Representing Animals

Tag: Berger

Why a 1500-Pound Murder Machine Does Not Belong in a Petting Zoo

November 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The video I chose depicts a group of children at Yellowstone National Park approaching far too close to a wild bison bull with the encouragement of an adult filming the events (hereafter referred to as “Moron”), and then running for their lives when the bison – entirely predictably – charges them.  This human-animal interaction illustrates the dangers of substituting voyeuristic thrill for respect for an animal.

The very first thing we hear in the video is Moron assuring the children that “he’s friendly” (B Loy).  Rather than shepherding the children away from the beast that has greater strength and weight than all of them combined, Moron just stands back and films the children as they approach the bison while repeatedly exclaiming “oh my gosh” (B Loy).

As the children approach, the bison turns to face them and begins shaking its head and hind quarters about while snorting loudly: classic warning signs that it is preparing to charge.  Moron even notices these “gestures,” (B Loy), although he doesn’t take any action to mitigate the considerable danger facing the children; whether this is because he didn’t realize what the gestures meant or because he was simply too empty-headed to act is unclear but given what we’ve seen of him so far, either is possible.  The bison then moves to block the path it saw the children taking; because it stands its ground as the humans approach and even moves to block their path, this is clearly territorial behavior and not self-preservation instincts.

Which is bad.

As the children continue advancing, the bison’s warning gestures become more pronounced and it lowers its head – this bull is going to charge whatever draws its attention next.  The two children who had managed to get past the bison are saved from almost certain death by a man who quickly hops onto the wooden footpath on the other side of the bison, the sudden motion causing it to charge.  The main group of tourists flees away from the bison’s territory, but one child breaks from the group and runs parallel to the border; the animal singles this child out and pursues him, quickly closing the distance until the child turns and sprints away from the bison’s territory with less than a yard between him and the animal, at which point the bison, satisfied that it has made its point, abandons the chase (B Loy).

It is by sheer luck that nobody was killed in this incident; it’s hardly uncommon to hear about tourists gored or trampled by bison, almost universally killing the tourist.  The worst part about this kind of thing is that it’s a 100% completely avoidable situation; even a modicum of common sense would have defused the situation before it escalated to the point that it did.  It was by sheer luck that nobody was killed, and if it were to happen again fatalities would be almost guaranteed.  It’s truly infuriating that nobody had that little bit of common sense not to approach Nature’s Rage-Filled Battering Ram.

Well, we’re calling the camera guy Moron for a reason.

Since I grew up on a farm that counted several heads of bison among its livestock (the bison were there before we were), I’m more familiar with the temperament and physical capabilities of bison than your average person idiot dad on vacation.  This is why I find it simply infuriating seeing things like this charge happen.  Not only does this sort of behavior jeopardize the safety of the tourists but it also epitomizes the marginalization of both the animal itself as it is reduced to a check box on the family’s vacation summary as well as its “wild-ness” as the people in the video treat it like it is a tourist attraction there solely for their amusement.

Bison are not animals to be trifled with; they can weigh to 2,000 pounds (read: a lot bigger than a person), run at up to 30 miles per hour (read: a lot faster than a person), jump up to six feet vertically (read: a lot higher than a person), and their heads sport two long, sharp horns sprouting from a bone plate in the skull that they can use to smash through a reinforced fence (read: a bison will ruin your day).  Furthermore, bison are typically ill-tempered and remarkably unintelligent animals with highly aggressive and territorial dispositions, and will not hesitate to use the aforementioned physical abilities to run down and kill anything that threatens it or intrudes on their turf.  As seen in the video, that includes tourists small children with questionable adult supervision.  Long story short, despite being herbivores a bison can and will mess you up if you don’t treat it with caution and respect.

The group’s close approach to the bison also encroaches on its “wild-ness” as an animal and reduces it to a sideshow stop on Yuppie Dad’s Great Yellowstone Vacation Plan (patent pending).  The father displays several behaviors that Malamud condemns, such as engaging in the voyeuristic thrill of watching the bison from a, at least in theory, superior vantage point of greater power (Malamud 221).  While he (thankfully) doesn’t take it as far as the physical self-stimulation Nimier witnessed (qtd. in Malamud 220), Moron does take part in the all-too-common metaphorically masturbatory exercise of wrapping oneself in warm, fuzzy feelings of superiority while sipping on a hot mug of smugness and looking at the “inferior” animals of the wild.  In the eyes of the tourists in the video, the bison was not a living, breathing creature but a tourism draw like Old Faithful (note: at no point has a geyser ever tried to violently kill somebody).

By reducing the bison to nothing more than a spectacle to provide fleeting amusement on vacation, the animal that was once revered as a sacred creature by the Plains Indians is marginalized until it is nothing more than a silhouette on the souvenir T-shirt your 15-year old son wears to let all his friends know about his awesome summer vacation.  The bison has been marginalized to something that is only good to look at for a few minutes by the side of a road; the animal that once owned the Great Plains has been reduced to Yellowstone National Park’s Bison™, merely a mascot for a tract of land in Wyoming and Montana – or for a certain clearly inferior liberal arts college that shall remain nameless (looking at you, Chris).  In the popular opinion, bison are simply objects for humans to look at in mild-to-moderate wonder; few people particularly care if the bison is looking back.  Berger identified this imbalance in Why Look at Animals?: “animals are always the observed.  The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance” (Berger 16).  Humans are too wrapped up in looking at the bison from the windows of their Winnebagos to bother wondering if the bison is looking back, and what it might think of them.

By forgetting that bison are more than source material for screen-printed images on T-shirts, they marginalize the animal until they also forget the sheer strength and lethality it carries.  This marginalization is the result of the reduction of the bison to a mascot or a tourist attraction, and stems from Man’s tendency to look down on animals who do not resemble himself.  However, the human perception of the bison, no matter how erroneous, cannot change simple facts such as this:

Those kids are damn lucky.

 

Works Cited:

B Loy.  “Angry bison charges small child at Yellowstone in scary video.”  Online video clip.           YouTube.  YouTube, 5 Sep. 2012.  Web.  9 Nov. 2014.

Berger, John.  Why Look at Animals?.  New York: Vintage International.  1977.  Print.

Malamud, Randy.  “Zoo Spectatorship.”  The Animals Reader.  Ed. Linda Kalof and Amy                Fitzgerald.  New York: Oxford Press.  Print.

Happy Cow?

October 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

sourcreamThis sour cream container has a picture of a cow grazing on it. The cow is not being anthropomorphized in any way. The cow appears to be healthy and eating fresh grass. This picture makes it seem like the cow used to make the sour cream was given plenty of grass to eat and exercise. The terms “Great Value” and “fat free” also appear on the container.

I had previously not thought about or even noticed this image on my sour cream before. However, after reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer I have begun to see its significance. This image is being used to manipulate the consumer in order to increase market sales. The field of  grass in this image extends around the whole container in order for the consumer to imagine that a free-range cow is being used to create this product. According to Foer, “the free-range label is bullshit” (61). The reason that this image would increase market sales is because, as Foer notes, most humans like to imagine that they are eating a “happy” cow due to the fact that most consumers care are ethical and have respect for the animals that they consume. Unfortunately, due to images like the one shown above, they are misinformed.  The most access to the outdoors and large green fields that the majority of the cows used to make sour cream get is through a window. Although we would like to think that the cow that aided in the production of the sour cream that ended up on our plates was given access to plenty of food and light, as the cow that is depicted in the picture above is, the truth is that “factory farms commonly manipulate food and light to increase productivity, often at the expense of the animals’ welfare” (Foer 59). The “Great Value” being indicated on this sour cream container points to the low cost of sour cream. However, this low cost is due to increased productivity caused by industrialized farming which Foer would argue is not a great value at all. The term “fat free” is on the container for marketing purposes because many Americans are concerned with becoming overweight.  There is a higher obesity rate in America now than ever before due to increased consumption of animal products, which tend to be full of fat. The increase in demand for fat-free foods, like the one shown in the image above, has paralleled the obesity rate. Although this container says that the sour cream is fat free, that does not mean the sour cream suddenly becomes healthy. Instead, the fat often replaced by other substances, such as artificial trans-fats, in order to make the food taste good. These synthetic trans-fats are often more unhealthy than the natural fats that the animal product possesses. Even though this kind of food is unhealthy, it is still produced because our demand for animal food products has “created a food industry whose primary concern isn’t feeding people” (Foer 209). Instead, its primary concern is making as much profit as possible even if it means sacrificing human and animal health.

The reason factory farms do not prioritize animal welfare is because they value animals only in an instrumental sense and not intrinsically. They want as much product as possible for as cheap as possible so that they can increase their profits. In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger argues that capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are to be blamed for “animals required for food [being] processed like manufactured commodities” (Berger 13).

Treating farm animals well is important because the health of what we eat directly impacts our own health. For example, the epizootic “mad cow disease” was caused by feeding meat and bone meal (MBM) to naturally herbivorous cattle. This disease was spread to humans via the ingestion of products coming from infected cows. Alice Walker comments on this human-animal connection in “Am I Blue?” when she talks about “forgetting”:  “People…daily forget, all that animals try to tell us. ‘Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson’ ” ( Walker 186).  This is why it is important for the public to be informed of the truth about what we put into our mouths. However, truly free-range cattle would decrease profits for many food production companies so they are using images like the one above to trick consumers into thinking they are consuming a product from a free-range cow.

References:

Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 3-28. Print.

“BSE: Disease control & eradication – Causes of BSE”.Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. July 2009.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Print.

“The Truth about Low-fat Foods.” BBC Good Food. BBC, n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2014.

Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue?” Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature. By Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2010. 182-87. Print.

 

 

Tony the Tiger… “It’s G-r-r-r-reat”

September 25, 2014 / / 3 Comments

tony-the-tiger-031411The first thing that came to my mind when thinking of a picture of an animal was Tony the Tiger. I will be drawing on Berger’s notion of humans anthropomorphization and viewing tigers as “Tiger”. Tony the Tiger is the 100% fictitious “front-man” for General Mills’ cereal Frosted Flakes, but the message he sends to kids and the comparisons I see between what he represents and Berger’s whole idea of animals of the mind, happens to be anything but fictitious.

In this picture, Tony wears an embroidered ascot, has a very fit physique and a grin ear to ear. Everything about this image screams friendly, approachable character.

Every kid knows Tony the Tiger, and his catchphrase “they’reeeee greattttt!” Before reading Berger, I had thought of Tony to be just a funny, happy-go-lucky cartoon character. I venture to say, not only is Tony’s anthropomorphization from Berger’s notion of “Tiger” to something less animalistic is peculiar, it is a sign of the collapse on how humans look at animals.

All cereal brands use a mascot of sorts to reach out to kids. How does Tony the Tiger reach out to kids so well? The Tiger represents a fierce animal, every kid aged toddler and above knows what a Tiger is. The Tiger is one of the staples at zoos. Frosted Flakes could not use a natural Tiger as their mascot, that would turn kids off and scare them. They turned a fierce animal into an enthusiastic, baseball-playing, father-like figure. A Tiger, as a father-like figure.

Before Berger, I viewed this image as a friendly, unthreatening, fictitious being. Berger talked a lot about “animals of the mind.” Animals have been thrown out of their category as animal and thrown into categories such as families and spectacles. Berger continues to compare all animals now “appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium,” never seen in their natural habitat, just in human’s vision of their ideal home. In my opinion, showing a tiger in its natural habitat would just as much draw kids in as Tony the Tiger. Berger was all about looking at animals as their primal origins defined them as. A Tiger is a hunter, and a fierce competitor; it should be viewed as such.

Berger would call out General Mills on promoting the trend that people seem to follow these days; the trend being the practice of using/viewing animals as useful beings, and looking at them as commodities. If Tony the Tiger was just a normal, fresh out of the jungle tiger, Berger would have no problem with that. It’s merely the fact that in today’s world a cereal company needs to turn him into a human being that Berger would dislike. In not even three weeks of this class, it has taught me to think about the animal in a more holistic way then I have previously. It is not so much my views have changed, as much as now I am thinking more about the animals in a different context.

Michael Pestel Talk

September 21, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I recently attended a talk given by artist Micheal Pestel. Pestel’s work is based largely on appreciating the birds in our lives that we often take for granted. His work also carries messages about the problems of bird extinction and how humans have a diminished relationship with nature. In his talk, Pestel discussed how birds helped him combine his love of music and art. He said that “to you they are birds, but to me they are voices in the forest.” By stating this, he was trying to show that he had a strong relationship with birds. By referring to them as voices, they were no longer considered animals and thus no longer considered second-class citizens of the Earth. He then emulated their voices by using several different flutes to make bird sounds.

Pestel’s views often align with Berger’s. For example, Pestel mentioned in his talk that three things killed the passenger pigeon: the locomotive, the telegraph, and the gun. He stated that these man-made inventions will now forever carry the shadow of causing a mass extinction. Berger showed a similar disdain for the Industrial Revolution and its consequences in his novel About Looking when he wrote that “the 19th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken” (3). Pestel mentioned that we stopped treating the world as our tribal ancestors did and believes that we have lost our relationship with nature because of the printed word. He thinks that we can regain the lost voices of animals by transforming our own language and own experience. He calls this “listening in with our mouths.” Although Pestel did not mention any specific ways that we can transform our language to help us understand animals more, one way that I think we can do so is by eliminating the human/animal binary from our language. We can do this by not lumping all non-human animals into the one category “animal” because this categorization promotes a view of self vs. other in which one must be inherently superior as opposed to viewing other creatures as equals living together harmoniously on Earth.

References:

Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print.

Pestel, Michael. “Brown Bag Artist’s talk: Michael Pestel: Requiem, Ectopistes, Migratorius.” Lafayette College. Williams Center of the Arts, Easton, PA. 17 Sept. 2014. Guest Lecture.

 

Horse Riding

September 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

horseriding After reading Berger and Walker, I have begun to think of holding a horse in captivity for recreational purposes in a different light. The image that I have selected, shown above, depicts a competitive rider forcing a horse to jump over an obstacle. This image comes from the Chestnut Hill Farm website which is a farm that offers equestrian lessons. It appears that the horse is her property and that the rider is the slave-owner whereas the horse is her slave. This image glorifies the sport of competitive riding. The assumption is that the purpose of the horse is for the control of the rider. The better control the rider has of the horse, the more successful the rider is considered.  After reading Walker’s essay, I noticed the firm grip that this woman has on the reins of the horse. That is not something that I would have noticed before and I wonder if it is an indicator of the power struggle between her and the horse.

I found Walker’s analogy between animal captivity and historical slavery interesting and wondered how it could apply to this image.  After reading Walker’s work, when I look at this picture I think about what the horse may be feeling or what may be going through the horse’s mind. Previously, I would not have focused on the horse or even thought how the horse may be emotionally affected by being held captive for the purpose of being ridden. After reading Berger and Walker, I find myself viewing this image from the animal’s point of view which has raised several questions for me.

The horse has been reduced and marginalized in order to fulfill the rider’s recreational needs. This is comparable to Berger’s ideas about how we reduce and marginalize animals by keeping them in zoos for our own entertainment. This interpretation of the image is different from how I previously viewed equestrianism. I used to think that it was exciting and fun. I even considered it something that I was interested in doing because I love horses. However, after reading Berger I realized that truly loving an animal does not involve marginalizing that animal. Berger’s view that capitalism is a large cause behind the reason we view animals for their instrumental value struck me and made me wonder if that idea could be applicable to the mission of Chestnut Hill Farms. Chestnut Hill is capitalizing on the horse’s majestic nature by making the sport look beautiful and graceful in this image. The image is focusing on the instrumental value of the horse while completely ignoring its intrinsic value.

Often, we treat animals the way we treat human beings in many aspects. My interpretation of this image human-animal relationships after reading Berger and Walker caused me to think about human-human relationships in a similar context. For example, human slaves were sold as gladiators during Ancient Roman times for the entertainment of the people. Similarly, animals such as horses are being sold for recreational purposes as well. Berger and Walker have gotten me thinking about whether keeping animals (both human and non-human) captive for recreational purposes is ethical. It also raised the difficult question of whether it is possible to have an animal as a pet and still give it full life. This is a question I have begun thinking about after reading Berger and Walker but have still not come up with an answer to because I do not believe that there is one simple answer to this question. I believe that the ability to give a pet full life has to do with how the animal is treated as well as if the owner views the animal for its intrinsic or instrumental value.

References:

Chestnut Hill Farm, 2014. Web. 10 Sept. 2014.

John Berger. “About Looking”. Pantheon Books, 1980. Print.

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

 

Looking Deeper Into a Picture

September 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

zookeeper

I found this picture in an advertisement website, where the advertisement is promoting “A day of being a zookeeper”. Therefore, this picture is a perfect way to represent what a great day you can have by being a zookeeper! At first glance, this picture looks as if both the zookeeper (the woman in the photo) and the serval (type of cat) are content with their situation during the moment of the picture. The zookeeper is wearing a smile on her face that runs from ear to ear, the serval and the zookeeper are both seemingly sharing a hug, and it even looks as if the serval is enjoying the hug; her ears are perked up as if it were a dog when it hears the word “walk”, and it even looks like she has a smile running through her face. This image makes the viewer assume that every person in this image (including the serval) is enjoying the moment at the zoo. But as you look deeper into the picture, you can see that there is a more critical perspective of this image.

The first part of the image that can be dissected is the background zoo. Tall grasslands, woods, savannahs, and other places associated to these types of habitats are mostly where servals are habituated. Concrete and boulders, as shown in the background, are not. Berger would say that the only reason we believe that this is a happy picture of a serval and a zookeeper is because of our nostalgia of zoo’s and how we see these types of animals as magical because of this great nostalgia of something we are not used to seeing. By remembering the way these zoo animals were in our nostalgia, we are creating in our minds the image of a serval, and by creating this image we are devaluing the actual animal for how it is because this animal will never live up the expectations our minds create.

Alice Walker would look at the way the animal actually feels, rather than where it is located. At closer look, the eyes of the serval tell its real emotions. The serval looks fiercely focused into space, which in many animal languages, is a sign of basically saying “back off”. Secondly, the “smile” can be interpreted as the serval’s hiss, also a sign of “back off”. The serval seems to be actually trying to push its self away from the zookeeper, instead of into the zookeeper.

By searching zookeeper into the internet, I knew I would be able to find an image that seems so inviting and loving towards animals, but could also be shown to have a more critical side to how we as humans are related to animals. 

Works Cited:

Berger, John. Why Look At Animals?. New York: Vintage International, 1977. Print.

Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue?”. Other Nations. Baylor University Press. 182-187. Print.

 http://www.zavvi.com/gift-experience-days/zookeeper-experience-zookeeper-for-a-day/10051858.html

http://www.servals.org/wild.htm

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