion required by the concept of anthropomorphism, is unwarranted, I
would argue, even were we able, by means as yet unknown, to identify
a characteristic or attribute as being uniquely human. It is dangerous
and misleading to suppose that attributes or behaviours ‘belong’ to the
creatures who display them, even in those cases where these creatures
seem to be the only ones who exhibit a particular quality. This point
is perhaps best demonstrated by an example of convergent evolution,
the phenomenon whereby the same adaptation is evident in entirely
unrelated species. Bats (order Chiroptera) are well known for their distinc-
tive means of navigation: sonar, also known as ‘echolocation’.22 This
ingenious ability is so different from anything experienced by humans

20
The Oxford English Dictionary includes an entry for ‘zoomorphic’, a general
term intended to cover any and all cases in which “the form or nature of an animal”
is attributed to something, although even this is principally used only of “a deity or
superhuman being”.
21
See Plumwood (2001, p. 57).
22
For accessible accounts of bat sonar see Dawkins (1986, pp. 21–37), or, more
concisely, Fenton (1998, pp. 27–32).
22 tom tyler

that it has even prompted the philosopher Thomas Nagel to claim,

notoriously, that it is literally impossible for us to imagine what it is like
to be a bat (Nagel, 1974).23 But as Richard Dawkins has pointed out,
sonar is by no means unique to bats. It has evolved, independently, in
two different genera of birds, in dolphins and whales, and, to a lesser
extent, in shrews, rats and seals. Even in bats it has (probably) evolved
on two quite separate occasions, in two distinct groups (Dawkins, pp.
94–97).24 It was first suspected that bats could “see with their ears” in
the eighteenth century (and confirmed in the 1930s), whilst it was not
verified in dolphins until the 1950s (Fenton, pp. 24–27). This contin-
gent historical fact, concerning the order in which different instances
of sonar were discovered, gave scientists no reason to suggest, thank-
fully, that dolphins are ‘chiropteromorphic’. That a trait has been
identified in only one class of creatures thus far is no guarantee that it
is unique to that class of creatures, be they bears, bats, or life forms
more alien still.25 The fact that, to date, the only creatures who have
been observed exhibiting trait x are human beings, does not justify the
claim that trait x is fundamentally and uniquely human, no matter
how clever or intellectually advanced it is. It is not inconceivable that
aliens might land tomorrow who engage in all kinds of activities and
behaviours that had, up until that point, only appeared on earth when
humans practised them. It would be a little perverse to claim, I think,
that those extra-terrestrials were presumptively ‘anthropomorphic’ in
their behaviour, especially if it subsequently transpired that they had
evolved those same advanced traits and abilities long before the ances-
tors of Homo sapiens had thought to come down from the trees.26 Better,

23
For a range of replies see the sustained discussion in Dennett (1991, pp. 441–48),
a rather quirky response by Hofstadter in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981, pp. 403–414),
and a speculative but illuminating treatment by Dawkins (1986, pp. 33–36).
24
Dawkins also points out that, pace Nagel, even (blind) humans make some use of
echoes in order to find their way about (p. 23).
25
For a lively discussion of the ‘how and why’ questions of convergent evolution,
with intriguing examples, see Gould (1980), or Dawkins (1986, pp. 94–109). Both
writers point out that, strictly speaking, even the most remarkable cases of convergent
evolution do not result in absolutely (genetically) identical adaptations. But the con-
vergence is frequently so close that only wilful pedantry would insist that the functions
were different in each case.
26
Exactly when this ‘descent’ occurred has been a matter of intense debate. Gould
manages to combine discussion of convergent evolution and the existence of extra-
terrestrial intelligence in his essay ‘SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel’ (Gould
1985). Briefly, he suggests that the existence of the former (on earth) makes the latter
(elsewhere) a possibility.
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 23

at this stage at least, to recognise and identify the quality in its own
right, and to leave as an open or empirical question its manifestation
(or not) in diverse beings.27
Anthropomorphism, both as term and concept, imprudently starts
with the human, even though the whole question of the nature of
the human has yet to be determined. Anthropomorphism as a notion
is, in short, anthropocentric, in a particular sense. This variety of
anthropocentrism is not one that necessarily implies human superior-
ity. We need not understand the various species—the mollusc, the bat,
the bear, the dolphin—as existing in some kind of hierarchy, at whose
summit humanity sits. But by invoking anthropomorphism as a term,
one is inevitably committed to thinking humanity first. By relying on
anthropomorphism as a concept, one places the human foremost. The
‘centrism’ of which one is guilty is best considered, then, not in spa-
tial terms, as a hierarchy, but in temporal terms, as a pre-eminence.
Anthrôpos is here central not in the sense that it is higher, but in the
sense that it is primary. Anthropocentrism is a kind of species narcis-
sism, an obsessive love of self. Just as the narcissist is self-absorbed, self-
centred, so the anthropocentrist is species-centred (‘anthropo-centric’).
Anthropocentrists, like Narcissus, have eyes only for themselves. This
‘first and foremost’ anthropocentrism, this species narcissism, which is
evident far too often in philosophy and contemporary critical thinking,28
is the foundation on which the notion of anthropomorphism rests, and
is in turn sustained by its continuing invocation.
Those who believe in anthropomorphism, those who see it about
them in the discourses of science and culture, whether they are the
Kennedys and Budianskys who desire to eliminate it, or the DeWaals
and Burghardts who see a need to preserve it, are, we might say,
modern day anthropomorphites. These anthropomorphites see ani-
mals being transformed, being given human form. They believe that
they see a transmutation, a metamorphosis, taking place: the Animal
cast in the image of Man. With this belief, though, they maintain a
faith in an originary distinction between Human and Animal. Like

27
Midgley develops this point more fully when she discusses the possibility of
understanding moods and feelings in both human and nonhuman creatures (Midgley
1983, pp. 129–33).
28
It is characteristic, for instance, of a certain hasty phenomenology which inscribes
too quickly a distinction between ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’. See Bataille (1989,
pp. 17–25) or Heidegger (1995, pp. 176–273), whose work I discuss more fully else-
where (Tyler 2005).
24 tom tyler

their mediaeval forebears, their perspective on the world starts with

the human. Appeal to the notion of anthropomorphism breezes over
awkward questions concerning the nature of the human, or rather, it
implicitly takes these questions to have been answered. It dashes on
to examine animals afterward, in second place, as if humanity and
animality were not conceptualised and constituted mutually and simul-
taneously. This ‘first and foremost’ anthropocentrism should never be
our starting point. If, by relying on the notion of anthropomorphism,
we preclude the possibility of recognising or discovering new kinds of
human-animal continuity we are condemned to a particular kind of
anthropocentrism which restricts what we can think both about human
being and about the being of other animals.29 If, on the other hand,
we suspend this assumption, this implicit and uncritical prior belief
in human uniqueness, the very notion of anthropomorphism fails to
make sense. Budiansky, a dedicated anthropomorphite, suggests that
anthropomorphism betrays a “lack of imagination” on our part as we
struggle to imagine what it would be like to be something else (1998,
p. xvii). Truer to say, perhaps, that the very belief in anthropomorphism
betrays a lack of imagination on the part of those so thoroughly wed-
ded to the idea that they are, first and foremost, human.

References

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London: Routledge.
Baker, Steve. 1993. Picturing the Beast. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bataille, Georges. [1948] 1989. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New
York: Zone.
Budiansky, Stephen. 1998. If A Lion Could Talk: How Animals Think. London: Phoenix.
Burghardt, Gordon M. 1985. ‘Animal Awareness: Current Perceptions and Historical
Perspective.’ American Psychologist 40 (8) (August): 905–19.
Daston, Lorraine and Gregg Mitman, eds. 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives
on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press.

29
This is not to say that a scientific or philosophical endeavour which adopts an
investigative strategy that is broadly in line with what was called ‘critical’ or ‘heuristic’
anthropomorphism might not be productive or illuminating. Far from it: Lockwood
lists a series of cases “where an anthropomorphic perspective has been helpful” (1989,
pp. 52–55), and Dennett has explored in depth just how productive this approach can
be (1987). Characterising this strategy as a form of “anthropomorphism” (Lockwood
does, Dennett does not), however, is in danger of leading researchers and readers alike
into adopting an anthropocentric perspective which is at odds with the possibility of
keeping the question of human uniqueness open.
 if h orses h ad h ands . . . 25

Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press.
——. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.
——. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen
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——. 1996. Kinds of Mind. New York: Basic Books.
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de Waal, Frans. 2001. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist.
London: Allen Lane.
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Gaylin, Willard. 1990. Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human. New
York: Viking/Penguin.
Gould, Stephen. Jay. 1980. ‘Double Trouble.’ The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in
Natural History. New York: Norton: 35–44.
——. 1985. ‘SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel.’ The Flamingo’s Smile. New York:
Norton: 403–13.
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——. 1992. Animal Minds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.
Heidegger, Martin. [1929–30] 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Herbermann, C.G. et al., eds, 1907–14. ‘Anthropomorphism, Anthropomorphites.’
Catholic Encylopedia, 558–59. London: Caxton. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
01558c.htm (accessed 25 March 2008).
Hofstadter, Douglas R. and Daniel C. Dennett. 1981. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections
on Self and Soul. Brighton: Harvester.
Holtsmark, E.B. 1994. ‘Critiques of “Proto-Guru” Xenophanes, a Precursor to Plato:
Xenophanes Fragments 11–12. The Daily Iowan (February 22).
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Macmillan.
Kant, Immanuel. [1783] 1953. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to
present itself as a Science. Translated by Peter. G. Lucas. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
——. [1781/1787] 1964. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith
[1929, revised 1933]. London: MacMillan.
Kennedy, John S. 1992. The New Anthropomorphism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Lewes, G.H. 1860. Sea-side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey. Edinburgh
& London: Blackwood.
Lockwood, Randall. 1989. ‘Anthropomorphism is Not a Four-Letter Word.’ In Perceptions
of Animals in American Culture. Edited by R.J. Hoage, 41–56. Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Midgley, Mary. 1983. ‘What is Anthropomorphism?’ Animals and Why They Matter.
Athens: University of Georgia Press: 125–33.
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Anecdotes and Animals. New York: State University of New York Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.
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26 tom tyler

Plumwood, Val. 2001. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London:
Routledge.
Russell, Bertrand. 1927. An Outline of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin.
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265–79.
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25 March 2008).
 CHAPTER TWO

MAGIC IS AFOOT: HOOF MARKS, PAW PRINTS AND THE

PROBLEM OF WRITING WILDLY

Pamela Banting

We were latecomers in a well-established process that

had gone on for fifty million years. The four-legged
carnivores and their prey had long since learned that
an animal, watched long enough, gradually dissolved
into signs. It left the marks that came to represent
it: footprints, urine, secretions, feces, molted antlers,
scratchings and rubbings, gnawed stems, bones,
feathers, beds, diggings, nests, tracks, and bits of fur
as well as an immense range of sounds and smells
unavailable to us.
—Paul Shepard, The Others, p. 24
Good writing is ‘wild’ language.
—Gary Snyder, ‘Language Goes Two Ways’, p. 130

Poststructuralist thought developed two intriguing yet seemingly contra-

dictory notions about textuality. First, from the work of Roland Barthes,
Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and numerous other theorists we drew
the notion that the term ‘text’ can be extended to other media beyond
the covers of the book. Film, music videos, photographs, fashion shows,
and body building, to name just a familiar few, were declared texts,
readable using methods not so dissimilar from those associated with
reading poetry or fiction. The second poststructuralist theorem about
textuality was that there is nothing outside the text, which is usually
interpreted as meaning that we have no access to the real per se but only
to its representations. Just as signs are not the things themselves—the
map is not the territory—texts do not refer outside or beyond themselves
to the world at large. Texts refer to other texts: textuality is intrinsi-
cally intertextual. One cannot read ‘through’ a text to the world: that
is simply the illusion of realism. That is, even as I glance up from my
computer screen and look out the window to the Rocky Mountains
in the distance, my mind involuntarily (even violently against my will)
28 pamela banting

jerks to the traditions of the sublime and the picturesque, vaguely

remembered lessons about tectonic plate movements from a course on
Earth and Planetary Sciences, tidbits of mountaineering history, the
mountain photographs of Byron Harmon, swivelling racks of postcards,
fragments of memories from hikes I have taken, and so on. The very
window in my study comes into play, framing my response as aesthetic;
it too is part of my momentary construction of ‘mountain.’ In other
words, we are surrounded by texts, which implies that the universe is
readable, but paradoxically, according to the same poststructuralists, it
is in the very act of reading these texts that we find ourselves caught
in a textual loop or Möbius strip from which we can never escape to
the world ‘outside.’1
Our debt to poststructuralist theories of textuality therefore includes
the corollary that the ‘natural’ world is not one. That is, the natural
world is not the binary opposite of culture or civilization. It is not a
place unmarked by human signs and indications. Some go so far as to
claim that the ‘natural’ world is no less socially constructed than an
urban environment or even a film for that matter. In his essay ‘The
Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ William
Cronon summarizes the idea of the social construction of wilderness.
He writes:
Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity,
it [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the cre-
ation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in
human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of
an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least
a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of
civilization. (1996, p. 69)

1
Interpretations of Derrida’s comment that there is nothing outside the text are
frequently misleading. What Derrida meant in that oft-quoted sentence is cogently
summarized by Alex Callinicos, in his obituary of Derrida:
Derrida’s most famous saying must be understood in this context. It was trans-
lated into English (rather misleadingly) as, “There is nothing outside the text”.
In fact, Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language
(in the French original he actually wrote “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—“There is
no outside-text”). Rather he was saying that once you see language as a constant
movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no
longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything acquires
the instability and ambiguity that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language.
(Callinicos 2004)
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 29

It is not just tamed, landscaped or designated recreational spaces that

are socially constructed: even the wildest places on earth are subject
to social constructions. The very idea of wilderness is itself a template
placed over the land. Think for instance of how Canada’s Arctic, which
until fairly recently signified to Europeans and non-aboriginal Canadians
barren wastes and frigid wilderness, is increasingly coming to signify
rapid climate change and even warm temperatures.
However, many writers who depict the natural world throw a monkey
wrench (or perhaps a Conibear or leg-hold trap) into the poststructural-
ist conundrum that everything is always already textual. Such writers
tend to reinforce or even radically extend that dictum, but they are just
as likely to deconstruct it. Even if our ideas of nature and wilderness
are as culturally conditioned as those pertaining to any other system,
nevertheless nature preceded us, exceeds us and, if our present wasteful
and profligate practices are not changed quickly, may also succeed us.
From an environmental standpoint, nothing exceeds like success. With
or without us and our sociocultural constructions, nature, such writers
inform us, is always already textual and will remain so long after we
humans extinguish ourselves. In his article ‘Lost for Words? Gadamer
and Benjamin on the Nature of Language and the “Language” of
Nature,’ philosopher Mick Smith states that
It is often, precisely, a thing’s ‘materiality’ (in the sense of its tangibility)
that is expressed and communicated to other things, the rock that falls
on your head, the force of the river’s currents against your legs. (2001,
p. 64)
American poet Gary Snyder has suggested that the growth rings of
a tree, the meanders of a river, geological strata, and other such ele-
ments of nature are “tawny grammars” (1990, p. 76) which can be
read.2 Snyder objects strenuously, as do I, to the notion that the human
species is alone in its use of language. He writes: “But they [animals]
do communicate extensively, and by call systems we are just begin-
ning to grasp” (p. 17). Animals’ lives are vocal, textual and significant
in the sense that they are rich in signs. We are not the only creatures
who can read and make sense of cougar tracks, bear or coyote scat,

2
Snyder borrows this term from Henry David Thoreau, who translated it from
the Spanish term grammatica parda. It refers to the kind of wild and dusky knowledge
humans used to learn from nature during childhood.
30 pamela banting

the “clock, clock, clock” of ravens, or indications that the weather is

about to change.3
A consideration of river meanders, bee dances and grizzly semiotics
illumines the prominent anthropocentric bias latent within the ostensi-
bly posthumanist, poststructuralist project insofar as it boldly declares
that nature is not the real but is always already cultural and textual.4
While it is without doubt true, as my previous illustrations attest, that
we construct nature through our various cultural lenses, it was after
all nature which taught us to read and write in the first place. For one
thing, the human brain evolved from the brains of our primate and
earlier mammalian ancestors. Moreover, as Paul Shepard has argued,
what we call culture and oppose to nature was built through proto-
human interaction with and mimesis of the survival techniques and
cultures of animals and birds. Shepard links tracking animals with the
development of humans’ sense of narrative:
The human mind came into existence tracking, which for us creates a
land of named places and fosters narration, the tale of adventure . . . The
unexpected turns in the epic quest have their origin in traces of the
wonder of things, itself the object of our tracking mentality. (1996,
pp. 25–26)5

3
Not only can wild animals read the behaviours of other wilderness creatures
but a recent study at the University of Calgary reveals that they also have the abil-
ity to read human behaviours. That is, like humans, more-than-human animals also
use popular hiking trails in the Rocky Mountain parks, trails which after all were in
many instances built over old animal trails. A multi-year study using cameras placed
along such trails demonstrates that the animals tend to make themselves scarce when
nature-loving humans invade the area on summer weekends. “It seems that they know
that when Friday night rolls around, it’s time to disappear, and on Monday morning
they’re back,”
according to Mike Quinn, co-supervisor of the project (Semmens 2005, p. 6).
4
Val Plumwood calls this the culture-reductionist project (2006, p. 143).
5
Likewise, in her essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, novelist Ursula LeGuin
suggests that hunting and gathering, direct engagement with animals and plants, and
the need to recount our excellent adventures with them taught us how to tell stories.
Her playful and witty feminist analysis critiques the dominance of the hunting tale:
So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the
proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going
straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the
central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the
story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it (1996, p. 152).
She recasts the novel instead as a gathering story, with an overall shape resembling a
sack, bag, purse, or medicine bundle.
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 31

Or, as Snyder remarks in his essay ‘Language Goes Two Ways’:

Each of the four thousand or so languages of the world models reality in
its own way, with patterns and syntaxes that were not devised by anyone.
Languages were not the intellectual inventions of archaic schoolteach-
ers, but are naturally evolved wild systems whose complexity eludes the
descriptive attempts of the rational mind. (2000, p. 127)
Like Shepard and Snyder, philosopher David Abram contends that:
Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human
community but between the human community and the animate land-
scape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the
more-than-human world. . . . These letters I print across the page, the
scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white
surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow.
We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal
ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up
the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would
be the meeting with the Other. (1997, pp. 95–96)
Considered from much broader, more inclusive, ecological notions
both of what constitutes the social realm and of textuality, ‘meaning’
is not simply the semantic, symbolic, cognitive, and solitary function
to which we habitually reduce it. In Western cultures, generally speak-
ing we tend to think of meaning as, at best, a sudden and unexpected
insight, a modest and brief epiphanic storm set off in our foreheads
by, for example, a passage of particularly well-written text, or, if we
are feeling expansively full of ourselves, we may claim that meaning
consists of a meeting of minds between reader and author. Contrast
the beard-stroking “aaaah” or “a-ha” in academia with the condition
of being awe-struck when encountering the Other in the flesh, whether
that Other be human or more-than-human, and especially when she
or he is the latter.
Even given that the world is always already textual, it does not logi-
cally follow that therefore we cannot access the ‘real.’ It may simply
indicate that the real is everywhere criss-crossed with text like animal
tracks over freshly fallen snow. Contrary to the pervasive notion that
there is nothing beyond the text, the real (or the beyond) is textual.
We are not forever one or more dimensions removed from the real
by virtue of human textualization or the multiple screens of historic,
aesthetic and cultural representation. The textual is the real. Moreover,
if we wish to claim that nature is always already socially constructed,
then it would seem only fair and just to incorporate into our notion
32 pamela banting

of that sociality our companion beings on the planet—the birds who

taught us how to nest, the bees who taught us sweetness, the moose
and bears who taught us how to track and read sign—and to inter-
polate how animals in many ways made us human—and textual—in
the first place. As Shepard writes, “Humans tracked into a new world
of double meaning, based on an amplified relationship to plants and
animals”. (1996, p. 22)
Let us now turn to the work of two Western-Canadian writers—Andy
Russell and Sid Marty—who have spent much of their lives outside
and who write out of prolonged personal interaction with both human
and more-than-human creatures and a deep awareness of nature’s own
semiotics. Natural historian, documentary filmmaker, environmentalist,
and creative nonfiction writer the late Andy Russell (1915–2005) often
figures the workings of nature in textual terms. His realistic wild animal
story ‘Sage,’ about a female grizzly and her male cub Sage, published in
his book Adventures with Wild Animals, offers a particularly good example
for analysis, presenting as it does a condensed biography of a grizzly
family.6 Russell borrows some of his anecdotes about the early years of
the female grizzly from an old trapper named Bill who “saw more in a
casual glance than most men would in a month, and he understood the
smallest sign” (1991, p. 14). When Bill examines a kill site, “What had
occurred, what bear was involved and every detail of the incident was
as clear as newsprint to him” (p. 17). As a former guide and outfitter,
Russell himself is adept at ‘reading sign.’ He writes:
Trailing him [Sage] was like reading a book written in a unique kind of
script, revealing and totally fascinating. Although we rarely saw him, he
taught us much about grizzlies in a way that was matchless. (p. 36)

6
The realistic wild animal story was pioneered in Canada and became a very popular
subgenre in both Canada and the United States just prior to and at the beginning of
the twentieth century. According to Ralph Lutts,
The wild animal story combined elements of nature writing and animal fiction.
Traditionally, nature essays about animals emphasized more or less detached
scientific observations of animals or the author’s emotional responses to them.
Earlier forms of animal stories tended to be fictional accounts in which the animals
were little more than humans in furry or feathery coats, whose narrative role was
to instruct and morally elevate the reader. . . . In the realistic wild animal story,
however, the animals ‘live for their own ends,’ rather than for human ends. The
stories emphasized the perspective of the animal itself. . . . Although the accounts are
presented in story form and employ fictional devices, the authors assert that their
tales are factual and represent accurate natural history (Lutts 1998, pp. 1–2).
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 33

Russell often, even typically, incorporates such signs as hoof marks,

paw prints, broken twigs, deer beds, and his readings of them into his
narratives. That is, he consciously foregrounds these kinds of signs as
intertexts to his narrative in a way that would be considered reflexive
if the marks, signs and inscriptions of other animals were considered
textual. In ‘Sage,’ for example, Russell simultaneously tells the story and
incorporates the story of the origins of the story. In fact, he erases his
own authorship insofar as he figures his writing simply as a reading, a
reading of signs left by animals during two sequences of events:
Once I found a place where he [Sage] had surprised and killed a beaver
among some aspens by a pond. All that was left was a slight smear of
blood and a few tufts of fur on a skiff of snow.
Another day, trailing his big paw marks through an early fall of snow,
I read the story of how he had taken a snowshoe hare. Going into the
wind, he had obviously seen the animal crouched in its hide in a tuft of
slough grass along the edge of a swamp. There was no apparent shift of
stride or attempt to stalk it—he just walked up to the hare, and plucked
the mesmerized animal from its bed with no more effort or fuss than he
would use to pick a mouthful of berries. (pp. 35–36)
In addition to such sources as the anecdotes of fellow guides, hunters
and trappers, as well as his own extensive first-hand observations of
events, Russell derives whole sections of his narratives from evidence
written in the snow, mud or sand, which, expert tracker that he is, he
decodes and relays for his readers.
In other places in his work he fills in the blanks in a narrative with
clues derived from, for instance, his dogs, Kip and Seppi, often figuring
their information in what one might quite properly call semiotic terms.
Describing his relationship with his dog Seppi, for instance, Russell
acknowledges the epistemological exchanges the two enjoyed:
I trained him, and he schooled me in many things associated with the
world of nature. His superlative nose told me much that the sharpest
eyes could not see. . . . He would pace ahead of me reading the scent, the
hair standing up on his shoulders, and we would trail the bear through
fiercely difficult places and conditions. Thus I was able to study move-
ments and habits of the grizzly where the sign would have been almost
invisible without the dog. (p. 35)
Russell also credits his sources, co-signing his narrative along with his
various animal partners and informants.
In his work Andy Russell also describes animal vocalizations in what
might be called anthropomorphic terms. A great horned owl, he writes
34 pamela banting

in the story ‘Sage,’ “hooted its question to the night” (p. 18). In ‘The
King Elk’ Russell describes how “The whole flat [valley] was alive with
the moving shapes of the great deer [elk], and the night musical with
their conversational squeals” (p. 46). In ‘Kleo’ a young cougar, whose
amorous advances upon a female are abruptly terminated by a larger
rival, is bested and bloodied. Hours later, Russell writes, Kleo
was still seething and boiling, a very angry cougar—so furious, in fact,
that he was talking to himself. He continued the soliloquy as he moved
down the opposite side of the ridge, his waving tail signalling his rage.
(pp. 143–44)
Some animals can be called either by mimicking their vocalizations
oneself or with mechanical calls. In ‘The King Elk’ Russell recounts
how, at the request of a client—a wildlife filmmaker—for some spectacle
in the scene in front of them, he knew
there was a good chance of blowing the whole herd out of sight by call-
ing in a second bull, but thinking it was worth the risk, I took out my
call. Pulling in a chestful of mountain air, I cut loose with a challenge.
Instantly King swung around to face us, and pointing his nose directly
at us, he let out a short bugle that sounded deceptively like an immature
bull. (p. 68)
Not only is Russell’s “challenge” answered directly but moreover it con-
tains a note of subterfuge as King is a mature bull elk, not a juvenile.
Of course, it would be easy to dismiss out of hand Russell’s intima-
tions of animal rhetorics—an owl’s interrogative hoots, elk’s conversa-
tional squeals and “wild music,” a cougar “talking” to himself, a bull
elk masking his age and strength by imitating the call of a younger
male—as poetic license or anthropomorphism, the writer simply apply-
ing metaphors of human language use to animals the same way voice-
over narration for television documentaries typically compares animal
lives to traditional, heterosexual North American or European human
nuclear families (dad as the defender and breadwinner, mom as a stay-
at-home nurturer; see Crowther 1997). Passages like these in nature
writing and environmental nonfiction are routinely ignored or written
off. For the most part, anthropomorphism is dangerously reductive and
ought to be avoided. There is also a very long and problematic tradi-
tion of referring to nature as a book, and an equally long metonymic
chain of signifiers which has devolved therefrom. But is the notion
of nature’s book only yet another inherited cultural cliché, simply
a residual metaphor for bridging the gap between the guide’s world
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 35

and that of the reader in the Lazy-Boy recliner?7 I would argue that
Russell’s diction points to actual phenomena which need to be taken into
account in developing an environmentally responsible literary criticism
or, to use Snyder’s term, a rhetoric of ecological relationship (Snyder
1990, p. 68). In addition, Russell’s comparison of tracking to reading
a newspaper or book should be taken seriously and not automatically
dismissed as mere stylistic ornament.8 Furthermore, he himself is care-
ful not to sentimentalize the notion of the textuality of animals’ lives.
The best illustration of his resistance to sentimentality may be found
in his realistic wild animal story ‘The Friendly Owl,’ also collected in
Adventures with Wild Animals, in which he recounts an anecdote about
the owl who lived with the Russell family. He speculates
Perhaps exposure to the written word triggered some kind of desire to
amuse himself or whoever happened to be watching, but he learned to
‘read.’ He would jump down on a newspaper page and closely trace the
letters across the columns with his beak in a way that was hilarious. (pp.
167–68)
Note that I am not arguing that Andy Russell does not draw upon his
inherited cultural repertoire in some of the metaphors he deploys. His
figuration of some individual animals as monarchs (particularly prime
elk and the largest of grizzlies, so-called ‘trophy animals’ in short) traf-
fics in metaphors which were not uncommon for the era, the 1960s,
in which he began to write and publish his first books. They are the
conventional metaphors one may find in any sportsmen’s magazine.
What I am arguing here is that to choose to read passages about animal
signification solely as conceits or metaphors is a deliberately premature
generalization, a hasty foreclosure and a logical reduction reflective of
our own poor listening skills and general poverty of experience with the
natural world. It is also deliberately to ignore, override, reduce, or even

7
Gary Snyder refers to the metaphor of nature as a book—the idea that creatures
and creation are the signifiers pointing irrevocably to a Creator as transcendental
signified and origin—as pernicious (1990, p. 69). I agree with him to that extent, but
I think that the evidence for the textuality of nature, understood in its broadest sense,
is overwhelming.
8
Sid Marty uses similar diction when he evokes animal significations, sometimes
comically, other times more seriously, always colourfully. For example, a flock of crows
pursues a red-tailed hawk “like fishwives nagging the butcher’s boy” (1995, p. 141).
His only company one day consisted of “whiskey jacks, scolding me for trespassing
as they hunted for cones among the limber pine” (p. 171). A ruffed grouse clucks “its
scandalized protest” (p. 172).
36 pamela banting

ridicule the voice and experience of a writer who spent most of his life
outdoors, was a well-respected naturalist with several honorary doctor-
ates for his work and whose expertise in reading sign probably exceeds
that of most literary critics (including the writer of this essay).
In Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies Sid Marty—poet,
singer/songwriter, and author of several books of creative nonfic-
tion—writes that he views it as his job as a writer to act as a voice for
nature, a role contiguous, I might add, with that of his former job as
a national park warden. He writes:
I am here to be the voice of the inchoate, in a word; I am here to listen
to the mountains. I need to be alone sometimes to hear what they have
to tell me. (1999, p. 13)
Note first of all that Marty does not present himself as speaking on
behalf of a mute nature which cannot speak for itself. Clearly if nature
did not in some sense have its own significations, he would not be able
to ‘hear’ the mountains either. What he purports to do is to listen to
the mountains and retransmit their incipient messages to those of us
who cannot or do not wish to hear them or who are outside range
most of the time. Christopher Manes’s article ‘Nature and Silence’ is
helpful in this context. Manes contends that
Nature is silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the
sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as
an exclusively human prerogative. . . . It is as if we had compressed the
entire buzzing, howling, gurgling biosphere into the narrow vocabulary
of epistemology . . . (1996, p. 15)9
For Marty, as for Manes, signification and subjectivity cut across the
great divide of the human/non-human, and listening can play a pivotal
role in “restoring us to the humbler status of Homo sapiens: one species
among millions of other beautiful, terrible, fascinating—and signify-
ing—forms” (Manes 1996, p. 26).10

9
Similarly, in his article ‘Fabricating Nature: A Critique of the Social Construc-
tion of Nature,’ David W. Kidner describes the ‘epistemic fallacy’ as the view that
“statements about being can be reduced to or analyzed in terms of statements about
knowledge” (quoted in Kidner 2000, p. 343).
10
Sid Marty is not the only writer who accords the natural world a voice. Ecofemi-
nist critic Greta Gaard writes that “Listening to the voice of nature has been widely
suggested as one means of reconnecting humans with nature” (1998, pp. 232–33). She
sees this concept running through the work of various Native American women writers
as well as the work of non-native writers such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver.
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 37

As auditor, interpreter and amanuensis, Marty can serve as a voice

for the inchoate not because nature is outside signification but because
his previous job as a park warden took him into such prolonged, daily
proximity with the natural world that the mountains have inscribed
themselves upon all of his senses, his muscles and bones, and his
memory. In his aptly titled essay ‘Porters of the Great Signs,’ Marty
describes his arrival at pioneer trail-maker Lawrence Grassi’s cabin:
As I stared at the circle of mountains again from the porch of Grassi’s
cabin, I felt the old joy of greeting combined with a powerful rush of
unrestrained animal spirits. (1999, p. 90)
The recognition scene, which engenders in him joy and a surge of
unnamed corporeal feelings (or perhaps I should say mammalian energy)
is stirred by his encounter not, in this instance, with another human
or even a non-human animal, but a landform and a place. His body
is wild: nature speaks or calls out to it, and he feels the need to reply.11
As he writes in the opening pages of his book Leaning on the Wind: Under
the Spell of the Great Chinook,
If the land has a voice, the [Baby] Boomers have not heard it yet. If, in
these pages, I can sometimes hit the notes that echo and harmonize with
that sustaining voice, I will be satisfied. (1995, p. 12)
In ‘The Old Trolls of Lake O’Hara’ Marty evokes the very moment
when that lake inscribed itself indelibly upon his consciousness.
Humbled by the beauty of the place, he writes,
The forest here was the kingdom of shadows, and I imagined whatever
creatures lived within it were staring out on the lake, like spirits at the
service of these gods. I wondered what purpose a raw young mortal might
serve in this mountain splendour. Then a trout, a large one, jumped where
the shadows of spruce trees turned the water to pools of mercury: at the
top of its liquid arc it seemed suspended between air and water. Perhaps
it was the quicker eye of youth made it so, but I think Lake O’Hara
imprinted itself on my brain at that moment. (1999, p. 34)

11
Recalling his childhood in Redcliff and Medicine Hat, Alberta, Marty writes:
The river washed me clean and the prairie wind was my towel. . . . I learned in
childhood what every prairie creature knows: it is the coulee, the creek bottom,
the river valley that offer the only shelter from the freezing winds of winter and
the hot winds of summer. (1995, p. 83).
38 pamela banting

The leap of a fish imprints the place upon Marty.12 Following in the
tradition of encounters with the sublime and its attendant ‘sublimation’
of the ego, Marty, humbled in the face of those particular mountains,
becomes simply “a raw young mortal” in the company and service of
the gods, along with the other creatures living there.13
Not only have Marty’s body, senses, mind, and memory been
imprinted by specific places but over the years his canvas rucksack too
has become a sort of palimpsest, scored outside and in by weather, river
water, mice, squirrels, porcupines, bears, fresh elk liver, the blood of
an injured friend, the angles of books, and his mandolin. The artifact
has been marked and marred by the natural. The rucksack functions
in the book as a sort of synecdoche for the author’s body, the marks
representing his experiences. Out of this weathering, erosion and
inscription, out of the short preface ‘Rucksack,’ tumbles the rest of
the book as Marty recreates the events associated with the rucksack’s
visible snags, tears, blood stains, and bulges. Just as Russell’s reading
of signs along the trail fills in gaps in his narratives, so too Marty’s
narratives stream from his reading of visual marks and material signs.
Like Russell, Marty does not privilege cultural over natural signs: signs
are signs as far as he is concerned, animal, vegetable or mineral (unless
they are trail markers that resemble crosses, weigh two hundred pounds
each, and have to be carried on his back up a mountain, as he relates
in ‘Porters of the Great Signs’).
While the activity and trope of reading are foregrounded in many
texts, in both Russell and Marty references to reading or to signs and
signification go beyond puncturing the realist illusion and gesturing
toward the artifice of the text to something even more interesting.
Frequently in these two western-Canadian writers’ nonfiction, reading
points to a co-constitution of the text by the writer and other animals,
or by writer and environment. In Russell and Marty, their sense of
their own subjectivity is flexed, reflexed and refracted not only by the
raced, classed and gendered Other but by Others in the broader, more

12
On a personal note, in my own experience I have found that nothing marks a
place in my memory like the sighting of a wild animal—the place where we saw the
young grizzlies, the avenue of poplars where we often see mountain bluebirds, the rise
where we saw three moose, the trail where I met a black bear, the stretch of highway
where a cougar crossed in front of my car.
13
Poet Tim Lilburn has written extensively about the loss or surrender of one’s
name in encounters with the natural world. In Living in the World As If It Were Home, he
writes “contemplative looking involves a slendering of self ” (1999, p. 17).
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 39

inclusive and much more radical sense of the animal Other and even
of place itself. With regard to place, as environmental philosopher
Christopher J. Preston remarks,
geography does not just affect what we choose to observe about the world;
it plays a more subtle, constitutive role in shaping the constructions of the
world on which we bestow the honorific ‘knowledge’. (2000, p. 215)
He continues: “only by pressing the idea that humans are not just
embodied, but embodied in particular and distinctive environments can
epistemology be naturalized to its fullest extent” (p. 217).
For instance, one cannot help but wonder in what ways not just episte-
mology but Derrida’s philosophy of the animal may have been different
had he lived not in Paris but in Banff or Waterton, Alberta, Canada,
or somewhere else in grizzly country. Would he have philosophized on
grizzly bears instead of his cat? I think of his essay ‘The Animal That
Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002) in which, naked, he muses
on his cat having followed him into the bathroom. By way of contrast,
think of Sid Marty coming home after his day’s work to his warden’s
cabin in Jasper National Park and finding a black bear standing on his
hind legs in front of the white fridge. As Marty writes “It is amazing,
really, how wild and scary a mere black bear looks, standing on your
kitchen floor while outlined against a home appliance” (1999, p. 172).
Thinking the animal, I would suggest, depends very much on whether
or not that animal can or cannot, may or may not, eat you alive—not
just whether it might see you naked in your bathroom.
In his article ‘Hunting, Tracking and Reading’ J. Edward Chamberlin
states that “Tracking as a form of reading has long had currency, but
always with a primitive cast” (2001, p. 70).14 He argues instead that
The complex balancing of the letter and the spirit of a text—or of a sign
and its meaning (which may include the motive of its maker)—which we
identify with reading practices that developed from classical through to
medieval to renaissance Europe was flourishing in a very sophisticated
form in the intellectual dynamics of ancient tracking in indigenous societ-
ies around the world. (p. 69)
Although in Chamberlin’s summary below of Louis Liebenberg’s
book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science the figure of the tracker

14
I would like to thank former graduate student Jeff Petersen for bringing this
article to my attention.
40 pamela banting

is human, I would suggest that we can read the quotation equally well
with a non-human tracker in mind. The passage, although somewhat
lengthy, is key to my argument:
Simple or systematic tracking, as he [Liebenberg] describes it, involves
taking information from animal signs in order to determine what an
animal was doing and where it was going: following the tracks, where pos-
sible; finding them, when necessary. Even in its more systematic form, this
mode of tracking does not go beyond evidence into opinion; but trackers
must, of course, know undisturbed terrain in order to ‘read’ disturbances,
and this requires what Liebenberg describes as “intermittent attention,
a constant refocussing between minute detail of the track and the whole
pattern of the environment.” Memory is crucial, since the tracker must
be able to recall a wide range of knowledge both significant and meta-
significant in order to place the signs in the appropriate semiotic context.
But the key is attention to detail. In fact, this kind of tracking highlights
a point often made about reading written texts: one must carefully read
what’s on the lines before one can read between or behind them. I suggest
tracking also often involves the recognition of what might be called style
and genre, for each animal has a style—predator or scavenger, individual
or herd, young and old, male or female, in different seasons; and each
animal may work in what for want of better terms might be called lyric,
dramatic and narrative modes. (2001, p. 77)
I would add that not only were our human ancestors ‘literate’ 30,000
years ago in the sense that they could read and interpret tracks and
other signs recorded in the natural world but other animals could do
the very same thing, often with more reliable results than those obtained
by our ancient relatives or ourselves today. While the dangers of literal
interpretations of texts are rehearsed daily in English literature classes,
those of always reading metaphorically—specifically, of leaping com-
pletely over the literal meaning of signs to some transcendental signi-
fied—have been far less criticized but are no less real. I would contend
that it is just as risky summarily to dismiss or arrogantly to overlook the
reading and writing practices of the wild as it is to fail to read novels
or poetry accurately.
One of the tasks remaining in the ongoing assimilation of post-
structuralist thought is to interrogate some of its European content in
terms of other geographies, in North American, Canadian, Western-
Canadian, even Albertan terms. Why not start from the foothills of
the Rocky Mountains, on the prairies or in the boreal forest? In this
essay I have examined aspects of the textuality of nature in the work
of two environmental writers from Alberta—Andy Russell and Sid
Marty—in order to adduce the texts of the natural world to a general
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 41

science of signs, and to begin the process of examining how including

animal calls, tracks and other forms of bio-, zoo- or eco-semiotics in
our notion of text might reconfigure our notions of signature, event
and habitat, as well as those of subjectivity, voice, writing, author and
authority, setting, metaphor, and meaning. There has been consider-
able quarrel with the idea of the social construction of nature, mostly
by humanists who do not wish to surrender the view that meaning is
exclusively man-made. However, Val Plumwood writes,
As animal studies are increasingly showing, culture as learned forms
of adaptation and forms of life, is also found in other species, animals
particularly, and is not exclusive to the human. If the term ‘culture’ is
used more broadly, in the fashion of anthropology, as meaning the sum
total of a group’s knowledge and practice in all spheres, there is even
less case for confining it to the human. (2006, p. 122)
The whole idea of the social construction of nature needs to be re-
thought in relation to the animal Others who precede and exceed us,
in some respects, in sign-making and reading practices. How many of
us who read for a living—as professors do—would be capable of read-
ing for our life, as wild animals do on a daily basis? I would hazard
the claim that the ability to read for one’s life is the very definition of
wildness. Such accepted poststructuralist notions as text and intertext
are radically refreshed when one includes within them signs and texts
from the more-than-human world. In this regard it is worth recalling
that Barthes formulated the very notion of the text (as opposed to what
he calls the ‘work’) one day while walking in a valley. He writes:
The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end . . .;
this passably empty subject strolls—it is what happened to the author
of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text—on the
side of a valley, a oued flowing down below . . .; what he perceives is mul-
tiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of
substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender
explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from over on
the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away.
(1977, p. 159)
Writers such as Sid Marty and Andy Russell who have lived their whole
lives in close proximity to wild creatures have a major contribution to
make both to our literary inheritance and to poststructuralist thought.
Frequently in contemporary Canadian literary criticism, unless a text
performs a kind of overt postmodern acrobatics on the page imitative of
the way Superman leaps from tall building to tall building in a cityscape,
42 pamela banting

it is either ignored or denigrated as some kind of hairy throwback to a

realist aesthetic and world view. Environmental nonfiction in particular
is generally ignored by literary critics, partly, I suspect, because despite
all our rhetoric around deconstruction and de-centering a significant
number of postmodernist and poststructuralist critics still read from an
essentially humanist position. On the one hand, the texts of Russell and
Marty are subtly rather than blatantly self-reflexive in the sense usually
associated with postmodern prose and, on the other hand, they are so
radical as to challenge and stretch the limits of those same aesthetics
and critical methodologies. Russell incorporates his interpretations of
hoof marks, paw prints and canine olfactory inferences into his stories
of encounters with wild animals. Marty deploys self-mockery and
parody to undermine the imperial humanist subject, and an expansive
trans-species sense of ‘voice’ to uproot some of the extended colonial
metaphors which continue to condition and skew our relationships with
our respective locales and with animals. In Russell’s and Marty’s texts,
as in the rest of the natural and material world, a sense of the magic
inherent in wild encounter is afoot. Maybe after all it is not human tool
use, consciousness, reason, spirit, language, or syntax—not our speech,
our handwriting or our opposable thumbs—which separate us from other
animals but rather our footprints which link us with them.15

15
I would like to thank the organizers of the following conferences and speakers’
series for the opportunity to test out earlier drafts and portions of this paper. A short
version of the paper was first presented under the title ‘Wilderness Words: Tawny
Grammars and Biosemiotics in the Work of Andy Russell and Sid Marty’ at the Wild
Words Conference, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 19–23,
2005. Thanks to conference co-ordinators Harry Vandervlist, Clem Martini, Donna
Coates, and George Melnyk. Thanks also to Gary Geddes, organizer of the Writing
Home: Science, Literature and the Aesthetics of Place Conference, Green College,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, May 12–14, 2006. I am
grateful also to Phil Hoffmann and the Apeiron Society for the Practice of Philosophy,
Calgary, who invited me to give a guest lecture as part of their Questions of Nature
and Philosophy Series. A short version of the penultimate draft was presented at the
fourth biannual meeting of the Society for Science, Literature and the Arts, ‘Close
Encounters: Science, Literature, Art,’ at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis,
University of Amsterdam, June 13–16, 2006. In particular I wish to thank Manuela
Rossini, Programme Chair, for the opportunity not only to present to the SLSA but
to meet so many other researchers in the field of Animal Studies.
 hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 43

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14, 2007).
Shepard, Paul. 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC/Covelo,
CA: Island Press/Shearwater Books.
44 pamela banting

Smith, Mick. 2001. ‘Lost for Words? Gadamer and Benjamin on the Nature of
Language and the “Language” of Nature.’ Environmental Values 10: 59–75.
Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder. San Francisco: North
Point.
——. 2000. ‘Language Goes Two Ways.’ The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism
to Ecocriticism. Ed. Laurence Coupe. Foreword by Jonathan Bate. London and
New York: Routledge: 127–31.
 PART TWO

MEDIATE ENCOUNTERS

The essays in this section address the consequences of the fact that,
for many people today, the vast majority of their encounters with ani-
mals are not immediate but rather mediated. Animals are rarely present
to individuals but are instead represented, for instance in television
programs and movies, in digital games and entertainment, in novels,
newspapers and magazines, in art and design, in radio broadcasts
and on websites, and in countless other media. At the same time, the
animals that people do encounter in the flesh are frequently unrecog-
nized as animals, having been slaughtered, processed, and renamed
as ‘veal’ or ‘pork’ or ‘beef ’, that is as ‘meat’. The authors of the two
essays in this section are in agreement that the consequence of these
different forms of mediation, through contemporary mass media and
through language, is a distancing of humans from other animals. This
estrangement makes it all the easier for humans to dominate, subject
and mistreat individual animals and indeed entire species.
First, in her essay ‘Post-Meateating’, Carol J. Adams explores the
changing ways in which humans have encountered animals as we have
moved from a modern to a postmodern sensibility. Whereas, during the
modern period, there was an acknowledgement of both the difficulty
and importance of understanding the experiences of real animals, in
today’s postmodern environment there seems to be an unreflective
preoccupation only with their cultural representations. Individuals are
more likely to concern themselves with the ‘neglect’ of Winnie the
Pooh stuffed toys than with any real bears or tigers or kangaroos, whilst
David Lynch’s artistic depiction of a cow, ‘Eat My Fear’, is likely to
cause greater offence than the fate of any real cows on which the work
is based. Adams outlines diverse manifestations of this shift from the
modern to the postmodern, from factories based on slaughterhouses
to farms modeled on factories, from animals conceived as machines to
digital toys treated as pets, from ‘pollo-vegetarians’ who eat meat to
vegans who wear fake fur, from campaigns for animal rights to PETA’s
ironic use of supermodels and celebrities. Adams does not suggest
that life was better for animals during the modern period. In fact,
46 mediate encounters

notwithstanding the many changes, significant continuities persist in

the human subordination and exploitation of other creatures. Despite
its potential to challenge and reformulate how we think about individu-
als and their experiences, postmodernism ultimately provides no great
relief for nonhuman animals.
Randy Malamud, meanwhile, examines in his essay ‘Americans Do
Weird Things with Animals’, the anthropocentric, imperialist prejudices
exhibited in the peculiar procedures adopted by many cultural practitio-
ners and their audiences. Beginning with the dead chicken parts used by
Pinar Yolacan to construct blouses, he moves to the elephants made to
appear in Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of the model Dovima,
and in fashion shoots promoting Chanel suits and Manolo Blahnik
shoes. In each of these instances, he argues, the animals are chopped,
chained, and cut up—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—as
a means of asserting human dominance and supremacy. Siegfried &
Roy’s stage show on the Las Vegas strip, featuring their ‘White Tigers
of Nevada’, provided a kitsch, symbolic battle ground for humanity’s
ongoing conquest of nature. Similarly, despite explicit messages of
empathy and commonality, Disney films such as Antz and Finding Nemo
prompted audiences to casual, incongruous acts of consumption and
control. Opportunities for genuine anthrozoological understanding
continue to be missed, as humans persistently ask the wrong questions.
Malamud closes the essay by providing his own, unpresumptuous answer
to that most enduring of animal questions in popular culture, ‘why did
the chicken cross the road?’. (TT)
 CHAPTER THREE

POST-MEATEATING

Carol J. Adams

The Postmodern Cultural Referent

In the early 1990s, activism in the United States against the methods
used to catch tuna fishes resulted in the Dolphin Protection Consumer
Information Act (DCPIA). The DCPIA was aimed at protecting dol-
phins so that they would no longer be captured and die as a result of
the nets used. National Public Radio carried a report when Congress
passed the DCPIA. As a follow up to the story, Linda Wertheimer, then
one of the hosts of National Public Radio’s news program ‘All Things
Considered,’ conducted an interview. Did she conduct it with an activ-
ist against the nets? A marine biologist? A trainer of dolphins in an
aquarium? A tuna fish sandwich eater? None of these. She interviewed
the creators of the award-winning play ‘Greater Tuna,’ and asked them
what their fictional characters from the town of Tuna, Texas would
say about the news.
Or consider this: during the 1990s, a hotel in Washington took lamb
chops off their menu whenever the late puppeteer extraordinaire Sheri
Lewis and her puppet ‘Lamb Chop’ were visiting.
In each of these instances the issue, which might be seen as the
impact of human beings on other animal beings—tuna fishes, dolphins,
and lambs—becomes instead an impact on cultural beings—actors
and puppets—who become the focus of attention. Sensibilities about
something cultural are being evoked, not sensibilities about something
ostensibly ‘natural.’ The referent is cultural; actual dolphins, tuna fishes
and lambs are eclipsed by the cultural.
In The Sexual Politics of Meat I proposed that nonhuman animals used
for meat are absent referents (Adams 2000). Behind every meal of meat
is an absence: the death of the nonhuman animal whose place the meat
takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from
the other animal and that animal from the end product. Consider the
New Yorker cartoon by Robert Mankoff called ‘The Birth of a Vegetarian’:
48 carol j. adams

a man is sitting in front of a slab of meat, looking startled because the

sound “moo” is emanating from the steak. Of course, the nonhuman’s
death is not in our face; only the postmortem state of a nonhuman’s
corpse is. We do not see our meat eating as contact with another animal
because it has been renamed as contact with food. This is the function
of the absent referent: to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that
she or he was once a nonhuman animal, to keep the moo away from
the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. And
if our references to animals in culture refer back to something else that
is also cultural—the residents of Greater Tuna, or Lamb Chop—then
they do not have to be about someone else, that is, they do not ever
have to land on nonhuman animals themselves. This point was made
in the greatly entertaining but evanescent Pooh furor of 1998.
‘Free the Pooh Five’ demanded a chorus of British newspapers in
early 1998. A British Member of Parliament had visited the New York
Public Library where the original stuffed animals of Christopher Milne,
those that inspired the stories about Winnie the Pooh, reside. It seems
that M.P. Gwyneth Dunwoody detected that Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Owl
and Kanga were unhappy there, as they were ‘incarcerated’ in a glass
case (in fact, a climate and light-controlled, bulletproof glass case). She
insisted they needed to return to Britain. The New York Times jumped
into the fray with a jocularity equal to the British papers (Barry 1998).
The Times carried photos of the stuffed animals on the front page. As
a Times reporter once observed to me, a newspaper writer must know
how to write well about nothing. But what provided some fun headlines
for the newspapers and unbearable puns for the politicians confirmed
the existence of the age of the postmodern referent. Everyone knew
that no stuffed bear was actually unhappy, no stuffed kangaroo was
actually homesick. The ‘sympathy’ evoked in the media stories damages
real animals in several ways: in what it says about people who express
care (such as those activists who worked to bring about protection of
dolphins) and the ones for whom the care is expressed (dolphins). By
substituting a cultural referent for the absent referent it displaces any
sympathy we might have for the real suffering of real animals. Secondly,
its humor undercuts our (meager) store of concern for animals. Finally,
consumers of the images and stories may consider that they have had
an animal encounter when they encountered solely cultural beings.
During the year 2000, New York City hosted more than 500 life-sized
fiberglass cows that had been decorated by artists. They were placed
around the five boroughs of New York in a ‘CowParade.’ Among
 post-meateating 49

Fig. 3.1 David Lynch’s ‘Eat My Fear’ from the New York City Cow Parade (2000)

fanciful and colorful cows like a Rockette cow, a surfing cow, and a
taxi cow, was filmmaker David Lynch’s ‘Eat My Fear’ cow. With forks
and knives stuck into the cow’s behind, the bloody disemboweled cow
was displayed for only a couple of hours. During that time at least
one small child, upon seeing it, started crying. Then it was banished
to a warehouse and put under wraps (Friend 2000). While meat eat-
ing requires violence, the absent referent functions to put the violence
under wraps: there is no ‘cow’ whom we have to think about, there is
no butchering, no feelings, and no fear, just the end product. (And David
Lynch is correct: people eat animals’ fear. Nonhumans who experience
fear before death release adrenalin which can leave soft, mushy spots
in their ‘meat,’ making their flesh tougher.) In the case of the banished
cow, it was a cultural product—David Lynch’s artistic representation
of a slaughtered cow—that was offensive and removed.1

1
In the United States, since the nineteenth century, slaughterhouses themselves have
been banished from the marketplace through zoning laws that forbade their operation
50 carol j. adams

In modernism there was something to be alienated from. Modern

humans were sensible of their distance from the ‘real.’ Indeed, there
was a nostalgic sense that there existed a real to be alienated from. In
postmodernism there is nothing to be alienated from. There is only
the system. We can never know the structure itself that we are in.
Ontologically, the cultural becomes the ‘real.’ There isn’t anything more
real to someone than Lamb Chop the puppet or the play ‘Greater Tuna’
or Pooh Bear. Such a change in perspective is a devastating one for
it enables a further distancing from the fates of individual nonhuman
animal beings. There is a great divide between those who love lambs
and do not eat lamb chops and those who love Sheri Lewis’s Lamb
Chop. What we have now is an extreme distancing from the experi-
ence of most nonhuman animals at the same time that people express
and act upon deep longings for connections with others, including
nonhuman animals and the rest of ‘nature’—whatever that is. As the
appearance of the ‘actual’ displaces the actual experience of nonhuman
animals as the referent for our relationships with other animals, feelings
of alienation and separation for humans, as well as a deep longing for
connection, intensify.2
Frederic Jameson observes in Postmodernism:
In modernism . . . some residual zones of ‘nature’ or ‘being,’ of the old,
the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that
nature and work at transforming that ‘referent.’ Postmodernism is what
you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is
gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but
one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’ ( Jameson
1992, p. ix)
Jameson argues that in general we have passed from the modern period,
with nature still a referent, to a postmodern period with culture as
the referent. His insight suggests that in a postmodern time animals
too will more frequently have cultural referents. The response to the
Lynch-ed cow was not that David Lynch should become an animal
rights activist (he admits that he eats meat), but that he should return
to filmmaking—return to more acceptable cultural productions (Friend
2000, pp. 62–63).

in certain sections of a city. In the first test of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1873
this zoning was upheld. See my discussion of ‘Slaughterhouse Cases’ in Adams (2000,
p. 209, note 23).
2
On this point see Berger (1980).
 post-meateating 51

During the modern period actual animals were the referent, albeit
often absent. Now our culture’s concept of animals is the referent. The
cultural referent is stuffed animals, puppets, fiberglass cows, and plays.
In response to the Pooh furor, an ironic reminder of cultural consump-
tion at its most literal was invoked. A New York Times editorial reminded
its readers of Maurice Sendak’s classic comment concerning great
children’s books: few first editions exist because they have been eaten
(‘Psychoanalyzing’ 1998).

Modern vs Postmodern Animal Encounters

If, as I suggest above, there has been a shift in relationship to animals,

and what prevails now is a cultural concept of animals, such a shift
should be evident in a variety of cultural manifestations. In this section
I identify some of the areas in which this change can be perceived. The
shifts from modern to postmodern approaches are often telegraphed
through a chart of binaries. David Harvey, for instance, reproduces Ihab
Hassan’s thirty-two binaries that show schematic differences between
modernism and postmodernism: purpose/play, design/chance, hierar-
chy/anarchy, presence/absence, centring/dispersal, paradigm/syntagm,
metaphor/metonymy, master code/idiolect, symptom/desire, paranoia/
schizophrenia, metaphysics/irony, determinancy/indeterminancy, et al.
(Harvey 1997, p. 43; Hassan 1985, pp. 123–24). For Hassan and Harvey
these are not solely polarizations. As Harvey explains, “the ‘real struc-
ture of feeling’ in both the modern and postmodern periods, lies in the
manner in which these stylistic oppositions are synthesized.” (p. 42)
Such an evocation of binaries that juxtaposes the modern with the
late capitalist or postmodern can be helpful in demonstrating how
human beings are encountering animal beings today. I discuss a selec-
tion of these binaries below (see table, p. 52).

Factories Modeled on Slaughterhouses > Farms Modeled on Factories

In The Sexual Politics of Meat I described how the division of labor on
factory assembly lines owes its inception to Henry Ford’s visit to the
disassembly lines of Chicago slaughterhouses (2000, pp. 63–64). Ford
credited the idea of the assembly line to the fragmented activities of
animal slaughtering: “The idea came in a general way from the over-
head trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef ” (Ford 1922,
p. 81). One book on meat production, financed by a meat-packing
52 carol j. adams

Table 1
Modern
• transforms the referent of
nature
• animals are absent referents
• factories modeled on
slaughterhouses
• farms owned by individuals
• zoos
• animals as machines
• vivisection in universities
• in vivo research
• ‘pollo-vegetarians’
• viruses
• animal rights
• product liability
Binaries
Postmodern
• transforms the referent of culture
• ‘cultural beings’ are referents
• farms modeled on factories
• factory farms owned by corporations
• conservation and p/reservation
• machines as animals
• biomedical research by corporations
• in vitro research
• mock meat
• prions
• animal rites
• product ‘libel-ity’

company, describes the process: “The slaughtered animals, suspended

head downward from a moving chain, or conveyor, pass from work-
man to workman, each of whom performs some particular step in the
process.” The authors proudly add: “So efficient has this procedure
proved to be that it has been adopted by many other industries, as
for example in the assembling of automobiles” (Hinman and Harris
1939, pp. 64–65).
Although Ford reversed the outcome of the process of slaughtering
in that a product is created rather than fragmented on the assembly
line, he contributed at the same time to the larger fragmentation of the
individual’s work and productivity. The dismemberment of the human
body is not so much a construct of modern capitalism as modern capi-
talism is a construct built on dismemberment and fragmentation. As
James Barrett observes, “Historians have deprived the [meat]packers of
their rightful title of mass-production pioneers, for it was not Henry Ford
but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the assembly-line
technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized organization of
work” (Barrett 1987, p. 20).
The introduction of the assembly line in the auto industry—called
‘Fordism’ by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity—had a
quick and unsettling effect on the workers. Standardization of work and
separation from the final product became fundamental to the laborers’
experience. The result was to increase worker’s alienation from the
product they produced. Automation severed workers from a sense of
 post-meateating 53

accomplishment through the fragmentation of their jobs. In Labor and

Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry
Braverman explains the initial results of the introduction of the assembly
line: “Craftsmanship gave way to a repeated detail operation, and wage
rates were standardized at uniform levels.” Working men left Ford in
large numbers after the introduction of the assembly line. Braverman
observes: “In this initial reaction to the assembly line we see the natural
revulsion of the worker against the new kind of work.” (Braverman
1974, pp. 148–49). Ford dismembered the meaning of work, introduc-
ing productivity without the sense of being productive. Fragmentation
of the human body in late capitalism allows the dismembered part to
represent the whole. Fordism created mass consumers as well as mass
producers, insuring a plentiful supply of consumers for, among other
things, those slaughterhouse products.
David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity traces the architectural
changes from modern to postmodern, from a time when space was
shaped for aesthetic purposes to a time when “timeless and ‘disinter-
ested’ beauty” was an objective in itself (1997, p. 67). In the reversal of
the reversal—from disassembly line to assembly line—factories provide
the architectural template for the new production methods applied to
nonhuman animals. The attitude advised for pig farmers—“Forget the
pig is an animal,” but see him or her instead as “a machine in a fac-
tory” (Byrnes, quoted in Mason and Singer 1980, p. 1)—required an
architecture of disinterest, of mass production, of factories. Architecture,
which in many ways had failed to respond to the human shape, errs
even more so with farmed animals. Thus, animals kept warehoused
are crowded, unable to move or stretch. It is not surprising that they
engage in antisocial behavior. The architectural change has enabled
cannibalism. Rather than ameliorate the situation by changing the
architecture, the response was to change the animal, for instance by
removing the beaks of chickens and turkeys or the pigs’ tails.
Harvey cites the analysis of ‘symbolic capital’ proposed by Bourdieu:
product differentiation in urban design has become more and more
important in the “pursuit of the consumption dollars of the rich.”
Luxury goods manifest this symbolic capital, whose purpose is to conceal
“the fact that it originates in ‘material’ forms of capital” (Harvey 1997,
p. 77). Meat, once available only for the consumption of the rich in
Europe during the early modern period, became ‘democratized’ in the
United States during the nineteenth century—a food that was avail-
able to all classes. It became one of the commodities that lessened the
54 carol j. adams

injury of class. Drawing on Bourdieu, Harvey explains the function of

symbolic capital: since “the most successful ideological effects are those
which have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence,” the
production of symbolic capital serves ideological functions because the
mechanisms through which it contributes “to the reproduction of the
established order and the perpetuation of domination remain hidden”
(pp. 78–79). Ideological effects are found too in the architecture of fac-
tory farms. They, too, required no more than a complicitous silence,
enacted by the verbal silence of the nonhumans within and by the
restriction on access to their inner spaces.

Farms Owned By Individuals > Factory Farms Owned By Corporations

After World War II this new way of ‘producing’ nonhuman animals for
human consumption also meant a change for the individual farmers.
Farmers become contract laborers who grow the nonhumans at the
corporations’ behest, and the family farm disappears. This is a radical
transformation: it changes the way some people can earn money; it
changes the ‘countryside’ as huge farms appear and produce, among
other things, immense piles of manure; it changes the relationship
between farmer and farmed; and it changes the very lifecycles of the
farmed animals, e.g. the early removal of calves from their mothers, the
killing of male chicks who have no economic value to the farmer.3

Zoos > Conservation and P/reservation

According to Randy Malamud, the zoo is a model of empire and also
imperial confiscation. The zoo “is the analogue, in popular culture,
to the colonialist text in literary culture” (1998, p. 58). Zoos present a
restricted, imperialistic, supremacist view of the natural world. Zoos are
cruel to the animal beings who reside there. They inflict pain. Zoos steal
not only the physical animals but also “their more metaphysical essence
and integrity” (p. 325). Zoos are not, despite their claims, mimetic of a
larger macrocosm. Animal captivity therefore is harmful to the captive
animal and to the human spectator. “People imprison animals, and
pretend that they are bettering themselves by such actions” (p. 27).
Zoos want us to misread them as they inculcate in us a spectatorship
of voyeurism.

3
Susan Squier discusses these transformations in her essay ‘Fellow-Feeling’, in this
volume.
 post-meateating 55

Under attack for the conditions of nonhumans under their care, zoos
in the late twentieth century discovered a new raison d’etre besides
exhibiting the otherness of the other animals: saving them. While failing
to acknowledge that the existence of one’s species is of no relevance
to an individual tiger or elephant, under the umbrella of preventing
extinction zoos have become sites of preservation, ‘reservations’ for
those whose otherness is deemed worthy of perpetuating for human
spectatorship. This leads to incongruous alliances. For instance, the
Dallas Zoo and Exxon Corporation together created a $4.5 million
tiger exhibit and breeding facility. Called ‘Exxon Endangered Tiger
Exhibit,’ it was funded by city bonds, a $765,000 grant from Exxon,
and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s ‘Save the Tiger Fund.’
The Exxon exhibit was planned to house as many as ten Sumatran
and Indochinese tigers and to include a facility where tigers could be
bred every four to five years. Also included would be air-conditioned
indoor holding areas with sleeping shelves and skylights, an outdoor
exercise yard and two maternity dens.
Explaining why an oil company was undertaking this venture, Ed
Ahnert, president of the Exxon Education Foundation and manager of
contributions for Exxon Corp explained, “We are the company that puts
a tiger in your tank.” A cultural tiger is concerned about ‘real’ tigers.
Whether a tiger in tank or zoo, the idea of ‘tiger’, like the idea of ‘the
wild’, is undergoing massive change. Since extinction does not matter
to the individual (see Kappeler 1995), but to the group, a humanocen-
tric concern is being imposed to create a unitary perspective. Further,
the conditions of poverty, colonialism, and hunting that threaten the
‘tiger’ are not identified. The political context is not a referent, only
the cultural; ‘the zoo’—whose existence is traced to the human need
to reaffirm human superiority over the other animals—becomes the
referent for (and saver of !) the tiger. The logical extension of this is that
one day there will be just one or two animals of each species left—but
they will be available to all of us, perhaps via the Internet. Whenever
we want to ‘see’ an animal, we will just log in to the virtual zoo, or
‘pet’ store, or rain forest.

Animals as Machines > Machines as Beasts

Tom Regan’s scholarly attempt to claim consciousness and biography
for animals, The Case for Animal Rights—a valuable effort at recognizing
the individuality of nonhuman animals—is notable, for our purposes,
for two things. First, it was practically dated, even before its appear-
56 carol j. adams

ance, by postmodernism’s replacement of the idea of the individual,

autonomous subject with the idea of multiple selves and a fluid subject.4
Secondly, however, Regan’s attempt as a ‘modern’ project, of repudiat-
ing once and for all Descartes’ definition of animals as machines, was
an important development. Others, especially Steve Wise, have ably
followed in his footsteps (Wise 2001).
While farmed animals become treated more and more like machines
in factory farms when alive, the idea of machines as animals prolifer-
ates. I proposed earlier that one aspect of the postmodern relationship
to the ‘cultural’ animal is reflected ontologically: there is only ‘the sys-
tem.’ Ontologically, the virtual becomes the real and this is effectively
demonstrated in the development of the virtual pet, a digital toy that
is treated as a pet. The ‘Tamagotchi’ is one of the most well-known
brands. One consumer describes the Tamagotchi:
The object is to see how long you can get your tamagotchi to live and
how well you care for it. Nothing complicated about it, which means no
breeding, no nothing. With great care the tamagotchi can live 30 years
(days). If you neglect it [it] might only live about 6–9 years (days). Its up
to you how you want your tamagotchi to be. (Lisa “insane” 2005)
Another explains just how to keep your ‘pet’ alive:
You feed the pet, care for it, clean up after it, and teach it to behave.
The second model has a sensor on top that lets your pet interact with
other version 2 pets to play or even mate to make the next generation of
Tamagotchis. The third model is able to use codes [. . .] to give your pet
gifts, special food treats, and toys. (Miss Kitty “Toy Diva” 2006)
Giga Farms and Giga Circuses have also appeared. The majority of the
first round of virtual pets were sold to girls. Manufacturers—to tap into
the boy market—decided to forget about pets that need to be nurtured
and to market virtual pets that fight. Computer game play involving
killing and blasting things fetishizes death in such a way as to remove
the concept of death. But with virtual pets, ‘dying’ takes on another
meaning: the playing is over. In order to understand the concept of
meat eating, much less the ‘fact’ of it, you have to comprehend the
dying involved. In the computer-mediated world of virtual pets death
involves mere disposability and replace-ability. The mediated realm of
the computer-influenced age involves never seeing the actual animal

4
See ‘Animal Rights > Animal Rites’, below.
 post-meateating 57

and yet experiencing the animal as virtual pet. Elaborate mourning

procedures can occur when a virtual pet dies. Needless to say, however,
a relationship with a virtual pet is not an encounter with an animal
being.

Vivisection > Biomedical Research, In Vivo > In Vitro Research

‘Vivisection’ sounds so quaint; ‘biomedical research’ has replaced it.
The latter term works by association: biomedical research is research
on animals. Where ‘vivisection’ sounds perhaps unsavory and invasive,
‘biomedical research’ sounds important and necessary. Thus, negative
connotations accrue to those opposed to experimentation on animals:
if one is not experimenting on animals one is not doing biomedical
research. University research has spawned spin off for-profit companies.
Research no longer focuses on how the nonhuman animal as an entity
experiences something (in vivo research) but instead on how isolated
animal parts experience being experimented upon (in vitro research).
Ironically, the postmodern state has seen the proliferation of experimen-
tation on nonhumans at the behest of the government at the same time
that the possibilities for replacing such experimentation come into exis-
tence. The bureaucratic state has reinforced the use of the nonhuman
through a Byzantine regulatory process that insures that questionable
animal studies are performed instead of quicker, less expensive non-
animal ones. If relevant information from the experience of humans
exists, it may be disregarded for questionable data from animals because
of these regulations. Tests on nonhuman animals introduce variables
that are not predictable and not necessarily reproducible.5 Yet, because
they are required by regulations, they continue.
Consider, for instance, one of the most popular nonhumans used for
animal experimentation: rats. Rats cannot vomit toxins; humans can.
Rodents are nose breathers; humans breathe through both the nose
and the mouth, enabling us to ingest toxins simultaneously through
both routes. Rats synthesize Vitamin C in their bodies; humans do not.
Excess fat accumulates in rats’ livers; in humans it accumulates in the
coronary arteries. Rats have no gall bladder; humans do. Animals are
exposed to high doses of materials being tested; humans are exposed to
low doses. Arsenic, to take one example, is not carcinogenic in rodents;

5
See, for instance, the infamous effects of thalidomide, taken by pregnant women
in the 1950s and 1960s.
58 carol j. adams

it is in humans. Because of these and numerous other differences that

Alix Fano enumerates,
the toxic effects observed in rodents may be completely irrelevant to those
observed in humans because the organs that are affected, the types of
cancers that are produced, the way in which they metastasize, and the
rates at which they manifest themselves, are vastly different. (Fano 1997,
p. 53)
At the same time that the postmodern state requires use of nonhuman
animals, technological advances have created alternative, non-animal
methods, including “computerized modeling and predication systems . . .,
genetically engineered cell lines, X-ray assays, batteries of human skin
and tissue cultures, epidemiological studies of populations, and carefully
controlled clinical trials.” (Fano 1997, p. 136). Most of these are fast,
less costly, reproducible, and importantly, more accurate. Some com-
panies have begun to use these alternatives. But regulations imposed
by governmental bodies have created a double standard, requiring that
non-animal methods be validated before they can be used, even though,
as Fano explains, “it has never been scientifically shown that animal
tests could be used to establish qualitative or quantitative carcinogenic
risk for humans” (p. 69).

Pollo-Vegetarians > Mock Meat

A response that weakened the concept of vegetarianism was its modi-
fication through terms such as ‘pollo-vegetarian’ or ‘pesco-vegetarian.’
Individuals using such (mis)nomenclatures for themselves are actually
omnivores who omit only dead four-legged beings or land animals from
their diet. One might argue that the ‘pollo’s’ and the ‘pesco’s’ were
hijacking vegetarianism back within a dominant modernist framework:
the radical critique by vegetarianism of the consumption of dead bod-
ies was eviscerated. Clearly, meat eaters who did not eat dead cows
thought they could be classified as vegetarian because they did not eat
‘red meat.’ Chickens and fishes continued to be absent referents.
In contrast to meat eaters who believed themselves to be vegetarians
has been the appearance of vegetarians who eat ‘meat.’ Prior to its
contemporary manifestation, the use of substitutes that resemble the
texture of meat could be found in many cultures. Now, however, mock
meat is much more widely available, giving a new meaning to ‘mock
turtle soup.’ Chinese cuisine pioneered the use of flavored gluten as
a meat substitute. Buddhist vegetarians could dine on sweet and sour
‘shrimp,’ Chinese ‘duck,’ and kung pao ‘chicken.’ Chinese vegetarian
 post-meateating 59

restaurants whose entire menu comprises meat substitutes can be found

in major cities throughout the United States. Meanwhile, mock meat
suppliers of ‘tofuturkey’, veggie ‘hot dogs’, veggie ‘burgers’ and even
Canadian ‘bacon’ have made inroads into traditional supermarkets.
Here, quotation marks allow for the substitution of a cultural referent
for the absent referent without any harm befalling animals. Ersatz meat
is meat without the animal. There is no absent referent. Rather than
meat eaters believing themselves to be vegetarians (pesco or pollo), the
postmodern period has allowed for vegetarians to eat ‘meat.’ Moreover,
it means that meat eaters may be eating vegetarian meals without even
knowing it.6 Thus, post-meateating. Does a meal still require an end-
ing, a closure? The modernists’ ending was that a meal required meat.
Perhaps, in fact, the idea of meat in a meal is a legacy of modernism.
Postmodernism may liberate the absent referent from the meal without
the consumer experiencing a perception of lack, of deprivation. The
referent of tofuturkey can be unconsumed.

Viruses and Antibodies > Prions

Viruses, such as HIV, influenza, and Ebola are modern diseases. Though
they may have been around for centuries, especially influenza, they were
only ‘discovered’ during modern times. Viruses contain genetic material
and require an animal host. A virus, by virtue of being a virus, infects
cells. The metaphor for describing the working of a virus is invasion:
When a virus successfully invades a cell, it inserts its own genes into the
cell’s genome, and the viral genes seize control from the cell’s own genes.
The cell’s internal machinery then begins producing what the viral genes
demand instead of what the cell needs for itself. (Barry 2004, p. 100)
The influenza pandemic of the early twentieth-century and the threat
of another one share a common source—birds. Indeed, “evidence now
suggests that all pandemic influenza viruses—in fact all human and
mammalian flu viruses in general—owe their origins to avian influenza”
(Greger 2006, p. 13).
The disease that represents postmodern times is so-called ‘mad cow
disease’. This disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy
(TSE). An encephalopathy is any degenerative illness of the brain; in
this case the disease attacks the brain and gives a sponge-like consistency

6
See my maxim in Living Among Meateaters: “Nonvegetarians are perfectly happy eating
a vegan meal, as long as they are not aware they are doing so.” (2009, p. 208)
60 carol j. adams

to it as the nerve cells are destroyed. It is a debilitating, fatal illness that

afflicts many species. Like viruses, this disease jumps species. Unlike
viruses, it is believed that the agent that causes mad cow disease—pri-
ons—has no genetic material. As with the avian flu virus, mad cow
disease signals the return of the referent as the prions leap from cows
to human beings causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the fatal human
equivalent of mad cow disease.
In 1984, Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner proposed that TSEs were caused by
rogue proteins known as prions that are thought to be abnormal vari-
ants of the prion protein normally present on the surface of nerve
cells . . . Prions lack the DNA and RNA that are the hereditary material
of other transmissible agents. (Altman 1996)
Dr. Prusiner’s studies, for which he won the Nobel Prize, were at first
“regarded as heretical because they invoked a bizarre concept that infec-
tions could be caused by an agent without genetic material” (Altman
1996). As Laura Beil put it, “to science, that’s a bit like announcing that
after some research, it turns out that computers can crunch numbers
perfectly fine without software” (Beil 1996). TSE’s appear invulnerable:
cooking, canning, freezing, bleaching, and sterilizing cannot destroy
them. They have been called “the smallest . . ., most lethal self-perpetu-
ating biological entities in the world” (Greger 1996). It is difficult to
‘make science’ when a disease has no genetic material, a long incuba-
tion period, and cannot be precisely identified until after death. What
makes it the representative postmodern disease is that it has no genetic
materiality for it to refer back to (see also Adams 1997).

Animal Rights > Animal Rites

After an incredible flourishing in the 1970s, the animal rights movement
has undergone some difficult times. First, many people seem concerned
about animal welfare, but not quite as many are willing to go vegan
or stop going to zoos. Secondly, because it has been best known as a
‘rights’ movement, anyone who does not feel ‘rights’ is the appropriate
language because of its liberal assumptions (from environmentalists to
postmodernists), disassociate themselves from the intent of the move-
ment as well.7

7
Another way exists, as Josephine Donovan and I have sought to establish (2007).
 post-meateating 61

In the narrative that imposes cause and effect on radical movements,

the animal rights movement is traced to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation
(1975), which doesn’t actually advocate rights per se. More probably
the awareness of the oppression of nonhumans that erupted in the
1970s was a result of a confluence of forces, including the extension
of the anti-Vietnam war and anti-violence activism of the late 1960s
and early 1970s to concern for nonhumans, the evolution of Earth Day
from 1970 onward, and the extension of feminist insights to beings
other than humans.
The animal rights movement has the misfortune of articulating a
modernist claim just as postmodernism absorbs and displaces modern-
ist thinking. It appears dated, announcing in its activism—boycotts,
placards, lobbying—its own anachronism. It appears absolutist and
serious in a time when irony and self-deprecation prevail. It is seen as
too serious, too literal, too preachy. Trying to get culture to get back to
the referent ‘animal’ is seen as too boring, not playful. Peter Singer and
Tom Regan, major theorists about nonhuman animals, are dismissed
in a postmodern response that rejects their basic assumption that a
modern, autonomous subject exists from which to extend his or her
rights to nonhuman animals. For postmodernism, multiple, evolving
selves exist, not a fixed unity.
This appears to be what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) knows. They don’t spend too much time in their public cam-
paigns saying “care about the animals.” Instead, they shock. They
use visual images but with cultural referents, not animals. They use
supermodels. They use celebrities. They take any cultural idea that is
circulating and twist it. Rather than producing for general consumption
the ‘bleeding Jesus’ pictures, as one Catholic friend calls them, of dam-
aged, injured animals, PETA puts on Mickey Mouse masks to protest
animal experimentation. They’re ironic. ‘Got Beer?’ they ask in their
attempt to point out that it is ‘safer’ to drink beer than milk, infuriating
anti-drinking activists. ‘Got prostrate cancer?’ they asked when Rudi
Guiliani—who indeed, did—was Mayor of New York City. (They were
pointing out the connection between drinking milk and prostrate cancer.)
PETA has recognized that the referent, animals, is gone. And they are
trying to work with what is there, cultural consumption, by manipulating
cultural images and issues. They are trying to get people to talk about
veganism without having to address what has disappeared. It does not
matter who they offend. In fact, the more the better. Tastelessness is
newsworthy; nonhuman farmed animals are not.
62 carol j. adams

Fig. 3.2 PETA’s ‘Got Beer?’ campaign (2000)

 post-meateating 63

Fig. 3.3 PETA’s ‘Got Prostrate Cancer?’ campaign (2000)

64 carol j. adams

David Harvey suggests that another aspect of the condition of post-

modernity is that because of “widespread insecurity in labour markets,
in technological mixes, credit systems, and the like” a preoccupation
with identity, with heritage, with entertainment has appeared (Harvey
1997, p. 87). We all carry around with us, according to Jencks, a “musee
imaginaire in our minds” (cited in Harvey, p. 87). Animal rites become a
postmodern project, in which members of the dominant culture claim
identification with Native practices such as hunting while they continue
to get their meals of dead animals from dominant practices such as
factory farming or ‘organic’ farming. Animal rites as heritage or New
Age expression—the use of eagle feathers, drumming with leather
drums, et al.—supersedes animal rights. Animal rites might also entail
the desire to affect the trappings of primitive cultures via scarification,
tattoos, piercing, and following diets like the ‘Neanderthal’ diet and
the ‘Caveman’ diet. Trying to recapture one’s primitive roots through
body modification and false rituals that offer a ‘mystical experience’,
from sweat lodges to hunting, becomes a cultural response to a cultural
idea of the primitive.
Similarly, the referent for faux fur is cultural. As Diana York Blaine
observes, the insistence by producers and promoters of ‘faux fur’ that
it is not ‘real’ seems strange,
perhaps for a more postmodern reason than merely avoiding the politics
of fur, especially when it’s bizarre in color or form. No animal bears
fur like that, so it’s in effect ‘virtual fur,’ divorced from any living being.
(Blaine 1998)
If, in modernism, there’s something to be alienated from, “postmodern
faux fur has no relationship to an actual animal—so why wear it? Perhaps
the engineered is now the Real” (Blaine 1998).

Product Liability > Product ‘Libel-ity’

Commodification is a process that produces consumers as well as meat.
If product liability was the concern of the modern reform movement,
seeking to protect consumers from the product, product libel-ity is the
postmodern response, designed to protect the product from consumer
advocates. During modern times, advocates attempted to protect con-
sumers from dangerously manufactured products. Ralph Nader’s famous
Unsafe At Any Speed (1965), outlining car manufacturers’ reluctance to
introduce safety features, could be said to have originated this time
period. In postmodern times, product libel-ity predominates, whereby
 post-meateating 65

products are protected from the consumers, specifically from activists

speaking out on behalf of consumers. In many cases the products
being ‘protected’ are consumable dead animal bodies. In Great Britain,
McDonald’s sued activists Helen Steel and David Morris in the infamous
and protracted ‘McLibel’ case (‘McLibel Trial’, no date). In Texas,
the National Cattleman’s Beef Association attempted to sue Oprah
Winfrey and anti-meat eating activist Howard Lyman after Lyman
had commented on Oprah’s show that ranchers were feeding dead
cows to their herds (Lyman, no date). Product ‘libel-ity’ becomes the
vehicle for corporations to protect the commodification of the product
and of the consumer.

No Particular Relief

I am not claiming that the modern period was a ‘better’ time for nonhu-
man animals; it was not. Exploitation was their fate then, too. Nor do
I see a break, some definitive moment when the modern ended, for I
am not examining a linear process, but one with both continuities and
discontinuities. In many instances, how the nonhumans are exploited
remains the same—they are eaten, experimented upon, are the captive
entertainment at circuses and zoos. What seems to be different is how
humans receive this information. I quoted Harvey’s suggestion earlier
that “the real ‘structure of feeling’ in both the modern and postmod-
ern periods, lies in the manner in which these stylistic oppositions are
synthesized” (Harvey 1997, p. 42). For instance, Hassan and Harvey
identify a movement away from metaphysics toward irony. Such a
movement enables the ‘ironizing’ of animals’ situation and of how
humans encounter them.
Those caring for animals face another layer of denial that they
must break through: not that people do not care, but that people are
bored by it. Thus, we are more likely to encounter the (absent) animal
referent in the Business section of the New York Times than in the News
section. For instance, before the Thanksgiving holiday, celebrated in the
United States on the fourth Thursday of November, regular newspaper
articles will feature the silly (the President ‘pardons’ one turkey) and the
dead (how to cook the unpardoned ones). Meanwhile, in the Business
section, the Patents column announced in 1997, ‘New techniques for
raising and killing turkeys arrive just in time for Thanksgiving’ (Riordan
1997). Because patents have to be very specific in their description, the
66 carol j. adams

Times had to be very specific in explaining them and why they were
needed. The patents were for the development of antibodies to coun-
teract a hen’s unhappiness when her eggs are removed, to insure she
will continue to lay more eggs; radiating the upper beak to cause it to
fall off; a turkey call on a shotgun; and a suffocation process for killing
turkeys by placing them in a chamber with carbon dioxide, argon, and
little oxygen. The specificity of description of why the patents were
needed was fascinating, touching on reproduction, the turkey’s role
as producer, and the transformation of live into dead—all topics that
require describing what happens to the absent referent:
– Reproduction: though turkey hens “like to lay a clutch of eggs and
then sit on them until they hatch,” the turkey farmer removes the eggs
to hatch elsewhere. Yet, the Times acknowledges, the turkey hens have
feelings: they are “upset” and “unhappy over the absence of their
progeny.”
– The turkey’s role as producer of his or her own flesh: because turkeys
live “in close proximity”—recall that farm architecture has changed,
enabling cannibalism8—the “tips of their beaks often are either cut off
or cauterized to prevent the birds from injuring one another.”
– During slaughtering, poultry workers must shackle a turkey’s legs,
hanging the bird upside down so that her or his head is immersed in
water. The bird is stunned by an electrical current passing through the
water. We are told that for the turkeys, “Their wings are flapping and
they’re very unhappy.” Then their throats are slit.
The newly registered patents were attempts to ameliorate the situation
for the farmer and the consumer, not the “unhappy” turkey, who still
faces loss of progeny, beak, and life. Just as the banning of the cow
from the CowParade suggests a rather definite substantiality to the
referent, so too does the acknowledgement of slaughter in the New
York Times’ Business section. This is what complicates the postmodern
response to activism on behalf of other animals. How does the absent
referent become restored, made present? How is the very real animal
body encountered? In contrast to activist efforts to undo reification,
the postmodern cultural referent may only further objectify, and thus
complicate, the attempt at restoration. Even if there were agreement
that someone is there, who is it?

8
See ‘Factories Modeled on Slaughterhouses > Farms Modeled on Factories’,
above.
 post-meateating 67

Playboar—the Pig Farmer’s Playboy offers one answer. Playboar’s function

is to create a playful male identity. I was sent my first copy of Playboar
shortly after the original 1990 publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat.
At first Playboar seemed to me a dated—modern—example of sexist
humor. Its cover announced this, as it featured an homage to the 1960’s
movie version of Lolita. The movie advertisement for Lolita depicted
heart-shaped sunglasses being worn by Lolita; with Playboar, a piglet
wears heart-shaped sunglasses. In the many years of its existence,
Playboar has felt the need to update itself only minimally. It did so with
one aspect of its centerfold. I had described the centerfold that appeared
in Playboar in The Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams 2000, pp. 50–51). At
that time, I did not know that the image I was describing was from
this magazine. I had encountered it in the pages of The Beast, a British
animal activist magazine, in the early 1980s. Jim Mason had seen the
image posted on a wall at the Iowa State Fair and snapped a photo-
graph of it. The centerfold depicts a healthy sexual being posing near
her drink. She wears bikini panties only and luxuriates on a large chair
with her head rested seductively on an elegant lace doily. Her inviting
drink with a twist of lemon awaits on the table. Her eyes are closed,
and her facial expression beams pleasure, relaxation, enticement. She is
touching her crotch in an attentive, masturbatory action. Anatomy of
seduction: sex object, drink, inviting room, sexual activity. The formula
is complete. But a woman does not beckon. A pig does.
At the time that I first encountered this seductive pig she was called
‘Ursula Hamdress’, a clear reference to Ursula Andress, the buxom
movie star of the 1960s. But in the copy of Playboar sent to me by an
activist in the 1990s, this ‘Littermate of the Year’ had been renamed
‘Taffy Lovely.’ Sensing that some cultural referent had gone out of style,
Playboar updated itself. But regarding the animals themselves, nothing
had to be changed.
In Chapter 3 of The Conditions of Postmodernity, David Harvey pro-
vides a discussion of the postmodern binaries referred to in part two
of this essay. He observes “the evaporation of any sense of historical
continuity and memory, and the rejection of meta-narratives” (p. 55).
One of the manifestations of postmodernity is that, “The immediacy
of events, the sensationalism of the spectacle (political, scientific, mili-
tary, as well as those of entertainment), become the stuff of which
consciousness is formed” (p. 54). Running parallel to the text in that
chapter are several famous images of naked women, specifically Titian’s
Venus d’Urbino, Manet’s Olympia (which reworked the ideas of Titian),
68 carol j. adams

Fig. 3.4 ‘Ursula Hamdress’ from Playboar (reprinted in The Beast: The
Magazine that Bites Back, 10 (Summer 1981), pp. 18–19)

Rauschenberg’s Persimmon, and an advertisement for Citizen Watches

featuring a naked young woman. If he had encountered ‘Ursula’ or
‘Taffy’ in his research he might have included her as well for she, too,
like Manet’s Olympia, is posed in a reworking of the ideas of Titian.
The question to be asked of both of them is: are they masturbating?
Those who manipulated the pig offer the answer that art historians
initially hesitated to admit about the Venus d’Urbino: her genitalia are
not being covered, they are being stimulated. The major difference between
them is the gaze: Venus beholds us directly, but would, or could, the
pig? Is the pig even alive?
In a note to the paperback edition, at the end of that chapter, Harvey
responds to what must have been some surprising criticisms.
The illustrations used in this chapter have been criticized by some feminists
of a postmodern persuasion. They were deliberately chosen because they
allowed comparison across the supposed pre-modern, modern, and post-
modern divides. The classical Titian nude is actively reworked in Manet’s
modernist Olympia . . . All of the illustrations make use of a woman’s
body to inscribe their particular message. The additional point I sought
to make is that the subordination of women, one of many ‘troublesome
contradictions’ in bourgeois Enlightenment practices, can expect no par-
ticular relief by appeal to postmodernism. (Harvey 1997, p. 65)
 post-meateating 69

As PETA itself has shown, using pictures of a woman’s body and

working with Playboy magazine ensure a successful media campaign.
So the question to be posed to the sexualized pig, following Harvey’s
acknowledgement that the subordination of women can expect no
particular relief by appeal to postmodernism, is this: does she reflect
the situation of women or pigs or both?
Recently I came upon Playboar for sale at the bookstore at one of the
most upscale of Dallas’s upscale malls, where symbolic capital is their
stock-in-trade. Playboar was placed immediately in front of the check-out
counter. “Out of curiosity,” I said to the clerk, “I am wondering why
are you carrying this?” “We can’t keep it in stock!” the man behind
the counter responded. Playboar confirms Harvey’s claim that some
things do not change and there are some things that postmodernism
has not relieved. Clearly gendered, the pig is either drugged or dead to
be posed in this position. Her eventual fate is represented there: dead,
consumable female flesh. Which will prove harder to change, the menu
with pig, cow, chicken and other flesh still central to it, or the subor-
dination of women? It depends in part upon whether butchery truly
animates an aspect of women’s consummability and whether women’s
subordination creates the environment for the absent referent status of
nonhumans (see Adams 2003).
Playboar conveys a message to those injured by class, a message that
meat eating once was able to sustain on its own: not only, “I can’t be
wealthy, but I can eat meat”, but also, “I can’t be wealthy, but I can
own a woman, I can eat meat, and I can enjoy the comic degradation
of women and animals.”9 With the absent referent, we do not have
to see meat eating as contact with a once-living animal because it has
been renamed as contact with food. We do not have to think, “This is
an encounter with an animal, an animal whom I required be violently
killed and dismembered.” Whether or not that nonhuman can be
experienced more fully because of the slippery nature of the subject
as ushered in by postmodernism, it remains the case that whatever
subject status nonhumans might gain from postmodernism, they have
yet to gain it at the supper table.
When I meet postmodern theorists whose work I value and we discuss
the status of nonhuman animals something peculiar happens. I think

9
I explore these ideas of how racism, sexism, and classism are implicated in meat
eating more extensively in The Sexual Politics of Meat (2000), especially pp. 36–49.
70 carol j. adams

that we are discussing the cultural referent when suddenly a defensive

acknowledgement is made. I am not told, “I think the referent is even
more slippery or culturally-mediated than you discuss in your book.”
Instead I am informed, “You need to know, I’m not a vegetarian.” I
am always surprised that they feel compelled to tell me this, as in those
situations I usually follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.10 Sometimes,
precisely which nonhumans the theorist consumes are identified (“I
still eat fish,” “chicken,” etc). The autonomous, unitary human fades
in the presence of postmodernism, except at a meal. At that time, there
is only one mouth, one stomach, one tongue performing the act of
feeding one body.
If George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a representative modern novel, in
both its theme and its depiction of a time when animals were owned
by individual farmers, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is perhaps the
postmodern equivalent: animals are produced by science, especially the
computer, and then computer graphics bring the animals to ‘life’ at
the movies. In Animal Farm one of the first things the liberated pigs do
is to throw away the implements of their oppression. In Jurassic Park, a
meat-eater’s nightmare is depicted, as carnivorous dinosaurs attempt to
do to people what people do to nonhuman animals, i.e. eat them. From
a farm to a park, from politics to play, from animals representing the
working laborers overthrowing the moneyed class, to the consumption
of leisure and entertainment for that moneyed class. Interestingly, the
individual who saves the humans from the nonhumans in Jurassic Park
is the sole vegetarian in the movie. She does so not through battling the
foe in hand to claw combat, but by breaking the computer’s password
which enables certain doors to close and stop the carnivores.
Ursula Nordstrom, the famous Harper and Row children’s editor, who
worked with almost every luminary of children’s literature—Margaret
Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak, and E.B. White among them—tells an
interesting story. She was once offered a meal with a dead rabbit as
the main course. She demurred, explaining “I publish rabbits” (Marcus
1998, p. xxxi). The referent was cultural. Not a break, not a dichotomy,
but something continuous from Animal Farm onward remains in the

10
On the dynamics of discussions between vegetarians and meat eaters, see my
Living Among Meat Eaters (2009), especially pp. 91–122.
 post-meateating 71

present. It is the difference between eating one’s childhood copy of a

children’s classic and eating a rabbit or a cow.11

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——. 2003. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum.
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Lantern.
Barrett, James. 1987. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers,
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11
Thanks to Tom Tyler and Randy Malamud for their careful reading of this essay
and their valuable suggestions in improving it. For discussions that greatly improved
my understanding of the phenomena I explore in this essay, I thank Diana Blaine and
Jayne Loader. This essay is for them.
72 carol j. adams

Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, 320–352. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
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 CHAPTER FOUR

AMERICANS DO WEIRD THINGS WITH ANIMALS, OR,

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

Randy Malamud

Americans do weird things with animals. Others do as well, but as in

most other mass-market cultural enterprises, Americans lead the way,
with our commercially-powerful resource-intensive anthrozoological
perversities. These perversities proliferate amid America’s imperialistic
orientation of entitlement toward our ecosystem (‘it’s all ours, we bought
Alaska, so drill away’), an orientation that sanctions animal fetishism,
speciesism, and short-sighted greed for material goods and experiential
novelty that we reap at the expense of nonhuman animals.
Probably our imperious stance toward the natural world grows out
of the same sensibility embodied in the political ideology of Manifest
Destiny. Nineteenth-century Americans invoked Manifest Destiny to
justify westward expansion toward the Pacific Ocean; in the twentieth
century a comparable ethos of self-important entitlement underlay
America’s claim to the role of superpower. And now, having achieved
a virtually unilateral geopolitical dominance, the next realm ripe for
the onslaught of Manifest Destiny is nature: more trees must be cut
down, more habitats bulldozed, more wetlands filled, more wilderness
plundered, more coal mined and burned, in the name of American
progress.
We Americans have a dysfunctional and sometimes paranoid com-
pulsion to ‘disarm’ the threat we see emanating from ‘nature-as-other.’
Our cultural exploitation of animals often facilitates—directly or indi-
rectly, consciously or subconsciously—this agenda of disempowering
animals. We seem to embrace Freud’s expression that a civilized society
is one in which “wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated”
(1969, p. 30).
When we encounter other animals, we selfishly abuse and manipulate
them, often and on a grand scale. Mostly, I think, we simply do not
understand them, and we are certainly poorer for this. Our cultural
interactions and representations are ecologically significant: how we
treat animals in culture affects how we treat animals in nature. The
74 randy malamud

implications of my polemical screed are meant to broach what the

world might look like if we could transcend demeaning idées reçues about
other animals’ “abjectivity” (lack of control over one’s representation,
in the words of Philip Morrissey; 1997, p. 20) and commence upon the
challenge of seeing them in a way that would enable us, in the future,
to generate representations that are more ethically and ecologically
reasonable. “What is at stake ultimately,” as Erica Fudge writes, “is
our own ability to think beyond ourselves” (2002, 22).
Americans are not unique in our proclivity for using animals weirdly.
A Brazilian ‘artist,’ Eduardo Kac, created what he calls a GFP Bunny:
GFP stands for Green Flourescent Protein, which is normally produced
by genes in the DNA of jellyfish. This rabbit glows in the dark. Kac
calls it transgenic art, billing this project as the first artwork to include
a genetically altered mammal.1 Nathalia Edenmont is a Ukranian
‘artist’ who kills animals to make art. She constructs displays of the
taxidermized heads of mice, rabbits, doves and cats: for example, a
hand with the head of a dead mouse on the tip of each finger. Her
gallery defends her by saying
One can, of course, choose to think that it is always wrong to kill animals
in the name of art . . . [ but] many other beautiful things hide some sort
of suffering. . . . Many of us eat meat, wear leather, or use makeup that
has been tested on animals. . . . But when a picture shows a dead rabbit,
all hell breaks loose. . . . She is not the first to use dead animals in works
of art.2
Indeed she is not: English ‘sculptor’ Damien Hirst, too, does weird
things with dead animals. One could enter into a long and heated
debate about how such tableaux as ‘This Little Piggy Went to Market,
This Little Piggy Stayed at Home’ (a pig cut in half ), ‘The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (a shark float-
ing in formaldehyde), and ‘A Thousand Years’ (a rotting cow head
with live flies) relate to the tradition of art: what this work means, and
whether, as Hirst has suggested, we may actually read into his oeuvre
some sort of redemptive, eye-opening exposé about the human-animal
relationship (see e.g. Baker 2006). But I prefer not to have that discus-
sion, and simply to dismiss him as brutal: and brutal in the particular
mode of high humanism. That is, the conceit that we can do what we
want with animals, because . . . we can do what we want with animals.

1
GFP Bunny, http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html (accessed 15 September 2007).
2
Wetterling Gallery, http://www.wetterlinggallery.com (accessed 6 January 2007).
 americans do weird things with animals 75

Anyone can do anything. This is my pithy formulation of the human-

ist ideology.
But even amid this international carnival of anthrozoological weird-
ness, I would argue, on behalf of my countrymen and women, that
Americans do the weirdest things with animals, and with such extensive
global ramifications, that we would do well to investigate, and ide-
ally, to reform, some of our cultural habits and behavior. My premise
is that it is morally, intellectually, and ecologically preferable not to
do weird things with animals. By ‘weird,’ I mean contra natura; silly;
irrational; counterproductive or retrograde, in terms of envisioning a
relationship that people could have with animals that would be more
fulfilling and better suited to our role as one species among many in a
complex and vast ecosystem. As someone who tries to be ecologically
informed and intelligent—aware of the complex interrelations that exist
between me and other animals, and plants, and the environment; intent
upon behaving in a way that respects the rights and the integrity of
all these elements, and minimally impinges upon their prosperity—it
makes me cringe with embarrassment for my fellow human creatures
in the presence of the pervasive cultural weirdness that manifests itself
so frequently. Characterizing this sensibility as ‘weird’ is an admittedly
simplistic, perhaps even juvenile way of trying to wholeheartedly shame
the weirdoes into recognition of their annoyingly bad form. On the
schoolyard, the taunt is hurled with the intent of challenging, even
bullying, the deviant subject to adhere to social norms. In this essay,
the taunt is meant to challenge the ecologically deviant actors among
us—the anthropocentrists—to stop behaving in a way that mocks the
‘normal’ symbiotic dynamic of our ecosystem.
To give a self-serving example of how people might benefit from
a more enlightened relationship with other animals: during the 2004
Asian tsunamis, many animals escaped. They seem to have had what
we might construe as some sort of ‘sixth sense’ (though this metaphysi-
cal construction might overstate the fact that the other animals simply
had keen sensitivity to the elements, and the planet’s rumblings). It was
widely reported that no animal corpses were found among the tens
of thousands of human corpses; the animals apparently fled to higher
ground before the waves hit (Mott 2005).3 Despite our earthquake/

3
Eyewitnesses reported that elephants screamed and ran for higher ground, dogs
refused to go outdoors, and flamingoes abandoned their low-lying breeding areas
(Mott, 2005).
76 randy malamud

tsunami alert technology (which, like the Maginot line, was facing the
wrong way; Revkin 2004), despite all the satellites and sensors and
computer models, we as a species failed to save ourselves while the
animals survived. Maybe someday the animals will tell us how they did
it. We do in fact talk to animals today: animal behaviorists, modern
day Dr. Doolittles, teach animals human signs, words, and grammars.
The apotheosis of this enterprise, as it now stands, is that we teach
orangutans how to communicate in sign language such expressions as
“I would like to buy an ice cream cone,” and when the animal gives
over the correct change (they are paid in coins for performing upkeep
tasks in their compounds), he gets his ice cream (Spalding 2003, p. 124).
Learning to talk with animals is a great idea, but we shouldn’t be talk-
ing about ice cream. Maybe somebody thought it would be a clever
market expansion to train another species to consume our goods in a
commercial economy, but I think we need to be talking more along
the lines of: how can we escape from the tsunamis? And what do
you think about what we are doing to the forests? Do you have any
better ideas?4
I want to interrogate humanism in terms of how we have integrated
animals into our cultural worldview. I’m interested in what part animals
play in this bundle of culture in the age of humanism, and what comes
next: what part will animals play in a posthuman consciousness? Let
me cut to the chase and acknowledge that my answer, indeed the final
three words of my essay, will be, “I don’t know.” But I’d nevertheless
like to ask these questions and, by critically examining the state of ani-
mals amid the last days of humanism, try to inspire others to grapple
with some of the problems I am unable to resolve myself. It appears
that the collapse of humanist ideology is imminent in a dithyramb of
toxic junk food and toxically bad culture (reality TV), insane globalist
fantasias (Iraq, ‘mission accomplished’) and ecological suicide by SUV.
We might think about where people will stand when the dust has
cleared, and we would be wise, in this assessment, to look carefully at
animals: to look at people and animals; to look at people as animals.5

4
One may worry that in fact human scientific discourse is in some sense already
asking these kinds of questions of animals, in a trope that takes the form of invasive
interrogation of and experimentation upon their otherness. My intention for this
dialogue that I propose with the other animals commences from a stance of humility,
not imperious power.
5
In this vein, see Parallax 12.1 (2006), a special issue entitled ‘Animal Beings,’
where editor Tom Tyler asks, “What kind of animal . . . is this human being? In what
 americans do weird things with animals 77

Nonhuman animals have not been as corrupted nor as implicated in

the humanistic fiasco as we human animals have been, so their virtues,
their survival instincts, their ways of being, may be better suited as
models to take us through the millennium. And the cultural history of
our relationship with animals is such a crucial element of our cultural
history as a whole, a vivid testimony to our existence, for better or
worse, for better and worse, as citizens of the planet.6 If we survey all
this with an eye toward critiquing the record of our interactions with
other species, a lot of other pieces fall into place, and we might become
saner members of our ecosystem.
The specific phenomenon that inspired this essay is a series of photo-
graphs of old women wearing blouses made from dead chickens. Read-
ing a story about this in the newspaper one morning, I said, out loud to
myself, “Americans do weird things with animals.” The photographer
is a Brooklyn artist named Pinar Yolacan, and her series is entitled
‘Perishables.’7 Yolacan sewed these blouses herself, out of raw tripe and
chicken skin and other assorted pieces of the birds. I presume that my
reader will indulge my premise that this is weird. Let me speculate as
to what might be going on in these photographs, what the ‘artist’ might
mean here, or think she means. Indeed, people do wear dead animals
in socially and fashionably acceptable ways: leather, fur, down; so why
not chicken? These blouses are obviously meant to disgust us on some
level—but why? The ways in which people use animals are, certainly,
arbitrarily culturally conditioned, and Yolacan might have thought it
would be interesting to make us reflect on why people regard certain
exploitative uses as beautiful and valuable while we respond viscerally
to others as disgusting.
Perhaps we are meant to wonder what it would feel like, and smell
like, to be these women wearing these chickens. Maybe Yolacan is invit-
ing us to think about our sensory relationship to animals. Again, it can
be delicate, beautiful: the smell of charred flesh wafting through a res-
taurant, if that’s your fancy; perfumes from secretions that are harvested
from animals (musk from deer, ambergris from sperm whales, castor

kinds of animal being does the human animal engage? What is it to be, rather than to
represent, an animal?” The issue pointedly “addresses the question of human beings
as animal beings” (2006, p. 1).
6
See Kalof (2007), and the six-volume series of which she is general editor, A Cultural
History of Animals (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
7
Rivington Arms, http://www.rivingtonarms.com/exhibitions/2005/perishables.php
(accessed 6 January 2007).
 78
randy malamud

Fig. 4.1a Fig. 4.1b Fig. 4.1c

Fig. 4.1 Pinar Yolacan, Untitled, from the series ‘Perishables’ (2004, courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms)
 americans do weird things with animals 79

from beavers, civet from the civet cat) . . . or it can be putrid. Presum-
ably these pictures mean to evoke the putrid end of the scale, and yet,
the women who are the human subjects of these photographs actually
do look somewhat dignified, and seem as if they fit at least somewhat
in these skins, and there’s even a certain beauty about the forms, the
clothes, which are not at all unlike some styles of haute couture. So
we come back to the question of how we relate to animals, how we
use them, how they appear in our culture—what do we do with them?
What boundaries or guidelines (if any) are there that mediate what we
do with animals? What ethical guidelines? What aesthetic guidelines?
What fashion guidelines? What ecological guidelines?
I think the answer is, few to none. Yolacan’s photos pretty clearly
cross the line, but that line is already far afield. There are few guidelines,
few rules about what we can’t do with animals, and this is weird—or,
this facilitates and legitimates weirdness. Any extant guidelines are
cultural conventions, and artists like Yolacan show these to be mal-
leable, dispensable in the cause of art (as they are dispensable also in
the causes of commerce or human convenience). Yolacan’s photog-
raphy is weird, I think, in a self-conscious, showy way. Other weird
things that people do with chickens—on factory farms, for example,
as Peter Singer describes in Animal Liberation (2002, pp. 95–118)—are
more covert, things we wouldn’t want to look at or think about while
nibbling on drumsticks, but they are fundamentally of a kind with this
public artistic weirdness, situating a nexus of all the weird things we do
with animals. They all supplement each other, and they all contribute
to the anthropocentric hegemony that keeps animals subaltern.
I wonder, as I look through Yolacan’s lens at a woman and a chicken,
a woman in a chicken: where’s the chicken? Yes, it’s there, but there’s no
there there. The only chickenness in these images is negative: the absence
of a chicken, the mockery of a chicken, the destruction of a chicken,
the perverse human transformation of a chicken.8 I am not suggesting
that it is the burden of every artwork to interrogate the chickenness
of the chicken, but I am ecologically offended by the pervasive failure
of human culture, and Yolacan’s work conveniently exemplifies this
aporia, to acknowledge with any serious engagement the integrity, the
consciousness, the real presence, of other animals in our world.

8
Carol J. Adams’ important formulation of the “absent referent”, by which animals
“in name and body are made absent as animals”, is germane here (1996, p. 40).
80 randy malamud

‘Perishables’ calls to mind another weird, famous juxtaposition of

animals with human fashion: a photograph called ‘Dovima with Ele-
phants,’ from 1955, by Richard Avedon. (One of the best-known fashion
photographs ever published, the picture may be easily found through
a Google image search, though the Avedon estate denied permission
to reprint it here.)9 Dorothy Virginia Margaret (Do Vi Ma) Juba was
a high-powered supermodel in the 1950s. In the photograph, Dovima
stands in the middle of the frame, striking a pose of lavish elegance: her
left foot points forward in a lithe step, her right obscured by the large
trailing creamy sash wrapped around a tight, sleek black pantsuit by
Dior. Her arms are spread as if she were in a ballet about to take flight.
Behind her are four elephants (one of whose body appears intact; the
other three are only partly in the frame); she places her right hand on
one elephant’s trunk, and appears to touch another elephant’s ear just
lightly with her left hand. The elephants are not static: three of them
have legs lifted, giving a sense of movement and energy. The group
stands on a wooden platform covered with a layer of straw and, less
immediately visible, chains that are attached to the legs of at least three
elephants. The trope here is beauty and the beast. Avedon represents
the elephants’ chained raw power, subservient to the delicate princess;
and so animality becomes transformed into a fashion accessory.
The tension in this encounter that empowers Avedon’s image involves
a contrast, a contest: between the beauty of nature and the beauty
of human cultural artifice. Who’s more powerful in this shot? Who’s
more beautiful? (These two questions are really the same question in
the discourse of fashion photography.) That’s what Avedon is asking.
What I’m asking is, why are we even playing these games? Why are
we so wrapped up in the discourses and fetishes of interspecies power
relationships, which displace the discourse of ecological relationships?
In humanism, we play out these discourses of power by cloaking them
in our uniquely human tropes of aesthetics—fashion, art, and so forth;
and this, I suggest, is our fundamental hubristic flaw. The discourse of
ecology embodies its own power dynamics, but it doesn’t play games
like this. Power is a real force in nature, and ecology integrates the
realities of power struggles, but that kind of power has a much greater

9
The full title is ‘Dovima with the Elephants—Evening dress by Dior, Cirque
d’Hiver, Paris,’ and it appears in Avedon (2005). A good online reproduction is avail-
able at http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/176/hiverparis19557kr.jpg (accessed
15 September 2007).
 americans do weird things with animals 81

logic and function than this kind of power. This power that Avedon
and Dovima manifest here—power over the elephants, power over
nature—is just . . . weird.
Fashion writer Annalisa Barbieri writes that this photograph
to me typifies what fashion photography should be about . . . There are
people that criticize fashion photography and say that it’s not depicting
reality, but I think it should always be inspirational and aspirational. I
love the scale of this picture. I love the fact that she looks almost as tall
as the elephants and the way the sash is done lends a very long line to
her . . . Having also worked with animals in fashion photography I know
that there must have been a crew of several dozen to actually control
them and I wonder how many takes they must have used to get this pic-
ture right. I just love the sheer scale of it and I think if more people did
more things like this, instead of the reality that is creeping into fashion
photography, we’d have far more beautiful images to look at. (Barbieri,
no date)
Barbieri looks at the picture and infers control: dozens of people control-
ling the animals, though beyond the frame of the photograph—it looks as
if it’s just Dovima, and Avedon, and Dior controlling the elephants. But
the controlling human presence is, as Barbieri demonstrates, profoundly
implicit in this image. Consider the composition. Dovima is, of course,
in the middle, and her corporeal presence is unmolested. But three of
the four elephants’ bodies are cut off: is this an anticipation of Damian
Hirst? Perhaps that is an unlikely overreading, but perhaps not—we
cut animals in half, cut their parts off, separate them, disfigure them,
at will. What Hirst does with his animals is the logical culmination of
the ethos underlying the framing, the cropping, the composition, of the
animal images seen in Avedon’s work.
Dovima’s hand rests on an elephant’s trunk, which is raised and
seems to be in motion: as if the animal is responding with a semiotic
erection. Another elephant’s trunk is cropped out, and Dovima’s sash
suggestively replaces this trunk. We don’t need Freud to detect the sug-
gestion of emasculation: the lithe woman is more phallically powerful
than the great big animal. Through the marvels and powers of culture,
of fashion, her dick trumps ‘his’.10 Dovima has the flashiest phallic-icon
in this picture.

10
In fact the elephants are probably female, like most circus elephants, as bull
elephants are too difficult to control, but still, the semiotics of animal representation
often, as here, ignore literal biological realities.
82 randy malamud

Elephants are ‘cool’ because they have trunks—that’s their selling

point in pop cultural iconography. A reductive semiotic commodifica-
tion condenses the animal into a synechdoche, one part representing
the whole, that becomes the distinctive selling point. A giraffe is a neck;
a zebra is a stripe; a camel is a hump. Dovima outdoes the elephants
at their own game: her sash is the animal’s trunk. Her pose, her pres-
ence, is inspired by them, and I suggest that something is simultane-
ously taken from them, and they thus become much less necessary
in this tableau: they are a backdrop, a reference point, but no longer
subjectively significant in any sense. Their chains are almost incidental
to their figurative captivity in this photo (they’re chained in so many
other ways), but nevertheless confirm their literal imprisonment, and
our power and desire to chain them: the power we presume, the power
we assume, by being able to keep them captive, and allow this weird
woman with a weird name to stand right by them, for a clever photo,
despite the danger that there should be in this tableau. Confirming
Freud, the dangerous animals have indeed been exterminated, and
what we see here are the pale simulacra, the ghosts, of their once-
dangerous spirits.
Half a century later, with a postmodern sideways glance at Avedon’s
touchstone, W, a high-end fashion magazine, offered a spread featuring
elephants dressed by top designers.11 Karl Lagerfeld used 90 yards of
tweed to make a pair of Chanel suits, an ensemble including matching
hats and earrings. Manolo Blahnik designed lace-up shoes. Helmut Lang
designed a black satin-striped cotton jersey tank top and a beaded bra.
A New York Times article about this spectacle quotes the photographer,
Bruce Weber, saying: “The wonderful thing about elephants is they
love to work, so it wasn’t like we were forcing them to wear clothes”
(Horyn 2004). Weber reiterates the myth of the contented slave—a
cultural lynchpin of slavery—in earlier American history. I’d respond
to Weber: it’s not like you weren’t forcing them to wear clothes, it’s not
like they asked for them.
The Times article included an image of Lang’s design sketch for one
of the ‘models’ named Tai. The sketch depicts an elephant overlaid
with lines: measuring lines, for taking the dimensions of the cloth,
but these lines also suggest chains, not unlike the chains in Avedon’s
photograph. Indeed, Lang’s lines are chains, and the measuring lines

11
‘Trunk Show.’ W 34 (1) ( January 2005): 76–101.
 americans do weird things with animals 83

Fig. 4.2 Bruce Weber, ‘Tai and Rosie in Dior,’ W magazine (© Bruce
Weber, 2005. All rights reserved)

at the borders of the sketch form a kind of symbolic cage. Every frame
becomes a cage, for animals in human culture. Lang’s sketch is, seen another
way, an elephant chopped up into pieces, which is what people are
prone to do with animals. We chop them, we crop them, into the
pieces that comprise Yolacan’s blouses and accessories, or the mea-
sured pieces, 156 inches, 186 inches, 181 inches, that we use to assault
these elephants in W, to hide their animality—to cloak them, to mock
them, to reduce them to human fashion. We force them to model our
postlapsarian shame of our natural bodies. We make them wear the
ridiculously uncomfortable shoes that we wear, because we are slaves
to fashion and misery loves company. Clothes make the man, they say.
Now clothes make the animal too: or make the animal a man—similar
but lesser; as if they would want to be like us. Is the ideal that every
elephant, one day, should have a designer outfit? To wear on their
outings to buy ice cream cones perhaps?
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams explains how dismembering
animals is a step toward objectifying them. “The institution of butcher-
ing is unique to human beings,” she writes (1996, p. 50). Butchering,
84 randy malamud

Fig. 4.3 Sketch for a fashionable elephant. Drawing by tailor from Helmut
Lang, made-to-measure studio (2004)

fragmenting a large, impressive creature into small, unthreatening, stan-

dardized pieces that are unrecognizable as the original animal, is, Adams
writes, a way of rendering animals being-less. In a slaughterhouse
an animal proceeds down a ‘disassembly line,’ losing body parts at every
stop. This fragmentation not only dismembers the animal, it changes the
way in which we conceptualize animals. (p. 47)12
After butchering, the name of the animal changes (from ‘cow’ to ‘beef ’,
from ‘pig’ to ‘pork’, ‘ham’ and ‘bacon’), and “only then can consumption
occur” (p. 48). The same is true for cultural butchering and consump-
tion, which is what Yolacan and Avedon and the fashion designers are
all doing with these animals: metaphorically butchering and consuming
them in a way that results in the desecration of the animal’s original,
inherent, authentic ecological being. For an instance of the textual

12
See also Adams’ ‘Post-meateating’ in this volume.
 americans do weird things with animals 85

fragmentation of animals, consider the disassembly (flensing) of the

whales in Melville’s Moby-Dick: the descriptions of how the whalers cut
up and used every last morsel of the whale (1967, pp. 348–51 [Chaps.
94 and 95]) have been conventionally regarded as an example of human
ingenuity and resourcefulness, a puritanically obsessive efficiency; I read
this, on the other hand, as a monomaniacal destruction of the whales’
integrity. Sadly, these readings are not mutually contradictory: human
ingenuity and violence against animals are complementary facets of the
same sensibility. This is all weird.
Two images posted on the now-dormant website petpics.com speak
to our fantasies of framing animals in tropes of human cultural com-
modification, figuratively (and here, literally) putting animals in boxes.
One kitten looks out at us from a Pop-Tarts box, and another spills out
of a Tampax package. I wonder about the staging of these photos: were
they as complicated and as laboriously organized as the photograph
of Dovima’s elephants? Were they spontaneous and kitten-originated
experiences? ‘Hank, Fluffy just crawled into a box—grab your camera
so that we can put this on petpics!’ These pictures certainly have no
need of the extensive power-wielding crews that Barbieri imagines
beyond Avedon’s frame, and yet, in terms of the cultural subordination
of animals, I suggest an equivalence: these seemingly innocuous, casual
pictures of cats in boxes embody as much weird force as Avedon’s
classic image.
I wonder if the specific commodities referenced here are significant.
Pop-Tarts are yummy, processed, convenient junk food. Tampax are a
product designed to make the messy course of nature more manage-
able. Both these products represent quick, easy, commodified responses
to biological imperatives: hunger and menstruation. Both come in
individually wrapped units, in lots of different flavors. Both have a
physiological downside—the risk of diabetes and dietary dysfunctions
on the one hand (if you eat too many Pop-Tarts); toxic shock syndrome
on the other hand (though that has supposedly been obviated in the
latest generation of ‘feminine products’)—but the drawbacks are, of
course, far outweighed by how compelling the products are. In these
images, the boxes are ‘recycled’ in a way that suggests that our animals,
especially when they’re at the peak of their cuteness—and are therefore
most valuable, in the currency of American cultural aesthetics—mesh
well with the discourse of American consumerism. (Imagine if you
really could buy cute kittens in assorted flavors and styles, as you do
with Pop-Tarts and Tampons.)
86 randy malamud

Fig. 4.4a & 4.4b Kittens peek from boxes on www.petpics.com

(acessed 1 Feb 2005; site currently under rehabilitation.)
 americans do weird things with animals 87

In fact, I believe it is not the case that the tropes of American mate-
rial consumption facilitate the well-being of animals. The discourse of
consumerism is dangerous to animals, and counterproductive in terms
of advancing our ecological understanding of anthrozoological relations.
The pet owners who put these kittens in the packaging depicted here,
or captured their images when they rambled into the boxes of their
own accord, suggest that these animals, like all animals, are somehow
to be consumed—not literally to be put in our stomachs or in our
vaginas, but still in some way to be consumed: to be put inside of us,
inside our culture, where they will be momentarily convenient, yummy,
useful, but will finally end up, in short order, getting flushed down a
figurative toilet as garbage or shit.
Siegfried & Roy do weird things with animals. They are animal
‘trainers,’ showmen, illusionists, who ran a show on the Las Vegas strip
for thirty years featuring a kitschy mélange of flamboyance, magic,
and animals. The keynote animals in their act were royal white tigers.
According to their website, there were only two hundred of them extant
in the world in 1998, mostly in captivity, and “58 of them are Siegfried
and Roy’s White Tigers of Nevada.”13 White tigers are very rare—they
are, in a sense, freaks: it’s countersurvivalistic for a tiger to be white,
both in the jungle and in a culture that fetishizes the fashion of exotic
whites; they have been widely poached for their pelts and body parts,
which command tremendous prices on the black market. (The black
market for white tigers: there are some very interesting semiotics lurking
in there.) The result of inbreeding, these tigers are rare in the wild, and
more likely to be born in zoos and captive breeding programs.14 White
Tigers of Nevada: weird! The very nomenclature bespeaks proprietary
control (all of Nevada owns them), a perverse geographical reconfigura-
tion. They are not “of Nevada” . . . except that they are now. Siegfried
& Roy have made them “of Nevada”; note the power of naming. And
of course, given their name, White Tigers of Nevada belong where else
but on the Las Vegas strip?
In October 2003, a White Tiger of Nevada named Montecore lunged
at Roy Horn during the show and dragged him offstage. The tiger
wrapped his jaws around Roy’s neck, making cuts that crushed his

13
Siegfried & Roy, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com (accessed 6 January 2007).
14
Big Cat Rescue, http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers.htm (accessed
15 September 2007).
88 randy malamud

trachea as well as deep puncture wounds on the back of his head; his
heart stopped for a minute and he was resuscitated. Bleeding from a
cut artery restricted the oxygen flow to his brain, leading to a near-
fatal stroke. Doctors had to remove part of his skull and sew it into
his abdomen to relieve swelling on the brain until it could be replaced
weeks later. The entertainer was left partially paralyzed and lost con-
trol of his speech. During the attack, most of the audience thought
that this was all part of the show—part of the illusion. Their show
was cancelled indefinitely, though their website suggests that it might
be resuscitated at some point in the future. The tiger was not killed,
as one would normally expect when an animal mauls a person. Roy
himself commanded that the animal’s life be spared, in a display of his
magnanimous love for the tigers despite Montecore’s beastly behavior
(Silverman 2005).
My reading of this story, at first, was, simply and unkindly, as Dante
would say, contrapasso: what goes around comes around; the power-
mongering that Roy visited on these tigers redounded back on him. It
seemed self-evident to me that this is what happens when people play
with fire: it seemed like a sign that we shouldn’t be doing this sort of
thing. But as a parable in my cavalcade of anthrozoological weirdness,
I think Montecore’s attack—might I say, “Montecore’s revenge?”—begs
more detailed scrutiny. Indeed, in the popular reaction to this incident,
the moralism that seemed so obvious to me (i.e., Roy had it coming)
was not at all widespread (Marquez 2003). Roy himself said that he
thought the tiger might have been protecting him (from what?)—trying
to drag him to safety (BBC News 2004). Roy seems unable to contem-
plate what seems pretty clear to me, that the tiger might have hated
being a White Tiger of Nevada and performing twice a night on the
strip, and this was how he manifested his feelings.
A mauling, or at least the possibility of a mauling, is in the subtext
of every carnival show. That’s what people pay hundreds of dollars per
ticket to see: a non-mauling, on most nights, though they know, deep
down, that there might be, or even should be, a mauling. So the audi-
ence finally got what they expected, what they knew and perhaps on
some level even hoped would happen someday, but at the same time,
as I noted, the audience responded as if this were simply part of the
show. This illustrates our conflicted and obtuse behavior as a cultural
audience, our head-in-the-sand, willful self-deception with regard to
animals and what we do with them. We’re flirting with danger, thrilled
by the spectacle of human mastery (Siegfried & Roy’s slogan is ‘Masters
 americans do weird things with animals 89

of the Impossible’); and then, when the animal attack comes, the audi-
ence does not revise their paradigms accordingly, does not acknowledge
that one might reasonably have expected an animal revolt to happen.
Animal shows, circuses, and carnivals, other than this one, were not
cancelled or outlawed after Montecore’s attack.
In the media, Roy is staging a comeback. Maria Shriver interviewed
him on a television news magazine show that offered, in the words of its
promo, “an intimate look into his harrowing experience . . . chronicling
Roy’s journey, including never-before-seen footage and new details
about his against-all-odds recovery.”15 Roy’s narrative is, loosely, in the
mode of the great white hunter tales of African adventure: the wily,
persevering hero is threatened but not overcome by the wild animals’
brute force. Frank Buck was the most prominent adventurer in this
genre, in the 1930s. But today, the narrative setting has shifted to Las
Vegas instead of the ‘dark continent,’ into a flashy indoor arena instead
of the jungle, and the tigers are white instead of the usual camouflage
variegation. It’s all very precious and tame instead of wild and woodsy,
and most interestingly, instead of the macho khaki-attired he-man Frank
Buck, the heroes are a sequined gay couple. Their website features the
tigers in their resituated ‘habitat.’ An image of a tiger traipsing through
their living room has a caption reading
Here you can see one of our magnificent Royal White Tigers making
himself at home in our Jungle Palace. Although the tigers generally prefer
to roam in the lush greenery, occasionally they like to silently pad from
room to room, paying us a personal visit.
The Jungle Palace is Siegfried & Roy’s residence, which features, as
another webpage explains, “a hand-painted Sistine Chapel Dome. . . .
It enhances the baroque splendor of one of our favorite areas—a cap-
puccino bar with antiques and collectibles from around the world.”
In this fantasia-habitat, antiques, profanely miscontextualized artistic
reproductions, cappuccino, and tigers all feature as constituent elements
of its global queerness.
This is the setting for the contemporary version of the conflict
between man and nature. We’ve driven the real animals in the real
jungle to the brink of extinction, and so we breed them and hoard
them in Nevada and then play out our perverse contests with them in

15
Siegfried & Roy, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com/news/entry.php?id=139 (accessed
6 January 2007).
90 randy malamud

these extravagantly tacky culturally mongrelized Las Vegas sets. The

icon of Las Vegas is its pastiche of skyline, bricolage gone berserk, with
the Brooklyn Bridge replica next to the Eiffel Tower replica, next to
the Empire State Building replica: all of which serves to reinforce the
kind of geographical and cultural dislocational bastardizing that results
in White Tigers of Nevada.
Unlike the Frank Buck versions of this story, neither man nor beast
died in Las Vegas. But I think this was the last installment in this genre;
I don’t think it can happen this way again. Let’s call this contest a draw,
but next time, I predict, the animal will win. I don’t know where exactly
the battle will play out, or which people and animals will be involved,
or how the animal’s triumph will be figured, but I think that, on the
brink of the posthuman age, there is a narrative compulsion for the
outcome that I’ve predicted. Putting gay men at the center of this kind
of story is a sign that it is nearly exhausted: the heteronarrative versions
that mainstream culture prefers have been largely used up.
Turning from real animals to animated animals, Finding Nemo,
Disney’s 2003 film, typifies American children’s cartoons that are
lately becoming considerably more intelligent, more thoughtful, more
sensitive to ecological and anthrozoological issues. The film is a big
improvement on the days when the cartoon canon was comprised of
alliterative animals—Road Runner, Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Woody
Woodpecker, Mickey Mouse—who had no discernable relevance to
the creatures they purported to represent. Antz (1998), an animated
Dreamworks movie starring Woody Allen as the voice of a neurotic
but lovable ant, is another thoughtful encounter with animals. In these
films, animals are dignified with agency and complex characters. Their
narratives are elaborated in a way that at least considers some degree of
parity between human consciousness and animal consciousness, human
emotion and animal emotion.
But here’s the rub: after Antz, sales of ant farms (Foucauldian voyeur-
ism run amok) went through the roof. Ants do not belong in ant farms
any more than white tigers belong in Las Vegas or kittens belong in
Tampax boxes or chickens belong on the torsos of old women. After
Finding Nemo, sales of clownfish skyrocketed (Walton, 2003). The dynam-
ics of consumption show consumers to be completely oblivious to the
message of the films. Let me spell this out, at the risk of belaboring
the obvious: Finding Nemo—starring, in the title role, a clownfish—is a
movie whose clear, unmistakable point is that fish don’t like being in
aquariums, and will go to enormous lengths to avoid this fate. It is a
 americans do weird things with animals 91

movie that anthropomorphizes (perhaps inaccurately but nevertheless

movingly)16 the family connections in animals and the extent to which
animals value liberty, equality, and fraternity as we do, showing that
they have comparable aspirations for integrity, self-control, pleasurable
existence.
Audiences seemed to understand what Finding Nemo was dramatiz-
ing, and seemed to enjoy seeing this, but then apparently integrated
that message into their cultural consciousness by going out and buying
a clownfish. What are they thinking? What is it like for a family that
owns a clownfish? Do the kids look at the fish and think of Nemo and
his family? Does ‘their’ fish remind them of the movie? Are they able
to see the fish, think of the movie pleasurably, and yet not compre-
hend that their actions are anathema to its narrative? The clownfish
is so distinctive looking, and the animators created such an accurate
figure that so closely resembles the living model, which would lead me
to hope that the empathy which the film inculcated for the animated
fish would transfer over to the real fish that looks just like the cartoon.
But alas, not so.
How does this cognitive-ethical process work? What allows people
to indulge in such blatant hypocrisy? Is it that the Disney fish is a Hol-
lywood fish, and the ones we buy are somehow less deserving of our
benevolence? Maybe real fish even deserve to be imprisoned, because
they’re not movie stars? Does the cultural attention to one token,
isolated animal somehow justify, or even demand, the oppression of
thousands of others? Something along these lines explains what hap-
pens in zoos—audiences fetishize a small, manageable, distinct canon of
animals, and then rationalize that they’ve given their ecological quota
of loving attention to animals, so screw all the others. Perhaps people
fetishize these animals because they’re such freaks: a panda bear in
Atlanta! A giraffe in San Diego! Displaced, caged, chained. Maybe we
do actually perceive the difference between zoo specimens and real
wild animals, and we ‘protect’ the zoo animals while we devastate the
populations of wild animals precisely because they are wild animals:
we feel guilty that we’re destroying their habitats, so if we eliminate
them all they cease to be a problem. Maybe we oppress animals simply

16
I think anthropomorphism is acceptable, in measure, as a means to an end, in
fostering empathy with animals. Tom Tyler’s opening essay in this volume examines
the implicit ethics of the concept of anthropomorphism.
92 randy malamud

because we still believe in the great chain of being and see it as our duty
to keep the inferior species inferior. Maybe we’re jealous of their wild-
ness, their transcendence of the trials of modern industrial life. Maybe
we want to drag them down to our level. Maybe we are playing out
Freud’s observation that a civilized society is one that has conquered
all the wild animals.
Any or all of these reasons might explain why people pretend to cel-
ebrate the figure of one animal, like Nemo, and then massacre, capture,
destroy, imprison, all the others. Weirdly, we show our admiration for
these ants and fish by bringing them into our lives as subalterns—but
still, they’re in our homes, and they should be grateful for that. We
Americans fetishize our homes, we fill them with a lot of stuff that we
own, and we seem to want to integrate animals into that paradigm,
however much it means absolutely disregarding or destroying their own
paradigms. Only we have paradigms, we believe. Or, while we may be
aware of their paradigms, we decide that those don’t matter. We pay
lip service to respectful and environmentally-conscious considerations
of animals in movies like Finding Nemo that broach independent animal
subjectivity—the authenticity of the animal apart from any human
construction—but then we buy more clownfish.
Cassius Coolidge’s famous image ‘A Friend in Need’ (c. 1870 and
still going strong over a century later) of dogs playing poker typifies
the retrograde consciousness that a more enlightened cultural public
will, perhaps, someday transcend in their desire to understand better
the integrity, authenticity, subjectivity, and sentience of other animals.
Americans do weird things with animals. Such kitsch douses us with
images of animals that are profane and irrelevant, clogging up the
limited space in our minds that we have for thinking seriously about
species other than ourselves.
Coolidge’s image has been reproduced endlessly, in cigar ads and on
calendars and on throw rugs and in velvet. Dogs can’t sit on chairs in
the way that Coolidge depicts. They wouldn’t want to. But Coolidge
has made them. Dogs can’t play poker. They wouldn’t want to. But
Coolidge has made them. The punch line of this painting, and the
aesthetically ethical harm of it, is the disjunction between what is
depicted and our knowledge of the reality that dogs can’t sit on chairs
and smoke cigars and play poker. Dumb dogs. But we have made them
do so. Clever us. At the risk of sounding like a priggish killjoy—I know
this is just supposed to be a fun painting—the more I think about it,
the more I see a kind of violence here that is not so dissimilar from
 americans do weird things with animals 93

Fig. 4.5 Cassius Coolidge, ‘A Friend in Need’ (c. 1870)

Yolacan’s chicken-blouses or Hirst’s rotting corpses. What Coolidge does

with his dogs here strikes me as tremendously presumptuous. Like the
behaviorists who teach orangutans to buy ice cream and the couturiers
who drape elephants in jewelry and tweed pantsuits, Coolidge reifies the
fantasy that ours is the best of all possible worlds, and other species could
do no better than to emulate humans, however ridiculous they might
seem in so doing, and however foreign our humanity may be to their
animality. I would be less offended by Coolidge if he, or other artists,
also created art that involved human animals in the guise and context
of nonhuman animals (and did so without intending aspersion on the
‘swinish’, ‘beastly’ humans so represented), if there were a reciprocity
that bespoke a sincere desire to broach the species barrier and see how
the other half lives; but that wouldn’t sell many cigars, would it?
Why did the chicken cross the road? This question has challenged
Americans for generations. It is, arguably, the single question that
we most often ask about animals. I believe we should be asking a lot
of questions, a lot of different questions, about animals, and that we
get distracted from the more important questions we should be ask-
ing—questions like how might we avoid a tsunami, and what is it like
to be a bat—because we spend so much time asking this question over
and over.
94 randy malamud

The humor plays out as follows: Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the other side; the answer is funny because it is not funny. It
is obvious. Why does anyone cross the road? To get to the other side.
But the joke lies in the presumptive disjunction between chicken and
road. That is to say, the riddle is indeed framed, initially, as an anthro-
zoological problem: with the underlying tensions about the danger that
there might be in a chicken’s crossing the road, and even, as Thomas
Nagel might wonder,17 what it is like to be a chicken crossing a road,
why the chicken might want to cross the road, what goes on inside
the mind of a chicken. But then the riddle’s answer is a cold dousing
refutation of the anthrozoological teaser. To get to the other side: duh.
Why does anyone cross the road? To get to the other side.
So a chicken is just like anyone else: this is, I think, the weird thing
that Americans think about animals that this riddle presupposes. A
road to an animal is like a road to a person—which, of course, is not
the case. Ask any deer, or armadillo, or possum, or whatever species
proliferates in your local brand of roadkill. Yes, people get killed on
roads too, but for people, that’s an accepted risk that we understand
when we use roads. We benefit from the roads, as well as, occasion-
ally, suffering from them. And we might have houses on one side of
the road, and stores on the other side, so, again, we benefit by crossing
the road. But animals encounter only the risk and none of the benefits.
If a chicken is actually on the road, she is on a large truck on its way
to or from the abattoir in a metal container with airholes that emits
feathers and smells and always reminds me of the trains on the way to
the concentration camps. My point is simply that a road to a chicken
is a very different thing from a road to a person; and the riddle that
draws its humor from the repudiation of this premise is just another
example of the weird and blinkered and self-obsessed, anthropocentric
perspective that Americans have on animals.
Gary Larson’s The Far Side presents a cartoon version that embodies
an existential challenge to the not-very-funny-the-longer-you-think-
about-it riddle. A chicken stares across a two-lane desert highway at a
large road sign that reads, ‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ and then beneath,
‘Why do you need a reason?’ (1993, p. 79) The chicken in this cartoon,

17
Nagel’s famous philosophical essay ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’ attempts, some-
what unsuccessfully, to broach the topic of animal consciousness (Nagel 1974).
 americans do weird things with animals 95

we should note, is not crossing the road; maybe she is about to, or
maybe she is stuck in an existential stupor brought on by Larson’s
deconstruction of the hackneyed joke. Larson inspires my own contri-
bution to this trope. This is what I’d call the take-home message, and
it may seem like a simple, weak, tepid, anticlimactic conclusion, but I
promise, it’s not. It’s powerful: a posthumanist rejection of the fantasy
of human omniscience with regard to animals.
Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know.

References

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New York: Continuum.
Avedon, Richard. 2005. Woman in the Mirror. NY: Harry N. Abrams.
Baker, Steve. 2006. ‘ “You Kill Things to Look at Them:” Animal Death in Contempo-
rary Art.’ In The Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals. Champaign, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 69–98.
Barbieri, Annalisa. (no date.) ‘Exploring Photography: Personal Tours.’ Victoria &
Albert Museum website. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/
guide.php?guideid=gu017 (accessed 6 January 2007).
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.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3663512.stm (accessed 11 January 2008).
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New York: Norton.
Fudge, Erica. 2002. Animal. London: Reaktion.
Horyn, Cathy. 2004. ‘The Outfit’s Great, but Do I Look Fat?’. New York Times, 7
December: B10.
Kalof, Linda. 2007. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion.
Larson, Gary. 1993. The Far Side Gallery 4. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel.
Marquez, Miguel. 2003. ‘Roy of Siegfried and Roy Critical After Mauling.’ CNN, 4
October. http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/10/04/roy.attacked/ (accessed
11 January 2008).
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050104_tsunami_animals.html (accessed 15 September 2007).
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ber: 435–50.
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Silverman, Stephen M. 2005. ‘Tiger Star Roy Horn Checks into Clinic’. People, 20
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Tyler, Tom. 2006. ‘Introduction.’ Parallax 38: Animal Beings 12 (1) ( January–March):
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January 2008).
 PART THREE

EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS

Both essays in this section complicate a normative account of animals

in experimental laboratories as simply being objects or passive victims
acted upon by a more or less detached scientist (ab)using his or her
nonhuman ‘other’. The encounters described here testify, rather, to the
distribution of agency across species as well as to the affective interaction,
synchronisation of movement, and other corporeal responses between
human and nonhuman ‘labourers’ in the process of knowledge forma-
tion. While it cannot be denied that the lab animals are significantly
‘unfree’ participants and that suffering is borne asymmetrically in the
event, these experiments show that human and nonhuman animals, as
well as machines, are woven together in an instrumental economy in
which ‘we’ live in and through the use of one another’s bodies.
Contributing an example from the first decades of the 20th century
of this kind of co-constitutive entanglement across machinic, animal and
human materialities, Robyn Smith demonstrates in ‘Affect, Friendship
and the “As Yet Unknown”: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin
Research’ how the co-presence of human and nonhuman agencies in
experimental systems turns the site of the encounter into a “zone of
intensity” in which the boundaries between human and animal, inside
and outside, self and other become blurred. Such dissolutions, Smith
insists, are the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of new knowledge.
The experiments under discussion make clear that tracing—indeed
building—the pathways of cellular metabolism, which subsequently led
to the discovery of what would later be called ‘vitamins’, was facilitated
by the experimental system itself: being in the company of rats, nurtur-
ing them with familiar food substances, touching them and observing
their general health and well-being, hearing the sounds of the exercise
wheels in which they turn round and round, the scientists got a ‘sense’
of the animals. These sensory experiences, the repetitive actions and
the coming together of different rhythms all contributed to opening
up lines of flight to future knowledge and to a sense of the subject as
a collective rather than a discrete and bounded entity.
While Smith is concerned with how experimental systems affect
the human partner in an assemblage and lead scientists to the ‘as yet
98 experimental encounters

unknown’, Donna Haraway broadens the analysis of experimental

encounters by addressing not only epistemological and ontological issues
but also the ‘hard’ ethical and political questions that ensue from the
complexities and contradictions of living and dying in the age of techno-
science. Her essay ‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response
in Experimental Laboratories’ opens with Nancy Farmer’s novel A Girl
Named Disaster, in which an animal caretaker in Mozambique places his
arm into a cage of biting tsetse flies in order to experience the ‘as yet
unknown’ and then to share this painful knowledge with the guinea
pigs in the lab. This scene functions as the starting point for Haraway’s
careful reflections on the nature of the work of animals and their people
in the scientific practices of medical and veterinary research. She calls
for the recognition that labour, use and instrumentality are not neces-
sarily evil but inherent to all embodied and mortal beings. Organisms
are located in a web of ‘critters’, sharing a material-semiotic ecology
that also includes an obligation (for the human animal) to engagement
with the suffering produced by unequal instrumental relationships.
Drawing on J.M. Coetzee’s novels Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, as
well as the philosophy of Derrida, the essay provides a template for
what a responsible ‘sharing of suffering’ should entail. Haraway calls
for a re-reading of the command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ as ‘Thou shalt
not make killable’, in a bid to work against human exceptionalism and
the singular categories of ‘Animal’ and ‘Human’. (MR)
 CHAPTER FIVE

AFFECT, FRIENDSHIP AND THE “AS YET UNKNOWN”:

RAT FEEDING EXPERIMENTS IN EARLY
VITAMIN RESEARCH

Robyn Smith

In 1911, Thomas B. Osborne (1859–1929), a researcher at the Con-

necticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and Lafayette B. Mendel
(1872–1935), a biochemist at Yale University, while performing feed-
ing experiments intended to determine the nutritive quality of isolated
amino acids, reported that they believed there to be some “as yet
unknown” dietary factor in milk which was essential to maintenance
and growth in mammals.1 They wrote, “as a maintenance diet our
food lacked something other than protein and energy” (Osborne and
Mendel 1911, p. 60). Without investigating it further, Osborne and
Mendel integrated this ‘as yet unknown’ factor, in the form of protein
free milk extract, into the basic diet of their lab rats in order to bring
their protein feeding experiments to successful conclusion. Several
years after these vexed musings on ‘as yet unknown’ food factors, other
researchers in the field of biochemistry took up the problem, and began
feeding experiments with rats, stating explicitly that their investigation
was for Osborne and Mendel’s ‘as yet unknown’ factor, and by 1913
this ‘as yet unknown’ substance had a name and a concept—that is,
vitamins.
The history of vitamins can illuminate the more general significance
of the ‘as yet unknown’ for accounts of scientific practice and objects.
These explicit statements about the importance of the ‘as yet unknown’
are striking because they highlight that experimental systems are estab-
lished in order to elicit the unknown, or to allow researchers to plunge
into the unknown (Rheinberger 1997). Scientists develop experimental

1
The third author of this piece was Osborne and Mendel’s research assistant Edna
Ferry. Within the history of vitamins literature this research is typically considered to
be the work of Osborne and Mendel only. Although this is perhaps unfair I am hold-
ing with tradition here.
100 robyn smith

systems that actively create changing and problematic environments

which force them to pose problems and think; i.e., in their experimental
systems scientists create, for themselves, encounters with the ‘as yet
unknown’. While other cultural and social practices, science fiction or
comic books for example, might also cultivate encounters with the ‘as
yet unknown’, the material practices of experimental sciences are dis-
tinct from the materiality of other cultural and social practices because
of the ways experimental systems engage and implicate the material
world. Hence, the focus of this essay is on the ways in which specific
experimental practices engage the material world and generate an
encounter between scientists and the ‘as yet unknown’. To this end I
will consider the establishment of feeding rations, repetition and rhythm
within the experimental systems and, finally, the scientists’ sense of the
animals’ well-being as established through touch and visual observa-
tion as specific aspects of the rat feeding experiments used by scientists
investigating the ‘as yet unknown’ food factor.

Building and Learning a Maze

Scientists began their investigations into the ‘as yet unknown’ substance
in food with animal feeding experiments using diets consisting of puri-
fied known food substances, isolated proteins, carbohydrates and fat.
I contend that the scientists effectively use known food constituents
to construct rat metabolism as a kind of maze. In the development
of various diet formulations, the scientists use that which was already
known to construct a site in which to lose themselves. This maze allows
them to enter and perform, for themselves, the rats’ metabolism. For
example, in his 1915 article, ‘The Nature of the Dietary Deficiency of
Rice’, E.V. McCollum considered the relation between polished rice
and purified foodstuffs. He reported,
Lot 329 . . . in Period 1 illustrates the failure of nutrition of rats fed pol-
ished rice supplemented with purified food stuffs. The inclusion of 2 per
cent casein in a ration closely similar to that of Lot 317 does not lead to
growth. In period 2 the reduction of the amount of rice to 50 per cent of
the ration did not lead to improvement in the condition of the animals.
Period 3 illustrates the marked stimulus to growth exerted by combining
wheat embryo with rice. (1915, p. 200)
And later,
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 101

This ration is similar to Lot 329 but carried more casein (5 per cent) and
5 per cent of Merck’s lactose. There is no noticeable improvement as a
result of these modifications of the diet. These results indicate that lactose
itself is unnecessary during growth. This is also borne out by feeding
experiments with egg yolk alone on which good growth is attained. Egg
yolk contains no lactose. (1915, p. 203)
In supplementing polished rice with purified food stuffs, various quanti-
ties and qualities of proteins, different salt mixtures and carbohydrates
and fats of various types, McCollum attempts to piece together the by-
ways and routes of the biochemistry of rat nutrition. In his various diet
formulations McCollum constitutes rat metabolism as a kind of maze
and proceeds to make his way through it. First, salt mixtures do not
provide a point of exit; then neither does the quality of protein. McCol-
lum creates the lines of rat metabolism along which he will journey by
using the known components of nutrition to instigate blockages. These
various diets are a means by which to both build and to go along with
rat metabolism. They are a means by which McCollum can enact the
rats’ metabolism. In constituting the rations of purified food substances
at his lab bench, McCollum enters into rat metabolism. These are not
chemically isolated substances on his lab bench. Rather, for McCollum,
they are the interiority of cellular processes.
McCollum presented his findings in a series of growth measurement
charts with a brief explanation of the diet used and the significance of
the growth presented, for the constitution of the diet. In the above quote
it is not, for example, the sufficiency of nitrogen which McCollum mea-
sures from the isolated food-stuff. His results are not chemical formulas.
Rather, his results are presented in growth charts and his measurement
is “failure of maintenance”. To find out what the isolated substances
are, McCollum uses the feeding rations to enter the rats’ metabolism
and effectively learns what the isolated substances do. Using different
nutrients to block the various processes of rat metabolism, McCollum
does not identify the constituents and processes of rat biochemistry.
Rather, he enters into and performs them.
In another experiment, McCollum makes a path for himself through
the mineral content of the diet, and the metabolism of minerals by
rats:
In this ration the mineral content was adjusted by salt and free mineral
acid additions so as to approximate closely the mineral content of pol-
ished rice. The excellent growth curves make it clear that for growth the
102 robyn smith

mineral content cannot be solely responsible for the failure of animals to

grow on a diet of polished rice. (McCollum 1915, p. 196)
In this instance, McCollum replicates the mineral content of polished
rice with artificial mineral mixtures. By building these mineral blocks
of rat metabolism himself and observing that they were not sufficient
to keep his rats alive and well, McCollum can be sure that the min-
eral content of the diet is not the route through rat metabolism. The
boundary between the subject and the environment is dissolved and
McCollum can inhabit the field of potential connections with rat
metabolism almost as though he were feeling his way along the walls
of the maze. To speak of observation and representation is insufficient
here, insofar as McCollum was not identifying the components of
metabolic processes; he was not making a map of rat metabolism. He
was not picturing to himself the interaction of already known chemical
constituents. Rather, he used feeding rations of purified food substances
to create for himself rat metabolism.
McCollum did not have the chemical markers he would need to ‘see’
the path of the foodstuffs. And yet, this blindness did not separate him
from the world, or render it inaccessible to him. Rather, it is because of
this blindness that McCollum is engaged with and by the world in the
way that he is. Because he did not have the tools of chemical analysis,
McCollum’s experimental system produced a dissolution of the bound-
ary between the scientist subject and the materiality of rat metabolism.
It is not the identity of the chemical reactions that McCollum pursues
with his feeding rations, but their unfolding. In constituting food rations
for his rats, therefore, McCollum is afforded a kind of indwelling in the
processes of rat metabolism. McCollum’s skill and knowledge as a chem-
ist are no longer simply skills of analysis. Rather, the feeding experiments
produce a back and forth between McCollum’s lab bench rations and
his lab animal metabolism so that what occupies McCollum at his lab
bench are the processes of metabolism and their emergence.

Scale and Repetition

Most of the experiments designed in search of this ‘as yet unknown’

factor were massive and it is striking to consider simply the work of
feeding the rat colony every day. The size and the repetitious nature
of the task highlight that, even if the work was begun everyday with
purposeful intent, such intent would quickly be lost to the rhythm and
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 103

the pace of the work. Therefore, it is worth asking how the materiality
of such a massive and repetitive task functioned in the production of
new knowledge.
The above study, ‘The Nature of the Dietary Deficiency of Rice’,
carried out by McCollum in Wisconsin, concludes with a total of 42
charts, each with various aspects of nutritional knowledge blocked.
Observations in the rat feeding experiments were taken and recorded
frequently. We hear of results obtained from Lot 308, Lot 313, Lot 316,
Lot 334, Lot 317, Lot 329, Lot 340, Lot 309, Lot 382, Lot 351, Lot
355, Lot 326, Lot 383 and Lot 324—a total of well over 200 animals
(McCollum 1915). This is work in which a scientist could really lose
himself. The records of observations read like a Gertrude Stein story,
a rose, is a rose, is a rose; the insistence of the observations belies any
hope of signification. With such repetition there are no causal relations,
no growth in a subject. The scientist as subject does not head-up the
action here because there is no master to this narrative. Rather the
sequence becomes a logic of affective sense. In their enormous repeti-
tion, the experimental systems constitute the virtual possibilities as an
insistence; an insistence of that which is outside the limits of knowledge,
outside that which is already known. Repetition here enables a worrying
and an exploration of the limits of reason. The repetition enables the
scientists to wonder at and to provoke that which is outside the limits
of our understanding.
The effect of the repetitious character of the experimental systems is
constituted in part by the differences within the experimental systems.
As we saw above, the rat feeding experiments designed in search of
the ‘as yet unknown’ substance in food used diets of rations of various
purified nutrients to see the effects of these different combinations. The
differences between the repeated experiments are sometimes very small,
consisting in, for example, the addition of water extracted wheat embryo
to a rice diet compared to the addition of acetone extracted wheat
embryo to a rice diet. Within these experiments, nutritional science is
deployed as a refrain, repeated variously. Because of the repetition of
these slightly different experiments, differences accumulate along lines
of variation. From this constant repetition of difference emerges the
capacity for the precipitation of the future. Through repetition against
the unknown a crescendo builds, precipitating an overflow and the
emergence of new knowledge. And indeed, the insistence of difference
within these experiments facilitate an encounter with novelty; McCol-
lum states that the results of his accumulated repetitions in difference,
104 robyn smith

“force us to accept the conclusion that there are necessary for normal nutrition . . .
unknown accessory substances” (1915, p. 184; italics in original). The new
irrupts upon a substrate of repetition.

Rat Metabolism and the Growth of Experiments

Through the development and continued use of particular rations,

experimental systems feed back on themselves to continue growing
through time, and they spawn new studies with similar but different
character traits, which also feed back on themselves, and continue
growing. Experiments were inspired by and grew out of experiments
undertaken earlier by the same scientists or by other scientists, or the
experiments are a graft onto the results of someone else’s previous
experiments. Consistently in these lab reports, the scientists make
statements which indicate that the current experiment was emergent
in the “real-time extension” of previous experiments (Pickering 1995).
Scientists frequently introduced the logic of their present studies as
having arisen as a consequence of the results of previous work. McCol-
lum, for example, suggests that his lab had already produced results
concerning corn and wheat and as a result were now turning their
attention to rice:
In former papers from the laboratory we have made clear the nature of
the dietary deficiencies of the corn kernel and wheat kernel as the sole
source of nutriment for growing animals. In the present communica-
tion we present experimental data showing the specific properties of
polished and of unpolished rice as a food, and show the supplementary
relationship between these and certain purified and naturally occurring
foodstuffs. (1915, p. 181)
As the scientists tell it in the scientific journals, these refrains are auto-
poetic and auto-catalytic, that is, self-sustaining and differential in their
reproduction.
If these experimental systems are self-organizing, rather than systems
organized by the humans in the system, perhaps the moment of dis-
solution of human and material agencies can be understood fruitfully
as a juggling act. The scientists have several experiments on the go,
several balls in the air, the fall of which they must wait through. They
must move themselves and conduct their act according to the rise and
fall of the rats’ weight, health and well-being as each emerges in time
and each experiment is launched in relation to the development of the
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 105

others in the same way that a juggler launches each ball in response to
the emergence of the whole juggling act. The scientists’ experimental
agency here is one with the emergence of rat metabolism. The real-time
extension of the experimental system is necessarily a process wherein
the boundaries between known entities are blurred; the material agency
of rat metabolism becomes the logic of the experimental process. Such
blurring of agencies creates the new boundary of the experimental sys-
tem, just as the juggling act is constituted in the dissolution of material
and human agencies.

Rhythm and the Dissolution of Agencies

Rat feeding experiments are constituted, in key respects, by the embed-

ding of the different durations of various aspects of the material assem-
blage. The experimental systems take on a rhythm or several rhythms
of their own which lock together, but which are distinct from, the
different durations embedded within the systems. For example, within
these enormous and enormously repetitive experiments, observations
are made and recorded consistently at specific and rhythmic inter-
vals. Osborne and Mendel provide a detailed record of the repetition
required of the animal experiments in their first Carnegie Institution
publication, ‘Feeding Experiments with Isolated Food Substances’:
Rat XII and rat XIII were caged separately on August 9 1909. Fresh
food-paste was introduced daily into the food dishes in excess of the
amount eaten, which was at first ascertained daily. The body-weights were
at first determined every other day, as was the nitrogen of the excreta
(urine and faeces). Subsequently it was found adequate to estimate the
nitrogen in weekly periods. (1911, p. 19)
The rhythm of these observations is a rhythm of the experimental sys-
tem that is distinct from any of the various time-frames found within
the experiments, such as the rate of growth or metabolism in the rats
or the teaching schedules of the researchers. According to Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht, rhythm can be considered a materiality with particular
functions in human imagination and thought. One function of rhythm is
“the coordinating function,” whereby rhythm facilitates the coordination
of bodily movements of different individuals such that it “allows them,
metaphorically speaking to become a ‘collective subject’ ” (Gumbrecht
1994, p. 172). These embedded durations establish timeframes and
speeds that are unique to the experiment. These new times and speeds
106 robyn smith

are the boundaries of a system that is out of phase with the timeframes
and speeds of the formed entities such as the rats, the scientists and the
subject of biochemistry, each of which went into producing the system
originally. The rhythms of the experimental systems function to lock
together the various timeframes within the experimental systems such
that the time of the experimental system begins to function as a whole.
The rhythms within the experimental systems enable the emergence
of a collective subject, which is a blur of nature and culture, a blur of
scientific knowledge and animal metabolism.
There is a point of rhythm so ever-present as to be practically invis-
ible in rat feeding experiments and in the way we think about human
interaction with rats. Notice the rats’ exercise wheel:
The exercising cage is an essential part of the colony equipment if fertility
is to be maintained and vigorous rats are desired. . . . The cage which we
have found very satisfactory is constructed upon a 21 inch bicycle wheel.
The excellent ball bearings of a bicycle wheel are essential, for revolv-
ing cages are subjected to a very considerable daily use. The recording
mechanism frequently registers 5000 revolutions in the twenty four hour
period. (Greenman 1923, p. 24)
Close consideration of the revolving wheel allows us to consider the
experimental system as a system driven by its own differential repro-
duction, rather than simply the work of scientists upon rats. First of
all, the rats’ agency is apparent in the need for the flywheel. Rat fer-
tility and well-being are sufficiently touchy as to act as agents in the
experimental system; the successful experimental system requires the
flywheel to maintain itself. The ‘constellating’ of the rat as a technical
object here relies upon the rats’ own material agency. However, the
flywheel does not only highlight the rats’ agency, but highlights the
dissolution of the significance of any one agency and the importance
of that which develops in the refrain of human and material agencies.
The fly wheel is the perfect site at which to see that the experimental
system, and not only the human aspect of the experiment, opens up to
become a performance of the rats’ metabolism. The interests of each
party are so caught up in the wheel that it is impossible to say where
the scientists’ interest and knowledge begins and where the rats’ interest
and metabolism begins.
According to Gumbrecht, rhythm is significant insofar as it is a
phenomenon “without a primary representation dimension” (1994,
p. 171). I argue that if, as Gumbrecht asserts, rhythm is a phenomenon
without a representative dimension, it is perfectly suited to carrying,
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 107

throughout the experimental system, the ‘as yet unknown’. The rhythm
of the exercise wheel is fundamental to the development of the much-
desired ‘fertile and vigorous rats’, which are essential to any successful
experiment and it is therefore bound intimately with the scientists’
desire. This is the rhythm of what they desire to know. The scientists’
desire takes on the surge of the cycle of the rats’ wheel and in this way
the resonance of the rhythm within the experimental system builds
and grows. The rhythm of the wheel, we might say, establishes and
perpetuates the wave of the coming to know, throughout the whole
experimental system. In establishing this rhythm with the revolving
cage the ‘as yet unknown’ and the scientists’ desire pervade the rat
colony and the experimental system. The rhythm of the revolving
wheel therefore is an essential material if the experimental systems are
to solicit the future.
Furthermore, Gumbrecht characterizes rhythm as a phenomenon
that is experienced as bodily movements. Narrative descriptions, on the
other hand, that which is known and can be represented, are phenom-
ena that are experienced as meaning (1994, p. 181). Gumbrecht argues
that imagination appears in the tension that is created in movement back
and forth between these two levels. This is to say that repeated bodily
experiences of rhythm will pull into tension the level of signification
available to those involved. The experience of the bodily movement
of rhythm is at least not reducible to the signification of any semantic
description involved. On the flywheel the pinch of the unknown and
that which cannot be represented in the experiment becomes thoroughly
mixed with that which is known and is representable. The rhythm of
the exercise wheel therefore establishes a rhythm by which that which
is unrepresentable or unknown is carried forward throughout the
experiment. This tension therefore is productive of imagination. This
is not to say that entire structures of signification are brought down,
but that in the tension between the semantics of representation and the
physical experience of rhythm, bodily movement can access significance
which is not part of a narrative sequence. As Gumbrecht understands
it, rhythm builds and grows into imagination.
Knowledge does not emerge solely from the sense the scientists make
of the data they collect for themselves, but emerges from the scientists
losing themselves, as a necessary effect of the huge task of rhythmic
data collection, and from the interlocking of the various durations and
rhythms by the rhythmic drive of the revolving cage. As Alphonso
Lingis suggests:
108 robyn smith

Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its teleology
and continues as a periodicity with a force that is not the force of the will
launching it and launching it once again and then once again; instead it
continues as a force of inner intensity. (1998, p. 61)
It may very well be that the scientists placed the rats on the wheels
to the end of maintaining the health of their subjects. However, very
quickly, as is apparent to anyone who has ever watched a rodent in a
wheel and dissolved in laughter at its absurdity, the logic of the process
is carried away by the momentum. The absurdity marks the extremity of
the self-reference that the revolving wheel performs in the experimental
systems and just as logic is carried away, so intentionality is pulled into
the orbit of absurdity, where the anomalous is cultivated.
This small piece of equipment is a function by which the experimen-
tal systems are coordinated as a whole and through which a collective
subject emerges. The rats’ exercise wheel is precisely the point at which
to see that rhythm allows for the undoing of the human and material
agencies constituting the system and that insofar as it performs this
function, this rhythm allows the system to function as a whole with
internal time-frames and durations and thereby enables it to function
as a productive experimental system. If the experimental system con-
sists of a juggling act of purified diets, here we can see that the real
trick is juggling while maintaining the balance of the experiment on
a unicycle. Certainly we can see the establishment of a closed system
through the traffic in differential at the outer limit of the balls in the air
and the revolving wheel as the “the little bobbles of the balls and the
wobbles of the unicycle have repercussions for each other and . . . become
linked . . . into a system” (Livingston 2006, p. 84).

Touch and Texture, Sight and Vitality

At the time of the formulation of the problem of the ‘as yet unknown’ in
food, the techniques of chemical analysis were insufficient to the task of
determining or isolating the chemical constituents of the accessory food
factor(s). Stanley Becker has argued that because Osborne and Men-
del did not recognize the significance of such an insignificant amount
of chemical substance they were unable to ascertain the presence of
vitamins in their rats’ food (Becker 1968, p. 157). The significance
of this observation is two-fold. First, Osborne and Mendel could not
conceive the importance of such an insignificant quantity of chemical
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 109

to nutrition, and second, they did not have the technology to isolate
the substance, even if they could conceive of the need to do so. These
biochemists could only re-construct the pathways of cellular metabo-
lism that were detectable at the time with the tools at hand. The only
test for the presence or absence of the unknown food ingredient was
a biological test, or an animal feeding experiment.
Central events in the assemblage of the experiment are observations
by the scientists. Observation in a scientific experiment means hosting
different and various sensations, which demand the opening and closing
of various points of entry and exit and exposing various surfaces to the
‘as yet unknown’. According to Ludwick Fleck, “There is no universally
accepted system of measurement in biology” and within the feeding
experiments measurements are also assessments of the animals’ “vitality”
and “well-being” (Fleck 1979, p. 63). Observations of well-being and a
standard of well-being were practical tools in the experimental system.
Noting and recording the well-being of the lab rat was a method for
containing and interpreting new results. Well-being therefore was such
a powerful tool for biological analysis because it enabled the concep-
tualization of the ‘as yet unknown’ food substance in a manner that
mathematical or chemical analysis would not have allowed.
The animals’ well-being and vitality, which cannot be measured
other than through a ‘sense’ of the animal, became both a resource
and a result within laboratory research. In the publications concern-
ing the ‘as yet unknown’ food factor at the time, the discussions in the
results sections are of coat texture and general appearance, activity
level and well-being as it ‘seems’ to the scientists. The significance of
the scientists’ ‘sense’ of the experiments as a material aspect of the
experimental systems and the emergence of new knowledge appears
in their observations of the animals’ general health and well-being. For
example, “The appearance of these rats was very miserable. They were
rough coated and emaciated” (McCollum 1915, p. 183). The coat of
the rat, therefore, no longer marked the boundary of the rat from the
scientist, rather it is a zone of intensity within the rat/scientist hybrid,
the blur of static that comes with rubbing a dry coat, which allows the
scientist to form a line with the rats’ interior. Such a statement recalls
an image of a sorcerer stroking her cat, stroking her rat, as she ponders
the future(s) she might devise. In rubbing the rats’ coats the scientists
blur the boundary of the animal body and encounter their interior
and the functioning of the intermediate metabolism. The lines of both
the subject and the object are redrawn, as scientists make observations
110 robyn smith

concerning the rats’ coats to describe the influence of an unknown

chemical in the intermediate metabolism of the rat.
In taking time to rub the rats, they break off from commonly accepted
standards of scientific activity to suspend themselves over the abyss
of the unknown, to feel that intensity on their skin. When sitting and
rubbing their rats, the scientists are in a state of suspension. They are
worrying the problem—suspended between points of knowledge and
points in time, between what they have known and that which they
do not yet know. This state of suspension is the site of the power to
disrupt the narrative line of nutritional knowledge.
Although we have this information presented to us as a result in
publication, we must understand that at the time the scientists’ rep-
etitious contact with the rats (in feeding, measurement or stroking)
really was an invocation of the future. The sense the scientists glean
from stroking their rats is not only of rough-coat or soft-coat. They
are interested in rough or soft fur only insofar as it bears with it the
traces of the rats’ metabolism. In petting the rats, the scientists do not
only trace the outline of the animals, rather this touch is an explora-
tion of the interiority of the rats’ metabolism and its unfolding. The
scientists were testing the future with these animals. “The mortality
of the young was somewhat high, a fact for which we have as yet no
adequate explanation” (McCollum 1915, p. 189). The rats’ future was
not bright. “They failed to make any growth, and died within two
months” (McCollum 1915, p. 182).

Friendship in Science

I have argued to this point that the intertwining of human and material
agencies in experimental systems establishes a zone of intensity, a field
of possibility which functions to host the future and solicit the new. In
this final section I maintain the argument that new knowledge emerges
in a refrain of human and material agency, but I pursue this interaction
through the actualization of the vitamins. Here a specific interaction of
the human and material agencies will highlight the process by which
knowledge and objects move from being incipient to being actual. An
exchange of correspondence between Osborne and Mendel in the late
spring and early summer of 1913 details nicely a refrain of human and
material agency through which the vitamins become increasingly actual-
ized. This exchange of correspondence occurred while Mendel was on
summer vacation and is a particularly compelling site of investigation
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 111

as the human agency here consists in the expression and negotiation

of friendship between the two men.
The exchange follows the publication of McCollum’s ‘successful’ rat
feeding experiments three weeks before Osborne and Mendel published
their ‘successful’ rat feeding experiments. McCollum’s publication
caused much excitement in Osborne and Mendel’s laboratories and it
is fortuitous for the historical record that Mendel was on vacation at
the time because it meant that he had to communicate with Osborne
by letter, thereby leaving a written record. McCollum’s perceived insur-
gency into ‘their’ field mandated that Osborne and Mendel stop and
take stock of the substance of their current experiment. What I want
to show here is that a good deal of relationship maintenance was also
undertaken and, without knowing how ‘necessary’ the emotional work
was, certainly the trust and intimacy in their friendship were contribut-
ing factors to the development of the scientists’ work with the rats and
the ‘as yet unknown’ in food. In these letters, both the friendship and
the rat compel Mendel in his work, even while on vacation. In response
to an initial letter from Osborne, Mendel writes:
You are not ‘bothering’ me when you write. I always like to hear from
you. Nor am I making any serious ‘change of thought’ here: in fact I
am putting in several hours a day trying to ‘catch up’ with the literature
which I have neglected in the past few months. I find, however, that the
problems in which I used to be interested—purine metabolism, parenteral
absorption, lymph, etc.—all seem ‘tame’ to me now when the center of
my interests has so long been pivoted on our common problems of the
rat. (Becker 1968, p. 241)
Tame—more on the order of a pet mouse than a swarm of rats; not
nearly so intense, certainly not of the same affect. And what renders
the problem so intense is the back and forth of the friendship (‘our
common problem’) and rat physiology, the back and forth between
human and material agency impresses Mendel as particularly intense,
as compared to other aspects of research.
On July 9, 1913, Osborne wrote to tell Mendel about a piece by
McCollum in the Journal of Biological Chemistry:
We have just received the July number of the Journal of Biological
Chemistry and are greatly interested in McCollum’s paper which I should
suppose you had seen before it was printed. If not, I will say that he might
just as well have supplied his data from our notebooks as from his. His
results agree with ours in all respects and he has discovered that butter
makes them grow. (Becker 1968, p. 237)
112 robyn smith

In stating that McCollum has discovered that “butter makes them

grow”, Osborne provides a peep into the process of actualization of a
scientific object. Allow me to step back a moment. In the letter, Osborne
refers to data that Mendel and he have built together. Osborne says
that McCollum has their data. He then goes on to say “and he has
discovered that butter makes them grow”. Notably, McCollum does
not actually use this phrase; this clearly then is Osborne and Mendel’s
result. McCollum’s data correspond to their data and McCollum’s dis-
covery corresponds to their discovery. This is the purpose of Osborne’s
letter to Mendel. It is not to inform Mendel of some discovery made by
McCollum that is a surprise to Osborne. He wrote to Mendel out of
frustration and disappointment, “It seems to me a pity that we should
be in competition with McCollum in this line of work” (Becker 1968,
p. 237). The point I want to make concerns what this letter and its
tone tell us about the process of actualization.
The process of actualization involves these kinds of discussions
among friends concerning butter and its effects on rat growth (in this
case). The conclusion reached between them that butter makes rats
grow is a grasping, a reach which grows up between human and
material agency. It has occurred to (or, for) them that butter makes
the rats grow. The statement, “butter makes them grow” is obscure;
its significance is elusive. This example shows nicely the obscurity of
the process of actualization and the extent to which this process is
one of feeling, practical experience and mood. Osborne and Mendel
understood the implications of such a statement because they were
friends. The actualization of this scientific object is linked to aspects of
knowledge production that are non-empirical, which cannot be pointed
up. This tenuous result, “butter makes them grow”, could be sustained
in actuality and become a scientific result only because the friendship
at work could sustain it as such.
The development of a phrase such as this occurs with the develop-
ment of a mood, a sense of intimacy between Osborne and Mendel and
within their laboratory. Insofar as it clearly is an idiomatic expression
for them, it stands in for their common experiences in the lab and
invokes for each of them a sense of belonging. The statement suggests
that the science undertaken in Osborne and Mendel’s lab is highly per-
sonal. Science here is a particular form of experimentation, a particular
arrangement of tools and materials. Osborne and Mendel’s friendship,
the intimacy they develop through their lab work provides a carrier for
the emerging thought-style, the emerging understanding of “accessory
 rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 113

food factors”. It was because of the intimate bond between them that
they could nurture this incipient result into actuality. The tendencies
and potential of the ‘as yet unknown’ are being pulled through the
refrain of friendship, lab bench relations and rat physiology. The spe-
cific effect of this statement, “butter makes them grow”, as one that is
apparently well-worn and serves as a marker for a whole set of results
and experiences in the lab has the effect of dissolving the subjects into
the object of investigation, the rats.
By naming these tendencies within the rat-human relations, “butter
makes them grow”, Osborne and Mendel begin the process of inhibit-
ing other tendencies so that the accessory food factors are increasingly
actualized. “Butter makes them grow” is a nascent limit, a budding
postulate, not yet expressed in the biological theories or accumulated
knowledge at the time. Insofar as McCollum’s paper upsets them, this
“butter makes them grow” is becoming a restrictive postulate. They
are upset because McCollum has reached the same limits they have
reached in developing the problem. “Butter makes them grow” is a
style-permeated structure of the problem. It is the budding of the
norms of what will be considered a scientific problem and how it will
be considered correct to deal with those problems. In this instance, the
emergence of the norms of scientific rigour emerges via the work and
the intimate specificities of a friendship.
To conclude, I suggest we can understand the zone of “the ‘as yet
unknown’ ” as a “continuous but highly differentiated field that is ‘out
of phase’ with formed entities” (Massumi 2002, p. 34). Such a notion
is compelling here because this phrase, “out of phase”, speaks to a
blurring and a fading of the boundaries of objects, the suspension of
boundaries across their own divides. Productive experimental systems
function as “weaver[s] of morphisms” (Latour 1993, p. 137). Scientists
inhabit the ‘as yet unknown’ through the suspension of the division
between the self and the environment or, in this case, the scientists and
their animals. Relationships within experimental systems are productive
of this encounter with the ‘as yet unknown’ precisely insofar as they
effect a suspension of identity.2

2
Thanks to the editors of this volume for their initiative. I am happy to acknowl-
edge the support of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Thanks also to José Lopez and Rob
Mitchell who read and commented on early drafts of this paper.
114 robyn smith

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Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins
in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 CHAPTER SIX

BECOMING-WITH-COMPANIONS: SHARING AND

RESPONSE IN EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORIES

Donna Haraway

Reading the young-adult novel A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer,

I was arrested by a relationship between an old African Vapostori man,
who cared for guinea pigs used for sleeping sickness research in a
little scientific outpost in Zimbabwe around 1980, and the tsetse flies,
trypanosomes, cattle, and experimental lab rodents. In their working
hours, their skin shaved and painted with poisons that might sicken
the offending insects with their protozoan parasites, the guinea pigs
were held in tight little baskets while wire cages filled with biting flies
were placed over them. The flies gorged themselves on the guinea pigs’
blood. A young Shona adolescent girl, Nhamo, new to the practices
of science, watched.
“It’s cruel,” agreed Baba Joseph, “But one day the things we learn will
keep our cattle from dying.” He stuck his own arm into a tsetse cage.
Nhamo covered her mouth to keep from crying out. The flies settled all
over the old man’s skin and began swelling up. “I do this to learn what
the guinea pigs are suffering,” he explained. “It’s wicked to cause pain,
but if I share it, God may forgive me.” (Farmer 1996, p. 239)
Baba Joseph seems to me to offer a deep insight about how to think
about the labor of animals and their people in scientific practices,
especially in experimental labs. The experimental animal science
inhabited in this chapter is largely medical and veterinary research in
which animals bear diseases of interest to people. A great deal of animal
experimental science is not of this type; and for me the most interesting
biological research, in and out of labs, does not have the human species
much in mind. The notion that ‘the proper study of man is mankind’ is
risible among most of the biologists I know, whose curiosity is actually
for and about other critters. Curiosity, not just functional benefit, may
warrant the risk of “wicked action.” Baba Joseph, however, is worried
about sick cattle, coerced guinea pigs, and their people.
116 donna haraway

The animal care taker is not engaged in the heroics of self-experi-

mentation—common trope in tropical medicine histories (Herzig
2005)—but in the practical and moral obligations to mitigate suffering
among mortals where that is possible and to share the conditions of
work, including the suffering of the most vulnerable lab actors. Baba
Joseph’s bitten arm is not the fruit of a heroic fantasy of ending all suf-
fering, or not causing suffering, but the result of remaining at risk and
in solidarity in instrumental relationships that one does not disavow.
Using a model organism in an experiment is a common necessity in
research. The necessity and the justifications, no matter how strong,
do not obviate the obligations of care and of sharing pain. How else
could necessity and justice ( justification) be evaluated in a mortal world
where getting knowledge is never innocent? There are, of course, more
standards for evaluation than this one; but forgetting the criterion of
sharing pain to learn what animals’ suffering is and what to do about
it is not tolerable anymore, if it ever was.
It is important that the ‘shared conditions of work’ in an experimental
lab make us get it that entities with fully secured boundaries called pos-
sessive individuals (imagined as human or animal) are the wrong units
for considering what is going on. That does not mean that a particular
animal does not matter, but that mattering is always inside connections
that demand and enable response, not bare calculation or ranking.
Response, of course, grows with the capacity to respond; i.e., responsi-
bility. Such a capacity can only be shaped in and for multi-directional
relationships, in which there is always more than one responsive entity
in the processes of becoming. That means that human beings are not
uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; animals as work-
ers in labs, animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same
sense as people; i.e., responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action
through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being (Barad
2007). “Intra-acting, people and animals in labs are becoming with each
other in a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters. If this
structure of material-semiotic relating breaks down, or is not permitted
to be born, then nothing but objectification and oppression remain.
The parties in intra-action do not admit of pre-set taxonomic calcula-
tion; responders are themselves co-constituted in the responding and
do not have in advance a proper check list of properties. Further, the
capacity to respond, and so responsibility, should not be expected to
take on symmetrical shapes and textures for all the parties. Response
cannot emerge within relationships of self-similarity.
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 117

Calculation, such as a risk-benefit comparison weighted by taxonomic

rank, suffices within relations of bounded self-similarity, such as human-
ism and its offspring. Answering to no check list, response is always
more risky than that. If an experimental lab becomes a scene only of
calculation in relation to animals or people, that lab should be shut
down. Minimizing cruelty, while necessary, is not enough; responsibility
demands more than that. I am arguing that instrumental relations of
people and animals are not themselves the root of turning animals (or
people) into dead things, into machines whose reactions are of interest
but who have no presence, no face, that demands recognition, caring, and
shared pain. Instrumental intra-action itself is not the enemy; indeed,
I will argue below that work, use, and instrumentality are intrinsic to
bodily webbed mortal earthly being and becoming. Unidirectional rela-
tions of use, ruled by practices of calculation and self-sure of hierarchy,
are quite another matter. Such self-satisfied calculation takes heart from
the primary dualism that parses body one way and mind another. That
dualism should have withered long ago in the face of feminist and
many other criticisms, but the fantastic mind/body binary has proved
remarkably resilient. Failing, indeed refusing, to come face-to-face with
animals, I believe, is one of the reasons.
We are in the midst of webbed existences, multiple beings in rela-
tionship, this animal, this sick child, this village, these herds, these labs,
these neighborhoods in a city, these industries and economies, these
ecologies linking natures and cultures without end. This is a ramifying
tapestry of shared being/becoming among critters (including humans)
where living well, flourishing, and being ‘polite’ (political/ethical/in
right relation) mean staying inside shared semiotic materiality, including
the suffering inherent in unequal and ontologically multiple instrumental
relationships. In that sense, experimental animal research is, or can be,
necessary, indeed good, but it can never ‘legitimate’ a relation to the
suffering in purely regulatory or disengaged and unaffected ways. The
interesting questions, then, become what might responsible ‘sharing
suffering’ look like in historically situated practices?
The sense of sharing I am trying to think about is both epistemologi-
cal and practical.1 It is not about being a surrogate for the surrogate, or

1
My thinking about what sharing suffering might mean was worked out partly in an
extended email dialogue in July 2006 with Thom van Dooren, an Australian scholar
and writer on the worlds of seeds in technoscientific agriculture.
118 donna haraway

taking the place of the suffering ‘other’ that we need to consider. We do

not need some New Age version of the facile and untrue claim that “I
feel your pain.” Sometimes, perhaps, taking the place of ‘the victim’ is a
kind of action ethically required; but I do not think that is sharing and,
further, those who suffer, including animals, are not necessarily victims.
What happens if we do not regard or treat lab animals as victims, nor as
‘other’ to the human, nor relate to their suffering and deaths as sacrifice?
What happens if experimental animals are not mechanical substitutes,
but significantly unfree partners, whose differences and similarities to
human beings, to each other, and to other organisms are crucial to the
work of the lab, and indeed, are partly constructed by the work of the
lab? What happens if the working animals are significant others with
whom we are in consequential relationship in an irreducible world of
embodied and lived partial differences, rather than the Other across
the gulf from the One?
In addition, what does ‘unfree’ mean here in relation to animals who
are in an instrumental relation with people? Where is our zoological
Marx when we need him? Lab animals are not ‘unfree’ in some abstract
and transcendental sense. Indeed, they have many degrees of freedom
in a more mundane sense, including the fact that experiments do not
work if animals and other organisms do not cooperate. I like the meta-
phor ‘degrees of freedom’: there really are unfilled spaces; something
outside calculation can still happen. Even factory meat industries have
to face the disaster of chickens or pigs who refuse to live when their
cooperation is utterly disregarded in an excess of human engineering
arrogance. But that is a very low standard for thinking about animal
freedom in instrumental relations.
To be in a relation of use to each other is not the definition of
unfreedom and violation. Such relations are almost never symmetrical
(‘equal’ or calculable). Rather, relations of ‘use’ are exactly what com-
panion species are about—the ecologies of significant others involve
mess mates at table, with indigestion and without the comfort of
teleological purpose from above, below, in front, or behind. This is not
some kind of naturalistic reductionism; this is about living responsively
as mortal beings where dying and killing are not optional or able to
be laundered like stolen money by creating unbridgeable gaps in the
pathways through which the flows of value can be tracked. Flows of
value can be tracked, thanks to Marx and his heirs; but response has
to go into trackless territory, without even the orienting sign posts of
reliable chasms.
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 119

None of this lets me forget that I called the lab animals ‘unfree’ in
some sense not undone by remembering that relations of utility are not
the source of that ascription. Baba Joseph did not say that understand-
ing the animals’ suffering made the wickedness of causing them pain go
away. He said only that his God “may forgive” him. May. When I say
‘unfree,’ I mean that real pain, physical and mental, including a great
deal of killing, is often directly caused by the instrumental apparatus,
and the pain is not borne symmetrically. Neither can the suffering and
dying be borne symmetrically, in most cases, no matter how hard the
people work to respond. To me that does not mean people cannot
ever engage in experimental animal lab practices, including causing
pain and killing. It does mean that these practices should never leave
their practitioners in moral comfort, sure of their righteousness. Neither
does the category of ‘guilty’ apply, even though with Baba Joseph I
am convinced the word “wicked” remains apt. The moral sensibility
needed here is ruthlessly mundane and will not be stilled by calculations
about ends and means. The needed morality, in my view, is culturing a
radical ability to remember and feel what is going on and performing
the epistemological, emotional, and technical work to respond practi-
cally in the face of permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic
hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantees.
Degrees of freedom, indeed; the open is not comfortable.
Baba Joseph did not replace the guinea pigs; rather, he tried to
understand their pain in the most literal way. There is an element of
mimesis in his actions that I affirm—feeling in his flesh what the guinea
pigs in his charge feel. I am most interested, however, in another aspect
of Baba Joseph’s practice, an element I will call ‘non-mimetic sharing.’
He did not get bitten in order to stand in as experimental object, but
in order to understand the rodents’ pain so as to do what he could
about it, even if that were only to witness to the fact that something
properly called forgiveness is needed even in the most thoroughly jus-
tified instances of causing suffering. He did not resign his job (and so
starve? or ‘just’ lose his status in his community?) or try to convince
Nhamo not to help out in the lab with Dr. van Heerden. He did not
‘free’ the guinea pigs or worry about the flies. Joseph encouraged and
instructed Nhamo’s curiosity about and with animals of all sorts, in
and out of the lab. Still, Joseph had his God from whom he hoped for
forgiveness. What might standing in need of forgiveness mean when
God is not addressed and sacrifice is not practiced? My suspicion is that
the kind of forgiveness that we fellow mortals living with other animals
120 donna haraway

hope for is the mundane grace to eschew separation, self certainty, and
innocence even in our most creditable practices that enforce unequal
vulnerability.
In an essay called ‘FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™,’ I confronted
a genetically engineered lab critter, patented under the name Onco-
Mouse, whose work was to serve as a breast cancer model for women.
Commanded by her suffering and moved by Lynn Randolph’s paint-
ing, The Passion of OncoMouse, which showed a chimeric white mouse
with the breasts of a woman and a crown of thorns in a multi-national
observation chamber that was a laboratory, I argued:
OncoMouse™ is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is
my sister . . . Although her promise is decidedly secular, s/he is a figure in
the sense developed within Christian realism: s/he is our scapegoat; s/he
bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a power-
ful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of
secular salvation—a ‘cure for cancer.’ Whether I agree to her existence
and use or not, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that
I and my sisters might live. In the experimental way of life, s/he is the
experiment . . . If not in my own body, surely in those of my friends, I will
someday owe to OncoMouse™ or her subsequently designed rodent kin
a large debt. So, who is s/he? (Haraway 1997, p. 79)
It is tempting to see my sister OncoMouse™ as a sacrifice, and certainly
the barely secular Christian theater of the suffering servant in science
and the everyday lab idiom of sacrificing experimental animals invite
that thinking. OncoMouse is definitely a model substituted for human
experimental bodies. But something the biologist Barbara Smuts calls
co-presence with animals is what keeps me from resting easy with the
idiom of sacrifice (Smuts 2001). The animals in the labs, including the
oncomice, have face; they are somebody as well as something, just
as we humans are both all the time. To be in response to that is to
recognize co-presence in relations of use, and therefore to remember
that no balance sheet of benefit and cost will suffice. I may (or may
not) have good reasons to kill, or to make, oncomice, but I do not
have the majesty of Reason and the solace of Sacrifice. I do not have
sufficient reason, only the risk of doing something wicked because it
may also be good.
I am trying to think about what is required of people who use other
animals unequally (in experiments, directly or indirectly, in daily living,
knowing, and eating because of animals’ labor). Some instrumental
relations should be ended, some should be nurtured—but none with-
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 121

out response; i.e., nonmechanical and morally alert consequences for

all the parties, human and not, in the relation of unequal use. I don’t
think we will have ever a general principle for what sharing suffering
means; but it has to be material, practical, consequential; the sort of
engagement that keeps the inequality from becoming commonsensical
or taken as obviously ok. The inequality is in the precise and change-
able labor practices of the lab, not in some transcendent excellence of
the Human over the Animal, which can then be killed without the
charge of murder being brought. Neither the pure light of sacrifice
nor the night vision of the power of domination illuminates the rela-
tionships involved. Inequality in the lab is, in short, not of a humanist
kind, whether religious or secular, but of a relentlessly historical and
contingent kind that never stills the murmur of nonteleological and
nonhierarchical multiplicity that the world is. The question that then
interests me is how can the multi-species labor practices of the lab be
less deadly, less painful, and more free for all the workers? How can
responsibility be practiced among earthlings? Labor as such, which is
always proper to instrumental relations, is not the problem; it is the
always pressing question of nonsymmetrical suffering and death. And
nonmimetic well being.
Jacques Derrida has been lurking in this reflection for quite some
time, and it is time to invite him in directly. Not least, Derrida elo-
quently and relentlessly reminds his readers that responsibility is never
calculable. There is no formula for response; to respond is precisely
not merely to react, with its fixed calculus proper to machines, logic,
and—most Western philosophy has insisted—animals. In the lineage
of those philosophers with and against whom Derrida struggled all
his life, the Human only can respond; animals react. The Animal is
forever positioned on the other side of an unbridgeable gap, a gap
that reassures the Human of His excellence by the very ontological
impoverishment of a life world that cannot be its own end or know its
own condition. Following Lévinas on the subjectivity of the hostage,
Derrida remembers that in this gap lies the logic of sacrifice, within
which there is no responsibility toward the living world other than the
human (Derrida 1991).
Within the logic of sacrifice, only human beings can be murdered.
Humans can and must respond to each other and maybe avoid delib-
erate cruelty to other living beings when it is convenient in order to
avoid damaging their own humanity, which is Kant’s scandalous best
effort on the topic, or at best recognize that other animals feel pain
122 donna haraway

even if they cannot respond nor in their own right obligate response.
Every other living being except Man can be killed, but not murdered.
To make Man merely killable is the height of moral outrage, indeed,
it is the definition of genocide. Reaction is for and toward the unfree;
response is for and toward the open.2 Everything but Man lives in the
realm of reaction and so calculation—so much animal pain, so much
human good, add it up, kill so many animals, call it sacrifice. Do the
same for people, and they lose their humanity. There is a great deal
of historical demonstration of how all this works; just check out the
latest list of current genocides-in-progress. Or read the rolls of death
rows in U.S. prisons.
Derrida got it that this structure, this logic of sacrifice and this
exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the
Animal; and he called that production criminal, a crime against beings
we call animals:
The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and
common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous
thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime.
Not against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the
animals, against animals. (Derrida 2002, p. 417)
Such criminality takes on special historical force in the face of the
immense, systematized violence against animals deserving the name
exterminism. As Derrida put it:
[ N ]o one can deny this event any more, no one can deny the unprec-
edented proportions of the subjection of the animal. . . . Everybody knows
what terrifying and intolerable pictures a realist painting could give to
the industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence to
which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries.
(Derrida 2002, pp. 394–95)3

2
This kind of “Open” is elucidated in Agamben’s reading of Heidegger (Agamben
2004, pp. 49–77). Agamben is very good at explicating how the “anthropological
machine” in philosophy works but, bare life (zoe) notwithstanding, he is no help at all,
in my view, for figuring out how to get to another kind of opening, the kind feminists
and others who never had Heidegger’s starting point for Dasein of profound boredom
can discern.
3
Sue Coe has produced vivid graphic art on just these matters (Coe 2000). See
also her website: http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/coebio.htm. Coe works within
a framework of animal rights and uncompromising critical prohibition against eating
or experimenting on animals. I find her visual work compelling, but the political and
philosophical formulations much less so. Extended to the critique of speciesism, the
logic of humanism and rights is everywhere; and the substance of moral action is
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 123

Everyone may know, but there is not nearly enough indigestion.4

Within the logic of sacrifice that undergirds all versions of religious or
secular humanism, animals are sacrificed precisely because they can be
killed and then ingested symbolically and materially in acts saved from
cannibalism or murder of the brother by the logic of surrogacy and
substitution. (Derrida understood that patricide and fratricide are the
only real murders in the logic of humanism; everybody else to whom
the law is made to apply gets covered by courtesy.) The substitute, the
scapegoat, is not Man but Animal. Sacrifice works; there is a whole
world of those who can be killed because finally they are only some-
thing not somebody, close enough to ‘being’ in order to be a model,
substitute, sufficiently self-similar and so nourishing food, but not close
enough to compel response. Not the Same, but Different; not One, but
Other. Derrida repudiates this trap with all the considerable technical
power of deconstruction and all the moral sensitivity of a man who
is affected by shared mortality. Judging that the crime that posits the
Animal is more than idiotic (a bêtise), Derrida goes much further: ‘[T]he
gesture seems to me to constitute philosophy as such, the philosopheme
itself.’ (Derrida 2002, p. 408)
Derrida argues that the problem is not human beings’ denying
something to other critters—whether that be language, or knowledge
of death, or whatever is the theoretico-empirical sign of the Big Gap
popular to the moment—but rather the death-defying arrogance of
ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human:
The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing
not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond
means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction. (Derrida
2002, p. 377)
Taking as given the irreducible multiplicity of living beings, Homo sapi-
ens and other species, who are entangled together, I suggest that this
question of discernment pivots on the unresolved dilemmas of killing
and relationships of use.

denunciation, prohibition, and rescue, such that inside instrumental relations, animals
can only be victims. Still, I need her flaming eyes to burnish my knowledge of hell—an
inferno for which my world, including myself, is responsible.
4
The statistics for animals killed worldwide by people for use in almost every aspect
of human lives are truly staggering; and the growth of that killing in the last century
is, literally, unthinkable, if not uncountable. Not to take all this killing seriously is not
to be a serious person in the world. How to take it seriously is far from obvious.
124 donna haraway

I am afraid to start writing what I have been thinking about all this
because I will get it wrong—emotionally, intellectually, and morally—
and the issue is consequential. Haltingly, I will try. I suggest that it is
a mis-step to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed
and those who may not, and a mis-step to pretend to live outside killing.
It is the same kind of mistake that saw freedom only in the absence
of labor and necessity; i.e., the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of
all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of each other’s
bodies. This is not saying that nature is red in tooth and claw and so
anything goes. The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror image mis-step to
transcendental humanism. I think what I and my people need to let go
of if we are to learn to stop exterminism and genocide, either through
direct participation or indirect benefit and acquiescence, is the com-
mand, “Thou shalt not kill.” The problem is not figuring out to whom
such a command applies so that ‘other’ killing can go on as usual and
reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to
live responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labor of killing,
so as to be in the open, in quest of the capacity to respond in relent-
less historical, non-teleological, multispecies contingency. Perhaps the
commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.” It is not
killing that gets us into exterminism, but making beings killable. Baba
Joseph understood that the guinea pigs were not killable; he had the
obligation to respond.
I think that is exactly what the sexually harassing, middle-aged scholar
of poetry, David Lurie, understood in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Working
with a vet whose duty to untold numbers of stray and sick animals was
fulfilled by killing them in her clinic, David brought the dog he had
bonded with to her for euthanasia at the end of the novel. He could
have delayed the death of that one dog. That one dog mattered. He
did not sacrifice that dog; he took responsibility for killing without,
maybe for the first time in his life, leaving. He did not take comfort
in a language of humane killing; he was at the end more honest and
capable of love than that. That noncalculable moral response is what
distinguishes David Lurie in Disgrace for me from Elizabeth Costello
in The Lives of Animals, for whom actually existing animals do not seem
present. Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Tanner Lecturer in Coetzee’s
The Lives of Animals, inhabits a radical language of animal rights. Armed
with a fierce commitment to sovereign reason, she flinches at none
of this discourse’s universal claims; and she embraces all of its power
to name extreme atrocity. She practices the enlightenment method
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 125

of comparative history in order to fix the awful equality of slaughter.

Meat eating is like the Holocaust; meat eating is the Holocaust. What
would Elizabeth Costello do if she were in the place of Bev Shaw, the
volunteer animal caretaker in Disgrace, whose daily service of love is to
escort large numbers of abandoned dogs and cats to the solace of death?
Or in the place of Disgrace’s Lucy Lurie, whose face-to-face life with
dogs and human neighbors in post-apartheid South Africa arrests the
categorical power of words in mid-utterance? Or even of David Lurie,
Lucy’s disgraced father, who finally inhabits a discourse of desire at least
as fierce and authentic as Elizabeth Costello’s distinction-obliterating
discourse of universal suffering? How do the relentlessly face-to-face,
historically situated, language-defeating suffering and moral dilemmas
of Disgrace meet the searingly generic, category-sated moral demands
of The Lives of Animals? And who lives and who dies—animals and
humans—in the very different ways of inheriting the histories of atroc-
ity that Coetzee proposes in these novels’ practices of moral inquiry?
(Coetzee 1999 and 2001)5
I suggest that it follows from the feminist insight that embraced his-
torically situated, mindful bodies as the site not just of first (maternal)
birth but also of full life and all its projects, failed and achieved, that
human beings must learn to kill responsibly. And be killed responsibly,
yearning for the capacity to respond and to recognize response, always
with reasons but knowing there will never be sufficient reason. We can
never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons; but
these practices will never get us into that kind of open where multi-
species responsibility is at stake. For that open, we will not cease to
require a forgiveness we cannot exact. I do not think we can nurture
living until we get better at facing killing.
If the plant molecular biologist Martha Crouch was right that some
of the pleasures of lab science that tend to make practitioners less able
to engage in full cosmopolitics come from a kind of Peter Pan-like
permanent preadolescence, where one never really has to engage the
full semiotic materiality of one’s scientific practices, then maybe shar-
ing suffering is about growing up to do the kind of time-consuming,

5
The Tanner Lectures represent a common, powerful, and in my view powerfully
wrong, approach to the knots of animal and human killing and killability. It is not that
the Nazi killings of the Jews and others and mass animal slaughter in the meat industry
have no relation; it is that analogy culminating in equation can blunt our alertness to
irreducible difference and multiplicity and their demands.
126 donna haraway

expensive, hard work—as well as play—, of staying with all the com-
plexities for all of the actors, even knowing that will never be fully
possible, fully calculable. Staying with the complexities does not mean
not acting, not doing research, not engaging in some, indeed many,
unequal instrumental relationships; it does mean learning to live and
think in practical opening to shared pain and mortality and to what
that teaches.
The sense of cosmopolitics I draw from is Isabelle Stengers’. She
invoked Deleuze’s idiot, the one who knew how to slow things down, to
stop the rush to consensus or to a new dogmatism or to denunciation,
in order to open up the chance of a common world. Stengers insists we
cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. Idiots know
that. For Stengers, the cosmos is the possible unknown constructed by
multiple, diverse entities. Full of the promise of articulations that diverse
beings might eventually make, the cosmos is the opposite of a place
of transcendent peace. Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal, in the spirit
of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s
philosophy, is that decisions must take place somehow in the presence
of those who will bear their consequences. Making that ‘somehow’
concrete is the work of practicing artful combinations. Stengers is a
chemist by training, and artful combinations are her métier. To get ‘in
the presence of ’ demands work, speculative invention, and ontological
risks. No one knows how to do that in advance of coming together in
composition. (Stengers 2004)
For those hemophilic dogs in the mid-twentieth century, their physi-
ological labor demanded human lab people’s answering labor of caring
for the dogs as patients in minute detail before addressing questions
to them as experimental subjects. Of course, the research would have
failed otherwise, but that was not the whole story—or should not be
allowed to be the whole story as the consequences of sharing suffering
nonmimetically become clearer. For example, what sorts of lab arrange-
ments would have to be made to minimize numbers of dogs needed?
How to make the dogs’ lives as full as possible? To engage them as
mindful bodies, in relationships of response? How to get the funding for
a biobehavioral specialist as part of the lab staff for training both lab
animals and people of all levels from principal investigators to animal
room workers?6 How to get humans with hemophilia or humans who

6
Training animals of a huge range of species from octopuses to gorillas to cooperate
actively with people in scientific protocols and husbandry, as well as training human
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 127

care for people dealing with hemophilia involved in care of the dogs?
How to ask in actual practice, without knowing the answer through a
calculus of how much and whose pain matters, whether these sorts of
experiments deserve to flourish anymore at all? If not, whose suffering
then will require the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing? All of this
is my own imagined scenario, of course, but I am trying to picture
what sharing could look like if it were built into any decision to use
another sentient being where unequal power and benefit are (or should
be) undeniable and not innocent or transparent.
The Belgian philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret argued
that “articulating bodies to other bodies” is always a political matter.
The same must be said about disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other
bodies. Despret reformulated ways for thinking about domestication
between people and animals (Despret 2004). My essay inhabits one
of the major sites where domestic animals and their people meet: the
experimental laboratory. I have made side trips into the agricultural
animal pen and abattoir, propelled by the cattle in Baba Joseph’s story,
beasts loved and cultivated intensely by Nhamo and her people, beasts
used cruelly by the tsetse flies and their trypanosomes, and beasts turned
into efficient, healthy enough, parasite-free, meat-making machines in
the death camps of industrial agribusiness. The language of nonmimetic
sharing and work is not going to be adequate, I am sure, even if it
is part of a needed toolkit. We require a rich array of ways to make
vivid and practical the material/ethical/political/epistemological neces-
sities that must be lived and developed inside unequal, instrumental
relations linking human and nonhuman animals in research as well
as other sorts of activities when our humanist or religious soporifics
no longer satisfy us. Human beings’ learning to share other animals’
pain non-mimetically is, in my view, an ethical obligation, a practical
problem, and an ontological opening. Sharing pain promises disclosure,
promises becoming. The capacity to respond may yet be recognized
and nourished on this earth.

caregivers to provide innovative behavioral enrichment for the animals in their charge,
is a growing practice. Trained animals are subject to less coercion of either physical
or pharmaceutical kinds. Such animals are calmer, more interested in things, more
capable of trying something new in their lives, more responsive. Previous scientific
research, as well as a bit of finally listening to people who work well with animals
in entertainment or sport, has produced new knowledge that in turn changes moral
possibilities and obligations in instrumental relationships like those in experimental
animal laboratories.
128 donna haraway

I end in the company of another arresting writer, Hélène Cixous, who

remembers how she failed her childhood dog by abject betrayal. She
only knew she loved him, only knew how to love him, only recognized
how he loved, many years later. Bitten hard in the foot by her crazed
dog, Fips, who had been brought to the insanity of the bite by the daily
pelting of rocks into the family’s compound in Algiers after World War
II, the twelve-year-old Cixous, subject like all her family to the insup-
portable pain of the death of her father and the repudiation visited on
the scapegoat outsiders by the colonized Arabs all around them, could
not face the awful fate of her dog. No complexity of lived history saved
her family from the label of doubly hated French Jews. The Cixous
family, like the colonized Arabs, were made categorically killable. No
grace of a happy ending saved Fips from the consequences. After the
leashed dog savaged the girl Hélène, who seemed to the dog about to
step on him, holding onto her foot in the face of desperate beating to
make him let go, Cixous could no longer face Fips. The dog, ill and
neglected, died in the company of her brother; Hélène was not there.
As an adult, Cixous learned to tell the story of Job the Dog:
The story ends in tragedy . . . I wanted him to love me like this and not
that . . . But if they told me I wanted a slave I would have responded
indignantly that I only wanted the pure ideal dog I had heard of. He
loved me as an animal and far from my ideal . . . I have his rage painted
on my left foot and on my hands . . . I did not make light in his obscurity.
I did not murmur to him the words that all animals understand . . . But
he had ticks, big as chickpeas . . . They ate him alive, those blood drinking
inventions created to kill a victim entirely lacking in possibilities to escape
them, those proofs of the existence of the devil soft vampires that laugh
at the dog’s lack of hands, they suckle it to death, Fips feels his life flow
into their tribe of stomachs and without the chance of combat . . . I did
not accompany him. A foul fear of seeing the one I did not love strong
enough die, and as I would not give my life for him, I could no longer
share his death. (Cixous 1998)7
My story ends where it began, with the dilemmas posed by blood-suck-
ing insects, when the logic of sacrifice makes no sense and the hope
for forgiveness depends on learning a love that escapes calculation
but requires the invention of speculative thought and the practice of
remembering, of rearticulating bodies to bodies. Not an ideal love, not

7
I am grateful to Adam Reed for giving me Cixous’ essay and for his evident pain
and care in reading it.
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 129

an obedient love, but one that might even recognize the non-compliant
multiplicity of insects. And the taste of blood.

Coda: Rearticulating

My friend and colleague Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi read ‘Sharing Suf-

fering’ in manuscript and forced me to come face-to-face with, as she
put it, “the hardest case for the theory of co-presence and response”,
challenging me to respond to the following question:
I want to know what you would say when someone buttonholes
you and says: I challenge you to defend the slaughter of lab animals
in biomedical experiments. No matter how carefully you guard them
from extraordinary pain, in the end, they are subject to pain inflicted
by you for the social goods of: knowledge-seeking in itself, or applica-
tions for human purposes. You did it. You killed the animals. Defend
yourself.
What do you say then?8

I wrote her back:

Yes, all the calculations still apply; yes, I will defend animal killing
for reasons and in detailed material-semiotic conditions that I judge
tolerable because of a greater good calculation. And no, that is never
enough. I refuse the choice of ‘inviolable animal rights’ versus ‘human
good is more important.’ Both of those proceed as if calculation solved
the dilemma, and all I or we have to do is choose. (I have never regarded
that as enough in abortion politics either. Because we did not learn how
to shape the public discourse well enough, in legal and popular battles
feminists have had little choice but to use the language of rationalist
choice as if that settled our pro-life politics, but it does not and we know
it. In Susan Harding’s terms (Harding 2006), we feminists who protect
access to abortion, we who kill that way, need to learn to revoice life
and death in our terms and not accept the rationalist dichotomy that
rules most ethical dispute.)
I act; I do not hide my calculations that motivate the action. I am
not thereby quit of my debts, and it’s more than just a debt. I am not
quit of response-ability, which demands calculations but is not finished

8
Email from Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi to Donna Haraway, July 15, 2006.
130 donna haraway

when the best cost/benefit analysis of the day is done and not finished
when the best animal welfare regulations are followed to the letter.
The space opened up by words like “forgive” and “wicked” remains,
although I grant that overripe religious tones cling to those words like
a bad smell, and so we need other words too. We have reasons, but
not sufficient reasons. To refuse to engage the practices for getting
good reasons (in this case, experimental lab science) is not just stupid,
but criminal. Neither ‘the greater human good trumps animal pain’
camp nor the ‘sentient animals are always ends in themselves and so
cannot be used that way’ camp sees that the claim to have Sufficient
Reasons is a dangerous fantasy rooted in the dualisms and misplaced
concretenesses of religious and secular humanism.
Obviously, trying to figure out who falls below the radar of sen-
tience—and so is killable—, while we build retirement homes for apes,
is an embarrassing caricature of what must be done, too. We damn
well do have the obligation to make those lab apes’ lives as full as we
can (raise taxes to cover the cost!) and to get them out of the situations
into which we have placed them in. Improved comparative biobehav-
ioral sciences, in and out of labs, as well as affective political/ethical
reflection and action, tell us that no conditions will be good enough
to permit anymore many kinds of experiments or practices of captiv-
ity for many animals, not only apes. Note, I think we now know that
at least in serious part because of research. But again, those calcula-
tions—necessary, obligatory, and grounding action out loud and in
public—are not sufficient.
Now, how to address that response-ability (which is always experi-
enced in the company of significant others, in this case, the animals)? As
you say, Sharon, the issue lies not in Principles and Ethical Universals,
but in practices and imaginative politics of the sort that rearticulates
the relations of mindsbodies, in this case critters and their lab people
and scientific apparatuses. For example, what about instituting changes
in lab daily schedules so that rats or mice get to learn how to do new
things that make their lives more interesting (a trainer to enhance the
lives of subjects is a little thing, but a consequential one). Besides get-
ting good human child care attached to labs, I’d love to see all those
jobs open up for good animal trainers. I imagine the lab people having
to pass a positive-methods training proficiency test and lab-oriented
biobehavioral ecology test for the species they work with in order to
keep their jobs or get their research approved. Experimenters would
have to pass such tests for the same reasons that bosses and workers
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 131

have to get it these days that sexual harassment is real (even if the
regulatory apparatus often seems to be a caricature of what feminists
meant); namely, that unless retrained, people, like other animals, keep
seeing and doing what they already know how to see and do, and
that’s not good enough.
Of course, thinking reforms will settle the matter is a failure of
affective and effective thinking and a denial of responsibility. New
openings will appear because of changes in practices, and the open is
about response. I think this actually happens all the time with good
experimenters and their critters. For most of this essay, I have con-
centrated on instrumental, unequal, scientific relations among human
and nonhuman vertebrates with sizable brains that people identify as
like their own in critical ways. However, the vast majority of animals
are not like that; nonmimetic caring and significant otherness are my
lures for trying to think and feel more adequately; and multi-species
flourishing requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is
accountable to irreducible differences.
In a doctoral exam committee with my colleague, marine invertebrate
zoologist Vicki Pearse, I learned how she looks for ways to make her
cup corals in the lab more comfortable by figuring out which wave
lengths and periods of light they enjoy. Getting good data matters to
her, and so do happy animals; i.e., actual animal well-being in the lab.
Inspired by Pearse, I asked some of my biologist friends who work with
invertebrates to tell me stories about their practices of care that are
central to their labor as scientists. I wrote:
Do you have an example from your own practice or those close to you
of how the well being of the animals, always important for good data, of
course, but not only for that, matters in the daily life of the lab? I want
to argue that such care is not instead of experiments that might also
involve killing and/or pain, but is intrinsic to the complex felt respon-
sibility (and mundane non-anthropomorphic kinship) many researchers
have for their animals. How do you make your animals happy in the
lab (and vice versa)? How do good zoologists learn to see when animals
are not flourishing? The interesting stories are in the details more than
the grand principles!
Michael Hadfield, Professor of Zoology at the University of Hawaii
and Director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory (the Pacific Biosciences
Research Center), responded:
What your questions draw to mind for me lies more in my work with the
Hawaiian tree snails than our small beasts at the marine lab. I have worked
132 donna haraway

very hard to provide laboratory environments for these endangered snails

that approach a field setting as closely as possible. To that end, we buy
expensive ‘environmental chambers,’ wherein we can set up day lengths
and temperature-humidity regimes that approach those of the snails’ field
habitats as much as possible. We also try to provide a leafy world and
the mold they scrape from leaves in abundance. Most importantly, we
provide all of this in a predator-free world, to ‘save’ them from the aliens
[introduced highly destructive species like predatory snails and rats] that
are eating them up in the mountains. I also find the snails to be beauti-
ful and their babies to be ‘cute,’ but that’s not very scientific, is it? For
many reasons—not least being their legally protected status—we work
very hard to keep from injuring or killing any of the snails in the lab. I
truly want to see these species persist in the world, and what we do in
the lab is the only way I know to make that happen, at present. We are
now caring for more than 1,500 tree snails in the lab, at great expense
and personal effort, with the goal of staving off even more extinctions
than have already occurred. A major part of this is keeping the snails as
healthy and ‘natural’ as possible (‘natural,’ because they must someday
go back to—and survive in—the field). If that’s ‘keeping them happy,’
then it’s our driving force.
How do we see (assuming we are ‘good zoologists’) that our animals are
not flourishing? Ah, well, usually it’s when they die. Snails and worms
don’t emit cries of anguish, nor typically show signs of illness for very
long before they die.
For the tree snails, I watch the demographic trends in each terrarium
very carefully (we census them at least bi-weekly) to note whether there
are births, if death rates are greater than birth rates, etc. At the first
hint of something wrong, I force the lab crew to immediately stop and
review every step in the maintenance-culture regime. We often have
to check an entire environmental chamber (10+ different terraria, with
several species) to see if something is wrong with the entire environment.
And we take immediate steps to remedy situations, even when we don’t
fully understand them. E.g., I recently concluded that my lab group was
over-filling the terraria with leafy branches from o’hia trees at each clean-
ing/changing session. They had concluded that, since the snails’ food is
the mold growing on the leaves, the more leaves the better. I explained
that the snails needed more air flow through the terraria, and that their
activities were strongly regulated by light, little of which reached the
centers of the leaf-crammed terraria. So, we’ve fixed that and are now
looking for the next problem and ‘remedy.’9

9
More details on this snail research can be found in Hadfield, Holland and Olival
2002.
 sharing and response in experimental laboratories 133

We are face-to-face, in the company of significant others, companion

species to each other. That is not romantic or idealist, but mundane
and consequential in the little things that make lives. Instead of being
finished when we say this experimental science is good, including the
kind that kills animals where necessary and according to the highest
standards we collectively know how to bring into play, our debt is just
opening up to speculative and so possible material, affective, practical
reworlding in the concrete and detailed situation of here, in this tradi-
tion of research, not everywhere all the time. This ‘here’ might be
quite big, even global, if abstractions get really well built and full of
grappling hooks for connections. Maybe even Baba Joseph and Cixous
would think so, if probably not the ticks and tsetse flies. Perhaps best
of all, in the lab and in the field, Hawaiian tree snails might actually
have a chance to live naturally because an experimental invertebrate
zoologist cared to respond and share suffering in nonanthropomorphic,
nonmimetic, painstaking detail.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cixous, Hélène. 1998. Stigmata, Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge.
Coe, Sue. 2000. Pit’s Letter. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Coetzee, J.M. 1999. Disgrace. New York: Viking.
——. 2001. The Lives of Animals. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (with Jean-Luc Nancy). 1991. ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation
of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’ In Who Comes After the Subject?.
Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96–119. New
York: Routledge.
——. 2002. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’. Critical Inquiry 28
(2): 369–418.
Despret, Vinciane. 2004. ‘The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthro-zoo-genesis.’
Body and Society 10 (2–3): 111–134.
Farmer, Nancy. 1996. A Girl Named Disaster. New York: Orchard Books.
Hadfield, M.G., B.S. Holland and K.J. Olival. 2004. ‘Contributions of ex situ Propaga-
tion and Molecular Genetics to Conservation of Hawaiian Tree Snails.’ In Experimental
Approaches to Conservation Biology. Edited by M. Gordon and S. Bartol, 16–34. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_
Meets_OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge. Susan Harding, Susan. 2006. ‘Get
Religion’. Unpublished manuscript.
Herzig, Rebecca M. 2005. Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern
America. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Pemberton, Stephen. 2004. ‘Canine Technologies, Model Patients: the Historical
134 donna haraway

Production of Hemophiliac Dogs in American Biomedicine.’ In Industrializing Organ-

isms: Introducing Evolutionary History. Edited by Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton,
191–213. New York: Routledge.
Smuts, Barbara. 2001. ‘Encounters with Animal Minds.’ Journal of Consciousness Studies
8 (5–7): 293–309.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2004. ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ Unpublished version.
 PART FOUR

CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS

Investigating discursive, material and operational entanglements

between human and nonhuman animals in early modernity and moder-
nity, respectively, the two essays in this section contribute stories and
histories of embodiment and intercorporeality that together provide
an ‘organic’—rather than technology-driven—genealogy of how we
became posthuman. Moreover, the explicitly historical approach pur-
sued by both scholars brings to the fore what, in the history of science
from the Enlightenment onwards—anatomy and primatology in the
case of their fields of investigation—has remained largely invisible, to wit,
the relevance of animals in scientific (r)evolutions. We are also witness
to the enormous efforts undertaken to efface the dependence on animal
bodies in order to produce and maintain a bordered humanity.
Laurie Shannon’s essay ‘Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renais-
sance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism’ reties the knots between
humankind and all other kinds with the help of the notion of a “com-
mon creatureliness”. The ideas of cross-species relatedness appearing
in Shannon’s sources from the 16th and 17th centuries range from the
observation of bodily analogies to the vision of an all-inclusive form
of quasi-political participation that the author terms a “zootopian
constitution.” Contrasting Harvey’s “cross-species analogical reason-
ing” favourably with the anthropocentric perspective of Vesalius (who
had charged Galen with being “deceived by his monkeys”, and called
for a fully human anatomy), Shannon dissects her material to render
visible the work of animals not only in the Renaissance production
of ‘the human’, but also in the fabric of ‘knowledge’ itself. She reads
the debates evolving around the issue of whether or not, and to what
degree, human and animal anatomies are ‘more kin than kind’ (as their
contemporary Shakespeare would put it) as symptomatic of “a crisis
of authority in Renaissance learning and medical science”. This crisis
had a literary and ideological afterlife in two texts by the seventeenth-
century authors Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, where the only
response to the troubling demonstration of interspecies connectedness
is to speculate that there must be some ‘invisible parts’ to ground the
‘truth’ of human exceptionalism.
136 corporeal encounters

More ‘Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthu-

manism in the Twentieth Century’ are made present by Jonathan
Burt. The author seconds Carol J. Adam’s critique of the replacement
of ‘real’ animals by images in late capitalism and explores the poten-
tial as well as the limits of animal-centred histories for the natural
sciences, the humanities and for critical reflection in general. More
specifically, Burt contributes to the current redefinition of the history
of human-animal relations in the twentieth century, with important
consequences for understanding a posthumanist thematic prior to the
articulation of posthumanism in the 1990s. His focus is a particular
body of work on primates by Solly Zuckerman from the 1930s and
early 40s which had two separate strands, one concerned with sexual
reproduction and cyclicity, the other with the effects of weaponry on
bodies. Zuckerman’s reading of primate social behaviour reveals how
the dynamic interactions between the scientist and the animals altered
both species socially and physiologically. While Burt concedes that these
alterations may lead to a rethinking of the human-animal divide, he
concludes with a cautionary warning, suggesting that the dissolution of
species boundaries should not be celebrated as “the ideal end point for
this repositioning”. Rather, corporeal encounters between living organ-
isms should in his view be regarded “with something of a worthwhile
questioning, if pessimistic, eye”. (MR)
 CHAPTER SEVEN

INVISIBLE PARTS: ANIMALS AND THE RENAISSANCE

ANATOMIES OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Laurie Shannon

‘Human exceptionalism’—the idea of a bordered humanity cordoned

off by some exclusive and defining feature from the entire balance of
all other creaturely kinds, while they, in turn, are herded into the con-
tracted fold of ‘the animal’—is an excessively familiar habit of thought.
Such gross classifications of ‘the’ human and ‘the’ animal often persist
even in contexts intended to trouble them. When, for example, The
New York Times referred to studies of the percentage of DNA shared
between chimps and humans (a 98% overlap), the writer concluded
that either chimps are 98% human or even Catherine Deneuve is “98%
chimpanzee” (Gates 2006). But what might it have meant, instead, to
describe Deneuve, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein (the offered
paragons of that paragon of species, Homo sapiens) as only “2% human”?
As Donna Haraway’s wonderful gloss on Bruno Latour’s We Have Never
Been Modern proposes, contemporary biological evidence suggests that
“we have never been human” (Haraway 2008; Latour 1993). I extend
that claim into the domain of cultural history here by exploring early
modern comparative anatomy as an important chapter in the long
story of interspecies relations.
Before contemporary genetic and evolutionary paradigms charted
biological and genealogical kinships among the species, what under-
standings traversed the border of the human to govern the sense of
cross-species relatedness? If we understand uninterrogated notions of
‘the human’ as a kind of lingering stagecraft of the Enlightenment,
what species arrangements preceded that historically-specific sever-
ance of man from beast? This essay particularly concerns cross-species
comparative thinking in the expanding practice of dissective anatomical
demonstration in early modernity, and so it charts one historical compo-
nent of the discursive ‘human/animal divide’ we have inherited. In this
effort, however, it explores a history of human/animal connectedness
138 laurie shannon

as much as it does the history of their categorical separation.1 In the

European and Anglophone west, of course, theological models have
long prevailed to urge a radical difference in kind between humans and
the other animals. This theological separation still operates in ethical
discourses (especially in contexts of medical testing) that depend on
a species-hierarchy of sacrificial value.2 The categorical and political
dispensation in Genesis had decreed that humans held both earthly
dominion and an immortal soul as unique entitlements from God. In its
early modern manifestations, ‘the human’ was defended by this strong
official border, even though the possibility of escaping its pale and falling
into bestiality remained a persistent moral risk (Bach 2005). Cultural
studies scholars Bruce Boehrer (2002) and Erica Fudge (2002) have
demonstrated that, despite these official accounts in the period, at the
level of signification the mutually-erosive interpenetrations characteristic
of any binary opposition apply in this one too. That is, the boundaries
of the ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are foundationally blurred by the fact that
neither enclosing concept can proceed without utter dependency on
the other as its negative case.
The seventeenth-century elephant in the room in any genealogy
of creaturely binarism, of course, is the model developed by René
Descartes, who is worth classifying in this connection as a philoso-
pher-anatomist. In a series of writings from The Treatise of Man (written
before 1637) to The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes re-understood
the divide set in Genesis in newly philosophical terms. He separated
a thinking, “cogito” figure of man apart from his now notorious figure
of “la bête machine.” It is fair to describe the cogito ergo sum doctrine as
a still-operative definition of the human species. This cogito, or ratio-
nal soul, is itself a gene-spliced hybrid of Aristotelian and Christian
thought. But as a crucial substrate for the highly-quoted philosophical

1
In managing the metrics of sameness and difference between ‘humans’ and ‘ani-
mals,’ there seems to be nothing but situated perspectives. We are ‘continuists’ and
‘discontinuists,’ depending on circumstances. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith so precisely
describes this kaleidoscopic situation, “once . . . our human distinctiveness is unsettled
by . . . our animal identity, there is no point, or at least no more obviously natural point,
beyond which the claims of our kinship with other creatures . . . could not be extended;
nor, by the same token, is there any grouping of creatures, at least no more obviously
rational grouping, to which such claims might not be confined” (Smith 2004, p. 2).
2
Experimental psychologist turned animal rights activist Richard D. Ryder first
dubbed this kind of deeply embedded bias “speciesism” in 1970; Peter Singer’s Ani-
mal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals translated “speciesism” into the
philosophical and ethical languages of utilitarian analysis.
 renaissance anatomies 139

resolution of the theological problem of skepticism (“I think therefore

I am”), the Cartesian account also offers a blunt severance of man and
beast. Reckoning the reasoning powers of a rational soul as uniquely
human, it limits all nonhuman animals to the machinic programmings
of instinctual response, calling them nature’s “automata” and likening
them to clocks and robots (Descartes 1968 and 1970; printed in Regan
and Singer 1976, pp. 13–19). Scholars debate Descartes’ particular
liability for the larger politics of species that this view entailed. Some
apologists, for example, argue that Descartes’ philosophical com-
mitment to the beast-machine idea was not central to his published
writings (since it appears mainly in letters) and that he did not go so
very far as to justify vivisection on its explicit basis, as some of his fol-
lowers did. More deconstructive readers have disclosed the potential
‘posthumanity’ of Cartesian subjectivity itself, despite its historic role
as the epicenter of modern humanness, by assessing the way Cartesian
mind/body dualism renders even the human body a machine.3 While
debate will continue on the philosopher-anatomist’s accountability for
the excesses of Cartesianism, the broad outlines of his dispensation of
the faculties of instinct and reason has had enormous impact, especially
as an intellectual legitimation of what is also the most convenient view
for humanity to hold. Whether expressed flat out as a biblically-derived
theology of the soul or as a Cartesian allocation of reason, humanity is
normally distinguished from all other creatures in absolute terms—when
the question of human status is posed directly.
This essay, however, takes a different tack. It pursues, instead, modali-
ties of cross-species relatedness—before and apart from Descartes. What
working concepts grouped humans and animals together, despite Des-
cartes’ foray into categorical separation? When and for what purposes
have we been more and less human by Haraway’s measure? If we
became, perhaps, ‘as human as we ever will have been’ as a result
of the seventeenth-century scientific paradigms that were themselves
preconditions for the Enlightenment, what might the prehistories of
the problem suggest for us about the future of interspecies relations?
In particular, I am interested in ideas of relatedness that range from
cross-species bodily analogy (central to this essay) to a pan-species

3
See Harrison 1992; see also Cottingham 1978; for an account of Cartesian phi-
losophy as containing a kind of posthumanism avant la lettre, see Badmington 2003. (I
am grateful to Manuela Rossini for this reference.)
140 laurie shannon

participation in something like a larger political form or what I label

a ‘zootopian constitution.’
I would like to mention three modes of relatedness across species
before turning to the specifically anatomical matters of corporeal
analogy, bodily substitution, and comparison at issue in Renaissance
anatomical research. First among them is the classical vocabulary of the
soul, as relayed in early modern texts of natural history and philosophy.
The Aristotelian account held that there are three main kinds or levels
of soul animating living things: the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul,
and the rational or intellective soul.4 This order of souls can surely be
viewed as tending towards exclusivity and distinctiveness at the human
top of its hierarchy. But it can also be read in the opposite way, to
emphasize the degree to which supposed higher life forms partake of or
participate in all the forms beneath them. In this sense, all living things
defy full categorical enclosure because they are, naturally speaking,
compounds. Francis Bacon, for example, refers to “the participation
of species,” arguing that “no natural being seems to be simple, but as
it were participating and compounded of two. . . . man hath something
of a beast; a beast something of a plant; a plant something of an
inanimate body; so that all natural things are in very deed biformed”
(Bacon 1997, p. 215). In this expression of the Aristotelian system of
souledness, we see a mutual partaking of kinds of soul—at least that
is the view from the top of this scale, looking down. The dispersedly
soulful Aristotelian universe obviously understands ‘soul’ in quite dif-
ferent terms from Christian discourses. The persistence, however, of
the term ‘animal’ (a nominalization of an adjective derived from the
Latin anima, for soul, spirit, or breath) suggests just how what I call a
‘zoopolitan’ sense of souledness we retain at some sedimentary level,
perhaps despite ourselves: ‘animals’ are called, everyday, by a name
that designates a certain kind of soul.
A further kind of cross-species relatedness, one loosely connected to
Aristotelian biological questions of anima, concerns the humoral system:
those elements and fluids understood to be the foundational components
of matter and of organisms in particular. The humoral language that
pervades colloquial period accounts of character and embodiment and

4
Although customarily these three are cited alone, Aristotle lists five kinds or “pow-
ers” of the soul: the vegetative, the sensitive, the appetitive, the locomotive, and the
intellectual (De Anima, 414a29–32).
 renaissance anatomies 141

persists in contemporary attributions of a hot temper or cold-blooded-

ness derives predominantly from the humoral system described by the
ancient medical writer, Galen. Gail Kern Paster’s work on the humoral
body makes a powerful case that, since animal and human bodies are
made of the same humoral ‘stuff,’ “identification across the species barrier
was compelling for . . . early moderns” (Paster 2004, p. 150).5 In effect,
then, a humoral constitution animalizes humans as much as the reverse,
exactly as the contemporary revelations of the genetic code with which I
began seem to do. As Paster shows, this substantial identification serves
to ground the pervasive likening of humans and animals in early modern
culture. A humoral framework of bodily and emotional likeness, as we
will see, does not necessarily settle the question of human-animal relat-
edness when it comes to what we might distinguish as the articulated or
anatomized body. Indeed, the underlying humoral likeness that Paster
describes offers a certain running contradiction to a developing desire
to distinguish species anatomically.
Lastly, we can describe a third kind of relationship across species
as ‘creatureliness,’ or even ‘co-creatureliness.’ Creatureliness names all
things, animate and inanimate, as created things—fellow artefacts from
the hand of a benevolent divinity whose creative powers were made
evident through what we now call biodiversity. Christian hermeneutic
traditions developed the notion that ‘nature’ was, in essence, as legible
as the Bible and fully consistent with it; in this context, nature was
termed ‘the Book of Creatures,’ and its denizens were to be attended
with the respect accorded to the letters and characters of scripture.
Julia Lupton’s essay, ‘Creature Caliban,’ explores the construction
of this single classification encompassing both humans and nonhu-
mans. The concept of the “creature,” she writes, “presents above all a
theological conceptualization of natural phenomena [and] marks the
radical separation of [all] creation from Creator” (Lupton 2000, p. 1).6
Sheer status as a ‘creature’ in the world entails a certain degree of
legitimating entitlement, since all creatures reflect godly intention.
Unduly harming the world’s creatures contravenes religious strictures
that require broad assent to all manifestations of divine intention or
authority. In other words, all creatures are ‘meant’ to be here. In fact,

5
Paster also rightly makes the case that these gestures—even of “identification”—can-
not accurately be reduced to anthropomorphism (see p. 145 and note 30).
6
For a contemporary philosophical account of creatureliness (one addressing only
Homo sapiens), see Santner 2006.
142 laurie shannon

this creaturely discourse represents a kind of undertow in the otherwise

human-exceptionalist application of Genesis, yielding a pious anti-
cruelty perspective.7 The dominant reading of Genesis, as an origin of
human sovereignty, could be set against competing scriptural moments,
like the exhortation directed to nonhuman life forms to be fruitful and
multiply and the dedication of “every greene herbe” for the mutual
use of “euery thing . . . which hath life in it selfe” (Genesis, 1:20–22). By
placing animals even potentially on a par with humans, these arguments
acknowledge the relevance, relatedness, and even quasi-constitutional
standing of animals.
With these three broad discourses of engagement across the border
of the human in the background—Aristotelian souledness, the humoral
system, and fellow creatureliness—I turn to take up the evolving status
of comparative anatomy in early modern medical contexts. I will look at
key moments in a relay of animal considerations: the sixteenth-century
reception of the classical medical treatises of Galen, the groundbreak-
ing anatomical publications of Andreas Vesalius, and Englishman
William Harvey’s physiological account of the circulation of the blood
in “living creatures.” In any history of our conceptions of the human,
Renaissance humanist and scientific approaches to knowledge serve
an out-sized role, and as the liberal arts spawned Renaissance Man,
so Renaissance anatomy produced a human body for modernity.8
Early modern anatomists and physiologists, however, were faced with
a persistent question, one made urgent by the scarcity of legitimately-
acquired human cadavers and one that was intellectually compromised
by the moral presumption of convenient access to animal bodies. That
question concerned how and whether animal and human bodies per-
tain to one another; whether they exist in some state of analogy. How
exactly was information drawn from the dissection of pigs, dogs, apes,
and others relevant, and by what logic did it contribute to a proper
knowledge of the human form?

7
This, despite more orthodox attempts to rebut concerns of this nature; see, for a
major example of such a rebuttal, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question
64, Article 1 and Question 25, Article 3. In another context, I explore the status of
such ‘animal rights,’ or what we might more historically term ‘creaturely entitlements,’
in early modern legal trials of animal defendants. See ‘Hang-Dog Looks,’ in Shannon
2010 (forthcoming).
8
As Jonathan Sawday has stressed, this took on literally theatrical dimensions in the
production and demonstration of the human body in the so-called ‘anatomy theaters’
that were established throughout the course of the Renaissance (Sawday 1996).
 renaissance anatomies 143

This essay proposes that a contested analogy between human and

animal bodies served as a crux in the evolution of anatomical science
(as well as a border skirmish between bipeds and quadrupeds in par-
ticular). Analogy itself, after all, is a paradigm of relatedness and, I argue,
an abstract form of what Haraway has figured for us as “companion
species” relations (Haraway 2003). The analogical status of the ani-
mal in the science of anatomy generated a debate that illustrates how
early modern medical scientists proceeded in their work—regardless of
whether they were observation-oriented empirical researchers or text-
based ‘medical humanists’ faithful to ancient writings and engaged in
producing perfected editions of ancient medical writers. In particular,
this zoo-analogical conundrum complicates Renaissance relations to
these sources of knowledge (most consequentially, Galen). Conflicts
about animal comparison thus presented nothing less than a crisis of
authority in Renaissance learning and medical science. As I hope further
to show, the shifting status of animals in anatomical research illustrates
the intimacy of an emerging knowledge of man with the work of the
various ‘companion species’ central to that knowledge—non-human
animals whose bodies literally enabled a new production of ‘the human.’
As a last note, I will touch on the literary and ideological afterlives of
this anatomical crisis of authority and comparison in texts of two
seventeenth-century English authors, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne.
Their language conveys how human exceptionalism must retreat to a
speculative domain of ‘invisible parts’ in response to the interspecies
dynamics of anatomical demonstration. In other words, debates about
animal anatomical comparison flush ‘the human’ out of the domain of
demonstrability and into a realm of naked proposition.

“Comparisons are Odious”

In 1608, the Englishman Edward Topsell published his expansive

translation of Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner’s mid-sixteenth-century,
multi-volume Historiae animalium (itself a structural imitation of Aristotle’s
writings on the subject). In typical natural historical style, most of the
animal entries depend on cross-species comparisons for description,
and so they illustrate the profoundly open-ended structures of clas-
sificatory knowledge in general, as a perpetual metric of likeness and
difference. For example, Topsell describes how the hyena has a “body
like a Wolfe, but much rougher haired, for it hath bristles like a Horses
mane all along his back” (Topsell 1608, p. 340). Topsell’s entry for the
144 laurie shannon

Ape, though, depends on comprehensive comparisons to the human

body. “Apes,” he writes, “ do outwardly resemble men very much . . . in
their face, nostrils, ears, eye-lids, breasts, armes, thumbes, fingers and
nails, they agree very much” (p. 3). The concept of ‘agreeing’ offers a
working sense of what analogy might entail: a certain working likeness
not necessarily requiring an identity that is absolute in a philosophical
sense. And so Topsell also gives a painstaking measure of the differences
between men and apes, citing detailed bodily disparities—for example,
the relative size of specific muscles that operate particular limbs and
digits, as well as the form of the liver and the “hollow vein holding it
up, which men have not.”
These anatomical details of features below the skin that Topsell cites
clearly derive from what Jonathan Sawday has described as a new, intel-
lectual “culture of dissection” (Sawday 1996, p. 2 and passim). Tracing
the influence of anatomization and the partitive thinking it spawned,
Sawday highlights the ways that knowledge increasingly took the form
of an “anatomy” of a subject’s parts (these compendia often explicitly
reflect the influence of medical practice, as in Robert Burton’s 1621 The
Anatomy of Melancholy). Not surprisingly, Topsell’s animal encyclopedia
names the sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius as his
source for this differentiating information, referring to the magisterial De
humani corporis fabrica (Fabrica) of 1543.9 Topsell’s perspective on Vesalius’
contribution is of special interest here. “Vesalius sheweth,” he writes,
“that [the apes’] proportion differeth from man’s in more things than
Galen observed” (Topsell 1608, p. 3). Topsell’s notation of Vesalius’
revision of received classical learning suggests how well-known, even
notorious, that revision was.
I turn now to this Vesalian intervention in the status of Galenic
authority, because the question of species pervades it. Scholars have
disputed how to balance the extent of Vesalius’ reliance on Galen
against his corrections and challenges to aspects of the Galenic system
(Saunders and O’Malley 1950, p. 58). Despite the historical fact of
loud opposition by contemporaries to Vesalius’ claims against Galen,
current research concludes that, in the main, Vesalius held to very

9
I refer to the accessible online English version of this text: On the Fabric of the Human
Body, An annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani
Corporis Fabrica, eds. and trans. Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast, (http://vesalius
.northwestern.edu/). Subsequent references to the Fabrica will be paginated to the 1543
edition that is indicated in the online translation.
 renaissance anatomies 145

broadly Galenic assumptions.10 Certainly Vesalius artfully obscures

the tension between authorities and empiricism when he justifies his
own investigative practice by invoking the empirical methods of Galen
himself (that is, Galen’s own use and recommendation of the practices
of vivisection and dissection).11 What is central for these purposes is
that, to the extent Vesalius does challenge Galen’s learning or refute
his authoritativeness, the status of animal anatomical comparison lies
at the very heart of his critique.
Vesalius’ rise from a position as a young anatomical demonstrator
(opening bodies below while an academic lecturer with clean hands
spoke from a podium above) to a star professor with a dramatic and
new pedagogical method at the University of Padua has been a key
exhibit in ‘great man’ theories of the Scientific Revolution and of medi-
cal progress.12 Such heroic-individualist narratives have come under
due scrutiny; even so, Vesalius’ academic moment is worth specifying.
On the one hand, Vesalius’ medical-humanist colleagues stood firm in
their belief that Galen’s unadulterated text could be recovered through
diligent comparisons of extant manuscripts and good humanist textual
editing (often with a view toward purging material added by Arab
writers in the course of their preservation of these texts). On the other
hand, less text-centered colleagues of Vesalius also noted discrepancies
between the Galenic body and the actual evidence developed through
anatomical demonstration. In one attempt to account for this, Vesalius’
one-time teacher, Jacobus Sylvius of Paris, went so far as to imply (in
a sort of reverse-evolutionary model) that perhaps human anatomy
had degenerated since Galen’s time (Sylvius 1541; cited in Garrison
2003).

10
Medical historian Andrew Cunningham argues that the entire anatomical
project of the Renaissance should be viewed less as a program of modernization and
self-authorizing observation and more as a return or ‘resurrection’ of ancient values.
(Cunningham 1997).
11
In the preface to the Fabrica, addressed to “The Divine Charles V,” Vesalius
emphasizes that he “joined Galen in urging medical students by every means possible
to take on dissections with their own hands.” (Vesalius, p. 4r).
12
Katherine Park makes the persuasive contextualizing claim (to a degree against
Sawday’s) that the conduct of anatomies, as such, did not represent the total revolu-
tion in practice or breaking of taboos about “opening the body” that has often been
alleged; instead, we must speak of an alteration of the terms and conditions under
which those events could occur (with all of the social implications the publicity of
the anatomy theater held, in contrast with the more domestic environments Park
describes) (Park 1994).
146 laurie shannon

Vesalius offered a simpler but much more disruptive explanation of

these discrepancies: Galen, he alleged, had simply failed to examine
human cadavers and so had erroneously cross-attributed numerous
details he found in animals to human anatomy.13 In other words,
Galen assumed cross-species analogy; he assumed that the bodies of
apes, dogs, and livestock were directly relevant evidence of the human
bodies for which they substituted. As C.D. O’Malley describes Sylvius’
teaching at the University of Paris, the academic practice of anatomical
demonstration greatly depended on such animal substitutions, silently
incorporating them without an account of exactly how they pertained:
“Sylvius lectured . . . from Galen’s book entitled the Use of parts, in which
anatomical description was drawn from animals and projected to the
human; then to illustrate the presumed human anatomy Sylvius dis-
sected [a] dog” (O’Malley 1964, p. 300).
Several key features of Galenic anatomy were flashpoints for the
Vesalian exposé of the Galenic body as, in fact, a menagerie. The
best known is the case of the rete mirabile. As Daniel Garrison describes,
“long-standing reliance on animal specimens had led to . . . the belief that
human blood was purified by a ‘marvellous network’ or rete mirabile in
the neck. Such a plexus is found in sheep and certain other ungulates
(where is cools the blood) but not in humans” (Garrison 2003). In the
Fabrica, Vesalius admits “I cannot sufficiently marvel at my own stu-
pidity; I who have so labored in my love for Galen that I have never
demonstrated the human head without that of a lamb or ox, to show in
the latter what I could not in the former, lest forsooth I should fail to display
that universally familiar plexus” (Vesalius, p. 642; my emphasis). A
lamb or an ox, in these dramas of theatrical presentation, was a stage
prop required to complete a demonstration of ‘the human.’
In a subtle—and visually witty—further instance of correction,
Vesalius takes up Galen’s location of certain canine skeletal features
in the human skull. At the beginning of the chapter entitled ‘On the
Twelve Bones of the Upper Maxilla, Including the Bones of the Nose’
(Book 1, ch. 9), a striking image appears. A human skull, without its
lower mandible, rests on top of the skull of a dog.14 Vesalius introduces
the chapter by alleging that “[w]e have placed a canine skull below the

13
See Gouwens, ‘Human Exceptionalism’; I am very grateful to Professor Gouwens
for sharing this forthcoming essay with me.
14
This illustration appears again in chapter 12 of Book I.
 renaissance anatomies 147

Fig. 7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543), Book I,
Chapter 9
(© Professor Daniel Garrison, Northwestern University)

human so that Galen’s description of the bones of the upper maxilla

may be more easily understood by anyone.” But what Vesalius means is
that Galen’s description may be understood to be demonstrably wrong,
by the contrast the image provides. As Saunders and O’Malley argue,
“the primary purpose of the illustration was to reveal that Galen had
described the premaxillary bone and suture of the dog as though pres-
ent in man”—showily illustrating that Galen was not familiar with the
particulars of human maxillo-facial anatomy (Saunders and O’Malley
1950, p. 58).15

15
Garrison and Hast explain that “In most vertebrates, including non-human pri-
mates, the os incisivum represents a separate element, the premaxillary bone, in the
upper jaw; in the human, the premaxillary bone fuses with the maxilla by the third
intra-uterine month. In the human, however, a ‘palatal sign’ of separation between
148 laurie shannon

Stepping back from this sort of detail for a bird’s eye view of the
larger Vesalian conception of anatomical research, we see that the
Fabrica stresses that the proper object of learning is the human, refer-
ring to “demonstrations of the human fabric,” to “the structure of
man,” and to man as “the most perfect of all creatures . . . fitly called
a microcosm by the ancients” (Vesalius, p. 4r). This work is not to be
understood as finished by the ancients. Vesalius scoffs at the infallibility
accorded to Galen: “no doctor has been found who believes he has
ever discovered even the slightest error in all the anatomical volumes
of Galen, much less that such a discovery is possible” (Vesalius, p. 3r).
As historian Kenneth Gouwens points out, Vesalius attributed Galen’s
errors “overwhelmingly to Galen’s reliance upon apes” (Gouwens 2008).
Here Vesalius’ specifically human orientation informs his sharpest criti-
cal language against classical precedent, as he uses Galen’s authority
to undercut Galen himself. Vesalius asserts, “it is just now known to
us from the reborn art of dissection, from a careful reading of Galen’s
books, and from the welcome restoration of many portions thereof,
that he himself never dissected a human body, but was in fact deceived
by his monkeys” (Vesalius, p. 3r). Deceived by monkeys—who are always
characterized in natural histories as, at once, cunningly deceptive and
incompetently imitative—Galenic anatomy had literally aped the human
instead of demonstrating it.
Avowing that Galen had “departed much more than two hundred
times from a true description of the . . . human parts,” Vesalius called
instead for a fully human anatomical science; addressing his patron
Charles V, Vesalius stressed the moral importance of “research in which
we recognize the body and the spirit, as well as a certain divinity that
issues from a harmony of the two, and finally our own selves (which is
the true study of mankind)” (Vesalius, p. 4r). In this anthropocentric
model, self-study is part of the species-being of man, as Vesalius recites
a commonplace that appears, in this context, as a form of species-narcis-
sism. Here, the self-study that would later become patently subjective
and skeptical for Montaigne—I “my selfe am the groundworke of my

os incisivum and the rest of the maxilla may persist until the middle decades as the
sutura incisiva.” O’Malley notes that although designed to advertise a Galenic fallacy,
“This very illustration convicted [Vesalius] of an error, since it displays the ethmoidal
labyrinth as a separate bone, a mistake corrected some years later by Fallopio”
(O’Malley p. 153).
 renaissance anatomies 149

booke; it is then no reason thou shouldest employ thy time about so

frivolous and vaine a Subject” (Montaigne 1933, p. xxvii)—is quite lit-
erally navel-gazing in an anatomical sense. In this respect, Vesalius fell
short of a true interest in the philosophical implications of comparative
anatomy. Both the earlier Leonardo (who made numerous compara-
tive anatomical illustrations, especially comparing the limbs of man to
those of quadrupeds, though these were not known in his time) and the
slightly later Pierre Belon (who cross-articulated the skeletons of a man
and a bird in the mid-sixteenth century) seem to have invested more
consequential meaning in the animal body than Vesalius did (See Cole
1975, pp. 49–62). From this standpoint, then, the Vesalian “revolution”
in empirical anatomy was also, in its desire to separate the human from
animal forms, a species-narrowing conceptualization of the study of the
terms of corporeality in the mid-sixteenth century.

Working Likeness

With the early seventeenth-century work of William Harvey (who was

trained at Vesalius’ institution, the University of Padua), anatomical
method visits the question of likeness and relevance across species again.
Harvey had been demonstrating his account of the circulation of the
blood since about 1616; his Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis
in animalibus (referred to as De motu cordis) was published in Germany
in 1628. During Harvey’s lifetime, an English translation entitled
Anatomical Exercises Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood of Living
Creatures also appeared (in 1653).16 Of special interest here is the fact
that this volume renders the “animalibus” of Harvey’s Latin title—and
indeed, perhaps half of the Latin declensions of “animal” in the text—as
“Living Creatures” or some variation on those terms. Though a fuller
philological discussion of this fact is needed, it seems fair to say that
Harvey’s unnamed translator, in effect, gives us a seventeenth-century

16
Geoffrey Keynes, Harvey’s twentieth-century editor, offers a defense of the sev-
enteenth-century translation over the one produced by Robert Willis in 1847 (which
uses the English word “animals” in the title and elsewhere) (Harvey, 1995 [1653],
pp. 198–99). The most recent edition—by Gweneth Whitteridge—also largely favors
the 1653 translation, and it recasts Harvey’s original title as An Anatomical Disputation,
while restoring the creaturely ending: Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in
Living Creatures.
150 laurie shannon

English gloss on the Latin term for living beings; in period idiom, the
animalia of Harvey’s study suggested not so much ‘nonhuman animals,’
but the broader sense of ‘creatures’ discussed above.
With this wider range of study, a shifting sense of the categories
within which anatomical research is organized emerges in De motu
cordis. This has complicating effects on claims for the uniqueness of
the human—and at about the same time that Descartes specifies the
terms of an absolute border between human and nonhuman animals
by enshrining rational capacity as the human signature. While Vesa-
lius had called—in classically Renaissance terms—for an anatomy of
man, Harvey instead envisions what I am calling a ‘zoopolity’ of bodily
forms: an organized grouping of bodies and functions that pointedly
includes animals. In the Harveian universe, human and animal figures
alike reveal one shared circulatory process. Harvey’s research certainly
included acts of vivisection that are monstrous acts from a number
of perspectives, both early modern and 21st century. But his account
of the circulation of blood and related aspects of the heart’s function
makes no apology for its cross-species analogical reasoning. Instead
it depends openly and explicitly on animals, not just as comparisons,
not just as silent substitutions for the human, but as direct evidence of
relevant truths about embodiment.
Harvey’s De motu cordis opens its dedication to Charles I of England
with this bold start: “the Heart of creatures is the fountain of life, the
prince of all, the Sun of their microcosm” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. vii).
The vast majority of references to the body as ‘microcosm’—like
the one from Vesalius just cited above—refer to the human body as
such, in its condition as a paragon and compressed expression of the
universal and/or the divine. Here Harvey repopulates the familiar
microcosm metaphor, using it to encompass all creatures. At the same
time, he speaks quite differently about his scientific object, describing
his discovery not in terms of the truths of humanity, but of “these new
things concerning the Heart” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. viii). He glosses
Vesalius’ titular reference, in the Fabrica, to the fabric of the human body
with his own frequent reference, instead, to “the fabrick of the heart”
(Harvey 1995 [1653], i.e. p. 101).17 Harvey’s broad reference to numerous
“living creatures” constitutes a broad taxonomic class that exceeds the

17
“Hoc itaq; loco . . . solumodo, quae in administranda Anatome circa fabricam cordis & arteriarum
comparent, ad suos vsus & causas veras referre enitar” (Harvey 1628, p. 63).
 renaissance anatomies 151

demographic embrace of Vesalian articulation. And, indeed, Harvey’s

experiments encompass a wide array: doves, eels, shrimp, sheep, adders,
dogs, oxen, whales, embryos, chickens, snails, and worms to name
some of them.18 In this sense, the perspective of Harvey’s research on
a different kind of object—the heart—groups living creatures together
as related, rather then dividing them as distinct as the lens of species
might require. The heart, we might say, is a shared language.
By making an organ and its functioning the object of research,
rather than the nature of a given species, Harvey brings animals back
to the table, (admittedly, it is the dissection table). But this time their
role is explicit, and they are legitimized as directly relevant evidence.
“Those things which are before spoken by former Authors concern-
ing the motion and use of the heart,” Harvey writes, “do either seem
inconvenient or obscure, or admit of no compossibility”; and he con-
cludes “therefore it will be profitable to search more deeply . . . and to
contemplate the motions of the arteries and heart, not only in man, but also
in all other creatures that have a heart; as likewise by the frequent dissection
of living things, and by much ocular testimony to discern and search
the truth” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. 15, my emphasis).19 Animals reveal
their proper share of this truth; in this database, they belong. Repeated
invocations of “creatures,” “living Creatures,” and “living things” in the
English translation of De motu cordis suggest, with powerfully cumulative
force, that the right set for inquiry includes more, not less, in the way
of animal kinds. Along with the celebrated early modern scientific turn
to ‘ocular’ proof, we also find assertions of animal relevance and of a
broadly zootopian vision of cross-species analogy. This is not to assert
a politically utopian vision, but only to name a categorical configura-
tion of bodies that suggests a quasi-political form extending beyond a
bordered humanity.
For Harvey, an anatomy based singly on human information seems
provincial rather than scientific. “They are to be blamed in this,” he
writes, “who whilst they desire to give their verdict . . . look but into man
only.” And here his language becomes even more overtly a question
of the political form of our relation to animal knowledge-providers.
Those who “look but into man only,” he charges, “do no more to the

18
For an exhaustive list of Harvey’s animal references, see Cole, 1957.
19
“. . . non solum in homine sed & aliis vniuersis animalibus cor habentibus contemplari: Quin
etiam viuorum dissectione frequenti, multaque autopsia veritatem discernere, & inuestigare” (Harvey
1628, p. 19).
152 laurie shannon

purpose than those who, seeing the manner of Government in one

Commonwealth, frame [a notion of ] Politics, or they who, knowing the
nature of one piece of land, believe they understand agriculture, . . . as
if from one Particular proposition they should go about to frame Uni-
versal arguments” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. 41).20 Here, even the highly
generalized abstraction of ‘the human’ has been diminished to a figure
for the particular and defrocked of its claims to represent a universal
kind of truth. Beyond the fact of his practicing the most extreme kinds
of vivisection exclusively on nonhumans and the sure preservation of
a categorical difference in that respect, Harvey’s cardiology neither
valued nor tried to prove a firm distinction between ‘human’ and ‘ani-
mal.’ His object was not ‘man’ but “living creatures” and the features
those creatures demonstrate jointly as members of a larger category
or class. In contrast to the political dispensation of Genesis, Harvey’s
science resists a knowledge based solely in human exceptionalism. The
“Universals” Harvey sought are not to be found within the confines of
the human. For Vesalius and Harvey, then, comparative anatomical
questions were not a sidelight on Renaissance science, but the scene of
a broadly significant struggle over observation, the structure of learned
authority, and—most interestingly for our purposes—claims for the
theological and rational uniqueness of the human.

The Literary Afterlives of Animal Dissection

I end with a consideration of one detail in Robert Burton’s multi-edition

1620s volume, The Anatomy of Melancholy (The Anatomy).21 Burton’s text
gathers almost everything said or known about melancholy into one
massive tome. For him, melancholy serves—among other things—as
a complex index of humanity by means of its close relation to classical
and Christian ‘folly,’ itself a great alternative to reason as the signature
feature of the human. As Foucault so memorably put this view, “the

20
“In hoc peccant, qui dum de partibus animalium . . . pronunciare, & demonstrare, aut cognoscere
volunt, unum tãtum hominem, eumque mortuum introspiciunt, & fictanquam, qui vna reipub. forma
perspecta disciplinam politicam componere, aut vnius agri naturam cognoscentes, agriculturam se scire
opinantur: Nihilo plus agunt, quam si ex vna particulari propositione, de vniuersali Syllogizare darent
operam” (Harvey 1628, p. 33).
21
The Anatomy of Melancholy was presented in five lifetime editions (1621, 1624,
1628, 1632, and 1638) and one posthumous edition containing corrections by Burton
in 1651.
 renaissance anatomies 153

head that will become a skull is already empty” (Foucault 1973, p. 16).
The Anatomy’s table of contents maps the state of knowledge on its
subject—it even operates as an allegory for knowledge itself. Sawday
notes the formal influence of anatomical thought on the structure of this
work, describing it as exemplary of the partitive approach to knowledge
produced by the “culture of dissection” he describes.
While a full account of The Anatomy is beyond the purposes of this
essay, an episode recounted in the lengthy preface, ‘Democritus Junior
to the Reader,’ pertains to the species problem made evident in Vesalius
and Harvey. A striking anecdote portrays the anatomist’s technique as
frustrated, rather than as triumphantly comprehensive or exhaustively
successful. In this story of the frustrated anatomist, we see the begin-
nings of a more severe kind of ‘disciplinary’ division of knowledge. As
Sawday describes the early modern situation, “what was to become
science—a seemingly discrete way of ordering the observation of the
natural world—was, at this stage, no more than one method amongst
many by which human knowledge was organized” (Sawday 1996, p. 1).
Burton’s passage, however, shows the signs of a developing mutual
inconvenience in the seventeenth century between scientific inquiry and
theological commitment (two modalities of thought that Descartes had
apparently hoped to keep together, by leading his argument from doubt,
through reason, to faith). In Burton’s prefatory material, he explains
his reasons for adopting the nom de plume of “Democritus Junior” and
thus invoking the rascally sage from the turn of the fourth century BC,
Democritus of Abdera—also known as the laughing philosopher. He
adopts the banner of Democritus to mark a shared mockery of human
folly. His satirical and anti-social behavior causes the original Democri-
tus’ neighbors to think him a madman; in the story retailed here, they
call in no less a figure than Hippocrates for a diagnosis. This embedded
(and apparently spurious) story of the doctor’s visit is highly suggestive
of the dilemma that animal anatomical comparison precipitated for any
ongoing, seventeenth-century human-exceptionalist view.
When Hippocrates and the villagers go to Democritus, they find him
“without hose or shoes, with a book on his knees, cutting up several
beasts” (Burton 2001, p. 48). After spending some pages figuratively
anatomizing human follies, Democritus argues that people are “like
children, in whom is no judgment or counsel, and resemble beasts,
saving that beasts are better than they . . . being contented with nature”
(Burton, pp. 50–51). Here Burton’s Democritus voices a common-
place of natural historical writing and moral commentary: the notion
154 laurie shannon

that animals cannot fail their species-being as humans can, insofar as

they do not sin or err. I have elsewhere termed this perspective one
of “human negative exceptionalism,” where humans present, for once,
the negative exception that proves the rule of animal virtue.22 Given
this only partly ironic commonplace about animal relative perfection,
we may ask, why seek to find the ground of a folly designated human
within the bodies of beasts, as Democritus is doing? Scattered around
him lie the dissected bodies of animals reduced to parts, as he seeks
an anatomical cause for (human) folly. As he himself acknowledges, “I
do anatomize and cut up these poor beasts, to see these distempers,
vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man’s body”
(Burton, p. 51). Indeed.
If animals lack whatever organ puts one in need of moral or satiric
correction, we might ask further, why would one want such an organ?
Here we begin to see that the ‘folly’ in Democritus’ example is struc-
turally indistinguishable from the soul that, in Christian contexts, must
err to be redeemed, as a text like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly explores in
such spectacular detail. In either instance, animals apparently have no
such organ; whether this function/capacity is thought of as folly or as
an immortal soul, it remains the monopoly of man. As Katherine Park
points out regarding the Aristotelian tradition, the highest faculties of
soul (intellect and will) “did not require physical organs and could there-
fore subsist after the body’s death; peculiar to man, these . . . faculties . . .
differed distinctly from the functions of the organic soul, which humans
shared to a greater or lesser degree with plants and animals” (Park 1988,
p. 464). What Burton’s seventeenth-century narrative shows is that this
monopoly, humanity’s signature feature, that ‘part’ that sets it apart
from all others, can neither be located nor demonstrated. Though it
comes as no surprise, to us, that a core tenet of religious belief cannot
be independently verified, the soul’s non-detectability had not neces-
sarily posed a problem in the context of Aristotelian and other earlier
scientific modes, as Park points out. In the emerging epistemic contexts
of a science that increasingly enshrines verifiability and ocular proof,
however, what once passed more simply as an article of faith is at least
partly reclassified in a new category made inevitable by scientific pro-
cedures. Along with the soul as such, humanity finds itself in this new
category: the category of the not proven. Animal comparison, it seems

22
See Shannon 2009 (forthcoming).
 renaissance anatomies 155

crucial to note, plays the central part in this new status for ‘the human’
as an unverifiable proposition or ‘Scotch verdict.’
As a tail-end to these considerations, here is Thomas Browne, from
the Religio Medici (published in 1643, a hundred years after Vesalius’
book):
In our study of Anatomy . . ., amongst all those rare discoveries . . . I finde
in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe, as in that I
finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in
the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not any thing
of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast. . . . Thus we
are men, and we know not how. (Browne 1968, p. 43)
The soul is wholly immaterial here, inorganic; it is alleged to be inte-
gral, but, in a powerful new way, it cannot be found or seen; it has
become, oxymoronically, an invisible part. While the problem of a
scientific demonstration of the soul is an enormous subject unto itself,
it might suffice here to note the contribution of comparative anatomy
in precipitating the problem. Looking at the brain, at “the cranie of
a beast,” observational science cannot verify an absolute difference or
locate a signature animal deficit. We can call the continued assertion
of bordered human difference a form of historically ongoing theology
or faith. But we can also see that the impact of animal analogy in
anatomical science forces claims for ‘the human’ more overtly into the
category of sheer assertion. In a universe of demonstration, the pure
assertion has become more evidently just that. “Thus we are men,”
asserts the human apologist, Thomas Browne, but this avowal takes
place in a new kind of tension with his conclusion that “we know not
how.” Pressing a human-exceptionalist retreat to the ideological ground
of invisible parts in an environment of anatomical demonstration, it
seems to me, is no small impact on the history of knowledge—for mere
beasts who are thought to lack reason.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

INVISIBLE HISTORIES: PRIMATE BODIES AND THE RISE

OF POSTHUMANISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Jonathan Burt

History is inefficient as a method of processing mean-

ing; it cannot keep up. . . .
(Halberstam and Livingston 1995, p. 3)

We have not to date been particularly well served by the history of

animals in the twentieth century. At least as far as anglophone writing is
concerned, there is a lack of studies that endeavour to connect analyses
of human-animal relations across different levels, from direct interaction
to more abstract levels of representation or institutionalisation. There
are, of course, exceptions to this picture: Donna Haraway’s work I take
to be outstanding (Haraway 1997 and 2008), whilst many other studies
currently considered for publication or in press, but the work available
so far is not integrated yet into a more general understanding of the
animal in modernity yet. Where we are better served are often those
studies that are continuations of narratives that have their origins in the
nineteenth century, or earlier, such as in zoo history (Rothfels 2002),
photography (Brower 2005) and film (Burt 2000) to some extent, as
well as the histories of ethics (Singer 1975 and 1999; Midgley 1983;
Armstrong and Botzler 2003), and institutions of animal welfare such
as the Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA). But sometimes
it seems as if there is a gap between the death of Queen Victoria and
the arrival of Peter Singer filled only by John Berger’s much cited thesis
(Berger 1980), usually with a complete absence of critical reflection,
of the replacement of the ‘real’ animal by its image in late capitalism.
Despite being sometimes helped out by historians of science—though
they are not usually interested in the broader implications of their work
for animals per se—, key areas that redefine human-animal encounters
in the twentieth century, in agriculture and industry after World War
I, in the laboratory from the early 1900s, warfare and military sci-
ence, the consequences of the tension between conservation and rights
activism in the interwar period, and the extensive use of animals in
160 jonathan burt

the visual and plastic arts in the period up to the late 1960s, are still
underexplored.
Even though this situation is improving, it raises two interrelated
questions. The first is: why do we have the animal histories that we
currently have or, to put it differently, why has there been something
of a blind spot for the very period which has had such staggering con-
sequences for animals in the contemporary world? The second is: do
human-animal interactions in twentieth-century history, especially the
encounters between animals and scientists in the fields of primatology,
biology and cybernetics, have anything to offer, challenge, or elucidate
as regards the assumptions of world views and cultural productions
appearing, for a number of decades already, under the label of ‘posthu-
manism’? Certainly, from an initial perspective of both the behavioural
and experimental sciences, animal history offers a number of caveats for
the more utopian sentiments of posthumanist manifestoes. Does this go
further though? Do aspects of the history of animals in the twentieth
century underpin posthumanist thinking in ways that posthumanism
is also, for whatever reason, blind to?

Animal History Meets Posthumanism

It is not clear from the diversity of texts that concern themselves with
posthumanism how coherent it is as a field of thought.1 It represents
a curious hotch potch with its strands of science fiction, military and
space science, computing, disembodied minds, postmodern philosophy,
offering on its more optimistic outings the possibility of transcending
categories like essentialism, the subject/object boundary, a human-
centred world, history, speciesism, and possibly death itself, as Robert
Pepperell prophesises: “Posthumans will be persons of unprecedented
physical, intellectual, and psychological ability, self-programming and
self-defining, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals” (Pepperell
1995, p. 175). And despite its effort to avoid ‘masterdiscourses,’ one
cannot help but sense a counter tendency that might tempt other kinds
of enslavement, as the following claim suggests: “The human body itself
is no longer part of the ‘family of man’ but of a zoo of posthumanities”

1
For a short overview of current trends in posthumanist theory, see the forthcoming
introductory volume of the book series Critical Posthumanisms (Callus and Herbrechter
2008).
 primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 161

(Halberstam and Livingston 1995, p. 3). Such statements encourage one

of the main suspicions of posthumanism that one finds in writers like
philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson, that if posthumanism is a working
out of postmodern philosophies of difference at the level of material
embodiment (whether biological, technological, or a combination of
the two), then we have to take seriously the possibility that posthuman
propositions about transcending difference will realise themselves in
just that: the posthuman as übermensch (Pearson 1997). Visions of the
globalisation of ‘humachines,’ to use a neologism of Mark Poster’s—“not
a prosthesis but an intimate mixing of human and machine that con-
stitutes an interface outside the subject/object boundary”—likewise
raise similar questions about what regions of the world ‘humachines’
will disseminate from and where to (Poster 2004, p. 318).
Posthumanism shares with postmodernism a similar set of ethical
binds concerning the articulation of theory in practice. There are also
other classic dilemmas such as whether the products of biotechnol-
ogy envisaged by the cyborg-favouring posthumanists would either
continue the ideals of anti-sovereignty and borderlessness or, on the
contrary, produce something more frighteningly autocratic. However,
posthumanism is at its weakest when it takes some convenient version
of humanism, inverts its elements, and pretty much just plugs it in.
Posthumanist figurations, as Manuela Rossini observes, are often “all
too human(ist)” (Rossini 2005). Whilst paying so much attention to the
dislocation of the human, the easiest bit of the equation, posthumanism
also needs to confront the fact that there is a deeply-embedded science
history that is far less easy to redirect, or dislocate, and in contact with
which one cannot but inherit a large amount of problematic cultural
baggage. Posthumanists who advocate the end of history allow for this
inheritance to be screened out and forgotten. The present essay seeks
to render those histories visible again. They matter.
Historically, the roots of posthumanism, its official genealogy if you
like as it has been described by scholars such as Katherine Hayles,
Peter Galison and Andrew Pickering, are located in the Second World
War. This period is seen as a significant turning point, “away from the
organism viewed through the prism of medicine and the clinic to new
sciences of information and control dominated systems” (Galison 1994,
p. 259). Important re-organisations of science take place in the direction
of integrated systems of human and machine for military purposes, for
instance Norbert Wiener’s work on anti-aircraft control, and we wit-
ness the growing significance of the computer and radar. Operatives
162 jonathan burt

and their machinery come to be jointly analysed as interlocking and

interlocked systems. Interestingly, animals do haunt the edge of this
narrative of the rise of posthumanism: Early robotic devices were named
after animals—William Walter’s Tortoise, Norbert Wiener’s Moth and
Bedbug, and Claude Shannon’s very basic maze-solving device, which
was named ‘the rat’; in many ways Shannon’s experiments were a direct
electronic translation of those rat maze experiments of the early 1900s
that were central to the emergence of J.B. Watson’s behaviourism.
Particularly relevant here are the altered rats that Watson used such as
the blind, anosmic and whiskerless rat that features in the concluding
experiment of his monograph on mazes and that Watson described as
an automaton (Watson 1907). Humberto Maturana and other biologists
working on the visual cortex of the frog in the late 1950s, and later the
colour vision of birds and primates, drew conclusions from that research
which contributed to notions of autopoiesis. Two separate issues arise
here: one concerns the human/nonhuman interface, in other words
hybridity, and one concerns the relative status of the organic and the
machine in the history of posthumanism, where the latter is seen as
more important than the former.

Hybrid Bodies and Practices

Bruce Clarke, in a very interesting article on the science fiction story The
Fly, remarks with regard to posthumanism that “the common effect of
its several definitions is to relativize the human by coupling it to some
other order of being” (Clarke 2002, p. 171). If we see hybridity as one
of the most important defining features of posthumanism, as its preoc-
cupation with nonhuman interfaces suggests, then we need to confront
hybridity as it is played out in science history, especially given that it
traditionally tends towards practices of optimisation, perfectibility, con-
trol and, in the case of domesticated animals, docility. Given the links
between hybridity and eugenics especially in early twentieth-century
animal science, we are alerted to the fact that hybridity is both scientific-
ally and culturally not a celebration of difference but a quest for purity
via processes of isolation and elimination. As an aside one might note
another point made by Ansell Pearson about what he sees as the per-
fectionist evolutionary assumptions behind the development of machine
intelligence: It is not clear that hybridity inherently confers an evolu-
tionary advantage. In fact, in many respects, it may confer a negative
one (cp. Pearson 1997, p. 222). Underlying this is an implicit critique
 primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 163

to the effect that, as posthumanism derives largely from the humanities

and science fiction, it suffers from a lack of proper address to the hard
sciences on which its projects are nevertheless heavily dependent.
I mentioned earlier Watson’s experiments with rats by way of intro-
ducing a parallel history to that of posthumanism: the pathway by
which we have moved into the post-animal era, which in certain areas
of human-animal interaction we have actually been living in for a
while. At the same time that Watson was experimenting with his rat
automata, the science of cross-breeding rodents and the isolation of
characteristics led, in Vienna from about 1904 and in Chicago from
1906, to the creation of pure-bred lines of laboratory rats (Burt 2006,
ch. 4). Seen as replaceable cogs in a global experimental machine, rats
were also caught up in complex representational structures that slid
back and forth between the languages of automata and anthropomor-
phism. In a manner that anticipates the idea of the posthuman as an
accelerated information processor, H.H. Donaldson described the rat’s
nervous system in his 1915 monograph on the animal as a speeded
up version of the human (cp. Burt 2006, p. 16). These interlinked and
sometimes contradictory symbolic connotations also tended toward a
kind of ‘identity overload’, which hints at the kind of shape the patho-
logical dimension to hybridity might take. In Freud’s ‘Rat Man Case,’
published in 1909, Ernst’s paralysis when it came to decision making
was in sharp contrast to the maniacal, proliferating associations he made
between the rat and, amongst other things, aspects of anal eroticism,
worms, children, the penis, syphilis, dirt, money, and even marriage.
This symbolic hyper-inflation anticipates a more recent rodent/hybrid
connection in posthumanism’s history: Haraway’s account of Onco-
mouse. She writes:
Oncomouse™ and its academic-corporate family [i.e. Du Pont] are like
civic sacraments: signs and referents all rolled into one fleshy mystery
in a secularized salvation history of civilian and military wars, scientific
knowledge, progress, democracy, and economic power. (Haraway 1997,
p. 85).
By the time we get to the 1930s and 40s the development of private
commercial companies to produce laboratory animals is well under
way.2 Early facilities for the commercial breeding of laboratory rats

2
Harlan Sprague-Dawley is founded in 1931, Carworth in 1935 and Charles River
in 1947.
164 jonathan burt

resembled battery poultry units, whereas now they contain some of the
most controlled environments on the planet and look like the set of a
science fiction film. Nowadays, from Charles River for instance, you
can purchase alongside the transgenic rats, rats with various types of
mechanical implant or rats with some of their organs partly or totally
removed. But it seems to me that the time when the post-animal stage
is really reached is when it is animal matter rather than the animal
body that is hooked up into technical apparatus, the body becoming
irrelevant. The MEART project by the art and science collaborative
research laboratory SymbioticA, just under a century on from the first
breeding of laboratory rats, is one of the best examples of this. For this
artistic-scientific project, a layer of rat neurons were taken from an
embryonic rat cortex and grown over a multi-electrode array. These
cells were then connected to a computer and stimulated by information
provided by a web cam, which was in turn filming visitors in an art
gallery. A recording was then made from the stimulated neurons which
sent a signal to a robotic arm that subsequently created the imagery.
This is a global project: the rat neurons are in Atlanta, Georgia, and
the robotic arm is in Perth, Western Australia.
To sum up the first half of this essay just briefly: although the Second
World War may mark a turning point in the science that is considered
to frame the posthuman project, animal science has continued on a
trajectory right through this period to the point where the organic/
machine interface has been radically realised. Furthermore, despite
the fact that the human-machine interface may have excited greater
attention—perhaps because it seems less messy (who wants to think
about the gory details of laboratory science anyway if at all possible)—,
hybridity as both a scientific and cultural practice entails the same sorts
of issues, whatever version of the nonhuman one is dealing with; for
optimisation read purification, for accelerating information processing
read the reconfigured animal body.

Solly Zuckerman and the Mimicry of the Nonhuman

I want to turn now to the another important facet of posthuman-

ism which again has significant exemplars in early twentieth-century
behavioural science as well as art: the mimicry of the nonhuman. The
example I want to use to explore mimicry comes from an episode in
the history of primatology, Solly Zuckerman’s work with Hamadryas
 primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 165

baboons. While it is not an episode that is integral to the development

of ideas about the posthuman as such, it nevertheless enables us to see
human-nonhuman relations at work in a scenario at the intersection
between scientific research and public culture with important conse-
quences for the realisation of posthumanist theory in practice. I will
begin with Zuckerman’s own account of animal mimicry:
when a monkey performs a series of acts in a manner that accurately
reflects the recently exhibited behaviour of a fellow animal, it is not nec-
essarily copying . . . it may simply be responding to a common stimulus
independently, but in such a way that it accurately simulates the behaviour
of another monkey . . . ‘imitation’ within a social group of animals consists
essentially in the continuous modification of one animal’s environment
by the activities of the others (Zuckerman 1981, pp. 169–171).
Very briefly, the background story is this: In 1925, the London Zoo
established a community of Hamadryas baboons as part of a project to
move away from cage-based exhibits.3 Further baboons, including 30
females, were added in 1927. The result of this project led to an animal
society that was given over to an exaggerated intensification of sexual
conflict between males as well as general sexual display behaviour. This
led, over a five-year period, to the violent deaths of the females, the
males largely dying of disease. As Zuckerman describes it, the females
died as prizes
fought for by the males. The injuries inflicted were of all degrees of sever-
ity. Limb-bones, ribs and even the skull had been fractured. Wounds had
sometimes penetrated the chest or abdomen, and many animals showed
extensive lacerations in the ano-genital region . . . two died shortly after
miscarriages apparently precipitated by the fighting. (Zuckerman 1981,
p. 220)
The data that Zuckerman took from his observations of the Monkey
Hill provided the cornerstone of his The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes
published in 1932, the first major synthesising scientific study of the
roots of primate behaviour. Zuckerman’s main thesis was that the sexual
relation was the key to the structures of social groups; i.e., mammalian
society took its different forms from how different reproductive physi-
ologies were configured.

3
A detailed account of this undertaking can be found in my essay ‘Violent Health and
the Moving Image: The London Zoo and Monkey Hill’ (Burt 2002, pp. 258–292).
166 jonathan burt

The significant part of the story for our purposes comes with what
happens next. Zuckerman’s notebooks in which he put down his obser-
vations from Monkey Hill are fairly sketchy and not particularly system-
atic. In fact, they offer more for zoo historians in their recording of the
horrors of the exhibit, especially as regards violence and deviant sexual
behaviour, than for the historian of science. However, Zuckerman’s
thesis effectively followed his eye which was particularly drawn to two
of the most striking features of the Hamadryas: their marked sexual
dimorphism (the large dominant adult males with their thick manes
of hair as opposed to the smaller females), and the extraordinary scale
of the swelling and purple-red colourings of the ano-genital region of
the female in oestrus.
In the 1930s Zuckerman became involved in the nascent science
of endocrinology, moving from his observation of sexual cyclicity in
primates to its manipulation. Whether using monkeys or, sometimes,
rats, Zuckerman’s endocrinological work was largely geared to influenc-
ing the female reproductive cycle. The administration of hormones to
primates produced all manners of striking visual effects. At one point his
collaborator Alan Parkes wrote to Zuckerman in 1935, bemoaning the
lack of sufficient male hormones for experiments, and saying that “within
a few months there should be lbs of male hormone and then we will
have a real shot at fur coats, green balls, and sunset backsides” (Parkes
1935). There was no doubting the social and commercial relevance of
this research: In 1940, Zuckerman was asked to test a new synthetic
oestrogen on monkeys by the Medical Research Council as a prelude
to trials by B.D.H., Boots and Glaxo on ovariectomized women.
By this time Zuckerman was also working on a parallel project, this
time for the military, which in some ways continued the exploration of
one of the central questions running through all of Zuckerman’s work:
the relationship between what is seen on the surface of the primate
body and what happens internally. These experiments included the
exposure of animal bodies to high explosives in bomb blast experiments,
to projectiles and bullets for the analysis of soft tissue and bone damage,
and to hammer blows to the head to calibrate the forces necessary to
induce concussion, all of which were deemed crucial to understanding
the nature of wounding and death. Such understanding was of special
significance for two of Zuckerman’s main questions: How did death
occur from bomb blast when there were no visible outward signs of
wounding on a dead body? Furthermore, how was it that the tiniest
fragment of a projectile could sometimes produce extensive damage
inside the body?
 primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 167

In the concussion experiments done between May 1940 and August

1941, rhesus monkeys were strapped vertically to a board with their
heads and backs exposed to blows from a pendulum which could
strike at measurable velocities.4 Blows of varying degrees of weight and
velocity on the head and back were intended to reproduce the impact
experienced when a body was thrown by the force of an explosion,
or pushed by trench walls collapsing against it. Reporting on these
experiments in August 1940, Zuckerman noted that because of the
low velocities involved, “no lasting physiological effects are produced”
but in another set of experiments with blows of increasing intensity,
the effects were more serious:
After the third and subsequent blows the animal had bouts of violent
shivering. Its pupils became somewhat dilated, and its nipples showed an
extreme pallor which usually passed off between blows. After the sixth
blow the animal closed its eyes as though fatigued but it still reacted
strongly to the noise. (Zuckerman and Back 1940)
There are many ways of reading Zuckerman’s project but overall we
can see how primatology functions here as a form of cross-species
interaction, and we are not so far from some of Haraway’s ideas about
the co-constitution and co-evolution of human and nonhuman animals.
And in some ways one can say that after these events neither captive
baboons, nor primatologists, certainly not Zuckerman, will ever be the
same again. There are different levels to the mimicry of the nonhuman
here. At an overt level we can interpret Zuckerman as a kind of über-
baboon. This is certainly a conclusion that can be drawn from the way
he behaved in his own (human) family: from his marriage onwards,
he made it clear to his wife that his work and career would come first;
he treated his son with disdain to the point that would embarrass his
friends; and was equally dismissive of his daughter’s boyfriends. But
more seriously, as Zuckerman’s own definition of animal mimicry
quoted at the beginning of this section makes clear, the cross-species
mimicry within this episode in the history of primatology is a function
of a parallel response to the same stimulus: the ano-genital region of
the female. This leads, as I quoted above, to ‘the continuous modifica-
tion of one animal’s environment by the activities of others.’ In this
perspective Zuckerman’s primatological work pretty much translates or
imitates the significant visual aspects of the spectacle of Monkey Hill into

4
For a more detailed account see my essay ‘Solly Zuckerman, the Making of a
Primatological Career in Britain, 1925–1945’ (Burt 2006).
168 jonathan burt

an experimental scientific project. Later primatologists, many of them

female, will reveal the crudeness of Zuckerman’s thesis with field studies
that demonstrated the significance of the actions of far from powerless
female baboons in the maintenance of baboon social structure (Smuts
1986). Ironically, Hans Kummer will challenge Zuckerman’s thesis using
a mimetic idea. Kummer wrote on the role of sex in the formation of
baboon society that initial social units often began with a young male
taking or adopting a younger female, and that dyad would then simulate,
or imitate, the behaviour of mother and child, though with the gender
of the mother reversed. (Kummer and Kurt 1965, p. 82)
In conclusion: what I am trying to show with Zuckerman is a particu-
lar conformation of mimicry of the nonhuman and its consequences for
cross-species interactions. But this isn’t a catch-all thesis by any means.
There was other endocrinological research, for instance, going on in the
late 1920s on rhesus macaques which did not arise from the observa-
tions of a Monkey Hill, and scientists had been hitting animals on the
head with hammers since 1874. More importantly, some boundaries
in the Zuckerman example between human and baboon stay rigidly
intact in terms of the relation between controller and controlled, whilst
others, such as general structures of sexually governed versus sexually
governing, male behaviour of humans and animals mirror each other
in a very particular series of shifting relations within the zoo and the
laboratory. Roger Caillois, who also wrote about mimicry, humans and
insects in the mid 1930s, saw an understanding of mimicry as touching
on the edges of language and thought. His extraordinary passage on the
headless praying mantis, “without any centre of representation” that
could “assume the spectral stance, engage in mating . . . and (this is truly
frightening) lapse into a feigned rigor mortis . . . that the mantis, when
dead, should be capable of simulating death” (Caillois 2003, p. 79), he
took as an illustration of the human death drive, a consequence of the
desire to dissolve the edges of the human and its ‘outside’. Caillois would
have been well aware of the traumatic implications of animal mimicry
as articulated in Freud or surrealists such as Max Ernst, whose bird alter
ego Loplop was such an important way of dealing with his problems
of sexual and artistic identity. However seriously we want to take these
animal-based examples, whether as warnings, allegories or something
more integral to the constant rethinking of the human throughout the
twentieth century, my final thought is that, in examining an outlook
that seeks to reposition the human, the practices and activities around
the human/nonhuman divide need to be much more carefully thought
 primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 169

through. Perhaps it would be best not to see the dissolution of such

boundaries, and I’m thinking of technology here too, as the ideal end
point for this repositioning. History may be slow, as my opening quota-
tion stated, but I think it sees the complexity of interactions between
living organisms with something of a worthwhile questioning, if pes-
simistic, eye. Of course, as for our environmental and epidemiological
futures, monkeys and rats have a lot to tell us about that too.

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 PART FIVE

DOMESTIC ENCOUNTERS

Human culture, in all its many forms, has developed and often depended
on the taming of wild animals. The essays in this section address
encounters with animal species that have been domesticated. Animals
who have been drawn into human society, and brought under direct
human control, provide diverse products and services. Numerous spe-
cies are farmed to supply food, in the form of meat and milk, eggs,
honey, and other edible substances, as well as fabric and fibres such
as silk and wool, leather and hair, fur and feathers. Beasts of burden
have been put to work to provide transportation, labour, and military
might. The superior senses of many birds and mammals have proved
advantageous to individuals and to whole societies. Animals have been
kept as pets and companions, and have furnished ornaments made from
bone and pearls. In recent years they have increasingly been subjected
to scientific experimentation and research. The essays that meet in this
section concern two of the most numerous and yet rarely encountered
creatures in contemporary western culture. The first focuses on what
we can learn from domestic encounters, the second on the lack of
knowledge they signal.
In her essay ‘Fellow-Feeling’, Susan Squier tracks changes in the
American chicken farming industry over the last century and a half as
reflections of shifting economic models. Squier begins with the poems
and veterinary advice of Nancy Luce, who wrote in the late nineteenth
century when chickens were typically kept by women, and for whom
little contradiction existed between her heart-felt attachment to the
hens and the economic benefits they provided. A marked contrast is
provided by Betty MacDonald’s humorous account of chicken farming
in the 1940s, as the industry shifted to intensive, systematic practices
overseen increasingly by men, and she herself learned to loathe chick-
ens. Finally, Linda Lord’s experience working in a poultry processing
plant of the 1970s precluded all empathy for the birds she came to treat
entirely instrumentally. Returning to the early work of Adam Smith,
Squier argues that his notion of “fellow-feeling” is an integral part of
social relations, and must be included in any economic model which
172 domestic encounters

attempts to account for the multiple forms of exchange between humans

and other animals. In the fellow-feeling born of her own, everyday
encounters with chickens, Squier finds a means of understanding the
well-being and wealth generated by an intimate association between
moral feeling and non-industrial agricultural practices.
Rats, meanwhile, though often overlooked as a domesticated species,
are used today for a wide variety of human purposes: as subjects in
laboratory experiments, as companion animals, as food, and even in
artistic practice. Steve Baker’s essay ‘ “Tangible and Real and Vivid and
Meaningful”: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats’ considers two
instances of aesthetic encounter. Kimbell’s Rat Fair drew large crowds
to Camden Arts Centre in London, and included such activities as rat
face painting (for humans), a rat beauty parlour (for rats), the sale of
rat-related merchandise, and a popular ‘Is your rat an artist?’ competi-
tion. Her related performance lecture, One Night with Rats in the Service of
Art, reflected on the process of conceiving works of art involving rats. As
Baker explains, Kimbell’s work addresses the nature of art’s distinctive
contribution to cultural knowledge about animals, and the place of living
animals in contemporary works of art. Baker highlights the importance
of curbing the impulse to make swift judgements and evaluations that
are likely to capture and constrain potential modes of engagement. A
key part of Kimbell’s “aesthetic experiments”, he argues, is their pro-
visional and precarious nature, their exploratory vulnerability deriving
from an acknowledged starting point of ignorance. Knowing—about
art, about animals, about the more-than-human—derives always and
ultimately from a position of not-knowing, whose productive possibili-
ties should be kept open. (TT)
 CHAPTER NINE

FELLOW-FEELING

Susan Squier

No sentiment or fine feeling enters into the life of the

modern hen in an intensive poultry farm. Hatched
early in the year, she is reared with one object, to lay
eggs before the winter sets in. Once she lays, system-
atic feeding and exercise keep her at work.
—Anon., The Back Garden Hen, p. 12

I’d been raising chickens for a while—sitting with them in the morning
as they scratched for insects in the dirt, making sure they were safely
on the perch when I closed them in at night—when I began to think
about fellow-feeling. A kind of empathy, born in the intimate encounters
that are so much a part of chicken farming: pouring the birds scratch
grain and clean water as they mill noisily around my feet; enjoying
the variety of their sounds, from soft clucks of contentment to urgent
churrings when they turn up a worm; grabbing them by the legs and
swinging them off the perch at night and holding them squawking
upside down, their wings flapping, so I could dust pyrethrum (a lice
remedy) on their butt feathers and under their wings; watching the hens
lift and fluff their wing feathers to shelter their chicks. Fellow-feeling:
the sense that my chickens are fellow creatures.
Chickens as fellow creatures? There was no question about that
to Miss Nancy Luce, who also raised chickens more than a hundred
years ago on the little island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
I’d come across Miss Nancy in the archives of the university where I
teach. Photographs of her with her chickens jostled with a pamphlet
she wrote, and a few short papers about her in a dusty manila folder in
the Special Collections room. Small-scale farmer and poet, she raised
chickens in her backyard in West Tisbury, Massachusetts during the
1860s and ’70s. To the tourists who visited her in hired livery carriages,
drawn to her as a local curiosity, she sold hens’ eggs and the privately
printed pamphlets of her own poems. An article filed with her papers
told a grim tale:
174 susan squier

Fig. 9.1 Women and their hens, poised between two meanings of fellow-
feeling. The Back Garden Hen (1917). Reproduced with the permission of Rare
Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State
University Libraries.
 fellow-feeling 175

Her life a village tragedy, her publishing office an old leather trunk, her
confidants hens, and her poetry unique, poor Nancy Luce lived out her
sixty-nine years of poverty and ill-health in a humble farm-house on
Tisbury Plain (Martha’s Vineyard), and for forty-nine of those years, after
her parents died, without human companion. (Clough 1949, p. 263)
But for me, what stood out was the companionship Nancy Luce shared
with her chickens. Although she raised them for their eggs, they provided
something else beyond that simple transaction. Something perhaps
unquantifiable, something in the zone of fellow-feeling.
The ‘something else’ that gave me pause in Nancy Luce’s story has
puzzled economists, too, ever since the writings of Adam Smith. The
‘father of economics’ was also interested in the idea of fellow-feeling.
It featured prominently in his treatise on The Moral Sentiments (1759),
where he explored the workings of this complex emotion, central (he
argued) to a fully functioning human community. The ability to feel for
other people, to experience sympathy, empathy, and concern for fellow
human beings, was to Smith an essential component of civil society for it
constituted the interdependence at the basis of social and economic rela-
tions. Yet in his foundational articulation of modern economic theory,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), written
seventeen years later, his focus on emotional complexity is replaced by
the notion of economic self-interest that would shape Western culture
for centuries. Smith put it vividly in Book I, Chapter II:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and
never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (Smith
[1776] 1904, 1.2.2)
From benevolence to self-interest, from humanity to self-love: rural
sociologists and agricultural historians like Deborah Fitzgerald and
Steve Striffler have vividly traced the agricultural journey from the mid-
nineteenth century small flocks of farm women like Nancy Luce to the
giant poultry farms of the late twentieth century, where low-wage, often
immigrant workers produce profit for distant shareholders (Fitzgerald
2003; Striffler 2005). The contemporary practice of poultry production
is carried out in vertically-linked corporations, whose giant grow-out
buildings, each holding 20,000 birds, stretch across the landscape of
the southern United States. As Striffler points out in a discussion of
one of the biggest corporate mergers in poultry production history, the
176 susan squier

Tyson Foods buyout of Holly Farms chicken, the poultry business is

now about generating profit, not serving people.
The folks who produce, process, and consume chicken for Holly, Tyson,
and ConAgra were and are not only completely irrelevant to the merger;
under the current system, they are oddly incidental to food itself. (Striffler
2005, p. 71)
It is a familiar story by now: chicken farming has been transformed
from a casual, undocumented part of the small farm economy to the
largest contemporary agricultural industry.
Yet there are indications that times are changing in the chicken
business. Recently I read in the Times that Tyson Foods has commit-
ted to converting twenty of their processing units to the production of
antibiotic-free chickens to be sold fresh to customers (New York Times,
2007). Large-scale poultry corporations like Tyson seem to be reframing
the image of their massive operations, perhaps spurred on by the popu-
larity of agricultural writers like Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver,
Joel Sallatin and Michael Pollan. Or perhaps—as the Times recently
speculated—it was the other way around:
Many of these writers say they are responding to the increased public
appetite for food’s back story. As they reveal their personalities, histories,
and insights, they bridge the distance between the people who grow food
and the people who eat it. (Bowen 2007)
Today’s “farmers who write” not only remind me of farmer-poets like
long-ago Nancy Luce; they may be reminding consumers that there is
another way of raising our food. Many of the writers own or operate
farms themselves—small ones, or even medium-sized ones—and sell
their goods “directly to the public, either through farmers’ markets
or community-supported agriculture programs, or C.S.A.’s, in which
customers purchase shares of a farm’s harvest.” (ibid.) Taggart Siegel’s
award-winning documentary, ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’ (2005)
explores the emotional implications of this shift as it reveals the strong
connection forged between Angelic Organics, a Chicago-area C.S.A.
started by ‘Farmer John’ Peterson, and its 1,200 shareholder families.
As one of the farm workers observes, “people come here to remember
what some of the basic things in life are: where your food comes from,
your neighbors, who your farmers are” (Independent Lens, no date)1

1
See also Roger Ebert’s review of this “loving, moving, inspiring, quirky docu-
mentary” (2006).
 fellow-feeling 177

As I sat with my chickens in the early morning sun I found myself

wondering what Adam Smith would make of this moment in agricultural
production. How would he explain the changed relation these writers
are documenting to the crops we farm (animal as well as vegetable) and
the changes in the structure of our agricultural economy? Would he
see any connection between the emotions they plumb in their writing,
and the economics of agriculture they are transforming? In short, could
there be an economic meaning to fellow-feeling? I found myself think-
ing once again of Nancy Luce, as well as Betty MacDonald, and Linda
Lord. All three women were involved in chicken farming between the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.
Two of them could be described as “farmers who write,” and although
the third seems to have lacked the leisure time for writing, a skillful
interviewer has given vivid voice to her contemplative powers. What
role did these women attribute to fellow-feeling in their agricultural
experiences?
Their narratives trace an arc of decline for the powerful moral
sentiment so central to human community. While Nancy Luce, as a
small-scale chicken farmer in the mid-nineteenth century, seemed to
mingle fellow-feeling and economic good sense, by the mid-twentieth
century chicken farmer Betty MacDonald finds herself alienated from
her chicks and chickens, as she struggles to manage the unwieldy scale
and schedule of her intensive egg farm. And at the turn of the twenty-
first century, Linda Lord—a low-wage worker in a poultry processing
plant—displayed no fellow-feeling at all for the chickens she was killing,
and precious little for her fellow-workers on the factory line. If fellow-
feeling led to community, and thus to a successful economy, as Adam
Smith suggested several centuries ago, the experiences of these women
suggest that a reinvented economy is a prerequisite for reinvigorated
communities and a return to fellow-feeling.
We will turn to Miss Nancy Luce, Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord
in a moment, but first let’s consider what fellow-feeling meant at the
time of the birth of Western economics. In his classic study, The Theory
of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 1976), Adam Smith argued that fellow-feeling
was an essential ingredient in social interactions, providing the social
glue that made all other aspects of society, and especially the economy,
possible. Smith saw this sentiment as foundational to the accumulation
of wealth, because it induced the commitment to the human collective
that was the prior condition of any economic transactions. As he saw
it, fellow-feeling produced empathy and sympathy particularly with
those less fortunate than we are:
178 susan squier

[ T ]his is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is
by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to con-
ceive or to be affected by what he feels . . . (Smith [1759] 1976, I.1.3)
Fellow-feeling induced a kind of somatosensory mirroring of the suffering
of another person, in Smith’s description. We have a visceral reaction
to the pain of others; we register it in our nerves and empathize with
them based on our sense of sharing the same painful feelings in the
same body parts. “Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of
body” may feel “an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent
part of their own bodies” when they see “the sores and ulcers which
are exposed by beggars in the streets.” The sentiment is frequently
targeted to specific bodily regions:
The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects
that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that hor-
ror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer . . . if that
particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable
manner. (Smith [1759] 1976, I.1.3)
Significantly, Smith’s examples cross a number of social categories and
incorporate a broad range of humanity in the deeply embodied expe-
rience of fellow-feeling. In his recounting, this may include empathy
even with people outside the customary circle of gentlemen, such as a
scabrous street beggar or, as he puts it later in his analysis, a woman
in childbirth or a man suffering from insanity (Smith [1759] 1976,
I.I.11, and VII.I.7).
The one boundary fellow-feeling could not cross, in Adam Smith’s
model, seems to have been that of species. Fellow-feeling in Smith’s
terms seems premised on the awareness of bodily similarity. An injured
leg speaks to a leg that might be injured; skin that is suppurating or
inflamed resonates to skin that is still smooth. And while Smith him-
self grants the limits in fellow-feeling that a man may experience for a
woman in the pangs of childbirth, his “theory of sociality” incorporates
fellow-feeling as a support for “the ‘two great purposes of nature’: ‘the
support of the individual, and the propagation of the species’ ” (Sug-
den 2002, p. 84). We need social organization in order to create the
security and material goods necessary for human populations to grow
and thrive. Since the human species must be propagated by gather-
ing in societies and producing wealth, species membership constitutes
a boundary-marker. There seems in Adam Smith no suggestion that
 fellow-feeling 179

the propagation of other species not as wealth but as objects of our

fellow-feeling can have any survival significance. What would Adam
Smith have made of the story of Miss Nancy Luce?

Miss Nancy Luce

When she published her book of poems and advice for chicken doctoring
in 1875, Miss Nancy Luce wrote at the dawn of the United States poul-
try industry. The United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.)
had been signed into being only thirteen years earlier; the first poultry
magazine in the nation (The Poultry Bulletin) had begun publication
only five years earlier; the American Poultry Association had been
organized only two years before; and it would still take another eleven
years for the Hatch Act to create the agricultural extension agencies
so powerful in defining modern chicken farming (Hanke, Skinner and
Florea 1974, pp. 52, 35, 36, 52). The field of agricultural education
joined the triad of educational institutions established with the passage
of the Morrill Act in 1862, along with land grant colleges and state
agricultural experiment stations. The U.S. Congress defined the mission
of agricultural extension education in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914:
“To aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and
practical information on subjects relating to agriculture.” (Cash 2001,
p. 433). Reflecting the existing agricultural understanding of chicken
raising as ancillary to the main work of a scientific farm, agricultural
extension education from its inception framed chicken farming as a
project particularly suited to women. The first speaker at a Farmer’s
Institute to address the topic of poultry raising was Mrs. Ida Tilson,
of West Salem, Wisconsin, who spoke of her success raising chickens
(Hanke et al. 1974, p. 65). Newly appointed agricultural extension
agents appealed to woman’s long history as poultry farmers, arguing
that the farm wife “Above all . . . wanted her flock to contribute to the
family income. She had confidence in its ability to do so.” (Hanke
et al. 1974, p. 66). The first poultry inventory in 1840 estimated that
there were 98,984,232 head of poultry being raised in the USA, and
women dominated poultry production in the nation until the end of
World War II, when “large-scale egg and broiler production [had]
gradually pushed women out of the poultry industry.” (Sachs 1996,
p. 107).
180 susan squier

Fig. 9.2 Miss Nancy Luce and two beloved hens. Reproduced with the
permission of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library,
Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

From her vantage point at the beginning of this process of agricultural

transformation, and clearly comfortable in the gender-sanctioned role
as chicken farmer, Miss Nancy Luce claimed authority both as an
interpreter of chicken behavior and as a healer of their ills. Moreover,
she wrote of her chickens as companions in the struggle for subsistance
rather than as products, although her exhortations to her readers suggest
that her sensitivity to animal welfare may have been an increasingly
rare quality even in her era of farm foreclosures and consolidations.
Her poems—many of them addressed to her chickens—speak vividly of
her fellow-feeling for the suffering of others, both animals and humans.
Consider, for example, ‘Poor Little Heart,’ verses she dedicated to her
favorite hen, Pinky:
Poor Tweedle, Tedel, Bebbee, Pinky. She is gone. She died June 19th,
1871, at quarter past 7 o’clock in the evening, with my hands around
her, aged 4 years. I never can see Poor little dear again.
Poor Pinky, that dear little heart,
She is gone, sore broke in her,
Died in distress, Poor little heart,
O it was heart rending.
O sick I do feel ever since,
I am left broken hearted,
She was my own heart within me,
She had more than common wit.
 fellow-feeling 181

Poor Pinky’s wit, and she loved me so well,

Them was the reasons,
I set so much by her,
And I raised her in my lap too.
* *
I hope I shall never have a hen, to set so much by again,
From over the sea, she was brought to me, one week old,
I raised her in my lap,
She loved me dreadful dearly.
She would jam close to me,
Every chance she could get,
And talk to me, and want to get in my lap,
And set down close.
And when she was out from me,
If I only spoke her name,
She would be sure to run to me quick,
Without wanting anything to eat.
She was sick and died very sudden,
Only two hours and a quarter,
About fifteen minutes dying.
Bloody water pouring out her mouth,
And her breath agoing, Poor little heart.
O dreadful melancholy I do feel for my dear,
She laid eggs till three days before her death,
She laid the most eggs, this four years around,
Than any hen I have on earth.
* *
Consider how distressing sickness is to undergo,
And how distressing in many ways,
My parents’ sickness, a number of years,
Caused them to sell cows, oxen, horses, and sheep,
English meadow, clear land, and wood land,
Consider how distressing sickness is in many ways.
(Luce 1875)
The fellow-feeling expressed by Miss Luce’s heart-felt poetic narratives
of her hens’ illnesses, almost maternal in their semiotic murmurings,
is echoed in a slightly different form in the veterinary advice manual,
‘Doctoring Hens,’ that she packaged as an appendix to her volume of
poetry.
182 susan squier

Human, do understand how to raise up sick hens to health. Some folks do

not know how to doctor hens, they doctor them wrong, it hurts them, and
it is dreadful cruel to let them die. It is as distressing to dumb creatures
to undergo sickness, and death, as it is for human, and as distressing to
be crueled, and as distressing to suffer. God requires human[s] to take
good care of dumb creatures and be kind to them, or not keep any.
(Luce 1875)
Her tone is urgent, pragmatic, and specific. For a blocked oviduct, seri-
ous enough to kill a hen, she makes a no-nonsense appeal to womanly
resourcefulness: “someone has a small finger, and common sense, take
the skin of egg out of her, then she is all right” (Luce 1890, p. 27). For
an intestinal obstruction she confidently recommends massaging the
hen’s stomach, giving a dosage of Epsom salts gauged by the smell of
the hen’s breath, and then hand-feeding the ailing bird. “Folks bring
hens to me in this disease, to the point of death, been sick a long time,
I cure them in five days . . .” (Luce 1875).
Miss Nancy Luce exhibited empathy for the birds who were her
companions. The final verse of the poem ‘Poor Little Heart’ makes
that clear when it asserts the similarities between animal and human
suffering, just as her advice manual compares veterinary and human
medical ailments and treatments. There seems to be little boundary
between medical and veterinary matters, or between the hen’s anatomy
and her own. Nancy Luce suffered from illness much of her adult life;
without much of a leap we could imagine the blocked oviduct or the
intestinal obstruction as her own. Nor does she see any gap between
sentiment and economic practicality: for a chicken farmer, tender care
will be profitable. As she explains,
I bought a young hen last year, she was dreadful wild, and when one
week was at an end she came to me, and let me take her up, she keep
still, and eat out of my hand, she remains gentle every since, and a good
hen to lay eggs. (Luce 1875)
In Nancy Luce’s view, the simple practice of keeping animals entails
the obligation to provide them with humane treatment. In short, fel-
low-feeling is central to Nancy Luce’s psychic economy: it is how the
energy she expends in the relationship with her chickens, and with the
broader human society to which she sells their eggs, is regulated and
replenished.
 fellow-feeling 183

Betty MacDonald

As a child of the 1950s I loved MacDonald for her wonderful Mrs.

Piggle-Wiggle series of children’s books. As an adult, raising chickens,
I love her for The Egg and I, the hilarious account of her struggles
as a chicken farmer on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington just
after World War II (MacDonald 1945). Reaching the top of the U.S.
nonfiction lists within a year of its publication in 1945, this memoir
captures a woman’s experience of chicken farming at the conclusion of
the agricultural transformation whose early glimmerings Miss Nancy
Luce documented.
Chickens and eggs had an ever-growing consumer market during
and after the Second World War, for they were the only products of
animal agriculture not subject to wartime rationing. By 1945 chicken
farming was being reinvented as a task for men, particularly for war
veterans hoping to establish a profitable place in the postwar economy.
Poultry keeping took on a systematic, scientific cast, as new methods of
flock management and feed ratio aimed at producing a larger product
more quickly and economically. This is the world entered by Betty
MacDonald and her husband Bill, an ex-Marine war veteran, once
they decide to take the plunge into chicken rearing.
Fellow-feeling for chickens is definitely a man’s emotion for the
MacDonalds. When, on their honeymoon, Bob begins to talk about his
experience raising hens and his interest in returning to chicken farming,
his feeling for chickens combines ardor and economics. As Betty tells
it, Bob speaks of his job as a supervisor on a large chicken ranch,
. . . with the loving care usually associated with first baby shoes. When
he reached the figures—the cost per hen per egg, the cost per dozen
eggs, the relative merits of outdoor runs, the square footage required
per hen—he recalled them with so much nostalgia that listening to him
impartially was like trying to swim at the edge of a whirlpool. (MacDonald
1945, p. 38)
The humor in The Egg and I lies in Betty’s sentimental education as a
wife-turned-chicken farmer. While Bob’s feelings for his chickens are
tender, Betty’s take a different turn. Before married life, her only contact
with chickens had been watching Layette, her grandmother’s Barred
Rock hen, lead her brood of “fourteen home-hatched fluffy yellow chicks
through the drifting apple blossoms” (MacDonald 1945, p. 138). As
her farming experience increases, and her feelings ripen and twist, the
184 susan squier

daily farm grind gradually vanquishes the memory of Layette: “This

sentimental fragment of my childhood was a far cry from the hundreds
and hundreds of yellowish white, yeeping, smelly little nuisances which
made my life a nightmare in the spring,” she explains wryly. And she
learns “to Hate Even Baby Chickens” (ibid.).
Many intertwined factors produce Betty’s dislike for the chickens she
and Bob raise on their wilderness chicken ranch. MacDonald’s memoir
extracts the humorous meaning from each of them: her experience as
an aspiring writer who subordinates her goals to those of her husband
out of a sense of wifely duty, the travails of new motherhood in their
isolated rural setting, and her lonely life on their isolated farm far from
a supportive community. But most significant, and most vividly drama-
tized on the MacDonalds’ farm, are the changing scale and gendered
character of post World War II chicken raising. Unlike Nancy Luce,
Betty and Bob MacDonald are enmeshed in modern intensive poultry
farming, in which a high volume of hens requires efficient feeding and
watering, careful record keeping, and the rigorous culling of unpro-
ductive layers. In this new agricultural model, the farmer is implicitly,
often explicitly, gendered male. Implicitly demonstrating her acceptance
of this model, Betty describes Bob as “the best chicken farmer in our
community” because he is “scientific, he [is] thorough, and he [isn’t]
hampered by a lot of traditions or old wives’ tales” (MacDonald 1945,
p. 146). Like other modern poultrymen, he separates “breeding and egg
raising,” understanding them as “two separate industries.” He studies
egg prices and calculates the ratio of input (feed) to output (eggs). And
he has definite opinions about what makes a poultry farm succeed or
fail: “the secret of success in the chicken business for one man was to
keep the operation to a size that could be handled by one man.” (ibid.).
The relation between the sexes on a farm is as clear as the species hier-
archy: any farm wife who would work side-by-side with such a paragon
must be, Betty MacDonald quips, “part Percheron” (ibid.).
The gendered transformation of poultry farming MacDonald rep-
resents with such humor also had serious implications, particularly for
working class women. Traditionally, the ‘egg-money’ had been held
separate from the general farm income. It was the private property of
the wife, to use as she wished. Thus, raising chickens provided farm
wives not only with the power to amend the farm diet when necessary,
but also with precious economic and occasionally even social autonomy.
When the rise of extension education in poultry farming destabilized this
arrangement in the 1930s and 1940s by introducing the predominantly
 fellow-feeling 185

masculine scientific farming model, women lost a large measure of

control over their lives. Rather than enjoying the security of being able
to provide for themselves, they were now subject to the vagaries of an
economic system in which they had no significant part. Little wonder
that women enjoyed less fellow-feeling for their chickens, entrapped as
they both were in an economy that showed increasingly little concern
for any creatures caught in its instrumental and disinterested gears.
We find the long-term impact of this economic trend on women, and
on the broader communities they anchored, in my final example: the
experiences of poultry worker Linda Lord.

Linda Lord

Like Nancy Luce and Betty MacDonald, Linda Lord’s story is intimately
shaped by her surroundings. However, rather than rural Martha’s
Vineyard with its occasional summer visitors or the lush but lonely
Olympic Peninsula, Linda’s territory is hardscrabble Belfast, Maine.
The chickens she encounters aren’t in her front garden or her parlor
as Nancy Luce’s were, or in whitewashed poultry houses, like those
adjacent to Betty MacDonald’s wilderness cabin, but in a dimly lit
factory where they are brought to be stunned, killed, scalded, plucked,
singed, and packed for shipping.
The poultry industry had been a prominent part of the Maine econ-
omy since the time of Nancy Luce, producing mostly eggs in the 1860s
but by the 1930s, when Betty MacDonald was getting into chickens on
her northwest coast island, shipping “New York Dressed” chickens to
out-of-state buyers (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 97). After World
War II, poultry had become Maine’s most important agricultural crop.
Even when Maine’s poultry industry consolidated into only a few large
processing firms, Penobscot Poultry held on, remaining as one of only
two Maine broiler producers (ibid., p. 98).
Around 1971, Penobscot Poultry was found to have been dumping
pollutants into Penobscot Bay along with another company. Both com-
panies were fined, and Penobscot’s corporate reputation suffered. Later
in the decade the company’s environmental problems continued, when
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were found in the flesh of chickens
from three Maine poultry plants, Penobscot among them, leading to
the destruction of 1.25 million birds. The error was finally attributed
to one flawed batch from a Ralston Purina feed mill, rather than to
186 susan squier

Penobscot Poultry, but the damage was done (ibid.). The industry was
further challenged by the deindustrialization facing Maine’s struggling
economy along with much of the rest of the Northeast. By the 1980s,
the state had begun the forced transition to a tourist economy.
Historians hold differing opinions about the factors that contributed
to the final closure of Penobscot Poultry in 1988, but among the mix of
causes were financial problems, mismanagement, and the intensifying
demands of vertical integration. We can see all of those elements at
play in a vivid interview and photographic essay compiled in the plant’s
last days by Cedric R. Chatterley and Alicia J. Rouverol. Their subject
is Linda Lord, a woman who started working for the plant after her
high school graduation, and continued working there for more than
twenty years. Lord held many positions at Penobscot Poultry. They
ranged from the low pay job of poultry transferring, or putting the
killed and plucked birds on shackles for the eviscerating line, to the
‘top pay’ position of poultry sticker, working in the room they called
the “blood tunnel” or “hell hole,” killing the stunned birds by putting
a knife through “the vein right in by the jaw bone” (Chatterley and
Rouverol 2000, p. 6).
Linda’s encounters with chickens were dominated by death, dismem-
berment and disability, rather than the breeding, laying and hatching
that animated the stories of Nancy Luce and Betty MacDonald. As I
read her interview, and gazed at the powerful photographs accompa-
nying it, I wondered how to bring Linda Lord’s very different expe-
rience of chicken farming—factory farming, as it was for her—into
conversation with the stories of the other women. Her interview gives
poignant articulation to the complex psychic and material economies
of industrial chicken farming. Although (or more likely because) she
hit the top of her personal pay scale as a sticker in the blood tunnel
at $5.69 an hour, Linda has a clear grasp of the economic realities of
her form of employment:
The way I look at it now, the chicken business here in the state of Maine
is just about phased right out. Because it’s costing too much for us, for
the grain to be shipped. You have to pay electricity, you have to pay the
fuel. You know, it’s a sad thing really, because it’s put a lot of people
right out of work. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2002, pp. 12, 34)
But what were her specific experiences of fellow-feeling? I wondered.
She acknowledged sympathy for her fellow poultry workers based on
the physical injuries they shared. Whether she was standing on the
 fellow-feeling 187

Fig. 9.3 Linda Lord on the Killing Floor (© Photograph by

Cedric N. Chatterley, 24 Feb 1988. All rights reserved)

assembly line hanging dead poultry, or stretching—awash in blood—to

grab stunned chickens off a moving overhead line, Lord was prey to
the same problems that characterized all of the people who “work on
the lines”: warts, tendonitis, and blood poisoning. There’s an ailment
specific to the industry, Lord explains:
You have like a rash break out all over you from the chickens . . . which
eventually will blister right up with little pus sacks, and the skin will peel
right off your hand, and they call it—“chicken poisoning” is what they
call it. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 5)
Linda has suffered from blood poisoning, and she is blind in her right
eye as a result of an accident on the assembly line, an injury for which
she finally got a partial settlement after three years working with the
workmen’s compensation lawyers at her union. It was no victory,
though, as Linda points out. Even drawing on the brutal calculus of
compensation, the disability money she received from the company
didn’t offset the economic cost of her injury when it barred her from
other employment possibilities once the plant closed:
They had a way that if—you know, the loss of a finger was so much, and
a loss of a hand was so much, or an arm was so much, or an eye was so
188 susan squier

much, and that’s how it went. But I don’t think they really realize just
what one eye—how it limits you in a lot of things. And it hurts you for
good jobs, too. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 59)
Linda’s comments recall Adam Smith’s analysis of how a physiologi-
cally-registered sense of fellow-feeling leads us to empathize—through our
bodies—with the ailments of others. Yet there were distinct limits to this
emotion for Linda. Responding to an interviewers’ question, she made
it clear that whatever connection she felt to her fellow workers based
on shared physical vulnerability was tempered by economic realities:
her straightforward need for this job and knowledge that the actions of
fellow-workers may jeopardize that income. In the late twentieth-century
climate of scarce jobs for low wages, Linda took her job in the poultry
processing plant because “that was just about the only place that was
hiring . . . And I wanted a job.” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 2)
SC You know, the first day we photographed the hell hole, we were
a little taken aback. It’s a pretty gruesome scene in there. How did you
feel about it when you began to work in there?
LL I was the type of kid growing up that nothing bothered me—blood
or anything like that. So when I signed up for that job—of course I’d
been in there and I’d watched and I had tried some, you know, on my
breaks and stuff . . . So I knew what I was getting into, and it didn’t bother
me, and I preferred working by myself than working by someone that
might cause trouble for you on the line.
SC How could people cause trouble for you on the line?
LL Oh, throwing stuff, you know, not doing their bird, but trying to
blame it on you . . . And if someone wasn’t doing their job on a bird, they
could trace it back.
SC So you thought that maybe the disadvantages of working with
other people were big enough that you rather would have stuck it out
by yourself in that room.
LL Yeah. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 7)
In contrast to Nancy Luce, who roughly a generation earlier urged
people to realize that “It is as distressing to dumb creatures to undergo
sickness, and death, as it is for human [sic],” Linda Lord’s relations
with chickens are instrumental rather than emotional, and focused not
on their generative capacities (the eggs they lay or the companionship
they offer) but on their destruction. She attributes her skill as a chicken
sticker to a lack of fellow-feeling for the birds themselves, a trait that
seems to have been nurtured by her employer.
Penobscot Poultry embodies the rationalization of life in the way it
compartmentalizes its poultry production. Chicks are incubated and
 fellow-feeling 189

hatched in one division, laying hens are housed and eggs collected in
another division and broilers grown, slaughtered and processed in a
third division. Workers’ lives are similarly compartmentalized, as we
learn from Linda’s experience as a poultry worker. The industrializa-
tion, consolidation, and final deindustrialization of regional poultry
production has not only reframed and narrowed the meaning of labor
for agricultural workers, but has also arguably eviscerated the meaning
of community to the town of Belfast. Reading her story and musing
angrily on the injustice of our contemporary economic paradigm, I
found myself wondering whether a return to Adam Smith’s writings
could shed light on this economic and social transformation, and maybe
even give some hope of an alternative model.

Adam Smith

Economists have long struggled to reconcile Smith’s The Theory of Moral

Sentiments (1759), and its explorations of sympathy, empathy and fel-
low-feeling, with the book he published seventeen years later, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Indeed, as they
have tried to show that Smith’s ideas of empathy and sympathy are
compatible with notions of rational choice theory, economists have
painted a picture of economic relations reminiscent of those encoun-
tered by Linda Lord at Penobscot Poultry. They have argued that
human beings are guided not by feelings but by rational preference,
and that individuals’ deeds are shaped by a rational assessment of the
utility of possible choices of action. Thus, as Sugden explains, rational
choice economist John Harsanyi and game theorist Ken Binmore have
reinterpreted the sentiment of fellow-feeling as a rational expression of
preference leading to choice. They explain a person’s decision to engage
in altruistic activities, though on the surface seemingly of little personal
utility, by quantifying the impact of that choice upon the individual’s
quantity of pleasure (Sugden 2002, p. 67; Harsanyi 1955; Binmore
1994; Binmore 1998).
More recently, critical economic sociologists and feminist economists
have issued a strong challenge to such a notion of rational choice
economics. Framing a critique of neoliberal economics that offers an
alternative economic theory attentive to issues of social justice, economist
Robert Sugden refuses the reinterpretation of fellow-feeling as prefer-
ence. Instead, he argues that Adam Smith’s notion of “fellow-feeling”
190 susan squier

models not merely utilitarian preferences but the interaction between

different human beings’ mental states. Sugden reminds us of the full
import of Adam Smith’s phrasing:
fellow-feeling is to be understood as one person’s lively consciousness of
some affective state of another person, where that consciousness itself has
similar affective qualities (Sugden 2002, p. 71)
While these similar qualities could consist in either the shared pain or
joy that we may feel in response to another’s experiences, the crucial
point is that whatever the emotion shared, the experience of fellow-
feeling itself produces pleasure. As he argues, being linked to another’s
consciousness and sharing their affective experience, whether of pain
or of pleasure, is inherently positive. The converse is also true: failure
to share another’s feelings can cause us distress, irritation or even pain.
As Sugden observes,
With what I believe to be psychological acuteness, Smith points to . . . the
unease and irritation we feel when we find we cannot sympathize with
someone else’s apparent sentiments of distress (Sugden 2002, p. 73).
As Sugden reinvigorates Smith’s analysis, it becomes apparent that
fellow-feeling is an integral part of our motivation to live in society:
we desire to feel with others. Because the sentiment persuades us to bind
ourselves to the demands and restrictions of society, it is “an essential
part of the technology by which relational goods—that is, social relations
that have subjective but non-instrumental value to the participants—are
produced” (Sugden 2002, p. 81). Understood in this light, Smith’s dis-
cussion of fellow-feeling in the context of moral development moves us
beyond simple instrumentalism into the realm of the psychic economy,
delineating the broader motivations for our participation in society. To
Smith the value of social relations exceeds the merely instrumental.
Feminist economists Jenny Cameron and J.K. Gibson-Graham have
gone even farther than Sugden, broadening the economic realm to
include marginalized groups and modes of transaction previously
viewed as non-economic (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003).
Redefining the economy “as an open-ended discursive construct made
up of multiple constituents,” they suggest that we employ additional
categories of economic analysis such as production and reproduction,
caring and nurturing, gift relations, environmental stewardship and
social cooperation, all to further the feminist goal of improving the
 fellow-feeling 191

representational adequacy of our economic models. They show how we

can introduce what they call “alternative axes of differentiation within
the economy”—that is, new models for explaining how difference is
produced and maintained—to disrupt our conventional assumption that
human activity is divided into the economic and the non-economic.
We can map the true diversity of economic relations and practice by
including alternative forms of transaction and calculation, different
modes of laboring and paying for labor, and a range of different kinds
of economic organization with different relations to surplus labor.
This exercise in representing alternative modes of economic analysis
can help us see how we might move toward “an economy in which
the interdependence of all who produce, appropriate, distribute and
consume in society is acknowledged and built upon” (Cameron and
Gibson-Graham 2003, p. 153).
This rather abstract economic analysis may seem a long way from
the dense materiality of the farming experience, but it enables us to
tease out the multiple forms of fellow-feeling and the multiple econo-
mies at play when Nancy Luce praises her hen Pinky in verse both
for her affection and for her impressive egg production. Indeed, once
we think of economics as simultaneously incorporating many contra-
dictory notions of value and different kinds of transactions, we can
understand Miss Nancy’s egg business as just one of several forms of
exchange in which she participates. These also include her care for her
hens in return for their affection and companionship, the sale of her
pamphlets of poetry and medical advice, and her provision of medical
care for her neighbors’ chickens in the hope that she will receive their
good will in return.
The different forms of economy and the different forms of fellow-
feeling are linked to each other, in fact. The illness and physical col-
lapse of her mother and father are devastating in classical economic
terms because they lead to the failure and sale of their farm, crops
and woodland. But more than that, they also have a devastating effect
on Nancy Luce’s psychic economy, for they force her to live in a way
that robs her of valued social approbation. Her biographer’s note that,
although some summer visitors came to her house to buy eggs and
books of poetry, “many used to drive ‘up-island’ to scoff, and . . . [others]
plagued Nancy, baiting her to see what she would do or say”, acquires
poignant significance in light of Adam Smith’s observation:
192 susan squier

Before a gay assembly, a gentleman would be more mortified to appear

covered with filth and rags than with blood and wounds. This last situ-
ation would interest their pity; the other would provoke their laughter.
(Smith [1759] 1976, I. III. 24)
In addition to the loss of sustenance, Nancy Luce is subject to the
brutal loss of community respect, embodied in the mockery of her
fellow human beings.
Attention to issues of empowerment and environmentalism, intro-
duced by feminist economists Cameron and Gibson-Graham, enables
us to tease out the complex costs of modern chicken farming for Betty
MacDonald and Linda Lord. We understand that Betty MacDonald’s
position as helping hand on the chicken farm managed by her hus-
band reinforced her already-entrenched sense of disempowerment as a
woman, while her ability to tolerate the chaos and hard work provided
the theme for her best-selling memoir. We can see how Linda Lord’s
poultry processing work both empowered and disempowered her: how
she took pride in being “the first woman in the industry to have a job
in the sticking hole” and “the only one that stuck it out killing birds
and stuff,” but felt stigmatized by her work-acquired disability and
later the loss of her job (Chatterley and Rouveral 2000, p. 71). We can
also identify the suffering that the PCB-tainted feed mill caused Linda
Lord as well as her whole town of Bethel Maine when it triggered the
environmental disaster and economic collapse that led to the closure
of Penobscot Poultry.
Moreover, the broader framing of the economy that Cameron and
Gibson-Graham advance in their feminist critique gives us the analytic
perspective to identify not only the suffering caused by a conventional
economic model, but also the well-being that can be produced by
alternative economic structures. So, let me close with a word about the
alternative economies that enable Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord
to achieve what Linda has called “content” (Chatterley and Rouverol
2000, p. 81).
When the rains of another autumn lead Betty to muse that “Hus-
band and wife teamwork is just fine except when it reaches a point
where the husband is more conscious of the weight his wife’s shoulder
carries than of the shoulder itself ” (MacDonald 1945, p. 285), Bob
MacDonald implicitly acknowledges the importance of exchanges of
caring, nurturing and community to Betty’s psychic economy by buy-
ing a modern chicken ranch nearer Seattle. After roughing it in the
woods of the Olympic Peninsula, the prospect of modern agriculture
is a welcome one. Betty is ecstatic:
 fellow-feeling 193

[it] seemed to me that from now on life was going to be pure joy. We
sat at the kitchen table and . . . figured assets and liabilities. At least Bob
did. I was busy figuring how many hours a day I would save by having
modern conveniences. (MacDonald 1945, p. 287)
She exclaims happily, “I suppose that with lights in chicken houses and
running water and things we wouldn’t have to get up until about seven
or half past” (p. 287). Her plea for some relief from drudgery seems
to fall on deaf ears, however, for Bob responds with the input/output
perspective of agricultural efficiency discourse: “Chickens have to be
fed anyway and the earlier you feed ‘em the sooner they start to lay”
(p. 287). We aren’t completely back in the mode of masculinist scientific
farming, however. It seems that the very act of writing The Egg and I
has rekindled a sense of fellow-feeling, a kind of solidarity, with the
chickens that are MacDonald’s subject. For Betty’s last words—spoken
as direct authorial address to the reader—suggest that the adventure of
The Egg and I has given her a new solidarity with her chickens: “Which
just goes to show, a man in the chicken business is not his own boss
at all. The hen is the boss.” (p. 287).
While Betty MacDonald’s economic privilege enables her to find a
mode of chicken farming that will accommodate her other commitments
(especially the writing that the experience catalyzed and that would
become her life’s work), Linda Lord has fewer options after the closing
of Penobscot Poultry. She gets a job as pieceworker in a rope factory
in Belfast, where she “average[s] between $6.50 to $6.75 to $6.80” an
hour, which she knows is only temporary, because “sooner or later
my age is not going to hack this pace that is going at Crowe Rope”
(Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 77). When an interviewer asks, “if
working for a living is just to bring the dollars in, what are the areas
of your life that you do get enjoyment from and that do mean a lot to
you?” Linda’s answer gives us a glimpse of those additional categories
of economic analysis theorized by Cameron and Gibson-Graham that
provide value in her life and enable her to say, “In a lot of ways, I’m
content” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 81):
Well, I love my animals. And I’ve got my trike and my motorcycle. And
I like to hunt, and I like to fish, and I like to camp. . . . And I just love
nature. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 80)
The trans-species connections rediscovered by Betty MacDonald and
Linda Lord at the conclusion of their encounters with industrial farm-
ing may seem to test the species limit integral to Adam Smith’s notion
of fellow-feeling, which he argues functions to serve our two innate
194 susan squier

desires, “self propagation and the propagation of the species” (Smith

[1759] 1976, III. I. 55, Note 2). Yet perhaps it is our anthropocentrism
rather than Smith’s conviction that has given rise to that inference. As
Margaret Schabas points out, to Smith it is
language and our propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange” that set us
apart from all other species and give rise to commerce and trade. But in
every other respect, we are seamlessly joined to the richer oeconomy of
nature. (Schabas 2003, pp. 273–74)
Human beings share with other animals the moral sentiment of
sympathy, according to Smith, because the feeling itself is produced,
independent of consciousness, by the physiology of the nervous system.
With the Physiocrats before him, Schamas argues, Smith believed that
agricultural labor was the major origin of natural well-being and social
wealth, and therefore he grounded his analysis of economic phenomena
in nature, both physiological and biological (Schamas 2003, p. 272).
Returning to Adam Smith’s theories with the new perspectives
introduced by feminist and critical economists, we can now understand
the importance of conceptualizing the agricultural economy broadly
enough to recognize its vital variety. As Cameron and Gibson-Graham
have shown, such an economy has room—indeed must make room—for
“multiple constituents” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003, p. 153).
Such an economy will understand that there are multiple sources of
value, both social and environmental. As the stories of Miss Nancy
Luce, Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord reveal, the varieties of work
in chicken farming, like the different sites in which the work takes place,
and the range of possible transactions that can result from it, will shape
the extent to which any of us is able to experience the fellow-feeling
that Adam Smith saw as foundational to community-building, and
thus to a successful economy. Each agricultural model, like each kind
of encounter with chickens, generates its own distinct capacity for fel-
low-feeling, its own specific notion of community, and I would suggest,
its own template for economic success.
As I sit out with my chickens at the end of a long day; when I col-
lect the handful of brown or white eggs in the early evening; when I
augment my flock with a bantam hen and chicks bought at the poultry
auction in Big Valley, where the Amish buggies jostle with the pickups
and mini-vans; when I crate up some of my hens and cockerels to take
to the Mennonite butcher in the next valley; and even when I serve
those hens to my friends in the form of a thick chicken-corn chowder,
 fellow-feeling 195

I think from time to time of that little book, The Back Garden Hen, with
its grim assertion that “[no] sentiment or fine feeling enters into the life
of the modern hen in an intensive poultry farm” (Anon. n.d., p. 13).
Right there in that pamphlet we can find an economic system under
construction, and constriction. Only eight pages before that dismissal of
sentiment, the author recalls his or her own experience raising back
garden hens: “The profits were pleasant, but the real pleasure lay in
the hours of happiness the hobby made possible.” (Anon. n.d., p. 7).
Economists have overlooked their own founder’s attention to the way
moral feelings and agricultural practices combine to produce both well-
being and wealth, as embodied by the diverse models of chicken raising
currently making a precarious place for themselves in the shadow of
the modern factory farm. Like the farmer-writers of our contempo-
rary moment, Nancy Luce, Betty MacDonald, and Linda Lord reveal
that we have much to gain if we embrace the broader economy of
fellow-feeling.

References

Anon. 1917. The Back Garden Hen: How Thirteen Hens Paid the Rates. Manchester: The Daily
News and Leader.
Berry, Wendell. 1996. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Berkeley, CA:
Sierra Club Books.
Binmore, Ken. 1994. Game Theory and the Social Contract. Volume 1: Playing Fair. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT.
——. 1998. Game Theory and the Social Contract. Volume II: Just Playing. Cambridge, MA:
MIT.
Bowen, Dana. 2007. ‘Old MacDonald Now Has a Book Contract.’ New York Times (20
June), p. D6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/dining/20farm.html (accessed
13 January 2008).
Cameron, Jenny and Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. ‘Feminising the Economy: Meta-
phors, Strategies, Politics.’ Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 10
(2): 145–157.
Chatterley, Cedric N. and Rouverol, Alicia J. 2000. ‘ “I Was Content and Was Not
Content”: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry.’ Car-
bondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Clough, Ben. 1949. ‘Poor Nancy Luce.’ The New Colophon II (Part Seven): 253–265.
Ebert, Roger. 2006. ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’ (Review). Chicago Sun-Times. http://
rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060119/REVIEWS/
60117003/1023 (accessed 11 September 2007).
Fitzgerald, Deborah. 2003. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hanke, Oscar August, Skinner, John L., and James Harold Florea. 1974. American Poultry
History 1823–1973. Madison, WI: American Printing and Publishing.
Harsanyi, John. 1955. ‘Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics and Interpersonal
Comparisons of Utility’. Journal of Political Economy, 63: 309–321.
196 susan squier

Independent Lens. no date. ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John: Community Supported
Agriculture.’ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/realdirt/ (accessed 11 September
2007).
Kingsolver, Barbara, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. 2007. Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins.
Luce, Nancy. 1875. ‘Poor Little Hearts,’ A Complete Edition of the Works of Nancy Luce, Of
West Tisbury, Duke’s County, Mass., containing God’s Words-Sickness-Poor Little Hearts-Milk-
No Comfort-Prayers-Our Savior’s Golden Rule—Hen’s Names, etc. New Bedford: Mercury
Job Press.
MacDonald, Betty. 1945. The Egg and I. New York: Harper & Row.
New York Times. 2007. ‘Tyson to Sell Chicken Free of Antibiotics.’ The New York Times.
(20 June). TimesSelect website. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/business/
20tyson.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (accessed 13 January 2008).
Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New
York: Penguin.
Sachs, Carolyn. 1996. Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Sallatin, Joel. 1993. Pastured Poultry Profits. Swope, VA: Polyface.
Schabas, Margaret. ‘Adam Smith’s Debts to Nature.’ History of Political Economy, 35
(Suppl 1): 252–281.
Smith, Adam. [1776] 1904. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
London: Methuen. The Library of Economics and Liberty website. http://www.
econlib.org/LIBRARY/Smith/smWN.html (accessed 27 June 2007).
——. [1759] 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: A. Millar.
Striffler, Steve. 2005. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Sugden, Robert. 2002. ‘Beyond Sympathy and Empathy: Adam Smith’s Concept of
Fellow-feeling.’ Economics and Philosophy 18: 63–87.
 CHAPTER TEN

“TANGIBLE AND REAL AND VIVID AND MEANINGFUL”:

LUCY KIMBELL’S NOT-KNOWING ABOUT RATS

Steve Baker

A card, an invitation, around four inches by six, printed on both sides.

On the pink side, in a typeface sprouting elaborate arabesques, are the
words One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, and smaller text identifying
this as the title of a “performance lecture” to be given by Lucy Kimbell
at Camden Arts Centre in London on the evening of August 31, 2005.
In it, she proposed to share “the results of her aesthetic experiments
with rats,” and announced: “Raising issues about ethics and aesthet-
ics, this event will appeal both to those disgusted by rats and to those
disgusted by experiments on rats”. On the black side of the card, in

Fig. 10.1 Lucy Kimbell, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, invitation card
(2005). Courtesy of the artist
198 steve baker

the same typeface, where the glossy black arabesques seemed to mimic
rats’ tails, was the announcement of a Rat Fair in the same venue four
days earlier. But this account already risks getting ahead of itself. The
“rather beautiful” invitation card, as the artist rightly calls it, seems
nevertheless to be an appropriate place to start because it is one of
the few tangible artefacts relating to this complex and fascinating but
highly elusive art project.
Lucy Kimbell describes herself as “an artist and interaction designer”
whose recent work “disturbs evaluation cultures in management, tech-
nology and the arts” (Kimbell 2007). One Night with Rats in the Service
of Art is in fact her only animal-themed project to date, though the
project’s concern with the ways in which rats get enmeshed in human
evaluation cultures certainly connects it to other aspects of her art and
design practice. After the initial delivery of the performance lecture in
August 2005, versions have been given on at least two further occa-
sions: at the Rules of Engagement sci-art conference in York in September
2005, and at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process
at Goldmiths College, London in March 2006. The interview with the
artist on which this essay draws heavily (hereafter Kimbell 2006a) was
conducted immediately after the Goldsmiths lecture.
The performance lecture is in part a description of the nature of her
art practice. Having to explain in meetings and telephone conversa-
tions with all manner of people with an interest in rats that she was
“a practice-based researcher”—hardly the most self-explanatory term
to those not involved in the contemporary arts—she summarized her
side of such conversations as follows: “The outcomes of my research
might be performances, events, yes, artworks. These can be art. No, no
drawings, no photographs, no paintings, no sculptures. No, no installa-
tions . . . ” For the benefit of the lecture audience, she explained:
In previous projects I have referred to what I do as “somewhere between
Bad Social Science and live art.” Social scientists in particular seemed to
appreciate what I did because it resembled what they did, but using bas-
tardized methodologies, using humour and failure. (Kimbell 2005, p. 4)
Like a lot of her interactive projects, One Night with Rats in the Service of
Art was very much “about showing the entanglements,” as she puts it,
between its various elements (Kimbell 2006b). In this case those elements
included her encounters with rats and various groups of humans, from
laboratory scientists to the so-called “ratters” who keep and display fancy
rats as a hobby, as well as animal rights activists and art audiences. What
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 199

would happen, she wondered, to her understanding of the widespread

human distaste for rats as she moved between these people’s spaces,
bringing together “different kinds of knowledge, desire and disgust”?
This was to be her “aesthetic experiment” (Kimbell 2005, p. 11)

A Poem, and the First of Several Drawings

Disarmingly, Kimbell’s performance lecture begins with a 42-line “cute”

poem about one of her early visits to a mouse and rat show, the tone
of which is clear enough from the first four lines of the final stanza:
And this is what I took away
The sound of rats, the sound of play
People playing, with each other
The rats a sort of rodent cover (Kimbell 2005, p. 2)
Its principal formal purpose within the lecture seems to be to wrong-foot
any and all of its likely academic audiences, as cute rhyming couplets
have no more legitimacy in the discourse of contemporary art than
they do in that of science.
From there, however, the lecture (illustrated by PowerPoint images)
moves to the first mention of a particular drawing—a drawing by an
artist who proposes to make “no drawings, no photographs, no paint-
ings.” Kimbell introduces it as “a piece of work I want to make but
have not yet been able to make”:
It’s called the Rat Evaluated Artwork or REA. I did this drawing more than a
year ago and I imagined it as a gallery piece, sitting on tables, with many
tubes and wheels, a closed environment for rats and for the spectators
who might watch them, offering diversions and decision points for rats,
and diversions and decision points for humans. (2005, p. 3)
The rats’ decisions, as they selected which routes to take through this
enclosed maze, were to include aesthetic evaluations as to whether this
artwork was itself something “beautiful,” or “mildly interesting,” or
“sensationalist”. Simultaneously flippant and serious from the outset,
this was another example of her working, as she says, “somewhere
between Bad Social Science and live art.”
Here, as in so many other instances of contemporary art with animal
concerns of one kind or another, it is important to hold back from
judging too quickly any “ethical” (or unethical) stance that the work
may seem to adopt. In this particular case, it is important to understand
200 steve baker

Fig. 10.2 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004).

Courtesy of the artist

both the place of the Rat Evaluated Artwork in the overall trajectory of the
One Night with Rats in the Service of Art project, and the journey through
her ideas and experiences on which Kimbell will take her audience in
the course of the performance lecture. To ask whether the project is
actually about rats, or merely about art, is to ask the wrong kind of
question. And as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers insists, “there
are no good answers if the question is not the relevant one” (Stengers
2004, p. 97).
The drawn, collaged and written elements that make up the REA
“drawing” date from early or mid-2004. Over the next two years, her
ideas for the realization of this artwork hardly changed at all, other
than realizing that she really couldn’t bring herself to make it. In the
2006 interview she described it thus:
The Rat Evaluated Artwork is conceived of as a gallery installation which is
physical in form, perhaps with some digital add-ons or bits of electronics
that apparently measure or track a rat’s movement within it, with some
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 201

textual meaning attached to those measurements, for example how fast

an animal might be running in a wheel, but it’s really conceived of as a
visual art piece, so it is an artwork. It requires, in that conception of it,
a live animal or live animals to be in it, to move through the tubes and
various decision-points while an audience is there, and for the audience
first of all to observe those movements and decisions, and also to see
these faintly ridiculous attached meanings, and I still want to do it in
a way—that’s my lack, or loss, that I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
(Kimbell 2006a)
Kimbell’s account of this projected artwork raises important themes
which will each call for attention in the course of this essay: the nature
of art’s distinctive contribution to cultural knowledge about animals; the
circumstances of living animals in works of contemporary art; the role
of the ridiculous in formations of knowledge; and the work of loss.

Knowing About Not-Knowing

Kimbell’s own awareness of and attentiveness to her working methods

allows her to be surprisingly forthright about the limitations of her
knowledge. In the performance lecture she announces early on that
“I knew nothing about rats other than that they were both objects of
disgust and fear in Western culture and objects of respect—as survivors,
fast breeders, quick adaptors.”
At the point where she started contacting scientists, however, she was
fully conscious that the two-year university fellowship and the research
council funding she had secured to support the project were seen as
validating her enquiry, even when expressed in terms such as these:
“Hello, I just want to know what you know about rats. Hello, I don’t
even know what I want to know exactly but will you let me be here
and watch and ask some questions?” (2005, p. 3). It was essentially this
same open and wide-eyed (but far from naïve) approach that paid off
in Kimbell’s early contact with some of the “ratters.” In the autumn
of 2004 she paid several visits to the home of a woman in Essex who
kept rats: “She had agreed to let me try to train them aesthetically.
Neither of us was clear what this meant . . .” (2005, p. 9). Reporting
on these early contacts with both ratters and scientists, Kimbell tells
her audience:
I had noticed myself using the term “experimental” as in . . . “I’m not sure
what I’m doing—it’s a kind of experiment.” It was a way of avoiding
saying what I was doing, since I didn’t know what that was, and so far,
202 steve baker

no one had challenged me. Within practice-based research, you can get
away with quite a lot. You are allowed not to know, for quite a lot longer
than you are elsewhere in the world. (2005, p. 9)
In reality, of course, this has nothing to do with “getting away with”
anything. As an artist operating without confident access to the skills
and traditions of a conventional artists’ medium (such as painting or
photography), her projects have no obvious formal starting point:
In a sense, like anyone else, I’m just trying to understand the world, or
look at the world and create some meaning for myself . . . and because I
have always crossed disciplinary boundaries, I kind of feel that I don’t
have a claim to any one knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, finding herself sixteen months into the two-year fellow-
ship before she felt clear as to what she was actually doing, she reports
“I was quite anxious through this project, it wasn’t easy being in this
place”—although, at the same time, “sometimes I loved it” (Kimbell
2006a).

Getting into Other People’s Worlds

One Night with Rats in the Service of Art repeatedly reflects on, and questions,
the nature of Kimbell’s own practice: “I seemed to have this liberty
as a practice-based researcher; but what was it that I was researching,
other than my ability to get into things, like buildings with animal rights
protestors outside?” (Kimbell 2005, p. 4).
Part of an answer might be that she was researching her way around
obstacles such as the need to conceptualize and articulate the proj-
ect—“probably too early on”—in order to secure funding for it. One
early funding application included the explanation: “By setting up
activities that resemble (but differ from) the activities of scientists
and breeders, the artist wants to illuminate the ambiguities within
rat breeding and experimentation and reveal philosophical questions
about what makes us human and rats animals.” Its philosophical and
hierarchical presumptions exemplify her tendency to operate in what
she engagingly calls “Stalinist super-project mode” in the early stages
of research (Kimbell 2006a).
In order to move on from this rather defensive and calculating
manner of operating, a casting-off of confidence and preparation was
necessary. In its place came something more open. As she explains:
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 203

This is the thing about practice: once I started actually forcing myself
to do something, like going to that woman’s house in Essex, where I just
forced myself to go, it made it tangible and real and vivid and meaningful,
through practice. And instead of “the design”—what’s the perfect design
or perfect project?—I was just doing a thing, and seeing what it was like.
And that moves you forward, not the design, not the conceptualization
of it. (2006a)
In Kimbell’s account of her own practice, the refrain of doing some-
thing simply to see what it was like, to see what happened, is an important
reflection of her curiosity-driven approach. Without reading anything
specific into the coincidence, the words call to mind Derrida’s famous
observation about the striking manner in which his own cat, free of
philosophical agendas, seemed to look at him: “just to see” [ juste pour
voir] (Derrida 2002, p. 373).
Seeking to explain why her research for the rat project took her both
into scientific laboratories and into rat shows, Kimbell’s immediate
response was: “It seemed important to go and be in both and see what
happened.” Of both of these environments, she has observed “I was
amazed about how far people let me go into their worlds” (Kimbell
2006b). She found the ratters’ world “a closed community although
quite welcoming” (2006b), and also found the scientists she encountered
to be helpful, especially the experimental psychologist Rob Deacon,
who works on rodent behaviour, and who became actively involved
in aspects of her project. Asked about whether these different worlds
shared any of their knowledge, Kimbell responded:
I don’t think they do, very much, which was why I did very quickly
become interested in the practices of these two groups that I looked at in
depth. . . . I was particularly struck when talking to the ratters by how much
biological knowledge they had, and some home-made animal psychology.
Some of those people breed rats, and try and bring out particular lines,
in the way that dog breeders do. So there’s a sort of homespun science.
I did interview somebody about this, and I said, so, where do you find
out about things? She said “from the literature,” and what she meant
was rat journals, not scientific journals. (2006a)
Deacon, on the other hand, was according to Kimbell “actually very
interested in, and recognized, the kinds of intimacy and knowledge
that owners and breeders would have.” Of his subsequent involvement
in her Rat Fair, she speculates that “he would privilege his knowledge
in a way, probably, but he was open to those discussions and actually
came along and participated, and wasn’t there to assert his special
knowledge” (2006a).
204 steve baker

In contrast to her work with scientists and ratters, Kimbell’s involve-

ment with animal rights activists was slight. Because of her discussions
with Deacon, who was based at Oxford University, and her aware-
ness—in the light of the SPEAK group’s sustained campaign opposing
the building of a new animal lab on that city’s South Parks Road—of
what she perceived as the “likely or possible risks to animal scientists
who explicitly experiment on animals plus, in the context of Oxford,
anyone associated with Oxford University,” she felt somewhat uncom-
fortable about how to engage with activists “as somebody not making
clear a critical position” (2006a).
Eventually she decided to attend a SPEAK rally in Oxford in July
2005 which had been organized to mark the one-year anniversary of
the University’s decision to stop building work on the proposed animal
lab (SPEAK 2007). She reports that she “felt very mixed there, because
I was there ambiguously, a bit like I was at the other events”:
So on the one hand I was very moved, in particular by one of the
speakers who was talking about his experience of working in an animal
lab with primates, and it was very upsetting, it was very distressing to
hear what happened to those animals, and the way he described it you
could not but be moved by these stories. But at the same time somehow
it wasn’t an open debate. So I didn’t come away feeling resolved about
what I thought, but I knew I had somehow to make that present in the
project. (2006a)
The last point is in many respects the crucial one: “I knew I had some-
how to make that present in the project.” Her expectations were perhaps
unrealistic (an animal rights rally is not the most likely forum for an
“open debate” weighing the arguments for or against animal experi-
mentation), and her actions (taking notes and photographs) apparently
caused some concern. Asked whether she was a journalist, her reply
that she was an artist may not have been the most reassuring one, and
she was probably wise to resist saying (as she had to the ratters and
scientists) that she was interested in conducting “aesthetic experiments”
with rats! Nevertheless, the point of the research was to feed into her
work, to allow something of the viewpoints she encountered at the rally
to be “present in the project.”
As with many aspects of the performance lecture One Night with Rats
in the Service of Art, this is done with both a lightness of touch and with
surprising shifts of tone that betray little if anything of her discomfort.
“I joined the rally to hear what was being said,” she begins. “It was like
a summer fete where the cakes were all vegan.” Within half a dozen
lines, however, the lecture’s language has changed markedly:
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 205

Here we are, our bodies protected over the years by vaccinations and
drugs most of which were probably tested on animals . . . My body, your
bodies, are a charnelhouse; stacked in it are the corpses of millions of
rats and mice and guinea pigs and fish and birds and cats and dogs and
primates used by doctors and scientists over hundreds of years. (Kimbell
2005, pp. 7–8)
These shifts of tone, and the jolts that they can occasionally deliver,
are made possible by the episodic and almost epigrammatic structure
of the lecture. Its circlings, refrains and juxtapositions belie the artist’s
clarity of purpose.

The Rat Fair . . .

Early on in the lecture, Kimbell asks in relation to her proposed Rat

Evaluated Artwork:
Could it be beautiful as well as disturbing, as well as problematic, as well
as funny, as well as politically incorrect, as well as entertaining, as well
as compelling, as well as unusual, as well as shocking, as well as all the
other things that projects like this can be? (2005, p. 3)
Its complexity and instability were simultaneously its strength and its
weakness. And returning to the REA midway through the lecture, its
precariousness becomes more apparent: “If these visits to labs and
rat shows and protests were research, the knowledge I was producing
was rapidly erasing the Rat Evaluated Artwork.” As her worldly advisers
from various rat worlds had told her, the problems with having busy
decision-making rats scurrying around a tubular maze in front of a
gallery audience were multiple. Rats are nocturnal, and “ ‘not known
for having a Protestant work ethic’, as one scientist put it.” She also
began to question whether it was “acceptable to have live animals on
display in a gallery for the consumption of audiences,” quite apart
from the question of what she would do with the rats after the show
(2005, p. 7).
The idea for a more ambitious project with rats “came directly out
of the Rat Evaluated Artwork,” and prompted Kimbell’s early visits to rat
shows and conversations with scientists. “I was initially thinking there
would be a live event, a performance lecture live event with some rats
in it,” she has said, but a series of conversations with Camden Arts
Centre led to an invitation to stage some kind of rat event as part of its
plans to draw in a wide public on a summer public holiday weekend.
This was to be the Rat Fair, an event distinct from but directly related
206 steve baker

to the performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art. As
Kimbell explains, it was only at this point that things “fell into place,”
even though it involved “doing double the project, in a way.” “So,”
she says, “the lecture came first, but I had nothing to talk about. I
knew I would, but then I made the event, and the event was itself a
conversation” (Kimbell 2006a). Characterized thus, the event is another
example of her fascination with entanglements, intertwinings, and what
she frequently called “sets of relations.”
The Rat Fair drew about 450 visitors who, between them, brought
along forty of their own rats. A kind of affectionate spoof on rat shows,
it was reviewed in positive terms by the editor of the National Fancy
Rat Society’s magazine Pro-Rat-a (Simmons 2005), and attended not
only by ratters but also by a wider public that was by no means limited
to the arts centre’s usual audience. Intended to be “more fun” than a
typical rat show, where “the major activity . . . is judging, having a table
with a white-coated judge and having this system of evaluating each
of these rats” (Kimbell 2006b), the Rat Fair’s attractions and activities
included rat face painting (on human faces), a Rat Beauty Parlour, and
a “Where’s the nearest rat?” map of Camden. Items for sale included
what the editor of Pro-Rat-a called “wonderful knitted garments with
holes designed in them for rats to snuggle in” but, as her review
acknowledged: “The ‘Is your rat an artist?’ competition was the chief
focus of interest” (Simmons 2005, p. 13).

. . . and Nineteen Rat Drawings

The “Is your rat an artist?” competition invited participant ratters at

the Rat Fair playfully to explore the extent to which their own rats
might have unrecognized artistic potential. A webcam was suspended
over what the review in Pro-Rat-a called “a large pen . . . filled with
wood chip, Perspex tubes and wooden objects which rats liked to stand
upright on to try to peer over the sides” (Simmons 2005, p. 13). This
“drawing area,” as Kimbell calls it, allowed each rat to operate “as a
kind of computer mouse” producing a drawing which was “literally a
trace of where the rat moved.” These drawings were then judged by
Jenni Lomax, director of the arts centre, to decide which one should
win “the world’s first Rat Art Award” (Kimbell 2005, p. 12).
For Kimbell, this is not just an exercise in absurdist aesthetics: she
doesn’t actually regard the rats as artists, as such, but each rat’s agency
is of some significance. Unlike a computer mouse, the rat “makes
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 207

Fig. 10.3 ‘Rat Beauty Parlour’ at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair, Camden Arts
Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist

Fig. 10.4 ‘Is Your Rat an Artist?’ drawing competition at Lucy Kimbell’s
Rat Fair, Camden Arts Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist
208 steve baker

Fig. 10.5 Jenni Lomax judging drawings at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair,
Camden Arts Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist

the decisions herself. She chooses her own path.” In that sense, she
interestingly remarks in the lecture, the drawings “are perhaps best
thought of as portraits of curiosity. . . . Openings, tunnels, corridors and
holes are all of interest to the artist-rat” (2005, p. 12).
Kimbell’s comments in the 2006 interview on the drawings and the
“system” that enabled their production are worth quoting and explor-
ing at some length. They illustrate some of the complexities, subtleties
and contradictions of her engagement with the whole project, and of
the place of living rats in that project. Of the nineteen drawings made
at the Rat Fair over a period of four or five hours (each rat being given
around ten minutes to move at will around the pen), she says:
I can’t really see the drawings on their own, as objects, without seeing
the enclosure, the webcam above it, the fact that that’s attached to some
specially written software, and remembering the way that I worked with
a particular young designer group, called Something, and a rat owner,
Sheila Sowter, and her rats, to prototype and test it. The drawings are
the output of that, but I think of that whole system as a piece. It was led
by me, but involved collaboration: I couldn’t make it on my own. And I
really like those drawings . . . But for me they are so clearly tied up with
that system that maybe someone that hasn’t seen the system wouldn’t
find them interesting. (Kimbell 2006a)
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 209

While far from uninteresting, the status of the drawings themselves is

certainly wide open to conflicting interpretations. The animal histo-
rian Jonathan Burt, who was close to completing his monograph Rat
(Burt 2006a) at the time of the Rat Fair, was invited by Kimbell to be
a respondent at the Camden version of her performance lecture, and
in conversation the following year he reflected on the relation of the
“Is your rat an artist?” drawing system to other rat-related art that he
discusses in his book. He praised the project as a whole as “a piece that
worked very well with rats . . . being built around the particularity of the
creature,” not least because “the rat is a route-finder that spends its
whole time moving through networks”—a point that he acknowledged
had much in common with Kimbell’s own mode of operation in this
project (Burt 2006b). But in drawing an analogy with the MEART
(Multi Electrode Array aRT) project developed in the early 2000s, he
expressed certain reservations concerning the nature of the art being
produced in both cases.
“MEART—the Semi Living Artist,” as described on the website
of the SymbioticA Research Group that developed and hosted it, “is
a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development
project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new
biological technologies” (SymbioticA 2007). Summarizing the project
in Rat, Burt explains that it involved a “radical hybridization of rat and
machine.” Neurons from an embryonic rat cortex in Atlanta, Georgia
were stimulated by a webcam filming the movement of gallery visitors,
and a signal was sent by computer from the stimulated neurons to a
robotic arm that then “draws pictures” in Perth, Western Australia,
which the rat neurons back in the USA could “see” by means of further
input they received. As Burt notes, however, the animal body is here
so “completely disarticulated” that “it probably makes little sense to
talk of the rat in this instance” (Burt 2006a, pp. 110–112).
The link between MEART and Kimbell’s “drawing system” is simply
that rats figure in both, and that “drawings” are produced by both. Like
Kimbell, the SymbioticA group seems fascinated by possible scenarios
“in which science and art are integrated,” as Burt puts it. Although he
insists that he intends no criticism of Kimbell’s wider project, Burt’s
observation is that in both of these unusual examples of drawing-pro-
duction “the art is really quite simple, because it’s just a response to
movement” (Burt 2006b).
The issue here, as will be argued more fully below, is that Kimbell’s
rat-generated drawings are not in any very useful sense “the art” in One
210 steve baker

Night with Rats in the Service of Art, regardless of the artist’s subsequent
fascination with getting the drawings framed, “just to see how those
things relate to each other” and “to see what life they might have in a
visual art context” (Kimbell 2006a). And in contrast to what Burt sees
as the rat’s effective absence from the MEART project, the presence of
rats—or rather art’s making-present of rats—will turn out to be central
to Kimbell’s project.
On the question of the conceptual shift from the original idea for the
enclosed Rat Evaluated Artwork to the Rat Fair’s “open” drawing system,
Kimbell responded as follows to the challenge that the latter seemed
little more than a physical manifestation of the former, but without
the confining tubes:
Yes, except it’s less stupid. The point about the REA is that it’s ridiculous,
whereas the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system is not ridiculous, and
also it inherits directly from science. Of course, all evaluations inherit
from attempts by institutions to capture and define and constrain activity
of different kinds, so the REA is a kind of scientific mechanism, but the
“Is your rat an artist?” drawing system came directly from seeing the
Morris water maze being used with an overhead camera and some specific
scientific software for watching and tracking how an animal moved, what
segment it spent most time in, and so on. (Kimbell 2006a)
The Morris water maze was designed by neuroscientist Richard G.
Morris in 1984 and is still widely used as “a behavioural procedure . . . to
test spatial memory.” A rat that may have been “applied” with vari-
ous drugs such as receptor blockers is repeatedly lowered into a small
circular pool of water that has no local cues such as scent traces, and
its attempts to escape by finding a submerged platform are tracked on
camera prior to analysis of the progress of its spatial learning (Wikipedia
2007). Kimbell makes the point that her own non-watery enclosure is
thus “a direct appropriation from a scientific technology which is well
tested and has been used extensively within experimental psychology,”
and that this is one of the means by which the worlds of the scientists
and the ratters are juxtaposed in her project.
Thinking further about the relation of her two rat “art” environ-
ments—the REA and the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system—she
acknowledges certain points of connection, ranging from stupidity to
the entanglements of agency. Of the drawing system, she concedes
“it is a bit stupid,” and after a pause in which she thinks back to the
REA’s proposed “diversions and decision points” both for rats and for
humans, she resumes:
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 211

Yes, no, it is similar, because also definitely built into “Is your rat an art-
ist?” is the idea that software and human and rat agency are all involved
and intertwined and you can’t separate them, because the owner is trying
to entice the rat to move in a particular way, maybe, or some of them
sat there trying to hover by the edge to reassure their animal that it was
OK, and then the rat was maybe a bit nervous and lurked in that area,
you can see that clearly in some of the pictures, the rat is just hanging
out in one area, that’s because their owner or human companion was
there. And in the REA, it’s the same, the human audience would have
some impact on the rats, even though it’s enclosed. (Kimbell 2006a)
The difference between the pieces, in the end, comes down to the shift
in Kimbell’s thinking about rats themselves. Still on the subject of the
REA, she continues: “But actually, now I know more about rats, they
wouldn’t like being in there, so it is impossible, given my current sort of
‘ethical’ position if I had to define it” (2006a). The difference, in other
words, is that for her as an artist in 2005 the “Is your rat an artist?”
drawing system was makeable, whereas much as she still hankered to
find a way to make it, the Rat Evaluated Artwork was not.

Aesthetics, Beauty and Ethics

One of the decision points—the “ridiculous” decision points—in the

proposed Rat Evaluated Artwork’s tubular maze is a junction where one
route suggests that the rat has decided that this artwork entails “ethi-
cal dilemmas” and the alternative suggests that it entails “no ethical
dilemmas”. And near the end of the performance lecture, Kimbell
asks of the REA (though with little sense of them being remotely
answerable questions): “Could it work aesthetically but not ethically?
Could it work ethically but not aesthetically?” (Kimbell 2005, p. 13).
In conversation, similarly, she uses the terms ethics and aesthetics with
some caution. This is partly because the One Night with Rats in the Service
of Art project does not have an explicit or clear-cut ethical agenda,
and partly because the kind of artist she considers herself to be is not,
first and foremost, a visual artist—a point that also has relevance to
her ideas about beauty. Asked about what kind of aesthetic dimension
there might be to the rat drawings and to the REA, she responded “I
never really have a clear idea what aesthetics means.” Nevertheless,
she acknowledged that in “adding these layers of reflexivity, and criti-
cality, and messiness” within many of her projects—qualities which in
her view “actually don’t find a lot of success within the art world, but
212 steve baker

Fig. 10.6 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004).

Courtesy of the artist

social scientists completely love them”—her work certainly does “have

an aesthetic” (Kimbell 2006a).
This all became a little clearer in her response to a supplementary
question about whether or not ideas of beauty had any place in her
work. Unlike a number of other contemporary artists whose work
on animal themes, though often far from conventionally beautiful, is
strongly motivated by a conviction about the beauty of the animals
themselves, Kimbell is clear that in this project she “wasn’t interested
in asserting some beauty in the rat.” As she explained:
I have a strong interest in beauty but I see it as made manifest in sets
of relations. . . . I doubt that I used the word beauty when I talked to
the ratters or the scientists. I presented them with my ambiguities, my
uncertainties, my anxieties, and I used this word experimental which I
referred to in the talk, so, “aesthetic experiments,” that was my little
loose label, but not beauty, because that would be, I imagined, a step
too far for them, to see beauty in these relations that I was imagining
and building. (2006a)
Here, interestingly, beauty is understood as something that can indeed
be made by the artist, but made from not-knowing, from vulnerability,
from precariousness. The idea is not dissimilar to Isabelle Stengers’s
comment on an audience’s “wonder” at “the skill of a dancer, under-
standing how close her gracious moves take her to the risk of falling
down, seeing in the dance how close together the double possibility of
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 213

harmony and failure come.” And for Stengers, the individual’s figuring
out (and acting out) of how to proceed in such circumstances—which
“is always . . . a selective and demanding creation”—is as close as she
wants to get to a “definition” of ethics (Stengers 2004, pp. 96–97). In
the question period following the Goldsmiths lecture, Kimbell herself
commented “I tried to show how perplexed I was in the doing,” and
when asked directly about ethics and aesthetics her response was “I
don’t know what I mean by these terms,” and more than that, “I don’t
want to have an answer to what they are” (Kimbell 2006b). If any
single remark epitomizes both the confidence and the integrity of her
project, it is probably that one.

Cold Language, Warm Language

Meeting Kimbell for the first time in 2004, while she was still in
“Stalinist super-project mode,” there were no clues that attentiveness
to the emotional power of language would come to lie at the heart of
her performance lecture. Her “charnelhouse” metaphor has already
been remarked on, but it is preceded in the lecture by several com-
ments about science’s linguistic distancing of the animal body. She
comments on a PowerPoint image showing “a small creature, alive,
but alive for science. Ordered from a catalogue, No Name animal, an
instrumentalized animal” (Kimbell 2005, p. 3). She notes the Charles
River company describing itself as “a ‘provider of animal models’. Not
animals. Animal models,” and she remarks more generally on language
that allows scientists to “maintain a distance from the live flesh they
work with. In lectures some scientists refer to an animal prepared for
a demonstration as a ‘surgical preparation’ instead of a rat” (p. 6).
This is not a matter of a comfortable and familiar form of academic
critique on Kimbell’s part, but an opportunity directly to counter this
scientific usage with what might best be described as warm language.
There are numerous examples in the lecture, most effective when they
are least expected. The list of facilities she had visited ends with the
comment: “Gated communities of scientists and live and dead bits of
science, hearts still warm in their hands” (p. 4). And flicking through
pages from the Charles River catalogue, she observes: “Rats, it seems,
don’t really exist in science, although there are millions of hot breathing
bodies boxed in laboratories all over the world” (p. 6).
What Kimbell is doing here is nothing as straightforward as delib-
erately aligning herself with an animal rights position, nor indeed of
214 steve baker

adopting a simplistic anti-science position. It is a matter, rather, of

attending to the distinctive modes of operation that her status as “a
practice-based researcher” (p. 4) made available to her. This can per-
haps be shown most clearly by means of contrast with an academic
approach to similar material. In his book Rat, for example, Jonathan
Burt observes:
there is a parallel between the rat fancy and the development of rat breeds
for laboratory science; not only are they two sides of an interconnected
practice, but at present fancy rats derive mainly from laboratory stock.
Thus scientists manipulate the rat’s body for purposes of experimentation,
while devotees and admirers of the rat do so for purposes of exhibition
and personal satisfaction. In both instances, the aim is to create an “ideal”
rat, whatever the purpose. (Burt 2006a, pp. 134–35)
Kimbell may find little with which to disagree in this passage, but her
own commentary on her direct experience of individual scientists and
individual judges at rat shows finds more complex and (for want of a
better word) humane common ground between them, and works to deny
her audience any easy opportunity to demonize them. Of the very first
rat show she visited, she reports: “The judge’s comments punctuated
the day. Good tail. Good head and ears. Let’s have a look at you then.
Cooing, hello sweetheart. Good tail. Good type. Ooh I do like you as
well. Ooh you are a messy boy, poo all over you” (Kimbell 2005, p. 5).
Elsewhere in the lecture she speaks of being in one laboratory with a
rat, “sweet in its box, enjoying being handled by the professor, enjoying
being caressed and stroked and cuddled, here, did I want a go, did I
want to hold it? I held science in my hands” (p. 3).
This use of an embodied or embodying language, which has the
general effect of making present (even in their physical absence) the
rats’ aliveness is, Kimbell acknowledged, “quite deliberate.” In response
to a comment about its further effect of making human responsibility
to the rats evident, she agreed: “Yes, absolutely, I was conscious of
that when I was writing those things” (Kimbell 2006a). Sometimes the
strategy is as simple as asking the same question of herself as of the rat.
The sentence in the lecture that follows “I held science in my hands”
reads: “Actually it looked pretty small and I wondered how would it
cope if I was able, if I was allowed to make the REA and get rats to
crawl through it. How I would cope” (Kimbell 2005, p. 3).
To borrow the words of human geographer Nigel Thrift, from his
essay on the practice rather than the abstract principles of ethics, this
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 215

is a matter of the artist “allowing affects themselves to communicate, as

well as ideas” (Thrift 2003, p. 114). Thrift acknowledges the practice
of research to be “a profoundly emotional business” that is frequently
experienced as “a curious mixture of humiliations and intimidations
mixed with moments of insight and even enjoyment,” especially when
it involves encounters or interactions with others (2003, pp. 106, 108).
In exploring “what a ‘good’ encounter might consist of,” he is fiercely
critical of the “tapestry of ethical regulation” that leads university ethics
committees—contrary to every creative impulse of research practice—to
assume “that there is only one way of proceeding,” and that their proper
role is “to render the ethical outcomes of research encounters predict-
able” (pp. 108, 115, 119). In praising, instead, forms of improvisatory
research practice that “perform a space of thoughtfulness and imagina-
tion” (p. 114), his words again come remarkably close to describing the
encounter staged in Kimbell’s performance lecture.

The Work of Loss

Noting that “rats do not live long in human years,” and that discus-
sion of illness and death “is part of the way ratters talk to each other,”
Kimbell makes this striking and rather unexpected observation about
her experience of the ratters: “The individual animals matter to their
owners but the real subject of the group’s conversation is loss” (Kimbell
2005, p. 5). The introduction of the theme of loss makes more sense,
however, in terms of the work that Kimbell sees One Night with Rats
in the Service of Art setting out to do. And she is quite clear that “it is
doing some work”:
It’s trying to expose the audience not just to the thinking process, but
to the lack-of-thinking process that’s involved in a project like this, or
actually in most practice, art and design practice, so it’s aiming to take
an audience through a story of the cycles of knowing and not knowing
that are involved in making something, and the reflexivity is important
to show the sense of looking at it at the same time as doing it. It requires
work from them to go through that narrative with me when I’m telling
the story but also to do the work of coping with the ambiguity, because
I don’t answer various things. . . . And so, depending on people’s own
place with that, they may find that more or less difficult. And it is a kind
of work, I offer them a loss: I’m saying, I can’t do this project, here’s a
project I’d like to do, I can’t do it, and I’m not going to do it, here’s lots
of reasons, and you can’t have it either. (Kimbell 2006a)
216 steve baker

She is talking here most directly, of course, about the Rat Evaluated
Artwork, of which she says towards the end of the performance lecture:
“It’s a piece of work I want to make but am not able to make. I can’t
make it because I can’t put live animals into a gallery piece, to make
them into this kind of spectacle . . . and anyway they would sleep, or sit
in the corner instead of wandering round. It wouldn’t work” (Kimbell
2005, p. 13). Asked about whether this exposure to loss involved a kind
of mourning process, she took the view that it had more to do with
“dealing with lack, lack we all experience as human beings”:
So, lack, loss. In a sense you can never have it, you can never have
this perfection, or this union, which I’m almost saying I might offer, if
I could make the complete artwork, which had rats involved, but I’m
saying you can’t, I can’t even imagine it, and I certainly can’t make it.
So I don’t think there’s a mourning to be done for that, it’s more an
acknowledgement, an observing of the sets of relations that come from
that. (Kimbell 2006a)
Kimbell has in mind here both the Rat Fair and the performance lecture.
Immediately before showing images of the Rat Fair in the lecture, she
had posed the question of whether she could show “rat as rat” rather
than as pet or as scientific model, and whether it would be possible
to bring together the “knowledges” of these very different rat worlds.
The answer, in her view, was itself an enacting of loss: “Because the
Rat Fair is the answer, the event was the answer, and if you didn’t
go, then, you get something from the images but it’s not the same as
being in that room in that moment, in its liveness.” Much the same
was true of the delivery of the performance lecture: “The liveness
of that is the answer, that there is no answer, and that you can’t really
separate them”—the answer and the impossibility of delivering it more
fully—“they’re entwined, like we’re entwined with the animals, and the
science is entwined with the ratting world even though they might not
have a direct dialogue” (2006a).

“A Place of Ambiguity”

Once the decision had been taken that the Rat Evaluated Artwork could
not responsibly be made—because any living rat it used “would still be
an instrumentalized animal. Rat for art’s sake” (Kimbell 2005, p. 9)—
why did the project as a whole continue to be called One Night with Rats
in the Service of Art? Kimbell says of the title:
 lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 217

I like it because it suggests there might actually be rats there. It brings that
fear, so it is provocative. I think “in the service of art” is useful because
I’m ultimately claiming this as an art project and therefore there is a
home for it. I’m not saying it’s philosophy—it has a home, so I name
that home. It seemed right . . . and it makes me laugh. (2006a)
One Night with Rats in the Service of Art might be said to be the sum of its
entanglements. It is purposeful, curious, and comfortable enough with
the limitations of its grip on things. “I wonder what knowledge, if any,
was produced here?” the artist muses towards the end of the lecture.
“What came out of these aesthetic experiments?” (2005, p. 12).
Reflecting on Kimbell’s project, Burt has said “it’s not confused,
that’s not the right word, it’s crossover, it’s mixed, its directions in the
end are uncertain, but the reason isn’t the project, it’s because of the
animal that she’s chosen”:
The rat as a figure, in terms of the history of its representation in the West,
is something that eats through things, and collapses a lot of boundaries,
and also unpicks language and thought. . . . What she’s doing, in the end,
is reproducing something that’s quintessentially what the history of the
rat has always been about, which is erosion, and in a sense this crea-
ture is determining much more of the project than even she is perhaps
appreciating. (Burt 2006b)
His nagging discomfort with the open-endedness of the project is
something that Kimbell might appreciate, but would not necessarily
share. In its aims, at least, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art is mod-
est, and exploratory: it is not, to borrow Thrift’s words again, “some
grandiose reformulation of the whole basis of western moral thinking.”
But it may indeed have some relation to the “new ethical spaces” that
Thrift envisages arising from attempts, “often for a very short span of
time, to produce a different sense of how things might be, using the
resources to hand” (Thrift 2003, p. 119).
For Kimbell, accepting and embracing the space of her own not-
knowing about rats served as just such a resource. There is a moment
in the performance lecture when she says something very telling about
one particular encounter with a scientist. Taken out of that specific
context, her comment effectively encapsulates the manner in which
her practice-based approach might engage—and allow others to
engage—with the experience of the more-than-human world: “What
I had to do at that point was hold open a place of ambiguity and be
there in it” (2005, p. 4).
218 steve baker

References

Burt, Jonathan. 2006a. Rat. London: Reaktion.

——. 2006b. Unpublished interview with the author. London, March 10, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).’ Trans.
David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28: 369–418.
Kimbell, Lucy. 2005. Unpublished text of the performance lecture One Night with Rats
in the Service of Art (dated August 31, 2005). Author’s copy.
——. 2006a. Unpublished interview with the author. London, March 8, 2006.
——. 2006b. Artist’s responses to questions from the audience after delivering the
performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, Goldsmiths, London,
March 8, 2006.
——. 2007. Personal website. http://www.lucykimbell.com/biog.htm (accessed August
2, 2007).
Simmons, Veronica. 2005. ‘Rat Art in North London.’ Pro-Rat-a 149: 13–14.
SPEAK. 2007. Campaign website. Report on July 2005 ‘Freedom March and Rally,’
Oxford. http://www.speakcampaigns.org/news/20050724march.php (accessed July
31, 2007).
Stengers, Isabelle. 2004. ‘The Challenge of Complexity: Unfolding the Ethics of
Science (In Memorium Ilya Prigogine).’ Emergence: Complexity and Organization (E:CO)
6 (1–2): 92–99.
SymbioticA. 2007. MEART project website. http://www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/
project.html (accessed August 21, 2007).
Thrift, Nigel. 2003. ‘Practising Ethics.’ Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Ed.
Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage. 105–21.
Wikipedia. 2007. ‘Morris water maze’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_water_
maze (accessed July 31, 2007).
 PART SIX

LIBIDINAL ENCOUNTERS

The two essays coming together at the end of this collection present
a climax in three related ways: first, they intensify the corporeal cross-
species encounters explored in the earlier contributions by engaging
with theories, stories, histories and practices that foreground the fleshly
entanglement of organisms; second, they look forward to the future
not only of human-animal relations but of animal studies and other
fields of research where the interplay between human and nonhuman
companion species is more than a one-night stand; and third, they
are also literally concerned with orgasms and other pleasures and joys
experienced by human and nonhuman animals as they unleash their
libidos and join in sexual acts real and imagined. Especially with regard
to the latter theme, the authors are doing pioneering work, insofar as
such animal encounters are still largely tabooed, both in society as well
as in academia, including animal studies. Committed to formulating
desire and sexuality outside the androcentric and anthropocentric
frameworks of Western thought and morality, both scholars offer highly
sensitive and ‘hot’ subjects for debate without the intention of turning
their readers either on or off.
The rejection of an androcentric-anthropocentric perspective in
favour of a posthumanism that is also decidedly postanthropocentric
allows Monika Bakke in her essay ‘The Predicament of Zoopleasures:
Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations’ to contribute to the revision
of the discourse and debate on human-animal intimacy initiated by
sexologist Hani Miletski in the late 1990s. This revision entails a shift
in language also: from “bestiality” to “zoophilia”—or, to use Bakke’s
even broader term: zoe-philia—and “zoosexuality”. To document this
shift and the positive implications thereof, her readings focus on nar-
ratives by zoophiles as well as visual representations by contemporary
artists of libidinal human-animal encounters. One is the depiction of
a naked woman fondling a stallion, shown as one sexual act among
many in an exhibition of photographic artwork by Andres Serrano
titled The History of Sex. The other examples are a photograph and a
silkscreen by Russian artist Oleg Kulik from his series “Family of the
220 libidinal encounters

Future”, in which he envisions a future in which dogs and other ani-

mals would be happy sexual partners to humans. Bakke portrays and
discusses these forms of love and sexuality in a way that should neither
provoke disgust nor fuel sensationalism, by contextualising them as part
of a history of sex that favours “the feelings, emotions and pleasures
experienced by individual animals of all kinds” over issues of natural
selection and reproduction.
Kulik’s vision of a posthuman future is a reality in the science fiction
novel analysed by Manuela Rossini in her essay ‘ComingTogether: Sym-
biogenesis and Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues’.
In this fictive world, human and animal bodies as well as technically-
engineered hyperpotent organisms engage in libidinal encounters that
leave none of the participants untouched and unchanged. Rossini’s criti-
cal-posthumanist discussion of the many Escherian transformations and
osmotic fusions resulting from orgiastic sexual intercourse are framed
by Susan Oyama’s developmental systems theory, Lynn Margulis’s
account of the origin of species and Donna Haraway’s companion-
species approach, the feminist and Deleuzian work of Elizabeth Grosz
and Rosi Braidotti on desire and ‘animal sex’, and philosopher Alfonso
Lingis’s zoopoetics, among others. Some of these writings also figure
prominently in Bakke’s essay. Sharing the postanthropocentric agenda
of all of these scholars, Rossini insists that symbiotic couplings between
different life forms have not only in-formed the matter and meaning
of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’, but will also be indispensable for the
survival and flourishing of all species. Finally, by drawing a parallel
between biological and narrative embedding, the author dreams of a not
so distant future in which the coming together of human and nonhuman
animals, of different texts and textures, concepts and theories will also
move the humanities into the age of the posthumanities. (MR)
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE PREDICAMENT OF ZOOPLEASURES:

HUMAN-NONHUMAN LIBIDINAL RELATIONS

Monika Bakke

[ W ]e are animals, indeed more specifically, we are

great apes. This does not make sex across the species
barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-
misused words may mean, but it does imply that it
ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as
human beings.
—Peter Singer, ‘Heavy Petting’
[ I ]t is in our passions for the other animals that we
learn all the rites and sorceries, the torrid and teasing
presence, and the ceremonious delays, of eroticism.
—Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, p. 39

Seeking pleasure1 is among the numerous features that human animals

share with other animals. Starting from the premise that all vertebrates
are endowed with “the same five basic senses,” Jonathan Balcombe
observes that many animals with a similar anatomy and corporeal
foundation to human beings must thus also experience pleasures like
“bliss, joy, comfort and satisfaction” (2006, p. 13). Western science has
so far largely neglected the libido of nonhuman animals, privileging
issues of natural selection and reproductive success over the diversity
of feelings, emotions and pleasures experienced by individual animals
of all kinds (cp. Balcombe 2006, p. 8). Moreover, the Western anthro-
pocentric tradition maintains a strong emphasis that when it comes to
human-nonhuman relations, the only true objectives are the satisfaction
of human pleasures. One exception is made to this: human beings
are not allowed to enjoy sexual pleasure from libidinal encounters
with other species. Cultural control over the experience of pleasure

1
With the aim of avoiding speciecism, my use of the term “pleasure” is very general
and relates to the libidinal experiences of human and nonhuman animals.
222 monika bakke

plays a significant role in the process of constructing and maintaining

the human-nonhuman border. And yet, pleasure—which in itself is
a troublesome experience, overwhelming the body and haunting the
imagination—often escapes this controlling framework.
Humans experience pleasure with nonhuman animals as frivolous
fun and joy, located within a scheme of anthropocentric cultural codes
in which human animals occupy the position of Subject, while non-
human animals occupy the position of Object. The various pleasures
taken from the bodies of animals mostly have an exploitative character,
such as eating their flesh, using their skins and furs, using them as a
source of labour and entertainment, and other forms of total control
based on the master-slave relation such as control of procreation
and aesthetic appropriations. All these practices ensure what Jacques
Derrida calls the “carnophallogocentrism” of Western metaphysics
(1991, p. 25). Even the role of “pet” a human imposes on an animal
is highly problematic: In many cases the relation between a pet and
his or her owner may look like a happy and pleasurable one for both,
but for the animal there is always the risk of being abandoned if the
emotional expectations of the owner aren’t met, including the fan-
tasy about unconditional love and continuous cuteness, fluffiness, etc.
(cp. Haraway 2003, pp. 11–12).
Erotic bliss as the tabooed aspect of human-animal pleasure, by
contrast, is noncultural, unspeakable, and possibly even lethal2 for the
anthropocentric Subject. As reflected in numerous literary and visual
representations, however, these two forms of experiencing pleasure
sometimes overlap and merge in acts of human-nonhuman sexual
encounters. From an anthropocentric perspective, animal sex is often
viewed with both fascination and repulsion. While considered to be
primitive, cruel, and even deadly, such sexual acts do not stop human
beings from fantasizing about them with an anthropomorphic imagina-
tion that projects specific sexual features onto specific animals. A closer
look at the physiology of animal sex, especially mammalian, provides an
obvious but challenging conclusion: our bodies are similar to those of
other animals, and so are our desires. Peter Singer in his controversial
article ‘Heavy Petting’ reminds us that

2
Historically, in the sense of capital punishment; now, in the sense of social con-
demnation and exclusion, and as simply physically dangerous.
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 223

there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals
do—or mammals, anyway—and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We
copulate, as they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the
fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to a man shows
how similar these organs are. (2001, e-text)
In Western modes of addressing the question of the animal, these simi-
larities have been used not to see close relations but, on the contrary,
to produce a dichotomy and total alterity in the moral sense. Hence,
the notion of ‘animal sex’ has been commonly used in a pejorative
sense to describe the most undesirable aspects of human (not animal)
sexual behaviour. This apparently speciesist view has been criticized
by Alphonso Lingis who suggests that the very quality of animality
in human behaviour actually gives our sexuality another dimension,
exceeding same species limitations and opening up a myriad of possibili-
ties within the plethora of eroticism. This attitude cherishes cross-species
similarities as well as differences. We are animals among other animals,
some of whom are humans, and this becomes especially apparent when
our bodies get orgasmic:
We feel feline and wolfish, foxy and bitchy; the purrings of kittens rever-
berate in our orgasmic strokings, our squirrelly fingers race up and down
the trunk and limbs of another, our clam vagina opens, our erect cobra-
head penis snakes its way in. Our muscular and vertebrate bodies tran-
substantiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions,
into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the
floating microorganism of the night air. (Lingis, 2000, p. 38)
My endeavour in this essay is to probe how human-nonhuman libidinal
encounters could be reconsidered from a postanthropocentric perspec-
tive. This requires a recontextualization of interspecies relations by
means of a shift in the concept of sexuality: from sexuality understood
in terms of instinct and biological compulsion for orgasmic release
to sexuality as plenitude open to otherness. The former, as Elizabeth
Grosz states in her analysis of various models of sexuality, is implicit
in the claim made by many men who rape, those who frequent prosti-
tutes and those prostitutes who describe themselves as ‘health workers’,
insofar as they justify their roles in terms of maintaining the ‘health’
of their clients. (Grosz 1995, p. 294). The latter understanding and
attitude, by contrast, escapes reproductive functions and the need for
immediate gratification. Against this background of two alternative
conceptions of sexual behaviour, I would like to advocate yet another
224 monika bakke

shift in comprehending human-nonhuman libidinal encounters: from

bestiality to zoosexuality.3
Zoosexuality is a relatively new term, but practices of loving animals
and making love with them are certainly not. Attitudes towards sexual
relations between human and nonhuman animals depend on the ideas
we have about ourselves, our bodies, our position in the environment,
our general convictions about sexuality and eroticism, as much as on
the specific ways we actually get our pleasures. Crimes of love and lust,
‘the unmentionable vice’ for which in past centuries many humans and
nonhumans paid with their lives, are still a taboo. But the marvelous
and ordinary stories of vulnerable lovers and passionate encounters
with no real futures have been told in literature and art constantly
throughout the ages. In this essay, I will look into the specific contem-
porary phase of the visual representations of human-animal sexual
encounters, focusing in particular on the attitudes towards bestiality
and zoosexuality reflected in these images. The significance of the
present moment should not be overlooked because the rejection of
the anthropocentric-androcentric perspective actually enables the shift
towards understanding human-animal sexuality in terms of zoophilia,
zoe-philia, biophilia, and zoosexuality, which allows us to start to break
and seriously question the taboo.4

Ordinary People with Extraordinary Desires

It is not enough to say that bestiality has simply got a ‘bad reputation;’
it is still a strong taboo. Not only is it something not to be done, but
also something not to be talked about. “Heard anyone chatting at
parties lately about how good it is having sex with their dog?” Singer
inquires, and the obvious answer is: “Probably not” (Singer 2001). It

3
The term “zoosexuality”, understood as sexual orientation towards animals, has
been in use since the 1980s; it was popularized by Miletski’s research in the 1990s
(Miletski 2002).
4
“Since zoophilia/bestiality is illegal in a number of countries (e.g. USA, UK),” as
Andrea M. Beetz reports, “most of the zoophiles are worried about being ‘outed’ to
the ‘wrong’ persons. Even though in Germany zoophilia is not illegal anymore since
1969, most zoophiles still are very cautious, since the social stigma could destroy their
private lives, they could perhaps loose their jobs, etc. In Great Britain, zoophilia can
still be punished with life imprisonment, though that is probably no longer a realistic
threat.” (Beetz 2000, e-text)
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 225

seems that the old Christian prohibition on bestiality5 —considered “a

sin too fearful to be named” (Bekoff 1998, p. 92)—has been particularly
persistent. Even as a subject of academic interest to sexologists, bestial-
ity is not as well researched as one could expect, given the immense
literature on human sexuality.6 However, in the late 1990s, the pioneer-
ing contribution of sexologist Hani Miletski brought about significant
changes in attitudes, also reflected in the language used to analyze the
sexual relations of humans and animals. One example is the strong
tendency for a more specific use of the term ‘bestiality.’ which is now
mostly understood as the practice of using animals as mere outlets for
sexual tension, closely linked to speciesism, and therefore inscribed in
the anthropocentric order. Zoophilia, in contrast, is an attitude which
situates sex with animals as “the ultimate consequence of love for them,
making love with them” (Dekkers 2000, p. 1). Zoophiles, or ‘zoos’ as
they are also called, declare their strong emotional attachment to nonhu-
man animals who become their companions and often also their sexual
partners. Sometimes they form life-long relationships with animals or
share their erotic practices between human and nonhuman animals. As
Miletski states in a report on her inquiries into the zoo community:
They tell me they love their animals and would do anything for them.
They tell me they won’t have sex with their animals unless the animal
shows them, with its body language, that it wants it and enjoys it. (Miletski
2002, p. 175)
In zoosexual relationships animals gain the status of a partner rather
than a victim of human lust. For this very reason, many zoos point
out the absurdity of denying animals the ability to consent to sexual
involvement with their body language, as they have claws, teeth, and
hoofs to show their disapproval. It is absolutely crucial, however, to be

5
See the following passages in the Old Testament: “Whoever lies with a beast, shall
be put to death” (Exodus 22:19); “You shall not have sexual intercourse with any beast
to make yourself unclean with it, nor shall a woman submit herself to intercourse
with a beast: that is violation of nature” (Leviticus 18:28–24); “A man who has sexual
intercourse with a beast shall be put to death and you shall kill the beast. If a woman
approaches any animal to have intercourse with it you shall kill the woman and the
beast” (Leviticus 20:15–16).
6
Miletski, who carried out a study with a sample of 93 zoophiles (1999), notes that
there had been only three important studies up to then providing some information
on the prevalence and frequency of human sexual interaction with animals: Kinsey
et al. (1948 & 1953), Gebhard et al. (1965) and Hunt (1974). Unfortunately, some of
the information must be assumed to be outdated now.
226 monika bakke

aware that there are many more subtle forms of power reationship
between the two ‘partners’ than the simple dichotomy of ‘rape’ versus
‘consent’. Still, to assume that the animal is always a victim is based on
the logic of bestiality, which paradoxically is the same logic that—in
the traditional tales of bestiality in art—almost always made women
victims of beasts who were not even supposed to be animals but male
humans or human-like male gods.
The stereotypical picture of a human involved in sexual acts with ani-
mals is “a poor, naive, confused, desperate, uneducated, ignorant farm
boy” (Miletski 2002, p. 40) who uses animals as objects to substitute for a
human partner, usually of the opposite sex. What adds to this ungrace-
ful image is that occasionally sexual contacts with animals have been
reported as violent acts against animals,7 and as animal abuse, which is
closely linked to human-to-human violence. 8 Therefore, bestiality has
been frequently identified with brutality, depravation and degradation
for both humans and animals.9 Contemporary laws in most European
countries and in some parts of the US reflect these attitudes, although
the charges leveled have been changed from the moral issue of having
sex with an animal to the charge of animal abuse. Some countries,
however, including Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark, allow
sexual relations with animals when the animal consents.
Analyzing human motivations for interspecies sex, R.J. Rosenberger
in Bestiality (1968) made a very symptomatic distinction, dividing people
practicing bestiality into two groups, which could, as I read it, be

7
The sexual act may be dangerous or even deadly for the human partner as well.
The famous case of Kenneth Pinyon’s death as a consequence of a sexual involvement
with a stallion is the subject of the documentary film Zoo (2007), directed by Robinson
Devor, which stirred so much controversy in the USA.
8
For more information about a correlation between human violence and animal
cruelty see: http://www.hsus.org/hsus_field/first_strike_the_connection_between_ani-
mal_cruelty_and_human_violence/ (accessed August 10, 2007) and: http://vachss
.com/help_text/animal_dv.html (accessed August 10, 2007).
9
In Christian Europe until the 18th century sexual contact with animals “was uni-
formly punished by putting to death both parties implicated, and usually by burning
alive. The beast, too, is punished and both are burned”. Such is the testimony given
by Guillielmus Benedictinus, who lived at the end of the fourteenth century. But there
is actually something particularly worth noting in these horrifying circumstances of
human-animal relations, namely the actual putting on trial of not only the accused
human but also the animal. The latter was also brought before the court and properly
tried. It could be pronounced equally guilty and convicted together with the human
partner, but also pardoned, not necessarily together with the human party. For an
example of the latter, see the case of Jacques Ferron (Evans 1987, p. 150).
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 227

characterized as ‘repulsive perverts’ and ‘unlucky losers.’ In the latter

group, we find all those individuals who practice bestiality clearly as sub-
stitution for a human partner. Such persons should be viewed as people
who found themselves in very unfavorable circumstances to which they
found very provisional and poor solutions; in this case, the incidental
errors and weaknesses may be forgiven. When human-animal sex is seen
in this way, however, anthropocentrism remains unchallenged because
the preference of this group of people would ultimately be to share
sexual pleasures with other humans only. The ‘true’ perverts, according
to Rosenberger, would be those individuals who make a conscious choice
of animals over human partners. Apparently, those humans who avoid
sexual contacts with other humans and find such a possibility completely
unacceptable represent the worst case. And, indeed, as Miletski points
out in her study, some zoos do have such an uncompromising attitude,
as e.g. the one confessing: “I am zoo exclusive and the very thought of
having sex with a human disgusts me” (2002, p. 171).
Contemporary zoophiles whose affection for animals enters the
tabooed zone of sexual bliss often identify themselves not with bestiality
but with zoosexuality. The latter is understood as a sexual orientation
towards animals, and is therefore not considered a condition to be
cured, condemned or suppressed, but rather as a variation of the erotic
impulse. Zoos report to be sexually attracted to particular species and
even to a specific individual animal or a group of individuals. Moreover,
there are some features exclusive to animals which some people find
attractive: “I am highly turned on by olfactory stimuli, and humans by
convention rarely allow themselves to have any natural human aroma”
(2002, p. 171). And yet, it is not only physical attraction which matters,
since zoophiles often stress that they seek serious emotional attachment
to a partner (or partners) whose position more closely resembles that
of a spouse rather than a sex toy.10 Nonetheless, the actual social real-
ity still makes interspecies affection an impossible love that has to be
hidden from the eyes of others.

10
No country recognizes marriages between humans and animals, since the latter
are not subjects recognized by law. However, people do get married to animals, which
in the western world is mainly a symbolic act of a commitment, while in India it may
be a way to protect a human from an evil eye. As to animals as sex toys, it is curious
that sex toys in the form of inflatable animals are advertised as fun and ‘edgy gadgets’
for nonzoos. They provide a fantasy of interspecies sex rather than a real experience,
which for the toy users would be too transgressive.
228 monika bakke

Recent research into human-animal sexual relations reveals a signifi-

cant subversive potential of zoosexual attitudes. Practicing bestiality is
acknowledging a taboo and then breaking it anyway, willing to bear all
the consequences, but practicing zoosexuality is acting as if the taboo
didn’t exist and is, therefore, disruptive of the anthropocentric order.
Bestiality has been, and still is, inscribed into a model of sexuality based
on violence, suppression, prohibition and taboo. Zoosexuality, on the
other hand, is not only a way to identify and name a very minoritar-
ian sexual practice but, more importantly, actually evokes a totally
different concept of ourselves, our bodies, and our relations with other
animals, including libidinal encounters with them. Zoophilia, as love
for animals, an attitude underlying any zoosexual act, offers an alter-
native to phallogocentric models of eroticism. Zoophilia, as described
by Lingis, is an all-embracing, wandering impulse that passes through
the surfaces of bodies of humans, animals, plants, and even inorganic
matter alike. Orgasmic sexual encounter, then, neither empowers the
subject nor the human status of a master of animals; on the contrary,
as a same-species sexual union, it is ecstatic for the self. Therefore, on
the orgiastic note, making a connection between sexuality and other
forms of incorporation such as eating, Lingis observes:
To be swept away into voluptuous passion is to lose the sense of one’s
self, one’s status, one’s reputation, one’s identity, one’s dignity. Take this
my flesh and eat me; take this my jism and drink and forget me. (2005,
p. 109)

Mistresses and Masters of Animals

Despite being a taboo in public discourse, human-animal sex is well

represented in European visual culture, especially in popular-cultural
productions but also in distinguished collections of classical painting
and sculpture, and can be seen as early as on the walls of caves marked
by our ancestors in the Bronze Age. But as Midas Dekkers points out,
before of all that evidence, “our gaze is averted, our giggles suppressed”
(2000, p. 1). Curiously, we seem to be blind to all such messages and
have long been unable to confront what is really represented there. We
persistently refuse to see animals as animals even though their bodies
are fully exposed, often represented in a very sensuous way, depicting
movement, surface, and texture, and giving the impression of body
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 229

temperature and smell. 11 The taboo is so strong that we refuse to see

what is really there, and we do not name what can be properly named.
Surprisingly, throughout the centuries the most paradoxical strategy has
proved the most sufficient here: a strong denial in front of undeniable
evidence.
Dekkers also makes an observation about the prevalence of female
and male human partners in visual representations, pointing out that
“[c]ompared with reality, in which it is virtually always men who actu-
ally copulate with animals, in art the roles are completely reversed”
(2000, p. 154). The reason for this, according to Dekker, is the obvious
fact that for centuries men alone produced images which reflected only
male fantasies:
As always a man identifies with the active party: the animal. He is the
stallion, the dog, the bull, the lusty monster with its outsized organ which
pumps the most insatiable woman full of sperm. (2000, p. 155)
However, if we draw on an ancient understanding of what animals
are like and consider that the term ‘bestiality’ in its original meaning
referred to people acting like animals with no control over their pas-
sions, with no reason, no justice and no respect for others nor for a
social order (cp. Bekoff 1998, p. 93, and Clark 2000, p. 88), only male
humans who represented themselves as looking and acting like animals,
can be called ‘bestialists.’ These persons either forcefully used animals
and/or women as objects in order to satisfy their own desires in real-
ity or, through images and fantasies, identified with so-called bestial
behavior. Paradoxically then the self-produced image of man is actually
that of bestialist and beast at the same time. Here, anthropocentrism
has produced the curious figure of bestialist-beast that is always male
and which, as I will argue reflects a fear of woman as beast.
Continuing his remarks on the predominance of images of women
and the lack of images of men in the representations of ‘bestiality
themes’ in art, Dekkers suggests that men have always avoided repre-
senting themselves as partners for animals because their fantasies would
be destroyed by women as beasts (2000, p. 155). Indeed, as Elisabeth

11
In the myth of Leda and the swan, the animal lover acts like a swan with all the
consequences of his act. As the result of this interspecies sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs
giving evidence to the animality of her partner who fused with her woman’s body.
230 monika bakke

Grosz points out in Animal Sex, female beasts or, rather, beasts as women
or especially associated with female sexuality, such as the infamous
praying mantis and black widow, for example, have a strong presence
in totally different types of male sexual fantasies, all of them linking
women’s sexuality to death. Grosz argues that
by linking sexual pleasure to the concept of death and dying, by making
sex something to die for, something that in itself is a kind of anticipation
of death (the ‘little death’), woman is thereby cast into the category of
non-human, the non-living, or a living threat of death. (1995, p. 284)
Conventional interpretations of human-animal sexual encounters,
including the one proposed by Dekkers, are strongly influenced by
speciesism and androcentrism; i.e., they take into account neither the
specificity of female eroticism nor the autonomy of female desire.
Within such an epistemological framework, female sexuality is simply
another version of male sexuality and, as Grosz adds, reduced to “het-
erosexual norms of sexual complementarity or opposition” (1995, p.
279). Miletski, referring to several opinions of ‘male specialists’12 about
motivations women may have for getting involved in sexual relations
with animals, quotes J. Handy who, in Girls who Seduce Dogs (1977),
identifies two syndromes: the first is the ‘The Amusement of the Hus-
band Syndrome’, referring to men who take pleasure from watching
their woman partner having sex with an animal; and the second one
is the ‘The Failure of the Human Male Syndrome’, meaning that men
may occasionally happen to be worse lovers than animals. The latter
opinion is also shared by W.W. Waine who suggests that “dogs may be
better lovers than men—they last longer, their tongues are larger and
rougher, and they love to perform oral sex” (in Miletski 2002, p. 45).
Greenwood, however, in Unusual Sex Practices (1963) is not concerned
with female sexual practices per se but with worries about “the emo-
tional state of the woman who requires such bizarre stimulation to
satisfy her sexual desires” (in Miletski 2002, p. 48); i.e., the conclusion
of the male specialist here is that only a mad woman would substitute
an animal for a male human lover.

12
Miletski points out that research on bestiality is mostly out-dated and written
in a pseudo-scientific manner which is “actually designed to sell erotic stories under
guise of case histories. They pretend to be authoritative, documented, and factual sex
studies” (Miletski 2002, p. 55).
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 231

Yet, Miletski’s own survey gives evidence that some women—not

only men and not in any relation to men—fantasize about having sex
with animals as well as about watching other people being involved in
such activities (2002, p. 170). Women can be interested in animals as
animals, and their desire is neither a form of substitution for a human
male lover, nor based on the heterosexual model. The following confes-
sion by a female zoophile offers a glimpse at this:
I wrote my first (innocuous and innocent as it was) zoo story when I was
seven—the girl married her dog in the end. Long before I understood sex,
sexuality, morality, or zoophilia, I understood that I had a deep love for
animals, a bond that was undeniable—especially for dogs. I don’t believe
I ‘chose’ this lifestyle. It is just a part of who and what I am—one part
of many. It is natural, consensual, satisfying, and overwhelmingly loving.
My dogs are happy—I am happy. My relationships with my dogs add a
dimension to my life that would be an aching void without them—they
do not, however, replace my relationships (sexual or otherwise) with
human beings. My dogs do not understand holidays, movies, books, or
the other hobbies I share with human partners and friends. They do not
understand music or candlelight or flowers. However, they are never away
from me. They comfort me. We play games and enjoy sunny days. We
love car rides with the windows down, take long walks, and just snuggle
happily and contentedly against one another. The relationships (human
and zoophile) are complementary. Both add important dimensions to
my life and allow me to care/love in return in different ways. Neither
my relationships with humans or animals depends on sex, but both can
be enhanced by it. Sex is merely an expression of love—and that’s the
bottom line. I love them. (in Miletski 2002, p. 194)

All Together Now

Among the reasons commonly given for the persistence and omnipres-
ence of classical bestiality themes in the visual arts—such as Europa and
the bull, Leda and the swan, and others—Dekkers lists “quite simply
ravishing beauty” (2000, p. 6). Needless to say, ‘beauty’ stands for the
sexually appealing body of a woman and/or both bodies either in sexual
union or suggesting this possibility, displayed as an object of the male
gaze. This androcentric interpretation suggests a bestiality perspective
in which the focus is on the release of sexual tension treated as a bodily
function. The displayed ‘beauty’ of a woman together with an animal
works as vehicle in achieving this goal by a third-party male human. But
the phallogocentric interpretative access to the sexual aspect of classical
232 monika bakke

images of bestiality excluding female pleasures is strictly controlled

and produced by the classical interpretations of the stories from Greek
mythology. Hence, the sexual fantasy realm has been open for those
who neither wonder about the identity of the two—the animal and the
woman—nor about the relation between them, but who always already
know that the animal is never an animal while the woman is always a
woman. In other words, both the woman’s body and the animal’s body
are colonized by male desire, and their own pleasures as a female human
or a nonhuman animal are not considered, known or acknowledged.
This androcentric attitude finds a continuation today; in the choice of
depicting the myth of Europa and the bull on the Greek two-euro coin,
for example. As a coin, the image is widely accessible, at least for some
part of the European audience, regardless of their cultural and sexual
interests, and it actually reflects and repeats the ideology of the origin
of European identity based on objectifying women.
The image on the coin is a traditional depiction of the myth of the
Phoenician princess Europa, who, whilst gathering flowers with her
attendants, was abducted to Crete by the god Zeus, who had appeared
to her in the guise of a white bull. Having been reproduced from a
Spartan mosaic of the forth century CE, its hidden sexual connota-
tion can be grasped only by viewers who are familiar with this myth.
However, this particular depiction shows neither apparent violence,
nor an explicit sexual act, which nonetheless are crucial elements of
the myth. Europa is represented here with her feminine body fully
exposed, the cloak dropped down to her legs. She is sitting on the
bull sideways, modestly holding onto the animal’s neck (rather than
to its horn, which has traditionally been associated with the phallus).
She faces the viewer, but she is not in any way confronting him: she
is exposed to the viewer’s gaze, not gazing herself. Even her contact
with the bull is not visual, as the regime of the gaze carries with it
the logic of the story to be continued by male bestiality fantasies. It is
my contention that only outside the traditional interpretative context
can women actually have a chance to regain representations of their
own desires, including as shocking a desire as the one for nonhuman
animals. For those not informed and controlled by the classical story
of bestiality with its violent connotations, the coin image is a depic-
tion of a naked woman, who enjoys tactile, olfactory and oral contact
with a bull. It seems to me, however, that her pleasures as well as
the pleasures of the animal cannot be easily dismissed. Alternative
stories about blissful sexual encounters between humans and animals
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 233

Fig. 11.1 Greek two-euro coin

234 monika bakke

exist and have been represented, including the current shift—from

bestiality to zoosexuality—in comprehending human-animal relations.
In the remaining part of this essay, I will consider two examples of
recently produced images of interspecies sexual relations that question
and disrupt the anthropocentric and androcentric interpretative conven-
tion described above: the first is the photograph Red Pebbles from the
series History of Sex by American artist Andres Serrano; the second is a
series of works called Family of the Future, which is a larger collaborative
project titled Zoophrenia by Russian artist Oleg Kulik and Russian art
critic Mila Bredikhina.
Serrano’s photo Red Pebbles, unlike the image on the coin described
above, offers a complex critique of the classical representations of the
woman-animal sexual encounter: here the sexual act is explicit. Mas-
turbating a stallion the female lover is the active party. Moreover, she
is confronting the viewer with her gaze. The first impression of the
image evokes the association with the fantasy of woman as beast, the
infamous praying mantis assuming the appearance of a woman. With
her naked body side by side with the animal, left hand embracing him
and right hand holding his penis, she looks back over her shoulder right
at the viewer in the most confrontational manner. She is in charge here,
recalling the figure of a murderous insect that acts as “the projective
vehicle” of a man’s worst fears since “it is not the male subject or the
phallus which threatens the female lover but, rather, the female lover
who threatens the phallus” (Grosz 1995, p. 282). But Serrano’s photo
offers more than this. It is not just about reversing the roles of the animal
rapist between a woman and a man. Here, the carnal love affair is actu-
ally between a woman and a horse: she is giving the animal pleasure,
simultaneously obtaining pleasure herself from this very act:
the hand, while in a sense ‘jealous’ of the pleasure it induces in the body
it caresses, also participates in the very intensities it ignites in a vagina
or around testicles: it does not simply induce pleasure in another, for
another, but also always for itself. (Grosz 1995, p. 288)
The woman does not display either bliss or horror, and her piercing
gaze seems somehow displaced, insofar as it belongs neither to the
pleasurable activity taking place here nor to the phallogocentric tradi-
tion of representing such themes. At the same time, it is a very effective
intervention separating the voyeur from the pleasurable activity, making
him immobile in the Medusa’s manner, likely frustrated, and above
all, aware of his intruding presence and violent appetites. And yet, by
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 235

Fig. 11.2 Andres Serrano, A History of Sex (Red Pebbles) (1996).

© A. Serrano. Courtesy of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

no means is the voyeur an unexpected guest at this interspecies-love

playground, as he is known to have ruled here for centuries. On the
contrary, the response to his arrival is well prepared and carried out
with his own weapon by the subversive power of the joke: the phal-
lus of the animal, located in the foreground and seen in its pre-erect
mode is not pointing up but pointing down, which is particularly
striking when playfully juxtaposed with a phallic shaped chimney, a
petrified phallus, which is part of the distant background. This is not
an innocent joke, but a serious manifestation of the priorities clearly
articulated here.
Another significant aspect of Serrano’s photo breaking with tradition
is that both the body of the animal and the body of the woman are
not fully exposed but only as much as they are in tactile contact with
236 monika bakke

each other. What we can see here is in a kind of pleasure zone, a field
of voluptuous intensity as the “orgasmic body cannot be identified with
the organic body” (Grosz 1995, p. 287). The bodies no longer operate
as complete objects but they become movements and actions, passages
of impulses going back and forth with no premeditated goals and func-
tions to perform; as such they are most open and receptive:
if libidinal impulses are fundamentally decomposing, desolidifying, liquefy-
ing the coherent organization of the body as it performs functional tasks,
unhinging a certain intentionality, they are more dependant on the sphere
of influence of otherness, on an other which, incidentally need not be
human but which cannot simply be classified as a passive object awaiting
the impressions of an active desiring subject. (Grosz 1995, p. 286)
Since Red Pebbles is a part of the series History of Sex, zoosexuality is
only one rather peculiar and minoritarian sexual interest among many
manifestations of sexual desires involving diverse bodies such as female,
male, young, old, human, nonhuman, as well as inorganic objects, all
in various configurations. Serrano’s History of Sex reveals numerous
eccentric, totally individualized stories of desire in its endless variety
of ways to pursue pleasure, which cannot be reduced to any functional
and normalized sexuality; here the erotic impulse is endlessly flowing,
manifesting itself in its all-encompassing plentitude, and not as an
effect of suppression and sublimation. Desire alone and away from any
functionality of sexual encounters is operating here:
desire need not, indeed commonly does not, culminate in sexual inter-
course but in production. Not the production of a child or a relationship,
but the production of sensations never felt, alignments never thought,
energies never tapped, regions never known. (Grosz 1995, p. 295)
The second example of contemporary critical interpretation of human-
animal sexual relations as a theme in art is Kulik’s elaborate series
of formally diverse works titled Family of the Future, anticipated by his
performances Meet My Boyfriend Charles (the latter being a goat) and
White Man, Black Dog. The series is significant in two aspects: first, it
breaks with the dominant tradition of representing woman (and not
man) in sexual union with an animal; and second, it places human-
animal sexual relations in the social context of the family, away from
the usual androcentric bestiality mode. Here man is neither the one
performing an act of violent sex in the guise of an animal, nor is he
taking the position of the victim, traditionally occupied by the woman;
man and animal are not the same, but they are equal. Against the
grain of speciesism and in the spirit of zoosexuality, this heterospecies
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 237

Fig. 11.3 Oleg Kulik, from Family of the Future series (1997). Photograph
courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow

family of the future postulated by Kulik is particularly concerned with

the sensuality and pleasure of the human as well as the animal partner,
where the latter is not just an object of man’s desire but a companion
and a lover. The nudity of both partners suggests their equal status as
animals who, despite all the differences between the species, actually
have lots to offer each other. Undeniably, their main common inter-
est is the erotic pleasure which Kulik stresses even more directly in a
series of drawings titled Kamasutra (also part of the Family of the Future
series), focusing on techniques of pleasure for mixed-species couples
of the future. The ambiguity of the animal partner’s sex is particularly
significant as it challenges the usual heterosexual aspect of the classi-
cal representations of human-animal sex in art and, at the same time,
insists that sexual difference, likewise in the case of interspecies sexual
relations, should not be understood in terms of limitations but of pos-
sibilities. As Grosz claims:
We await, no longer a science of sexuality, its formalization and abstrac-
tion, but an art of sexuality, not its analysis but its celebration as diverse
becoming, not knowing and thereby containing it, but elaborating and
extending it. (2005, p. 214)
238 monika bakke

Fig. 11.4 Oleg Kulik, sketch for ‘Family of the Future. Kamasutra’ (1998).
Photograph courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 239

Family of the Future forms part of a larger project called Zoophrenia by

Kulik and Bredikhina, initiated in 1993 with a manifesto consisting
of “ten commandments” that situate it in a ‘postanthropocentric’
perspective—as stated in the third commandment: “The future is post-
humanistic.”13 Humans should finally step down from the homocentric14
top position since they are no more than just one species among many.
The main focus of the manifesto is on the necessity for a change in
attitudes towards nonhuman animals, which for Kulik and Bredikhina
is to be the essential survival strategy: “Neither the Superman, nor
the common man, eagerly hiding the Superman in himself have any
future.” It seems that the survival of our own species depends not on
optimizing reproduction but, rather, on symbiosis, fusion and exchange
with other life forms. Family of the Future serves as an example of an
extended family in its broadest sense, as descended from a common
ancestor, which reaches all the way back to the most primary life forms.
This multispecies family far exceeds the homocentric reproductive unit
of the present concept of ‘family.’ Not aggression towards other species
but zoophilia or even zoe-philia is the expected and productive attitude
in the world of change from which self-centered humans will eventually
disappear “in order to give birth to a new concept of the world and to
win the right to have a future” (Kulik and Bredikhina).

Vital Incorporations, Lusty Connections

A necessary requirement for assuming a zoophilic position understood

in its broadest sense—not only reduced to the sexual aspect, though
not eliminating it either—is to give up the homocentric convictions
and revise the notion of the embodied subject. This is a radical move
in search of a new model based not only on sexual incorporations
but also on incorporations considered at even the cellular level of
our bodies. The body is not a sealed vessel but a symbiotic system all
the way down to the individual cells, which are themselves evolved
in a process involving endosymbiosis, i.e. incorporation on the level of
single-cell organisms (Margulis 1981). Indeed, our bodies are environ-
ments within environments, “a sort of ornately elaborated mosaic of

13
The project includes installations and performances involving animals and people
as well as the most famous ones, where the artist himself acts as a dog.
14
I use the term “homocentric” as a synonym of “anthropocentric”.
240 monika bakke

microbes in various states of symbiosis” (Sagan 1992, p. 369). As we

move towards a biocentric perspective, the concept of the individual
as an autonomous unity needs to be revised:
The body is not one self but a fiction of a self built from a mass of
interacting selves. A body’s capacities are literally the result of what it
incorporates; the self is not only corporeal but corporate. (Sagan 1992,
p. 370)
In other words, life is based on connections, networking, and exchange
on all levels. We live among other life forms, affecting and being affected
by the organic and inorganic environment we incorporate one way or
another; “we make love only with worlds” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977,
p. 294). Our identities, like our sexual orientations, are never stable; our
bodies are multiplicities constantly communicating and merging with
the organic and inorganic matter of which we consist. Life itself in its
biological vitality as zoe, which now emerges as subject, never stops but
moves on in a constant flux regardless of any individual ‘zoological’
loss. This radical, yet crucial, reconfiguration of the subject, as Rosi
Braidotti explains, “starts with asserting the primacy of life as produc-
tion, or zoe as generative power” (2006, p. 110). In this view, the anthro-
pocentric subject is no longer privileged because “[z]oe rules through
a trans-species and trans-genic interconnection, or rather a chain of
connections which can best be described as an ecological philosophy
of non-unitary, embodied subjects” (p. 111). The radical shift from
zoophilia to zoephila means that life itself can no longer be considered
only a passive object of discourses and actions; on the contrary, it is
itself active as it moves on, no matter what and in whatever form and
mutation it may momentarily take.
For the humanist subject, the rejection of anthropocentrism evokes
the predicament of not knowing one’s location in respect to other life
forms, as the location of humans with respect to the environment is no
longer fixed. This new case of ‘not-knowing’ certainly does not mean
being deprived of knowledge or isolated from it; on the contrary, it
means being confronted with an excess of new cognitive possibilities, of
awareness of the connections and the immensity of interrelations with
the environment. Therefore, this highly sensitive anthropocentric subject,
now in transition, is no longer able to comprehend and conceptualize
its own condition if still operating within the established framework of
humanism. The usual response of the anthropocentric subject to not-
knowing has been fear, more specifically and paradoxically perhaps, not
 human-nonhuman libidinal relations 241

a primal fear for one’s life but a fear of life. Zoe goes on no matter what,
as Braidotti points out, and “[c]onsciousness attempts to contain it, but
actually lives in fear of it. Such a life force is experienced as threatening
by a mind that fears the loss of control” (2006, p. 110).
Loss of control has been considered in different terms by Roger
Caillois, namely as a possible source of pleasure for humans and
nonhumans classified as the “pleasure of vertigo” ( whereby a human
being or an insect “gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily
equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and pro-
voke the abdication of conscience” (1962, p. 109). Living vertiginously
means living on the edge of sustainability, being “on the edge of too-
muchness” (Braidotti 2006, p. 214), which for some, paradoxically, is
a survival strategy, insofar as it may be the only way to actually carry
on living. In the moment of vertigo one is even more alive somehow;
on the border of life and death life is the most intense. Zoopleasures
becoming zoe-pleasures reveal even more clearly the necessity of the
endless process of merging of vitality and death. With its disregard for
individuality, zoe-philia will always be an outrage for the anthropocentric
subject, yet its hidden but permanent existence and recent emergence
is also evidence that the humanist subject is already infected by non-
humans—more infected than ever—as it opens up to the immensity
of the life of which it consists and in which it can participate with joy.
The latter cannot be ignored at any level and at any moment for, as
Lingis assures, “joy opens wide our eyes to the surfaces warmed and
illuminated but also to the shadows; joy gives us the strength to open our
eyes to all that is there” (2000, p. 106). Zoopleasures and zoe-pleasures
emerge as contagious and still more deadly than any other pleasures
we pursue but this makes them all the more vital.

References

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London: Macmillan.
Beetz, Andrea, M. 2000. ‘Human Sexual Contact with Animals.’ http://www2
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Bekoff, Marc. A. ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Greenwood
Publishing Group.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.
Caillois, Roger. 1962. Man, Play, and Games. Thams and Hudson.
——. 1990. The Necessity of Mind. An Analytic Study of Mechanism of Overdetermination in
Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in the Individual
Consciousness. Venice, Calif.: The Lapis Press.
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Clark, Gillian. 2000. ‘Animal Passions.’ Greece and Rome, 47 (1): 88.
Dekkers, Midas. 2000. Dearest Pet. On Bestiality. London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schisophrenia. New
York: Viking.
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view with Jacques Derrida.’ In Who Comes After the Subject? Edited by E. Cadava,
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Devor, Robinson. 2007. Zoo. ThinkFilm.
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Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘Animal Sex. Libido as Desire and Death.’ In Sexy Bodies: The
Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Edited by Elizabeth Grosz and E. Probyn, 278–300.
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——. 2005. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, London: Duke University
Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Kulik, Oleg, Bredikhina, Mila. ‘Ten Commandments of Zoophrenia.’ http://uchcom.
botik.ru/ARTS/contemporary/362/RACT/SL8B.HTM (accessed 25 February
2008).
Lingis, Alphonso. 2000. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 2005. Body Transformations. Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture. New York: Routledge.
Margulis, Lynn. 1981. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co
Ltd.
Miletski, Hani. 2002. Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia. Bethesda, MD: East-West
Publishing Co.
Sagan, Dorion. 1992. ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity.’ In: Incorporations. Edited
by Crary, J. and S. Winter. New York: Zone.
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Singer/heavyPetting/main.asp (accessed 10 February 2008).
 CHAPTER TWELVE

COMINGTOGETHER: SYMBIOGENESIS AND

METAMORPHOSIS IN PAUL DI FILIPPO’S
A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES

Manuela Rossini

During our e-mail conversation a few years ago, Paul di Filippo seduced
me into reading his sexually explicit SF novel A Mouthful of Tongues: Her
Totipotent Tropicanalia (AMoT ) by describing it as “the most ‘transgressive’
and posthumanist and gender-conscious” text he has written so far.
Indeed, published in 2002 and classified in reviews as “erotica”, even
“pornography”, AMoT imagines a possible world where ‘monstrous’
mutations and Escherian transformations of all sorts are the order of
the day: mainly through orgiastic intercourse with other human or non-
human creatures, men change into women, women into men, human
beings into animal-human hybrids and finally, at the end of the book,
into jaguars, flocks of birds and swarms of butterflies. In the light of
psychologist Susan Oyama’s developmental systems theory and similar
biological as well as philosophical theories of evolution and change that
inform my textual analysis, these metamorphic processes can be seen as
invitations to the reader and critic to conceptualise (post)human identity
as neither predicated upon the constituting logic of man/woman nor
sustained by the human/animal abyss. As a radical alternative to the
dominant cultural imaginary concerning cross-species sociality in 21st-
century naturecultures, AMoT offers more politically promising represen-
tations of the multiplicities and complex assemblages ‘we’ are (becoming).
The novel thus lends itself perfectly as material to further explore
the construction, deconstruction as well as reconstruction of species
boundaries in contemporary literary, philosophical and scientific writ-
ings. Moreover, the essay reflects my larger endeavour to intervene in two
domains of cultural theory and practice by taking animal encounters seri-
ously: one is the field of posthumanism, the other the field of feminism.1

1
Some passages of this essay have appeared in slightly mutated form in my online
publication of 2006 and have also been elaborated into a longer German text, forthcom-
ing in Gender Goes Life, edited by Marie-Luise Angerer and Christiane König (2008).
244 manuela rossini

While both fields are heterogeneous and pursue different questions and
agendas, they share the goal of thinking beyond binary oppositions
such as human-machine, human-animal, nature-culture, man-woman,
heterosexual-homosexual, etc. Yet, while the former—especially so-
called “cybernetic” or “popular” posthumanism—has often been “all
too humanist”,2 reinforcing old hierarchies in the guise of the “new” or
“post” (Rossini 2005), the latter has also not been able so far to forge
analytical tools to do away with the body-mind dualism proven to be so
harmful to women and all of Man’s Others. What might help feminists
(and any scholar committed to justice and social change) to theorise
difference outside oppressive and hierarchical dualistic frameworks, as
Donna Haraway suggests in her latest book, is “to come face-to-face
with animals” (2008, p. 72). As a consequence of meeting and falling
in love with Cayenne (an individual of the Australian Shepherd breed),
Haraway herself looks specifically at dogs and dog-human relations in
order to learn “an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of
significant otherness” (2003, p. 3). Cyborgs, she adds, are no longer
good trainers in this respect:
I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in Reagan’s Star Wars times
of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer
do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed
for critical inquiry. (p. 4)
Many of Haraway’s books and talks include personal stories of intimate
encounters as a starting-point for theorising. In the piece of “dog writ-
ing”, the Companion Species Manifesto I quoted from above, it is tongue-
kissing between a human and a canine bitch (a term of honour for
Haraway) that seems to have triggered off her critical reflections and
implicit recoding of “love” and “sexuality” beyond heterosexual and
speciesist grand narratives:
Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of
what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked
our DNA, you’d find some potent transfections between us. Surely, her
darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. . . . Her . . . quick and lithe tongue
has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system

2
Kate Hayles has used the term “cybernetic posthuman” in her standard work on
posthumanism as a technical-cultural phenomenon (1999, p. 4). The label “popular
posthumanism” figures prominently in Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003), dedicated to
posthumanist culture and theory.
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 245

receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her message,

or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing her self from
other and binding outside to inside?
We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; . . . We
are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand.
We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the
flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify
in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. (pp. 1–3; italics
in original).
The coming together of organic materials described here, as well as
the premise of this manifesto that dogs and humans have co-evolved,
is indeed an excellent illustration of Lynn Margulis’s central thesis,
developed for over three decades, and most recently updated in her
book Acquiring Genomes (co-authored with her son Dorion Sagan): “we
people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated
various other kinds of organisms” (2002, p. 19). “Making each other
up, in the flesh”, to repeat Haraway, organisms of the human and
nonhuman kind always contain within themselves ‘alien’ bits and pieces.
This implies that as humans we are not the entirely autonomous, self-
contained and self-creating subjects of modernity we tend to think
we are. We cannot fashion ourselves in our own image. By the same
token, animals are always already marked by the trace of the human.
Hence “companion species” is a far more appropriate term to denote
that both human and animal ‘natures’ are essentially relational, made
through sharing and the interweaving of self and other, “binding out-
side to inside”.3 In other words, the notion of “companion species”
denotes what Diana Fuss says about Nietzsche’s postulate “human, all
too human”: it “syntactically locates at the center of the human some
unnamed surplus—some residue, overabundance, or excess.” And this
ex-cess, she continues, “may be internal to the very definition of the
human, an exteriority embedded inside the human as its own condition
of possibility” (1996, p. 4). The same, I would like to argue, applies to
the animal, “all too animal”.
The simple fact that human beings are above all organic and mortal
beings, and that the game of life on earth follows the rule of multidirec-
tional gene flow, were two major reasons for Haraway to distance herself

3
The word “companion” derives from the Latin cum panis, which means “with
bread”; a companion is thus someone with whom one literally or metaphorically shares
food and other things.
246 manuela rossini

from her alter ego, the cyborg, in favour of the concept “companion
species”—, without fully abandoning the earlier material-semiotic figure.
I have followed her move mainly for the additional reason that cyborgs
are far too often figured as male and (less so but also) female fighting
machines, and very rarely as a mixture of human and animal. On the
basis of my readings of cyborgs in films, literature and game culture, I
can confirm that such figurations of the icon of posthumanity betray all
too clearly what Haraway calls “humanist technophiliac narcissism . . .,
the idea that man makes himself by realizing his intentions in his tools,
such as domestic animals and computers” (2003, p. 33). Yet, a techno-
phobic stance won’t do either to come to terms with the posthuman
condition. What is needed, rather, is a certain degree of scepticism as
one characteristic of that Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter call a
“critical posthumanism”—“ ‘critical’ in the sense of both its importance
as a modulation of cyborg-riddled scenarios and cloning-savvy idioms,
and also through is capacity to cue a critique of those scenarios and
idioms” (2008, forthcoming).4 For me, one of the main goals of such a
critical-posthumanist position would be to be critical of computational
or informational theories that reduce the richness of being and organic
matter to the poverty of ones and zeros—favoured by most Artificial
Intelligence researchers and some Artificial Life researchers also—and
to emphasise the very unpredictability, indeterminacy and irreducible
multiplicity of human and nonhuman ‘life’, its incalculable différance
and excess in the sense mentioned above.
In order the better to pursue this revisionary critical-posthumanist
project, I have shifted my focus from human-machine interactions to
human-animal compositions, drawing on new evolutionary theories
and philosophical texts that use concepts originating in the natural
sciences for my reading of literary configurations of the human. At
the same time, I have investigated works of narrative fiction that enact
symbiogenetic accounts of the origins of species (which I will introduce
later) and that, consequently, show us worlds inhabited by transgenic
posthumans and couplings between human and nonhuman animals.
Apart from the more widely discussed SF authors Octavia Butler and
Greg Bear, who openly acknowledged their indebtedness to the work

4
Callus and Herbrechter are also the editors of the Rodopi book series Critical Post-
humanisms. The quote is from their forthcoming introductory volume to the series.
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 247

of Margulis, one of my finds is the American writer I discuss here,

Paul di Filippo.
Like Haraway, di Filippo is the author of a manifesto, Ribofunk:
The Manifesto, that expresses a discontent with cyborg figurations: “the
‘cyber’ prefix has been irreparably debased by overuse, in vehicles
ranging from comic books to bad movies. The tag now stands for
nothing in the public mind but computer hacking and fanciful cyborgs
such as Robocop” (1998). To balance this picture and to offer above
all an alternative to cyberpunk, the SF genre inaugurated by William
Gibson’s Neuromancer, di Filippo weighs in with ribofunk, an amalgam
of “ribosome” and “funk”. Furthermore, it is a style of writing that
is well suited to describe libidinal encounters that produce the spilling
of juicy matters and hot rhythms in both human and animal bodies:
“Ribofunk must be as sensual as sex, as unsparing in sweat, cum, bile
and lymph as the body is prolific in these substances” 1998). This,
indeed, is the stuff that the dreams of AMoT are made of.
Di Filippo’s ribofunk novel leads us into an urban jungle, somewhere
on the American Continent, into a future that is only a few years ahead
of us. The protagonist is a 25-year-old woman called Kerry Hackett.5
The story begins with a wet dream (in every sense of the term): in her
dream, Kerry finds herself in a rain forest, where she has the sex of
her life—with a jaguar. After having a joint orgasm, the human female
of the two sexual partners also turns into a jaguar, and they live hap-
pily ever after in this lush paradise. Reality, by contrast, is a nightmare:
within only a few hours (or minutes of reading) Kerry is raped by her
husband, by her boss and by a patrolling soldier. Utterly devastated,
Kerry decides to throw herself into a mass of genetically engineered,
one hundred percent totipotent cells—the benthic6—in the laboratory
of the biotech company she works for as a secretary.
Orgastically melting with this hypervital entity, Kerry dissolves yet
emerges again as a new life form or, rather, it is the masculine-encoded
benthic that absorbs both Kerry’s body and identity as well as her
memories and experiences, and, in the process, becomes something
more than the sum of Kerry’s reassembled parts:

5
The protagonist’s name is almost an anagram of author Kathy Acker, who died
of cancer in 1997 and to whom the book is dedicated.
6
The benthos is an aggregation of organisms living on or at the bottom of a body
of water. It is composed of a wide range of plants, animals and bacteria from all
levels of the food web.
248 manuela rossini

Now begins Kerry Hackett’s transubstantiation, a conversion of flesh

to more than flesh, a seachange of self. . . . imploding, her facial features
vanish inward, as do her breasts. . . . Arms merge into torso, legs fuse,
as the forked stick of her humanity backward eggs. . . . The next step
of totipotent-directed evolution manifests first as fractally distributed
ripples, as if a complex net beneath the grub’s epidermis were shaken
from multiple points. Then, reprogramming and redefinition: from distal
loci, perfect digits emerge, tender pink toes and fingers with nails already
tinted a unique scarab green. . . . Hair rethatches skull, ears appear, and
the Kerry-physiognomy, that unique assemblage of cartilage, jelly, muscle
and bone, pushes out from inside like an image formed from behind in
a toy composed of a million floating microscopic pins.
Perfect from toenails to teeth, breathing deeply, the nude Kerry Hackett
lies on the cold tiles. . . . Wrapped in virginal white . . . radiating a kind of
abnormal, seductive vitality. . . . the pitcher-plant perfection of her reworked
body. . . . squirms as if in heat. . . . her drupleted strawberry tongue . . . plainly
autonomous and impossibly severed from its roots, poising there like a
miniscule predator, toad or lizard. (p. 37)
Di Filippo describes this secular transubstantiation as “directed evo-
lution” and “reprogramming”, which presupposes the existence of
information or codes in the cells of an organism through which it will
be possible to build an exact copy of the original body (or system) out
of a million tiny particles now enclosed in another body (or system).
In the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the text
does not defend those theories labelled “gene fetishism” or “biological
determinism” by their opponents. Neither does the text privilege the
influence of the environment over the system, as in social or cultural
constructivism. Rather, AMoT comes close to Oyama’s developmental
systems theory (DTS) or paradigm of “constructivist interaction” (2000,
p. 3), in that the novel seems to suggest that the (re)combination of
genes within a system and environmental influence outside a system
are co-constructing a new organism that is both unique and largely
incalculable. Such an approach enables critical thought to move outside
the nature-versus-culture or nature-versus-nurture divide while main-
taining the interpretive paradigm of constructivism. Biological beings
are indeed ‘constructed’, as Oyama remarks, but
not only in the sense that they are actively and discursively construed by
themselves and others, but also in the sense that they are, at every moment,
products of, and participants in, their own and others’ developmental
processes. They are not self-determining in any simple sense but they
affect and ‘select’ influences on themselves by attending to and interpreting
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 249

stimuli, by seeking environments and companions, by being susceptible to

various factors, by evoking reactions from others. (pp. 180–181)
The politically and ethically relevant potential of DST consists primar-
ily in the proposition that system and environment, inside and outside,
are mutually determining; in other words, power, control and agency
are neither here nor there, neither attributed to the self/subject nor
to the other/object but are seen as multiple and distributed. A second
important implication of DST is that we cannot legitimately define
information as a binary code of ones and zeros, as a blueprint, fixed
programme or stable representation of what a living organism will
inevitable become and then eternally be. In AMoT ditto, the fact that
there occurs another osmosis almost immediately after the symbiosis
of the human protagonist with the benthic described above, might well
be read as giving literary expression to this insight.
The new, totipotent nonhuman substance with “a mouthful of
tongues”, outwardly appearing as Kerry, disappears into the body of
a certain Senhora Yemana and flies off to Bahia where she hopes to
meet the jaguar of her dreams. In the Brazilian jungle she acts poly-
morphously perverse: mostly upon her initiative, she has sex with men
and women, young and old ones, with jaguars and centaurs, soft, hard,
vaginal, anal, oral, in all possible and impossible positions, for hours
and with seemingly insatiable lust. In the sexual act, humans (of all
sexes and genders) literally become the animals they have always been,
as Alphonso Lingis observes:
Far from the human libido naturally destining us to a member of our
species and of the opposite sex, when anyone who has not had inter-
course with other animals, has not felt the contented cluckings of a hen
stroked on the neck and under the wings rumbling through his or her
own flesh, has not kissed a calf ’s mouth raised to his or her own, has
not mounted the smooth warm flanks of a horse, has not been aroused
by the powdery feathers of cockatoos and the ardent chants of insects
in the summer night, gets in the sack with a member of his or her own
species, she and he are only consummating tension release, getting their
rocks off. When we in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone
of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the calf, the
kitten and cockatoo, the powdery moths and the lustful crickets. . . . Our
muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze, slime, mam-
malian sweat, and reptilian secretions into minute tadpoles and releases
of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night
air. (2003, pp. 170–172, italics in original)
250 manuela rossini

The zoopoetics at work here means more than simply representing

animals.7 As Steven Connor writes about zoopoetical texts in general:
“It means letting animals in on meaning, even allowing the animality
of meaning” so that “[animals] would exert distinctive forms of pull
and pressure on the work of meaning”.8 If we apply a zoopoetical
reading to AMoT, we could say that the representation of ‘animal sex’
(between human animals and between humans and nonhuman animals)
function as axes of transformation of what it means to be human or
animal, man or woman, etc.
As we come (together), Lingis writes in the foreplay to his observa-
tions on human sexuality in the same text, “our impulses, our passions,
are returned to animal irresponsibility” (p. 172). This is not, however,
irresponsibility in the sense of not responding to the partner(s) seduc-
tion and touch, but irresponsibility as non-response to the everyday
interpellations that turn our bodies into well-functioning, competent
and hence efficient wheels in the production machine of capitalism.
Nor is it irresponsibility in the sense of the irrational, instinctive and
uncontrollable (human) behaviour that in our society is negatively
associated with “animal sex”. It is, rather, that the very ‘animality’
of our passions renders human sexuality more sensual and creative,
opening up a multiplicity of “libidinal zones”, as Elizabeth Grosz
names the localised and particular regions and scenes of “joyous or
painful encounters” and “corporeal intensification” where, “through
experimentation, practices, innovations, the accidents or contingencies
of life itself, the coming together of surfaces, incisive practices, inscrip-
tions”, bodies and the world as a whole are “continually in the process
of being produced, renewed, transformed” (1995, p. 199). Libidinal
desire is here not described as a human body’s regression and longing
for some preoedipal and infantile state, as in Freudian psychoanalysis,
but as being propelled forward through interchange with an other that
beckons from outside the self, an other that is not necessarily human,
not even animal (cp. p. 200).

7
I adapt Derrida’s word “zoopoetics” here, used by the philosopher to describe the
preoccupation with animal being(s) in writers like Kafka and others (2004, p. 115).
8
The excerpts are from the online publication on Connor’s website of bits and
pieces that were not herded into the covers of his book Fly, published in 2006 within
in the Reaktion Animal series.
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 251

In contrast to such a decidedly posthumanist understanding of desire

and sexuality, a humanist reading faithful to Freud would interpret
Kerry’s dream of having sexual intercourse with a jaguar as the mani-
festation of a perverse desire to blur the boundaries between humans
and animals. The ‘cure’ psychoanalysis would then devise is a taming
of the beast through the elimination of all that is improper; i.e. not
proper to the human. As feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes in
her book Metamorphoses:
non-human drives for multiple encounters, wild bodily motives, heightened
sensory perception and unbridled sexual activity, have to be assimilated
or incorporated into a well-organised and functioning organism and by
analogy, into well-regulated and normal orgasms. (p. 140)
The domestication and disciplining of individual bodies according to
the rule of a scientific discourse of ‘normality’ described here corre-
sponds to the central split Michel Foucault identified in his history of
sexuality at the onset of modernity in Western societies; i.e., the split
between ars erotica and sciencia sexualis (1990, p. 67). AmoT is a shame-
less celebration of the former, insofar as di Filippo gets ‘ribofunky’,
pouring all his energy into painting the erotic and sexual activities of
the novel’s protagonist in the most creative way. At first sight, these
portrayals seem to be less an affirmation of Kerry’s libido than the
stereotypical outpour from the pen of a sexist author (ultimately di
Filippo but also the author-character in the book who tells the story),
denigrating female sexuality as animalistic and dangerous for the male
member of the human species—especially since he also uses the nick-
name “She-Beast” for the horny heroine. Confronting di Filippo with
my unease in another e-mail after I had made it to through the “sweat
and cum” of this ribofunk novel, however, I was assured that the author
is primarily concerned with showing the destabilising, border- and
category-crossing effects and affects of sexual intercourse for all the
involved partners—male or female, human or animal.
In this respect, AMoT flirts strongly with the definition of sexuality
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the ‘becoming-Beast’, so to
speak, of Man:
Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many
uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of becoming-woman
of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of
particles. . . . Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their
reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds
252 manuela rossini

but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us

become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared element
from the animals far more effectively than any domestication, utilization,
or imitation could: ‘the Beast’ . (1987, p. 279; my emphasis)
The incitement to becoming-animal is often misunderstood: Deleuze
and Guattari do not mean that human beings should really turn into
animals or engage in sex with, say, a dog. The idea is, rather, that
while having sex our organs function like those of animals and, for the
duration, manage to escape the organisational and stratificatory power
of societal norms. Like Deleuze and Guattari, di Filippo seems to sub-
scribe to the point of view, also expressed by Peter Singer, Jonathan
Balcombe and others referenced by Bakke in this section of the book,
that the “shared element” is the experience of pleasure. By challeng-
ing the essentialist argument that human and animal sexualities or, by
the same logic though not by analogy, male and female sexualities are
completely different, I do not want to say that they are exactly of the
same kind—the same species, so to speak. It would be foolish—and
dangerous—to believe this. I second Grosz’s claim, rather, that in libidi-
nal encounters both parties are “metamorphosed”, insofar as “both
become something other, something incapable of being determined
in advanced [sic], and perhaps even in retrospect, but which nonethe-
less have perceptibly shifted and realigned” (1995, p. 200). There is
a concomitant shift in analytical focus here also: from what a body is
to what a desirous body does when (be)coming-together with another
desirous body, producing a new com-position instead of opposing one
another as fixed or given identities.
In AMoT the transformative and destabilising power of libidinal
encounters with regard to sexual dimorphism, finds an articulation in
the following scene, among others: when the metamorphic Senhora
Yemana—alias She-Beast, alias Kerry Hackett—is asked by a formerly
male character she has just changed into a woman with the use of
her own sexual organs, while she herself has turned into a person
perceived as ‘male’, “Your womanly essence—how can this develop
into my male parts?”, she answers: “I am neither man nor woman . . . I
am both and neither” (p. 117). In short, even though impersonating a
female human being, she represents a tertiary, anti-essentialist logic. As
such, she can be said to function like the boy-actor on the Renaissance
stage or, even more so, like the Alien in the Alien movies. The Alien,
in Kelly Hurley’s reading, is a posthumanist figuration that enables us
“to imagine otherwise”, especially to image human identity beyond the
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 253

constituting logic of genital difference (penis/no penis): “to imagine

other (alien) systems of reproduction, other (alien) logics of identity”,
to even guide us towards “another (alien) logic of ‘the human’, one
predicated only occasionally and incidentally on categories of sexual
difference” (1995, p. 211).
Senhora Yemana not only modifies her sex and outer shape, but also
those of her human and nonhuman partners. In each case, however,
the shape shifting is not described in linear or binary fashion, where
a person is female or human one minute and male or an animal the
next, but as a continuous, symbiogenetic process of mutual transfor-
mation. As the story moves forward, the totipotent mass in the human
skin of Kerry continues to lose her humanness, becoming more alien
or nonhuman with every page. Through a mystical intervention remi-
niscent of magic realism, the metamorphic process is reversed; that is,
a shaman manages to return the metamorphic body into its original
benthic state only, however, to initiate the osmosis of a entire indigenous
tribe: “Flesh lost its boundaries, neighbor melting into neighbor . . . like
an immense stranded jellyfish”. Then this compound, this “featureless
lump of living matter”, evolves into a gigantic jaguar “some hundred
bodies large” (p. 165). And also in other parts of the world, an increas-
ing number of human beings change into animals. To be precise: each
individual person does not transform himself or herself into a single
new form of life, but into a swarm. Kerry’s husband, for example,
dissolves into “butterfly by butterfly” ( p. 211), another one into “bird
by bird” ( p. 213).
The numerous descriptions throughout the novel of the mergings,
osmotic fusions and disappearances of bodies into other bodies, resonate
strongly with Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis or morphogenesis,
according to which eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, protists with
a nucleus in their cells) owe their existence to bacteria, prokaryotic
(nucleus-free) life forms which emerged out of the oceans’ benthos,
where they had bubbled each other up, ‘infected’ and ingested each
other and, later on, acquired and exchanged genes from and between
different species. Such an insistence on symbiotic couplings is diametri-
cally opposed to the militaristic and capitalist rhetoric of survival of the
fittest which Darwin had taken over from social philosopher Herbert
Spencer as a synonym for “natural selection”, even though The Origin
of Species clearly argues that identities and differences emerge exclusively
through mutation and interconnectivity between different life forms, and
not through competition between individuals and species. Moreover,
254 manuela rossini

microbes as the ancestors of human cells undermine anthropological

(and anthropocentric) truth-claims regarding the evolutionary history
of Homo sapiens. By confirming the Darwinian thesis that the geneal-
ogy of the human starts with nonhuman matter, microbes thus help
us to redraw the boundary between nonhuman and human animals.
Margulis’s theory of the bacterial origins of new species also serves my
larger purpose to use biology not only as a field for Feminist Science
Studies but as a source of inspiration for a theoretically and politically
relevant understanding of subjectivity, identity and embodiment (cp.
Wilson 2002: 285).
Bacteria, as sociologist Myra Hird has demonstrated, are a useful
category of analysis with which to denaturalise the sex/gender system,
to advance queer thinking and, not least of all, an ethics of difference.
Since bacteria “recognize and avidly embrace diversity, they do not
discriminate on the basis of ‘gender’ differences at all.” Having recourse
to another book by Margulis, namely What is Sex?, Hird reminds us
that the bacteria that entered our bodies and move freely within them
are as “infinitely ‘gender’ diverse, as are most of the species on this
planet” (2002: 104). Or, in the words of SF writer Greg Bear, who
explicitly draws on the endosymbiotic theory of Margulis: “we’re all
different sexes, inside” (2002; my emphasis).9 We may hence conclude
that the human body—at least on the level of its material interior—is
not sexually dimorphic. Nor is the human body purely ‘human’ but,
rather, an intersexual, unstable, unfinished ‘work in progress’ as a result
of heterogeneous exchange with its environment.
Luciana Parisi takes a step further the implications of the definition
of sex by Margulis and Sagan as “a genetic mixing of organisms that
operate on a variety of levels” that “in the biological sense has nothing
to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction
or gender” (1997, p. 285). Disconnecting sex not only from gender and
reproduction but also from bodies as organic entities, she has coined the
label “abstract sex” to include in her definition of sexuality the produc-
tive coming-together, exchange, amalgamation and creation of the new
by elements from all levels of life, not only bacterial and organic but
also inorganic, geological or climactic ones, etc. (2004, cp. p. viii). In its
abstract form, sex might also include the inhuman matter of language
and its equally composing and decomposing agency. Hence, the various
metamorphoses through interspecies sex of AMoT could also be read

9
This sentence appears on the first, unnumbered page of the book.
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 255

metaphorically as a metareflection on writing and its potential to undo

the humanist subject and its supportive phallogocentric structures,
including the sex/gender system and the animal-human divide. The
link between sexual promiscuity and language/writing as also always
being in excess and producing disruptive ambiguities, can be found in
the following passage from Bruce Clarke’s Allegories of Writing:
Metamorphic monstrosity represents the uncanny productivity of lin-
guistic reproduction, an illicit fornication in the basement brothel of
the verbal imagination always breeding new figures. The promiscuous
nature of metamorphic procreation can disrupt any discursive system.
Metamorphic episodes . . . insert an unpredictable play into rational struc-
tures. (1995, p. 84)
More broadly speaking, the analogy described in this quotation allows
me to connect developmental processes of living systems to processes of
writing. Again, I follow Clarke who in his posthumanist ‘sequel’ to the
earlier book, reads “narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories
of the contingencies of systems” (2008, p. 11) and as exemplification
of the potential of writing to transform given and normative forms of
subjectivity and corporeal being. Seen from this perspective, writing
can act as a pharmakon in the Derridean sense; i.e. as a material sub-
stance entering a body from without and transforming the self—akin to
bacteria, in fact. Writing thus resembles the ants on Escher’s Moebius
strip: it is a perpetually wandering outcast that dwells neither entirely
outside nor entirely inside the logocentric system. As I hope to have
shown, this subversiveness of the marginal or liminal characterises
not only the narration of AMoT but also the power—the “totipotent
tropicanalia”—of the novel’s hypermorphic protagonist.
At the end of the book, we read that protagonist Kerry has become a
“sphinx-like” creature, half-jaguar, half-woman who engages her former
Afro-American colleague Oreesha Presser in oral sex until “the black
woman loses her familiar shape also, . . . exchanging it for a form that
sisters Kerry’s” (pp. 179–80). When, thanks to the totipotent tongue of
She-Beast, “[a] final gestalt of change ripples over both women, extend-
ing upward from their animal-human interface, leaving them complete
jaguar twins” (p. 180), there seems to be an ontological closure, an end
to instability. But it is the nature of the kind of nomadic subjects that
metamorphs are to “saunter boldly off ” (p. 180), as it says in the pen-
ultimate line of the novel, just as it is intrinsic to narratives to “travel”
(Bal 1997, p. 137). And thus the text ends as it began, moving “[i]nto
that deep, dark, dangerous dream”. Instead of suggesting a repetition
256 manuela rossini

of the same, however, there is instead the promise of endless becomings,

of coming together and co-habiting the earth as companion species.
As a dream ultimately dreamt by the author, and also as a story within
a story—in the course of the novel, we actually learn that what we
have read so far is the text written by a certain Luis Salvador—AMoT
ditto is the kind of self-conscious composition that according to Clarke
is typical of all literary metamorphoses. Again, we can construct a
parallel between the narratological device of textual embeddedness and
the biological theory of (endo)symbiosis that has been central to this
essay:10 the situation of text within text corresponds to the situation of
a symbiont living within a host, such as bacteria in the gut of human
and nonhuman animal. It is thus an appropriate narrative structure for
a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric understanding of what it means to
be a living organism. Furthermore, by emphasising the dream logic of
texts, di Filippo insists that, as he wrote in another e-mail conversation,
“everything that manifests in the human sphere of reality starts out as
a thought and/or dream!” The reader is reminded that we have the
freedom to imagine the future of humanity in our own terms—and
also the future of the humanities.
Just as I imagine a future where difference can be fully celebrated
rather than (ab)used for the objectification and suppression of the
other—whether that other be defined in terms of gender, race, sexual-
ity, animal or machine—I dream of the humanities morphing into the
posthumanities before long.11 This dream reflects my desire for more
appropriate terms and categories of critical and cultural analysis to
deal with the complex entanglements between human and nonhuman
actors, things and institutions, or when confronted with the kind of
subjectivities and new life forms emerging from these encounters. What
is needed more than ever is an intersectional analysis and inter- or
transdisciplinary (if not post-disciplinary) research teams where vari-
ous approaches, concepts and actors enter into dialogue, to the mutual
benefit and flourishing not only of each field but above all of each of
the human and nonhuman animals comingtogether in it.

10
For a thorough coupling of biological and narrative embedding that draws on
Mieke Bal’s narratology and systems theory, see Clarke 2008.
11
I would like to draw attention at this point to Cary Wolfe’s book series of this title
with Minnesota University Press: http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/posthumanities
.html.
 symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 257

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Bear, Greg. 2002. W3. Women in Deep Time. New York: ibooks.
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Callus, Ivan and Stefan Herbrechter. 2008 (forthcoming). Critical Posthumanism. An
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Clarke, Bruce. 1995. Allegories of Writing. The Subject of Metamorphosis. Albany: State
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——. 2008. Posthuman Metamorphosis. Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press.
Connor, Steven. No date. ‘The Antient Commonwealth of Flies’. http://www.stevenconnor
.com/flies (accessed on 18 July 2008).
Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003). Special issue: Posthumanism. Edited by Bart Simon,
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Di Filippo, Paul. 1998. ‘Ribofunk: The Manifesto’. http://www.streettech.com/bcp/
BCPgraf/ Manifestos/Ribofunk.html (accessed on 16 March 2008).
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Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
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——. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago:
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Lingis, Alphonso. 2003. ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face’. In Zoontologies. The Question of
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Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. 2002. Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origins of
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——. 1997. Slanted Truths. Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. New York: Copernicus.
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 INDEX

abattoir 94, 127 anthropocentrism 11, 19, 23–24, 30,

abjectivity 74 46, 75, 79, 94, 135, 148, 194, 219,
Abram, David 31 221–29, 234, 239–41, 254
absent referent 47–49, 52, 58–59, homocentric 239
65–66, 69, 79 humanocentric 55
Ad-Damīrī 4 post-anthropocentric 219–20, 223,
Adams, Carol J. 4, 45, 47–72, 79, 239, 256
83–84 anthropomorphism 4, 11, 13–24,
adder 151 33– 34, 91, 131, 133, 141, 163, 222
Adventures with Wild Animals (Russell) 32, anthropomorphite 13–14, 23–24
35 humanization 20
Africa 6, 89, 115, 125 anthropozoology (see animal studies)
agon (άγών) 1–3, 8 anthrozoology (see animal studies)
agriculture 100, 117, 127, 152, 160, antler 28
172, 174–95 (see also farm) Antz 46, 90
Allen, Woody 90 ape 130, 142–148, 165, 221
ambergris 77 (see also primate)
America 5, 7, 13, 29, 34, 36, 40, 46, aquarium 47, 90
73–95, 172, 234, 247, 255 Arabia 4, 6
American Poultry Association 179 Arctic 29
anatomy 6, 67, 135, 137–55, 182, 221 Aristotle 5, 138, 140, 142–43, 154
Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 144, armadillo 94
152 art 3–5, 7, 45, 49, 79, 89, 160, 164,
Andress, Ursula 67 168, 172, 197–217, 224, 226, 229,
androcentric 219, 224, 230–36 231–39
Animal Farm (Orwell) 70 artist 5, 48, 74, 77, 79, 93, 172,
Animal Liberation (Singer) 61, 79, 159, 197–217, 219–20, 234–35, 239
138 Avedon, Richard 46, 80–82, 84–85
animal rights 15, 45, 52, 56, 60–61,
64, 122, 124, 129, 142, 213 baboon (see Hamadryas baboon)
animal rights activist 16, 50, 138, bacon 59, 84
198, 202, 204 Bacon, Francis 140
animal studies 2–8, 41–42, 57, 219 bacteria 247, 253–56
anthropozoology 2 Baker, Steve 7, 16, 172, 197–218
anthrozoology 2, 46, 73, 75, 87–88, Bakke, Monika 7, 219–20, 221–42, 252
90, 94 Banting, Pamela 4, 12, 27–44
human-animal studies 2 Barbieri, Annalisa 81, 85
zooanthropology 2 Barthes, Roland 27, 41
‘The Animal That Therefore I Am bat 21–23, 93–94
(More to Follow)’ (Derrida) 18, 39, beak 35, 53, 66
122–23, 203, 250 bear 12, 21–23, 29–33, 38–39, 45
animal welfare 60, 130, 159, 180 panda 91
animality 23–24, 80, 83, 93, 122, 223, Rupert Bear 14
229, 250 Winnie the Pooh 48, 50
animation (see cartoon) Bear, Greg 246, 254
animism 15 Beast, The 67–68
ant 90, 92, 255 beast-machine (bête machine) 56, 138–39
260
beaver 33, 79
becoming-animal 251–52
bee 30, 32
beef 45, 51, 65, 84
behaviorism 14, 17, 76, 93, 162
benthos 247, 253
Berger, John 50, 159
bestiality 7, 138, 219, 221–42 (see also
zoophilia)
Bible, The 13, 139, 141
Genesis 138, 142, 152
Old Testament 13, 225
binary 51–52, 67, 138, 244, 249,
253
biomedical research 52, 57–58, 129
bird 7, 22, 30, 32, 38, 41, 59, 66,
77– 78, 148–49, 162, 168, 171,
173– 96, 205, 243, 253
‘Birth of a Vegetarian, The’
(Mankoff ) 47
Blahnik, Manolo 46, 82
blood 6, 33–34, 38, 49, 115, 128–29,
141–42, 146, 149–50, 181, 187–88,
192
blood poisoning 187
blood tunnel 186–88
bluebird 38
body language 17, 225
bone 7, 27, 37, 146–48, 165–66, 171,
186, 248
Bourdieu, Pierre 53
Braidotti, Rosi 220, 240–41, 251
breed 55–56, 75, 87, 89, 163–64, 184,
186, 201–03, 214, 244, 255
broiler 179, 185, 189 (see also chicken)
Browne, Thomas 135, 143, 155
Buck, Frank 89–90
Budiansky, Stephen 16–19, 23–24
Bulliet, Richard 6
Burghardt, Gordon 19, 23
Burt, Jonathan 6, 136, 159–70, 209– 10,
214, 217
Burton, Robert 136, 143–44, 152–54
butcher 35, 49, 69, 83–84, 175, 194
butter 111–13
butterfly 243, 253
Caillois, Roger 168, 241
calf (see cow)
Camden Arts Centre 172, 197, 205,
207–08
camel 1–9, 82
dromedary 4
‘the ship of the desert’ 4
CamelCase 3
index
Cameron, Jenny 190–94
Canada 12, 29, 32, 38–41, 59
cannibalism 53, 66, 123
capitalism 51–54, 136, 159, 250, 253
car 38, 51–53, 64, 231
carnival 75, 88–89
carnivore 27, 70
carnophallogocentrism 222
Cartesian (see Descartes)
cartoon 47, 90–91, 94
Case for Animal Rights, The (Regan) 55
castor 77
cat 16, 39, 74, 79, 85, 109, 125, 203,
205 (see also tiger)
kitten 85–87, 90, 223, 249
cattle (see cow)
Chamberlin, J. Edward 39
Chanel 46, 82
charnelhouse 205, 213
chicken 7, 16, 46, 53–54, 58, 69–70,
77, 79, 90, 93–95, 118, 151, 171–72,
173–96, 249 (see also broiler, cockerel
and poultry)
chicken poisoning 187
chimpanzee 16, 137
circus 17, 56, 65, 81, 89
civet 79
Clarke, Bruce 162, 255–56
class 53, 69–70, 184
Clever Hans 16–18
clownfish (see fish)
cockatoo 249
cockerel 194 (see also chicken)
Coetzee, J.M. 98, 124–25
colonial 42, 54–55
commodity 53, 64–65, 82, 85
community 16, 31, 119, 126, 165,
175–77, 184–85, 189, 192, 194, 203,
213, 225
companion animal 7, 171–72, 175,
180, 182, 188, 191, 211, 225, 237
pet 55–56, 87, 111, 216, 222
virtual pet (see digital game)
companion species 5, 32, 98, 115–34,
133, 143, 219–20, 245–46, 256
Companion Species Manifesto, The
(Haraway) 143, 222, 244
computer game (see digital game)
Connor, Steven 250
consciousness 13, 37, 42, 55, 67, 94,
190, 194
conservation 52, 54–55, 159
consumer 47–48, 53, 56, 59, 64–66,
85, 87, 90, 176, 183
convergent evolution (see evolution)
 index 261

Coolidge, Cassius 92–93 ‘Eat My Fear’ (Lynch) 45, 44–49

cosmopolitics 125–26 echolocation 21–22
cougar 12, 29, 34, 38 ecology 31, 35, 73–76, 79–80, 84, 87,
cow 13, 45, 48–51, 58–60, 65–66, 69, 90–91, 98, 117–18, 124, 130, 240
74, 84, 115, 127, 181 (see also ox) economy 7, 54, 76, 97, 117, 163, 171,
calf 54, 223, 249 173–96
Mad Cow Disease 59–60 ecosystem 73, 75, 77
CowParade 48–50, 66 Edenmont, Nathalia 74
coyote 29 eel 151
creatureliness 135, 141–42 Eeyore 48
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease 60 egg 7, 171, 173–96
Crichton, Michael 70 Egg and I, The (MacDonald) 183–85,
C.S.A. (Community Supported 192–93
Agriculture) 176 elephant 46, 55, 75, 80–85, 93, 138
cyborg 161, 244–47 elk 12, 34–35, 38 (see also moose)
empathy 46, 91, 171, 173–78, 182,
Darwin, Charles 137, 253–54 188–89
Dawkins, Richard 21–22 endosymbiosis (see symbiosis)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica Enlightenment 68, 124, 135, 137, 139
(Vesalius) 144, 147 Europe 17, 29, 34, 39–40, 53, 138,
de Waal, Frans 16, 18–19 226, 228, 231–32
Deacon, Rob 203–04 evolution 5–6, 11, 14, 19, 21–22, 137,
deer 33–34, 77, 94 145, 162, 167, 243, 246, 248, 254
Dekkers, Midas 225, 228–31 (see also natural selection)
Deleuze, Gilles 126, 220, 240, 251–52 convergent evolution 21–22
Dennett, Daniel 14, 19, 22, 24 experiment 5, 7, 17, 57, 61, 65, 76,
Derrida, Jacques 18, 27–28, 39, 98, 97–134, 151, 159–70, 171–72, 179,
121–23, 203, 222, 250 197, 202–04, 210, 214, 250
Descartes, René 56, 138–39, 150, 153 (see also dissection and vivisection)
Di Filippo, Paul 8, 220, 243–58 aesthetic experiments 197–218
diet 5, 58, 64, 85, 99–104, 108, 184 extinction 55, 89, 132
Caveman diet 64 Exxon 55
Neanderthal diet 64
digital game 4, 45, 56, 246 Family of the Future (Kulik) 234, 236–39
virtual pet 56–57 farm 7, 45, 51–54, 56, 61, 64, 66,
dinosaur 70 67, 70, 171, 173–96, 226 (see also
Dior 80–81, 83 agriculture)
Disgrace (Coetzee) 98, 124–25 factory farm 52, 54, 56, 64, 79, 118,
Disney 46, 90–91 195, 185–89
dissection 142, 144–45, 148, 151–53 Farmer, Nancy 98, 115–16, 119, 124
(see also experiment and vivisection) fashion 27, 46, 77–84
Djinn 1–3, 8 faux fur (see fur)
DNA 60, 74, 137, 244 (see also gene) feather 7, 27, 32, 64, 94, 171, 173,
dog 1, 3, 8, 12, 16, 33, 75, 92–93, 249
124–27, 128, 142, 146–47, 151, 203, fellow-feeling 7, 54, 171–72, 173–96
205, 220, 224, 229–31, 236, 239, feminism 3, 30, 36, 61, 68, 117, 122,
244–45, 252 125–26, 129, 131, 189–94, 220,
dolphin 22, 23, 47–48 243–44, 251, 254
dove 74, 151 fetishism 15, 56, 73, 80, 87, 91–92,
‘Dovima with Elephants’ (Avedon) 46, 248
80–82, 85 Finding Nemo 46, 90–92
dromedary (see camel) fish 16, 21, 38, 47, 58, 70, 90–92, 193,
205
eagle 64 clownfish 90–92
early modernity 6, 53, 135, 137–157 tuna fish 47
262 index

Fitzgerald, Deborah 175 honey 7, 171

fly 162, 250 hoof 4, 12, 17, 27, 33, 225
Ford, Henry 51–53 horse 1, 3, 8, 13, 16–18, 143, 181,
Foucault, Michel 1–2, 152–53, 251 234–35, 249
Freud, Sigmund 73, 81–82, 92, 163, ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’
168, 250–51 (Kipling) 1
‘Friend in Need, A’ (Coolidge) 92–93 human-animal studies (see Animal
‘Friendly Owl, The’ (Russell) 35 Studies)
frog 162 human exceptionalism 6, 135, 137–57
Fudge, Erica 74, 138 humanism 74–76, 80, 117, 122–24,
fur 6–7, 27, 33, 64, 77, 110, 166, 171 130, 161, 249 (see also posthuman)
fake fur 45, 64 humanities 2, 113, 136, 163, 220, 256
humanization (see anthropomorphism)
Galen 135, 141–49 humanocentric (see anthropocentrism)
Garrison, Daniel 144–47 Hume, David 13
Gaylin, Willard 15–16 humoral system 140–42
gene 5, 19, 59–60, 74, 122, 137–38, hunting 18, 30–31, 33, 35, 39, 55, 64,
141, 245, 248, 253–54 (see also DNA) 89, 193
Genesis (see Bible) hybrid 109, 138, 162–64, 209, 243
GFP Bunny 74
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 190–95 ice cream 76, 83, 93
giraffe 82, 91 ideology 53–54, 73–76, 135, 143, 155,
Girl Named Disaster, A (Farmer) 98, 232
115–16, 119, 124 in vitro research 52, 57–58
Gould, Stephen Jay 22 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Gouwens, Kenneth 146, 148 Wealth of Nations, An (Smith) 175,
Grassi, Lawrence 37 189–94
‘Greater Tuna’ 47–48, 50 insect 115–16, 128–29, 168, 173, 234,
Grosz, Elizabeth 220, 223, 229–30, 241, 249
234, 236–37 intertextuality 27–28
Guiliani, Rudi 61, 63 intra-action 116–17
guinea pig 98, 115, 119, 124, 205 Iraq 76
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 105–07 irony 45, 51, 57, 61, 65, 154, 168

hair 7, 33, 42, 143, 166, 171, 248 jaguar 243, 247–55
ham 84 Jameson, Frederic 50
Hamadryas baboon 165–68 jellyfish 74, 253
Haraway, Donna J. 5, 98, 115–34, junk food 76, 85–86
137, 139, 143, 159, 163, 167, 220, Jurassic Park (Crichton) 70
222, 244–47 Just So Stories (Kipling) 1
hare 33
Harmon, Byron 28 Kac, Eduardo 74
Harvey, David 135, 142, 149–53 Kanga 48
Harvey, William 51–53, 64–69 kangaroo 45, 48
Hassan, Ihab 51, 65 Kant, Immanuel 20, 121
Heidegger, Martin 11, 20–23, 122 Kennedy, John 14–15, 18–19, 23
hen (see chicken) Kimbell, Lucy 7, 172, 197–218
herd 34, 40 ‘King Elk, The’ (Russell) 12, 34
Hirst, Damien 74, 81, 93 Kipling, Rudyard 1–3, 8
Historiae animalium (Gesner) 143–44 kitsch 46, 87, 92
History of Sex (‘Red Pebbles’) kitten (see cat)
(Serrano) 219, 234–36 ‘Kleo’ (Russell) 12, 34
Homer 13 Koran (see Qur ān)
Homo sapiens 15, 22, 36, 123, 137, 141, 254 Kristeva, Julia 27
homocentric (see anthropocentrism) Kulik, Oleg 219–20, 234, 236–39
 index 263

laboratory 99–114, 120, 127, 131–32, Mickey Mouse 61, 90

159, 163–64, 168, 172, 198, 214, 247 Middle Ages 4, 6, 24, 39
Lagerfeld, Karl 82 Midgley, Mary 14, 23, 159
lamb 47–48, 50, 146 Miletski, Hani 219, 224–27, 230–31
Lamb Chop (puppet) 47, 50 milk 7, 61–63, 99, 171
Lang, Helmut 82–84 Milne, Christopher 48
Larson, Gary 94–95 Milton, John 2
Las Vegas 46, 87, 89–90 mind-body dualism 117, 139, 244
Latour, Bruno 113, 137 Moby-Dick (Melville) 85
leather 7, 64, 74, 77, 171, 175 modernism 50–65, 68 (see also
leopard 19 postmodernism)
Lewes, George Henry 14 mollusc 14–15, 23
Lewis, Sheri 47, 50 monkey 16, 19, 135, 148, 165–69
libel-ity 52, 64–65 Montecore 87–89
libido 7, 219–20, 221–42, 247, 249–52 moose 32, 38 (see also elk)
lice 173 more-than-human 4, 7, 11, 30–32, 41,
Liebenberg, Louis 39–40 172, 217
Lingis, Alphonso 220, 221, 223, 228, Morris water maze 210
241 mouse 38, 61, 74, 90, 111, 120,
lion 13 130, 163, 199, 205–06 (see also
Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee) 98, OncoMouse)
124–25 Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent
Lolita (movie) 67 Tropicanalia, A (di Filippo) 8, 220,
Lord, Linda 171, 177, 185–89, 192–95 243–58
Luce, Nancy 171, 173–77, 179–86, musk 77
188, 191–92, 194–95 myth 82, 229, 232
Lupton, Julia 141
Lyman, Howard 65 Nader, Ralph 64
Lynch, David 45, 48–50 Nagel, Thomas 22, 94
Narcissus 23
MacDonald, Betty 171, 177, 183–86, National Cattleman’s Beef
192–95 Association 65
magic 1, 12, 27, 42, 87, 253 National Fish and Wildlife
Malamud, Randy 5, 46, 54, 71, 73–96 Foundation 55
mammal 30, 37, 59, 74, 99, 165, 171, natural selection 18, 220–21, 253
222–23, 249 (see also evolution)
Manes, Christopher 36 naturalist 36, 143
Margulis, Lynn 220, 239, 244–47, nest 27, 32
253–54 Nevada 46, 87–90
Marty, Sid 4, 12, 32, 35–42 New Age 64, 118
Maturana, Humberto 162 New York Times, The 48, 51, 65–66, 82,
McDonald’s 65 137, 176
McLibel case 65 New Yorker, The 47
MEART (Multi Electrode Array Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 245
aRT) 164, 209–10 Nordstrom, Ursula 70
meat 4, 7, 45, 47–71, 74, 83–84, 118,
125, 127, 171 ‘Old Trolls of Lake O’Hara, The’
mock meat 52, 58–59 (Marty) 37–38
media 27, 45–46, 48, 69, 89, 202 Olympia (Manet) 67–68
Melville, Herman 85 Olympic Peninsula 183, 185, 192
Mendel, Lafayette B. 99, 105, 108, OncoMouse 120, 163
110–13 One Night with Rats in the Service of Art
metamorphosis 8, 23, 220, 243, (Kimbell) 172, 197–206, 211, 215–17
251–56 orangutan 76, 93
metaphysics 51, 65, 222 Orwell, George 70
264 index
Osborne, Thomas B. 99, 105, 108–13
Oyama, Susan 220, 243, 248
owl 33, 35, 48
ox 1, 3, 8, 146, 151, 181 (see also cow)
pain 54, 98, 115–22, 126–31, 178,
190, 250
panda (see bear)
Park, Katherine 145, 154
Parisi, Luciana 254
Passions of the Soul, The (Descartes) 138
Paster, Gail Kern 141
paw 4, 12, 27, 33, 42
pearl 7, 171
Penobscot Poultry 185–89, 192–93
People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals (PETA) 45, 61–63, 69
perfume 77–79
Persimmon (Rauschenberg) 68
pesco-vegetarian (see vegetarian)
pet (see companion animal)
virtual pet (see digital game)
Peterson, John (‘Farmer John’) 176
Pfungst, Oscar 17
phallus 81, 232–35
phallogocentrism 228, 231, 234, 255
(see also carnophallogocentrism)
pig 53, 67–70, 74, 84, 90, 118, 142
Pinky 180–81, 191
Plato 7
Playboar 67–69
Plumwood, Val 21, 30, 41
poetry 2, 4, 27, 29, 34, 36, 38, 40,
124, 171, 173, 175–76, 179–82, 191,
199 (see also zoopoetics)
pollo-vegetarian (see vegetarian)
‘Poor Little Heart’ (Luce) 180–82
Pop-Tarts 85
porcupine 38
pork 45, 84, 90
possum 94
post-anthropocentric
(see anthropocentrism)
posthuman 3, 6, 8, 30, 76, 90, 95,
135–36, 139, 159–70, 219–20, 239,
243–44, 246, 251–52, 255–56
posthumanities 220, 256
postmodernism 4, 41–42, 45–46, 82,
47–71, 160–61 (see also modernism)
poststructuralism 27–30, 40–42
poultry 66, 164, 171, 173–96
(see also chicken)
praying mantis 168, 230, 234
Preston, Christopher J. 39
prey 27, 31
primate 6, 30, 136, 147, 159–70,
204–05 (see also ape)
primatology 18–19, 135, 159–70
prion 52, 59–60
product liability 52, 64–65
psychic economy 182, 186, 190–92
psychology 6, 13, 17, 19, 127, 138,
160, 190, 203, 210, 243
Qur ān 4
rabbit 70–71, 74
rat 5, 7, 16, 19, 22, 57, 97, 99–114,
130, 132, 162–64, 166, 169, 172,
197–218
Rat Evaluated Artwork (Kimbell)
199– 201, 205, 210–12, 216
Rat Fair (Kimbell) 172, 198, 203,
205–09, 216
ratter 198, 201–07, 210, 212, 215
raven 30
Regan, Tom 55–56, 61
Religio Medici (Browne) 155
Renaissance 6, 39, 135, 137–57, 252
ribofunk 247, 251
road 6, 46, 94–95
roadkill 94
Rossini, Manuela 8, 42, 139, 161, 220,
243–58
Rupert Bear (see bear)
Russell, Andy 4, 12, 32–35, 38, 40–42
Russell, Bertrand 13
sacrifice 118–24, 128, 138
Sagan, Dorion 139, 245, 254
‘Sage’ (Russell) 12, 32–34
Samson Agonistes (Milton) 2
Sawday, Jonathan 142, 144–45, 153
seal 22
semiotics 30, 32–33, 40–42, 81–82, 87,
117, 125, 181
material-semiotic 98, 116, 129, 246
Sendak, Maurice 51, 70
Serrano, Andres 219, 234–36
sexism 67, 25, 251
Sexual Politics of Meat, The (Adams) 47,
51, 67, 69, 83
Shannon, Laurie 6, 135, 137–57
shark 74
sheep 146, 151, 181
Shepard, Paul 27, 30–32
shrew 22
shrimp 58, 151
 index 265

Siegel, Taggart 176 tiger 45–46, 55, 87–90 (see also White
Siegfried & Roy 46, 87–90 Tigers of Nevada)
sign language 76 Tigger 48
silk 7, 171 tofuturkey 59
Singer, Peter 61, 79, 138, 159, 221–22, Topsell, Edward 143–44
224, 252 tracking 12, 27, 29–33, 35, 39–41
slaughterhouse 45, 49–54, 66, 84, 185–89 transgenic 74, 164, 246
Smith, Adam 7, 171, 175–79, 188–94 Treatise of Man, The (Descartes) 138
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 138 trout 37–38
Smith, Mick 29 tsunami 75–76, 93
Smith, Robyn 5, 97, 99–114 tuna fish (see fish)
Smuts, Barbara 120, 168 turkey 53, 65–66
snail 131–33, 151 Tyler, Tom 1–9, 11, 13–26, 71, 76,
Snyder, Gary 27, 29, 31, 35–36 91
social science 2, 198–99, 212
sociology 3, 175, 189, 254 Ursula Hamdress 67–68
Socrates 7
sonar (see echolocation) veal 45
soul 138–140, 142, 154–55 vegan 59–60, 204
SPEAK 204 vegetarian 48, 58–59, 70
species narcissism 23 pollo-vegetarian 45, 52, 58–59
speciesism 73, 122, 138, 160, 223, pesco-vegetarian 58
225, 230, 236, 244 Venus d’Urbino (Titian) 67–68
spider 14 Vesalius, Andreas 135, 142, 144–50,
black widow spider 230 152, 155
Squier, Susan 7, 54, 171–72, 173–96 veterinary 17, 98, 115, 124, 171,
squirrel 38, 223 181–82
steak 48 video game (see digital game)
Stengers, Isabelle 126, 200, 212–13 Vietnam war 61
Striffler, Steve 175–76 virtual pet (see digital game)
subaltern 79, 92 virus 15, 52, 59–60
subhuman 16 vitamin 5, 57, 97, 99–114
Sugden, Robert 178, 189–90 vivisection 52, 57–58, 139, 145, 150,
superhuman 18, 21 152 (see also dissection and
Superman 41, 239 experiment)
symbiosis 75, 220, 239–40, 249, 253, 256 von Osten, Wilhelm 16
endosymbiosis 239
symbiogenesis 8, 220, 243–58 W (magazine) 82–83
SymbioticA Research Group 164, 209 Watson, J.B. 162–63
symbolic capital 53–54, 69 whale 22, 77, 85, 151
systems theory 220, 243, 248, 256 White Tigers of Nevada 87–90
Wiener, Norbert 161–62
tail 34, 53, 198, 214 wilderness 12, 28–30, 42, 184–85
Taffy Lovely 67 Winfrey, Oprah 65
Tamagotchi 56–57 (see also digital game) Winnie the Pooh (see bear)
Tampax 85–86, 90 Wise, Steve 56
taxidermy 74 wolf 21, 143, 223
television 4, 34, 45, 76, 89 Wolfe, Cary 2, 256
Thanksgiving 65–66 wool 7, 171
theology 138–39, 141, 152–53, 155 World War I 159
Theory of Moral Sentiments, The World War II 54, 128, 161, 164, 179,
(Smith) 175, 177–78, 189, 192, 194 183–85
Thrift, Nigel 214–15, 217 worm 132, 151, 163, 173
266 index

Xenophanes of Colophon 13 zoology 131–33

zoomorphic 21
Yolacan, Pinar 46, 77–79, 83–84, 93 zoophilia 219, 224–28, 231, 239–41
(see also bestiality)
zebra 82 Zoophrenia (Kulik and Bredikhina) 234,
zoë 122, 240–41 239
zoë-pleasure (see zoopleasure) zoopleasure 7, 219, 221–42
zoo 17, 52, 54–55, 60, 65, 87, 91, zoopoetics 220, 250
159–60, 166, 168 zoopolity 140, 150
London Zoo 165 zoosexuality 8, 219, 224–28, 234–36
Zoo (film) 226 zootopian 135, 140, 151
zooanthropology (see Animal Studies) Zuckerman, Solly 6, 136, 164–69