Plumwood does not call her story “Being meat,” though that would have been a catchier title. The point of her account is precisely that “being prey” — potentially food for another being — is not the same as “being meat” — being nothing more than food. The realisation that one can be meat and also be a complex being led Plumwood to conclude that other beings — including the ones that people typically eat — can be our food and more than our food. The act of violence is not in predation itself, but in treating other creatures as mere meat.
In order to put her traumatic experience into words, Plumwood had to overcome the pressures and powers of dominant narratives about animal attacks on people. Although “[f]ew of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it,” Plumwood was determined not to play the heroine. When the camp ranger finally found her and she began the long journey to hospital, Plumwood overheard the rescuers’ boastful plans to return to the river and hunt down the crocodile. She resisted this plan forcefully: “I was the intruder,” she writes, “and no good purpose could be served by random revenge.” Having survived the attack, Plumwood faced a threat of a different kind — “the cultural drive to represent it in terms of the masculinist monster myth: the master narrative.”
The imposition of the master narrative occurred in several ways: in the exaggeration of the crocodile’s size, in portraying the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization. The events seemed to provide irresistible material for the pornographic imagination, which encouraged male identification with the crocodile and interpretation of the attack as sadistic rape.
There are echoes in this quotation of Carol J. Adams’s thesis in The Sexual Politics of Meat.2 But Plumwood rejects what she sees as the reproduction, in Adams’s work, of the dualistic thinking that characterises the master narrative. In the American ecofeminist tradition of Adams and others, Plumwood claims, all hunting is condemned as predatory, violent, masculinist and morally corrupt, set in opposition to a supposedly more ethically and environmentally sustainable female gathering culture. Hunting and gathering thus correspond to a preexisting assumed male/female dualism. This model ignores forms of hunting that may not be based on the instrumentalisation of animals, and idealises and universalises women’s gathering activities, overlooking evidence of female hunters, for example in some Indigenous societies.3 Drawing on examples from Australian Aboriginal culture, Plumwood is careful neither to associate hunting exclusively with men nor to demonise it or predation.4 Her point is that in the mainstream Australian media the crocodile attack could be readily assimilated into a patriarchal plot that anthropomorphised the crocodile as a sexual hunter and reduced her, Plumwood, to a victim devoid of agency.
While challenging the masculinist adventure tale foisted upon her by the Australian press, Plumwood reminds the reader — and herself — of her arrogance at venturing into crocodile waters without seeking the advice of “the indigenous Gagadgu owners of Kakadu.” Plumwood’s rendering of her own tale, like much of her philosophical writing, is indebted to the teachings of Aboriginal Australians. From them she learned the value of stories as collective, transgenerational meaning-making, as well as a holistic way of thinking about death that “sees animals, plants, and humans sharing a common life force.”5 She contrasts this worldview with Western anthropocentrism and individualism, and “Being Prey” presents a forceful challenge to those traditions. As the philosopher Matthew Calarco writes, the importance of Plumwood’s tale lies in her “effort to think not simply her death as such, but her willingness to accept her indistinction from the world around her, the loss of her human propriety.”6 For Calarco, “Being Prey” is a radically anti-anthropocentric account of what it means to be human, one that makes room for being animal and being food for others.
Val Plumwood’s contextual vegetarianism
Plumwood’s reflection on the shattering experience of being prey provided one basis for her particular kind of ecofeminism. At the heart of this lies a critique of dualistic thinking, the Western philosophical tradition that divides the world into a series of hierarchal binary oppositions: reason/nature, man/woman, human/animal, human/nature, European/Other and so on.7 Plumwood identifies what she calls “ontological” vegetarianism or veganism — which categorises some beings as food and others as not food — as an extension of, rather than a challenge to, such dualisms.8 Her critique of ontological veganism focuses on two areas of thought: utilitarian and rights philosophies, on one hand, and American cultural ecofemimism, on the other. Plumwood argues that utilitarian and rights theories are extensionalist, that is, they extend moral consideration — and with it the status of not food — to those animals most similar to human beings. While human omnivores draw the line between what is food and what is not at the boundary between humans and all other beings, including other animals, Plumwood accuses thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan of moving the distinction further along the chain, replacing the human/animal dualism with a another binary opposition: sentient/non-sentient, or those deserving rights and moral consideration/those not. Some animals are thus afforded moral status while the majority of the other-than-human world is excluded from the moral community. The unstated assumption in utlitarianism and rights theory is that human beings can never be food. In contrast to what she understands as this anthropocentric position, Plumwood proposes what she calls “ecological animalism,” defined as “re-envisaging ourselves as ecologically embodied beings akin to rather than superior to other animals.”9
Plumwood also detects ontological veganism in the work of Carol Adams and some other American ecofeminists. Plumwood is one of the few thinkers to highlight the problem with Adams’s comparison between violence against women and animals.10 Plumwood challenges the parallel that Adams draws between the reduction of farm animals to meat and the reduction of women to sex objects. In both cases, Adams mistakenly conflates use with instrumentalisation. Just as it is possible to imagine non-exploitative sexual relations, Plumwood insists, it is possible to imagine animals being used by human beings in a way that is not purely exploitative. Against a veganism based upon the premise that all use of animals for food or human benefit is exploitative and instrumentalist, Plumwood argues that it may be possible for people to use animals without reducing them to mere instruments for our own ends.11
When we human beings take ourselves out of the food chain, refusing to be food for other creatures (including as rotting corpses), we take from other living beings — including plants — without giving back.12 Plumwood does not object to human beings eating plants, though her critique of ontological veganism anticipates recent critiques of moral vegetarianism based on scientific evidence of plant sentience.13 Nor did she espouse the eating of meat. Her experience of being potential prey for the crocodile confirmed her vegetarianism. However, Plumwood argues that it is wrong to privilege animals above other forms of life and to prioritise animal advocacy over other forms of political commitment. She stresses the inseparability of the struggle against anthropocentrism and campaigns to end the exploitation of people, calling upon animal rights activists to form political alliances with workers’ movements, radical health movements, environmental organisations, small farmers and movements against neoliberalism. According to Plumwood, proponents of ontological veganism put too much emphasis on the actions of the individual activist, forestalling the kinds of alliances necessary for the construction of an effective ecological ethics. Her contextualised ethics of eating, in contrast, targets “the most extreme examples of distortion and instrumentalisation of animal lives — the intensive farming practices that treat animals as no more than living meat or egg production units.”14
Plumwood contrasts the unethical reduction of factory farmed animals to “no more than living meat” with her own moment of revelation, following the near-death experience with the crocodile:
We are edible, but we are also much