Representing Animals

Author: Jixuan Zhang

A Man Among Wolves

November 7, 2014 / / 3 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eerUnxonS-I

   A Man Among Wolves is a documentary made by National Geographic. This video is just a 3 minutes clip from the original 2-hour documentary. It mainly tells the life of Shaun Ellis who chose to live his life among a pack of wolves. The video starts with the narrator saying, “This is Shaun Ellis, he’s done something few would dare and few would understand.” Then Shaun sat in front of the camera and said, “For me, personally, it costs family, home, security, financial commitment, everything is gone.” A great portions of this video is depicting the kind of life Shaun had with wolves: he washes his hair by the river, he roars to the wolves, he howls with the whole pack of wolves, he eats raw meat with wolves and he licks wolves very intimately. The narrator then talks about Shaun’s scientific purposes, which are studying and writing about wolves in Poland and America. He dedicated all his time spending with a pack of wolves and eventually became the “alpha male” in the pack.  At the end of the video, the wild life park Shaun and his pack of wolves live in was briefly introduced. There are fences separating the tourists and the animals. One scene that is very worth noting is that as tourists are on the one side of fences observing animals, Shaun is on the other side cuddling with a wolf.

Throughout the whole video, there is a very typical narrative voice of a male as you could hear in any documentary. The background sounds are wolves howling, trees whirling and bird singing. All of these sounds give us a sense of nature, telling us that Shaun and his pack of wolves are living in a truly natural environment.

This amazing video is also relevant to Malamud’s arguments in Zoo Spectatorship. In Malamud’s essay, he is completely against the zoos; he says that spectators disrespect animals in the zoos, and zoos just don’t allow animals to be themselves. In this video, what Shaun does was not just observing wolves at distant. He chose to become one of them in the most natural conditions. He didn’t disturb the original life of wolves at all. Malamud states that, “zoos celebrate people’s power over animals, our penetrating ability to keep them and watch them.” (228). However, Shaun regards himself as one member of the wolf pack. And by doing this, he could appreciate the real beauty of these amazing creatures. So I think Malamud would support Shaun’s way of interacting with the wolves even though it seems extreme to most people.

The purpose of this video is purely educational. As Shaun said himself, “ I wouldn’t be doing this if I don’t think it wouldn’t make a difference.” He successfully showed that man could live in harmony with wolves as long as man respect their way of living.

Sources:

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

 

 

Blog Post #3

October 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The animal producIMG_2358t 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.

 

 

Blot Post #2 Looking into an enslaved monkey’s eyes

September 16, 2014 / / 3 Comments

 

Blog Post #2        Looking into an enslaved monkey’s eyes

Shanghai-monkey    I chose an image from Wikipedia that is a good representation to the modern human-animal relationship. In the picture, a man and a monkey are on the street. The man with a bowl in his hand is begging for money. The really shocking thing about this image is that the man is also holding a rope that surrounds a monkey’s neck. Obviously, the man is leading the monkey. There is smile on the man’s face. The monkey appears to be suffering because he is clenching his fist around the rope. This picture represents a modernized slavery. The only difference is that this is human enslaving animal not human enslaving human.

In Berger’s essay “Why look at animals?” John Berger discusses the enslavement of animals, he quoted Buffo in his work, “ To the same degree as man has raised himself above the state of nature, animals have fallen below it: conquered and turned into slaves”. In this image, the man is at a higher level than the animal. Perhaps the man is being mistreated in real life; he is living at the bottom of human society. However, he could easily vent his anger on the monkey. Mistreating the monkey makes the man feel satisfied that there is always something that underneath him. As Berger says, “They are creatures of their owner’s way of life, the pet completes him”. The monkey is a testimony to the dark side of humanity: how human is willing to scarify another species to fulfill their own satisfaction.

Also the reasons why the man in the picture wants to bring a monkey when begging are worth exploiting. Sadly, the street where the man is begging with the monkey is just a few miles away from my home and I have seen beggars with monkeys more the once in China. Normally, the man trained the monkey to do some tricks or maybe just made the money to make the same begging gesture. Some pedestrians might find the monkey “cute” or “funny” and give the man some money. To the man, the monkey’s value is purely instrumental. The monkey is just served as a tool to make money for the man. The intrinsic value of the monkey is being neglected completely. In Alice Walker’s essay “Am I blue?” she talked about how human has forgotten animal’s right completely, “there are those who never once have even considered animals’ rights: those who has been taught that animals actually want to be used and abused by us”. The reason why this kind of begging is alive not only comes from the man who abuses the animal, but also comes from the indifference to the mistreatment to the animal from the whole society. The whole society is marginalizing animal.

 

 

 

 

 

Sources for the post:

“Shanghai-monkey” by F3rn4nd0 – File: Shanghai man with monkey.jpg. Via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai-monkey.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Shanghai-monkey.jpg

 

John Berger. “About Looking”. Pantheon Books, 1980 print. Sept 10 2014

 

Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue.” Human Rights Anthology. Ed. Lee Peralta. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1995. 438-445. Sept 16 2014

About Sandy

September 5, 2014 / / 4 Comments

index     My name is Jixuan Zhang. Call me Sandy. I’m majoring in Economics. I’m from Chengdu, China. It is a big city located at east part of China .It is a city famous for hot pot and pandas. Hot pot is a very special and local food in Chengdu. Basically you just put  a big simmering metal pot at the dinner table and add a lot of chili and sichuan pepper into the pot. While the pot is simmering, you could add any ingredient you want. Having hot pot every once in a while means that you need to have a very high tolerance of spicy food. And I love spicy food.  I don’t have any brothers or sisters thanks to the single-child policy in China. So growing up in a big city without a sibling can get  quite lonely at times too.

Sadly, I don’t have a dog. It is not easy to have a dog in a big city like Chengdu. But I love dogs and I used to spend a lot of time with my cousin’s dog. It’s a white Labrador.

For this class, I do want to learn a lot about college writing. All my previous experience about college writing comes from FYS, which is obviously not enough at all.

As for my life after class, I spend a lot of time playing soccer and tennis with my friend. I also like to watch soccer games on weekend. Real Madrid and Manchester United are my favorite teams. Although the United is not doing so well recently, I have been supporting them for over 10 years.

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