United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
15 August 2020

Living and Learning the Life of a Captive Animal - In a Zoo or in Any Cage

In an article posted Aug. 14 on Sentient Media, journalist Christina Russo tells
how a life-changing trauma in her life has deepened her already sympathetic
insight into the suffering of animals trapped in the prisons humans force them
to live in. Her account reminded me of comparisons and contrasts I draw in The
Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale, between the death-in-life of animals in
"entertainment" and on industrialized farms.
- Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns

Read: I Was a Journalist Who Reported on Captive Animals -Then I Became One
By Christina M. Russo
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_____________________


"Extinction Through Incarceration"
From The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities
By Karen Davis

At the heart of the zoo's paradoxical status is a sort of double-alienation. On
the one hand the zoo is a sort of prison - a space of confinement and a site of
enforced marginalization like the penitentiary or the concentration camp. And on
the other it cannot subvert the awful reality that the animals, from whatever
vantage point they are viewed, are "rendered absolutely marginal." It
demonstrates, as John Berger is at pains to point out, a basic ecological fact
of loss and exclusion - the disappearance and extinction of animals - through an
act of incarceration. ‑ Michael Watts, "The Age of the Chicken"

In "Why Look at Animals," John Berger presents the environment of the zoo as a
paradigm of false anthropomorphism at its worst. "The space, which modern,
institutionalized animals inhabit," Berger writes, "is artificial."

In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is
illusory. Nothing surrounds [the animals] except their own lethargy or
hyperactivity. They have nothing to act upon - except, briefly, supplied food
and - very occasionally - a supplied mate. (Hence their perennial actions
become marginal actions without an object.) Lastly, their dependence and
isolation have so conditioned their responses that they treat any event which
takes place around them --usually it is in front of them, where the public is
- as marginal. (Hence their assumption of an otherwise exclusively human
attitude - indifference.) . . . At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and
passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan
mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any
more occupy a central place in their attention.

Berger says that animals in the zoo "disappoint" the public, especially the
children, who want to know, "Where is he? Why doesn't he move? Is he dead?"
Animals on factory farms and in laboratories differ from animals in the zoo in
that they are not intended to be viewed, yet all of these animals share the fate
of being prevented from being seen in their own right. Animals on display are
the objects of blind, and blinding, encounters between a human audience and the
animals' human-imposed personas. Animals who break out of their phony images are
punished - further punished, that is, since the condition of spectacular
captivity (captivity for the sake of spectacle) is, of itself, the fundamental
punishment - by being beaten, starved, isolated, sold, killed, or all of the
above. Zoo animals, so-called, are imprisoned in a world that expresses elements
in human nature that no normal nonhuman animal would voluntarily consent to
enter and live in.

Likewise, animals on factory farms are imprisoned in a world which their psyches
did not emanate and which they accordingly do not understand. Forcing our
psychic pattern on animals who fit the pattern only by being "stretched" or
"amputated" to conform is the very essence of the genocidal assault on nonhuman
animal identity, in addition to the direct extermination of millions of animals
every day by humans. As Roberta Kalechofsky writes in Animal Suffering and the
Holocaust, the animal is trapped in the "symbolism of another group. The
animal's life and destiny are under the control of the symbolic signs of
others."

Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in total confinement buildings within
global systems of confinement, and are thus separated from the natural world in
which they evolved. They are imprisoned in alien bodies genetically manipulated
for food traits alone, bodies that in many cases have been surgically altered as
well, creating a disfigured appearance - they are debeaked, detoed, dehorned,
ear-cropped, tail-docked, castrated, and (in the case of piglets) dentally
mutilated - and always without painkillers.

Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in a belittling concept of who they are.
Nor is their predicament new so much as a further turn of the screw that, with
genetic engineering and other refinements of unrestrained scientific violence to
animals firmly in place, continues to turn. In The Animal Estate: The English
and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Harriet Ritvo shows how animals became
surrogates for nineteenth-century agendas, in particular Britain's imperial
enterprise in which "material animals" and "rhetorical animals" embodied the
most powerful possible symbol of human possession and control:

As material animals were at the complete disposal of human beings, so
rhetorical animals offered unusual opportunities for manipulation; their
positions in the physical world and in the universe of discourse were mutually
reinforcing. Their ubiquity made animals particularly available to the
Victorians, either in the flesh or as something to talk about. They figured
prominently in the experience even of city dwellers. The streets were full of
cabhorses and carthorses; flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were driven to
market once or twice a week; many urbanites raised pigs and chickens in
crowded tenements, or bred a variety of pets, from pigeons to rabbits to
fighting dogs.

Although these creatures might be strong in the muscular sense, they were also
manifestly powerless, as were bulls in rural fields, lions in menageries, and
even the dangerous game stalked by hunters on the African plains or in the
Indian hills. And in the rhetorical sphere they were less potent still. If the
power of discourse lies in its inevitable restructuring and re-creation of
reality, the ability of human beings to offer counterinterpretations places
inevitable limits on the exercise of that power. Animals, however, never talk
back.

The many separate animal-related discourses of nineteenth-century England
constituted a single larger unit, which both discussed and exemplified a
central theme of domination and exploitation. - Harriet Ritvo, The Animal
Estate

Available online:
The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities

UPC Bookstore:
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United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
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