Author: Christopher Kelly

The video I chose comes from youtube and is called, “Pig rescues baby goat”. In the video a drowning goat is pushed onto shore by a pig that swims into the water to help. The cameraman’s narration can be heard at the beginning of the video when he frantically yells, “Goat in the water” and then at the end once the goat has been saved he says, “And there he is, the hero pig”. According to the video description the larger context is that the baby goat fell into a pond at a petting zoo and got its foot stuck underwater, which explains how it became trapped. The video is also filmed in a continuous wide shot, with the goat in the center of the frame and the pig appearing in the bottom left hand corner.

When I first saw this video I was captivated by it because, like the zoo spectators in Randy Malamud’s essay “Zoo Spectatorship”, I fell victim to the voyeuristic mindset and found myself interested in the video because of the element of danger that was involved. The internet is filled with video similar to “Pig rescues baby goat” in which a cute animal in peril is saved and many of them rack up millions of views because they allow the viewer gets a thrill from seeing a cute animal experiencing a dangerous situation. Malamud sums up this one-sided voyeuristic experience with the quote, “The voyeur seeks a spectacle, the revelation of the object of his interest, that something or someone should be open to his inspection and contemplation; but no reciprocal revelation or openness is conceded” (Malamud 230). Malamud’s definition of Voyeurism explains why videos like “Pig rescues baby goat” are so popular: they allow the viewer to see something not often experienced in their day-to-day lives and because of this the viewer gains an incredible amount of satisfaction by living vicariously through the spectacle that they are watching, which in this case is a potentially perilous scenario in which a goat avoids death by being helped by a fellow animal. Much like the zoo spectator the viewer of “Pig rescued by goat” is aware that the act of spectating is invasive, but the viewer continues to do so anyway because they get a thrill from seeing this rare side of the animal kingdom, the only problem is that the experience that they are presented with is entirely fabricate. The video “Pig rescues goat” was created by comedian Nathan Fielder as a social experiment to see if he could create a viral video by using a perilous scenario involving two adorable animals, and the result was a success: the video went viral within days. The comedian used apathy, voyeurism, and cute animals to entice the viewer and was so incredibly successful at doing so that the video received 9 million views. When paired with the Malamud reading it becomes clear that this hoax is no different than the entire experience of zoo spectator ship because both scenarios highlight the sociopathic tendencies that we as voyeurs have developed over time. According to Malamud zoos, “foster sociopathy” by giving people the opportunity to get pleasure from feeding animals and watching them mate and defecate. By this logic videos like “Pig rescues baby goat” also feed our sociopathic appetite because they present us with fabricated perilous situations that we ultimately derive satisfaction from because we get to experience a spectacle that is cute or rare. The hoax video is clearly manipulating the viewer’s empathy and love for cute animals, but in doing so it is able to reveal that we as human beings are incredibly voyeuristic and have a deep-rooted fascination with spectating.

Malamud, Randy. Zoo Spectatorship. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Print.

For this assignment I chose to analyze a Borden cheese stick package, which features an anthropomorphic cow logo on the front of packaging. The cow in the logo is smiling and wearing a necklace mad of daisies, which I believe is supposed to suggest that Borden only uses happy cows to make their cheese and dairy products. There is also a sun shining and bright, upbeat colors surrounding the cow, which insinuates that the farms that Borden raises the cows on are nurturing, natural environments where cows have access to sun light and other necessary amenities. The package also features the name “Elsie” next to the cow, which serves to humanize her and make it seem as though the farmers who raise these cows form personal relationships with their livestock and view them as unique individuals with intrinsic value.

If you were to view the anthropomorphic cow on the package with regards to Foer’s idea of species barrier it would become increasingly apparent that this cow symbol represents the large species barrier that exists within our current food system. In the Words/Meanings section of “Eating Animals” Foer discusses a phenomenon in which humans find themselves drawn to one particular animal while completely disregarding the wellbeing of another smiliar animal. The example that Foer provides focuses on a zoo in Berlin that brought in hundreds of guests by having a cute polar bear named Knut, yet they fed those same animal lovers Wurst de Knut, which was a pork product made entirely from factory farmed pigs. This inability to care for the wellbeing of all species across the board is especially evident through the advertisement of many animal byproducts.  If I were to go into the grocery store and look in the milk section I’d most likely find dozens of cartons and dairy products featuring happy cows on the label, and might even pick one brand over another if one mascot really pulls at my heart strings. This is because species barrier had led me to sympathize with the cute, anthropomorphic version of a cow and disregard the wellbeing of the actual cow that was milked and used for it’s by products. The species barrier causes humans to value one animal, or in this case representation of an animal, over another because that particular animal has a greater usefulness or appeal than another. This is a flawed system because it creates a false dualism that exists just to sell products. These products are marketed to manipulate people’s emotions and in doing so they fail to actually get people interested in the wellbeing of the animals that are being depicted. This is not an issue if the farmers genuinely practice family farming techniques, but if the company marketing these products engages in factory farming practices then this is incredibly misleading and wrong because their cows are definitely not happy in the conditions they’ve placed them in.

Borden’s depiction of cows on their packaging also embodies the new type of Anthropomorphism that Berger discusses in “Why Look at Animals?” when he says, “Anthropomorphism was the residue of the continuous use of animal metaphor. In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them” (Berger 11). Berger’s ideas on anthropomorphism are important because they help to reveal that anthropomorphism has historically been used to describe the human condition through animal metaphors, but the growing need for animal by-products in last two centuries have led us to lose our connection with these creatures and in turn reduce them to “the model of a machine”. This explains why Borden uses “happy cows” on their packages because it comforts the consumer by making them think they’re supporting a brand that still views animals anthropomorphically, when in reality Borden is just using happy, anthropomorphic depictions of these animals to sell more products. The anthropomorphizing of animals on food packaging is really just an attempt to suggest that the animals are happy to be used for their meat and by-products and are raised in acceptable conditions.