Not too long ago in class we talked about the Spanish Nurse that was infected with Ebola, and consequently the authorities euthanize her dog.
Well, I saw on the news recently the the Dallas Nurse that was infected with Ebola also has a dog. Luckily, authorities will not euthanize the dog. More about this story is found here.
ALBANY, New York—Can an animal who possesses the essential qualities of personhood ever be considered, in the eyes of the law, a person?
As of now, the answer is no. But a panel of New York state judges yesterday considered that question, which was posed by a group called the Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Tommy.
As I strolled through Wawa in search of a potential package to photograph, I came across a
Jack Links Beef Jerky package. There is an image of a bull on the front and back of the package. The black outline of a bullhead is the well-known logo for Jack Links Beef Jerky. The animal is depicted in a masculine manor. An emphasis on the head and especially including the horns in the logo gives us a feeling of strength and toughness. Jack Links Beef Jerky marketing definitely targets men of all ages. The bullhead is pinnacle for men to believe that if they eat this product they too will become tough and strong like a bull. The image also takes on a phallic look, more so targeting the male gender and the concept of mascunlinity. The terms Jack and Jerky are relatable by men because it may suggest a euphemism for masturbation. The animal isn’t really doing much in this image. We don’t even see the face of the bull just the black outline as a logo, and there is not real setting. Perhaps this is to detach the buyer’s thoughts from what they are specifically eating (an animal) instead of the concept of what they are eating. The animal is being represented solely as a product, to be used for instrumental purposes only. John Berger would also recognize the animal being used for its instrumental value as seen in his essay Why Look At Animals?
If Jonathan Foer, author of Eating Animals, were to analyze this package, I could assume the numerous assumptions he would make about it. When seeing the image of the animal he would be curious to what type of animal the beef is coming from? As the image seems to depict a bull, he may argue that the company is unsentimental towards animals since we can’t directly identify what animal is in the logo. He could argue the animal may be some other beef processed animal like a cow. He would than most likely question how this animal was farmed, factory or family? Or he might not even bother with that question considering he believes soon enough the term factory farm will fall out for a few reasons. First in his hopes that there will be no more factory farms, or second that there will be no family farms to compare them to. Foer would want to know whether the meat was Kosher or not. Coming from a Jewish heritage and especially the consequences his grandmothers endured during the war, this would be important. Kosher would be defined as that if humans must eat animals, it is done respectfully and free of suffering. Foer would probably agree that along with this package comes a familiar story. Its the same story the male gender has been told about eating meat since we can remember. Eating meat makes you big and strong. I can remember my nonno (italian for grandfather) would always tell me to eat a lot of meat and I will become a strong man like him, then he would flex his arm. Whether its the stories we are told, or what the media projects, eating meat has always been seen as a form of masculinity.
This article
from the NYT on a new study of primate intelligence reminded me of Brian O’s question about animals and learning. In this study, chimps were observed not only making tools (old news) but learning how from one another.
The animal produc
t I have chosen is a container of chicken liver. On the lid and side of the container, there is a picture of a hen sitting there. Above the chicken there is text that reads: “ Quality guaranteed”. The text forms a circle around the hen. I cannot tell if the hen is laying eggs or just sitting there. It is not a photograph. It is a realistic drawing. Right next to the hen, it has the name of the product, “chicken livers”.
From customer’s perspective, the hen depicted on the container is very peaceful. It can give customer a sense of safety that the livers they eat all comes from hens like this. Jonathan Foer would definitely say that the hen depicted here is very misleading. In Foer’s book Eating Animal, he goes into great depth to talk about the living condition of chickens. Firstly, these chickens are living in the so called battery cages. Each of the chicken just has sixty-seven square inches of floor space (Foer 47). This space is so small so that the chicken could not even sit there peacefully. The chicken we eat can never live a life as peacefully as the chicken in the picture. Also Foer points out that there are two kinds of chicken for farmers, broilers (chickens that become meat) and layers (chickens that lay eggs). And they are designed to be completely different: they have different genes, different bodies and even different metabolism (Foer 48), the image on this container is a layers, not a broilers. Further, on the lid of the can, bolded words say “ all natural”. There is no certain criterion that we could use to determine whether the food is natural or not. And under the circumstance that ninety-nine percent of the meat we eat today comes from factory farm, we are more than certain that the “All natural” here is just a gimmick. Even though one could claim that the hens we eat would never be like the one we see in the picture, we could never ban the company from putting the image on their product. It is just a drawing.
This can of chicken liver reflects the reality of the meat market now. Retailers tried their best make the general public believe the meat they eat comes from animals that are living in a way much better condition than they really are.
Works cited:
Foer, Jonathan S. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print.
Chik-fil-a Billboard
This is a Billboard of two cows writing “Eat Mor Chikin” by Chick-Fil-A. This is part of Chick-Fil-A’s advertising campaign where cows are begging people to “eat more chicken” because burgers are a clear staple of most fast food places and Chick-Fil-A serves chicken exclusively. In this advertisement released by Chick-Fil-A in May of this year, a woman is eating a burger when a cow walks up to her on her park bench and watches her eat the burger, intending to imply the cow is making her feel guilty. The cow then gestures to a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cow” to imply that this cow is looking for her friend and the woman is possibly eating her. While I personally find this joke to be mildly amusing and relatively harmless, if you really think about it, its also quite morbid.
The commercial is clearly anthropomorphizing the cows in order for us to sympathize with them. It’s intended to be humorous but this brings the question as to whether it is entirely ethical to make a joke out of eating chicken and beef. I am curious that if Burger King released a similar video but in place of a cow, they put a chicken, looking for her friend. Would someone feel as guilty about a chicken as they would a cow? Or because we eat both would we not care about either much? As Berger and Foer both discuss, we tend to rank the value of an animal based on their intelligence and whether or not we are “familiarized” with the animal as a companion.
So if we were to watch this commercial, do we make the assumption that the advertisers are using this value system to make us feel bad for the cow and in turn want to eat more chicken? Because clearly the chickens aren’t making a campaign for us to eat more cows. Are they as smart as the cows to start protesting chicken eating? Where are the hens confronting those chowing down on their friends by protesting it with an “Eat mor Cow” campaign? If we were faced with “Battery Cages” or “Broiler Chickens” would we still be willing to go get Chick-Fil-A?
While we accept that this is intended to be a light hearted commercial it’s interesting to me that clearly the advertisers are using what seems to be a commonly understood fact: we don’t like being confronted with what we’re truly eating. The author of Eating Animals, Johnathan Foer, discusses our imbedded guilt in “Eating Animals” in multiple ways, about the processing of meat and all that is wrong with it and why we are so uncomfortable knowing these facts. We all kind of pretend we don’t feel guilty but I’m sure that if we were confronted with a cow watching us while we ate a burger, most people would probably feel at least a small pang of guilt and maybe stop eating it until we eventually crave it again.
Foer writes:
“Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I’ve discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory– disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own (Foer 30) .”
I think this commercial, despite its light-hearted intentions, tugs at us a little deeper. We all recognize that we would feel guilty if a cow confronted us about eating her friend, because perhaps we know the torture that went in to making that delicious burger we’re chomping into. In America, cows aren’t typically viewed as companions but they also are generally viewed as more intelligent than a chicken, even though we still eat them. By anthropomorphizing them however, by having them look for their friends and send humans desperate pleas to not eat them, we begin to sympathize with the animal. The reason the ad-campaign has such mass-appeal is because we’re all chuckling at the fact that, as Foer says above, we all feel at least a little bit guilty about eating animals.
The talks we have had the past couple of days has got me thinking about animal intelligence, and I couldn’t help but to think about the tests showing crow intelligence. This video also talks briefly about something we have talked about in class, the thought of how we value intelligence based on our own idea of what intelligence is. Another amazing video about a crow intelligence is on Ted Talks, which discusses how intelligent crows really are.
There are lots of stories about Excalibur, the dog exposed, to Ebola who was euthanized. Here’s one. It’s interesting that concern for the dog tends to be represented as separate from concern for humans (look at the way this article ends). As if people who care about one by default do not care about the other.
ETA: Such rhetoric is pretty common whenever anyone expresses concern for non-human animals, and its intent is to demean that concern. It also reinscribes the human/animal binary by implying that concern for non-human animals is somehow different from concern for human animals, that a reasonable person could not have concern for all animals, human and non-human.
Image source: time.com/3457587/the-case-against-eating-ethically-raised-meat/
Just in time for our discussion of Eating Animals—an article in Time magazine about why “happy” meat isn’t what it appears to be.
When you first think of a cow, the first word that pops in your head is probably not skinny. In 1994, Nestle added the Skinny Cow brand to their vast food empire. On each product of the Skinny Cow line, the customer views the iconic “skinny cow.” This slender cow, that is actually named Skinny, is meant to show consumers that “great-tasting snacks” do not have to mean you have to eat unhealthily, according to Skinny cow’s website. This particular product that is photographed is their “Divine Filled Chocolates Candy.”
On this package, Skinny is lying on top of a banner of the product name in a quite comfortable and flirtatious manner. She has a tape measurer around her to demonstrate all of the weight she has lost thanks to these delicious snacks. Nestle even took a next step and gave Skinny some mascara, red lipstick, contacts for bright hazel eyes, and a curvy figure. Nestle has anthropomorphized this cow with woman-like features and even a name to relate her to the most-likely woman consumer.
Prior to reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Eating Animals, I did not really give much thought to the depictions of animals on products. After reading Foer, I looked a little bit deeper and more carefully at the word choices and the entire image of the cow Nestle specifically picked out on the packaging.
Just look at the word “Skinny” in Skinny Cow. Nestle specifically did not choose the word healthy or low-calorie. They chose the word “skinny” for a reason. They wanted customers to give their product a second look as they passed it in the candy and snack aisle. Skinny replaces the over-killed words healthy and low-calorie, representing the aspirations of the modern day woman. Perhaps Nestle also chose to use the word “skinny” because, as Foer points out with the terms healthy, fresh, natural, etc., it allows the company to use words that are associated with positive results to the consumer and positive conditions to the animals, all while actually being not necessarily true. Foer, for instance, demonstrates these misleading labels with the word “fresh.” According to the United States Department of Agriculture, “fresh” poultry refers to poultry that has “never had an internal temperature below 26 degrees or above 40 degrees Fahrenheit” (Foer 61). This example showcases how easy it is for a consumer to assume that their “fresh” poultry refers to something completely different to what it actually is. This does not only stop with “fresh.” This also applies to copious amounts of words including “natural,” and even “skinny”- which most likely has nothing written about in USDA regulations.
If you visit the Skinny Cow website, you will encounter the following text, “Meet Skinny, a.k.a. the goddess of all things delicious and indulgent. She laughs often, lives life to the fullest, and never denies herself a Skinny snack.” After my own general knowledge and reading Eating Animals, I cannot help but have to reread those two sentences a few times. The irony involved is quite apparent. In the United States, where now “Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs… are factory farmed” (34), I found it hard to believe that these cows that make the milk needed for the Skinny Cow brand have any life that is lived to the “fullest” and consists of laughter.
John Berger points out in About Looking that the Industrial Revolution and capitalism have lead to the reduction of the animal in the food industry: “animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities” (Berger 13).
Sources:
Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 3-28. Print.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Print.
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