Ok, so I’d been wondering for a while what would be a good way to start the Anthrozoospace blog, and then on Tuesday I ended up at a lecture on Biopower and Biopolitics. If that sounds intense, I can confirm that it was. What was great about the lecture actually came from the Q&A session afterwards, and was prompted by the dullest, most banal question out there, the groan-inducing ‘but if we should treat all living beings equally, how do we know how to treat vegetables?’
That old chestnut.
Anyway, the lecture was one of four that made up a conference entitled ‘Unruly Creatures: The Art and Politics of the Animal’, which took place at the Natural History Museum in London, which I actually didn’t ‘end up’ at, I booked a ticket, months ago in fact, because I wanted to experience a Steve Baker (author of Picturing the Beast and The Postmodern Animal) lecture. Baker’s talk was good, but the first speaker out of the blocks, philosopher and English professor Cary Wolfe, got us onto the topic of Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ and the notion that the body – any body - can be an object of government, and is subject to the will of the powerful and mighty. The idea was to use biopolitics to shine a light on our (governments’, all of them) schizophrenic attitude towards animals, e.g. why the U.S. is currently considering ‘awarding’ great primates human-like rights while the wide scale practice of factory farming still regurgitates and then sucks away the lives of millions of cows, pigs, chickens...
It was mind-bending stuff, and I’m not sure how that vegetable question got asked, but Wolfe’s answer referred us to Jeremy Bentham and his oft-quoted 1789 observation that the question of any moral responsibility we have towards animals was not ‘‘Can they reason?’, nor ‘Can they talk?’, but ‘Can they suffer?’’
Wolfe proposed that the question we should in fact be asking ourselves is not ‘Can they suffer?’, but ‘Can they flourish?’, i.e. rather than ‘inviting everybody into the boat’, something comes into focus when we start thinking about a living being’s potential to flourish, to thrive, and what it means for us to take away that potentiality when we kill/capture/otherwise maim an animal. Clearly (I’m not going to say arguably, who would argue it?), a carrot has less ability to ‘flourish’ than a macaque, and a dragon fly has less ability to ‘flourish’ than a human being. A hierarchy of sorts emerges.
This line of thought was picked up seamlessly by philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret, in her talk ‘Experimenting with Politics and Happiness – through Sheep, Cows, and Pigs’, which featured a short film about primatologist Thelma Rowell. Rowell, who after thirty years of studying apes had grown sick of the automatic distinction that humans tend to make between primates and the rest of the animal kingdom, went off to study the interactions of sheep, and assures us that they can live unexpectedly complex and rewarding social lives, if only we would let them survive long enough to develop them (the scope for social interaction with others of one’s species can surely be considered an important indicator of the ability to flourish).
Despret believes vehemently that the question is not ‘Can they suffer?’, but ‘Can they be happy?’ She argues that people who rely on Bentham’s original observation for moral guidance are taking almost as Cartesian a position as the followers of Descartes themselves (contentious, I know), in that they are still treating the animal as a recipient, or a reactor, rather than an active subject – an actor. So the question ‘Can they be happy?’ places the animal solidly in an autonomous position in which it has the power to fulfil itself. Furthermore, the way that an animal becomes happy is through interacting with things that interest them, and, when a being is interested in something, they become interesting.
To summarise. Once we observe an animal’s capacity to be interested, they become interesting. Once they become interesting, we finally understand what we take away from them when we keep them tethered in a stall all their lives. People who work in highly intensive farms do not find the pigs interesting, because the pigs aren’t interesting…they have nothing to interest them. The potential to flourish is present, but is denied. The potential to be happy is present, but is denied.
We might all have opinions about which of these questions is the most pressing. Having interviewed several farmers in the past, I am confident in saying that most of those farmers would confirm that ‘their’ animals have the ability to suffer, and to be happy, in the same way that they told me how clever their favourite ewe was, how bonded their sheep families were with each other, how much joy their cows expressed when let into the fields for the first time after winter. To those farmers there is no question; it’s all self evident. But when the time comes those same animals are still sent to slaughter, because that’s the way it works.
All three questions are not intended simply to be the objects of philosophical ruminating. They are political questions, relating to the governance of the very weak by the very powerful. We kind of, sort of, pretty much know that the way we are governing is wrong. So…how should we treat animals?
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