Touching the Beast

It’s true - I’m a toucher. We’re all a bunch of touchers actually, especially when it comes to other animals. This week we went to Heathrow Special Needs Farm for my company’s annual charity help-out day. We turn up and paint fences, lay gravel paths, that kind of thing. The farm is somewhere for disabled people to interact with animals, among them horses, donkeys, pygmy goats, rabbits, pigs and chickens. The sights, sounds and smells are stimulating, but most of all, the farm is a place of touch; the most satisfying of all the senses.

I have a soft spot for the goats, particularly Naomi, a brittle and bony old girl, who shares a toothy smile when I stroke her neck. The fur is black and wiry, and I can feel her papery skin underneath. In fact, many in our group seem drawn to stroking the animals, clustering around the donkeys or goats to get that satisfying feeling of fur under their fingertips.

                                          Naomi

So why the urge for contact?

Touch is the first way that we explore the world. As babies, our curiosity is sated by feeling things with our hands and putting things in our mouths. We love to touch and we love to be touched back (and here I talk about touch in a non-sexual manner). Yet, following on from last week’s post, when I wrote about the body being a political object, touch is often viewed in terms of a dominance/submission dichotomy, in which the touch-er exhibits their dominance, and the touch-ee displays their inferiority by submitting to the touch. Think about business men slapping each other on the back, or an insecure boyfriend showing his ‘ownership’ by placing a hand on his girlfriend’s knee.

…affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance’s anodyne – it is dominance with a human face. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand, dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is the pet.

Yi-Fu Tuan, 1984

Am I dominating Naomi when I lay my hand on her neck? I would say that it’s important for the touch to feel reciprocal; instead of just tolerating the contact, the goats seem to like it. They arch their necks in satisfaction or offer the underside of their chins when you draw your hand away. I’d say that Naomi likes the feeling of having her beard scratched, although obviously I can’t be certain, having only a rudimentary understanding of her body language.

There are times, though, when a touch is hostile, even violent. All dominance and no affection. Norman Autton describes child abuse as a disorder of touch, and this perhaps can be translated to animal abuse as well. Arnold Arluke interviewed adolescents who had a history of harming animals, often their childhood pet, or a neighbour’s. Interviewees described drowning, burning, delivering electric shocks, taping limbs together, cutting tails off, punching and kicking animals. These deviant activities are interpreted as a way for children to engage in ‘adult-like’ behaviours, in practicing the control of other beings. Surely, though, there is also the element of touch to consider. The adolescents rarely describe actually wanting to inflict pain; rather, they are curious to see the reaction of the animal. Where some children might explore animals through stroking, others choose a more aggressively tactile way to explore. Their touch goes beyond the surface of the skin, to the very inside itself.

In Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer quotes a slaughterhouse worker who describes his actions on a pig. A passage that I’m not going to forget in a hurry has the worker ramming an iron pole deep into the pig’s rectum and then slicing the front of the pig’s nose clean off, like a slice of luncheon meat. He, too, wanted to see how the pig would react. I remember reading somewhere that ‘we hate them so much because they don’t fight back’, and I wonder if the slaughterhouse worker wanted to see whether a pig would finally fight back. Either way, we’re back to touch. Good, bad, comforting, terrifying. How does the worker touch animals outside the slaughterhouse? How is he required to touch animals at work? Slaughterhouses often resemble dis-assembly lines. Maybe he was checking that the pig wasn’t an automobile.

Now it gets interesting. Recent studies have shown that Western babies and nursery school-aged children are touched less than 12 percent of the time. With concerns about the accusation of sexual abuse, nurses, teachers and even some parents are abstaining from any incidental contact, including affectionate contact. But we need contact. Autton describes it as ‘skin hunger’, and it’s not just a human thing, it’s a mammal thing. We literally need to touch each other to live and to thrive…and to know how to touch other beings. Tiffany Field has written about ‘touching cultures’ producing low incidences of adult aggression, and ‘limited touching cultures’ producing high levels of aggression in adults. She cites doctors such as J.H. Prescott suggesting that touch deprivation in childhood actually leads directly to physical violence later in life.

It would be interesting to be able to compare the childhood touch-experiences of the pet abusing adolescents with non-abusing adolescents, but this isn’t an exact science – yet. If I were to coin a phrase for it, I might go so far as to say that physical abusers of people and animals experience ‘touch frustration’. For whatever reason, their exploration of other bodies is transgressive and harmful, and that reason might well have a direct correlation with their own experiences of touch.

I touch Naomi gently for the same reason the slaughterhouse worker touched the pig with such violence: I want to see her reaction. I wait for her to communicate back, and she does.