From dreaded comparisons to strategic images
It is never good enough to stop at a critique of bad language or representations. One task of activists is to consider in what contexts particular comparisons might work well, and what kinds of language and images we might use most effectively to promote positive change. Used with careful consideration, provocative representations might promote reflection that prompts people to treat animals in more humane ways. The historian Hilda Kean emphasises the importance of visual imagery in changing attitudes and actions towards animals in the past. Focusing on the rise of campaigns against cruelty to animals in Britain in the nineteenth century, she argues that there was a close relationship between the act of seeing the mistreatment of animals and campaigning to end it. Similarly, in her discussion of the English live export protests of the 1990s, Kean insists that demonstrators were affected both by witnessing the suffering of caged veal calves as they were transported to ports and airports, and by the hidden cruelty they imagined the animals would undergo at the end of the voyage.42
According to the artist and critic Steve Baker, animal advocates should not be in the business of recycling old images, but instead should try to create new ones that will promote more ethical inter-species relations. In a world saturated with images of animals, Baker wonders “whether and how things might be changed — to the advantage of the animal — through the constructive use of representations.” In his book Picturing the Beast, Baker makes a useful comparison between two posters used by the British Royal Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (RSPCA) for the launch of its advertising campaign for dog registration in 1989. The first poster — which, significantly, Baker does not reproduce — features a picture of “a huge pile of dead dogs.” The photograph “(i)conographically,” and presumably on purpose, recalled images of heaps of human bodies from concentration camps, similar to the one described above, and, according to Baker, “understandably caused controversy and offence.” A second poster — which does appear in Baker’s book — shows a photo of a black bin bag (a “doggy bag”) filled with something and tied at the end. Although this second image was “superficially, more restrained” than the first, Baker argues that by “the very act of leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations to picture the final body which the bag concealed, thus denying them the catharsis of responding to its literal depiction, the image arguably remains more potent and more horrific than the pile of dogs.”43 Baker implies that a political image may have more currency when used in a way that trusts the human viewer to make the imaginative link herself rather than having it thrust upon her.
When animal advocates turn expressions like “eternal Treblinka” into slogans, carry signs emblazoned with the word “Auschwitz,” or circulate photographs of dead chicken bodies in heaps, they literalise and force analogies, reifying them and presenting them as perpetual truths. In so doing, they simplify the historical specificity of the Holocaust and of the exploitation of animals alike. While representations of violence committed against animals have a certain shock value that may motivate people to change, such images also carry dangers. When they try to impose a particular message on an image or word, animal advocates do something similar to anti-pornography feminists: they tell us that there is only one way of interpreting the images around us. If we sincerely want to change what Baker calls the “contemptuous attitudes and painful practices to which animals are still too often subjected,” we may be better off with powerful but subtle representations of animals that allow room for people’s careful contemplation and consideration.44 All vegans would do well to keep this in mind when we choose the images and language we use.
Alternative animal metaphors
Baker’s approach to images that might help to disrupt anthropocentric attitudes acknowledges that people’s understanding of animals always relies to a certain extent on our imaginations. We understand animals as symbols as well as living beings. This is apparent in the use of animal metaphors in language. While some metaphors reduce both human and other animals to one-dimensional stereotypes, others may help people to identify with animals in more positive ways, and even to challenge the boundary between human and other species. An example of the former is those metaphors used to deride certain groups of people by associating them with despised creatures. When political activists call the security forces “pigs” they mean to insult the police, but they denigrate the real animals as well. The expression “fat cats” similarly degrades the wealthy people who are meant as its target, but insults and belittles felines and fat humans in the process. The English language is full of such metaphors. Even when they have a poetic ring, they do little to help us to understand animals as living beings worthy of our care.
The performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross has used her art “to ask some hard questions regarding our use of animals as ‘metaphors’ for human suffering.”45 In her description of preparing for and writing her one-woman performance piece, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, Ross provides a useful contrast between animal metaphors that draw attention to human causes without adequately taking into account the experiences of animals, on one hand, and those that offer the potential for transforming human-animal relations, on the other hand:
One of the first and most prominent prostitutes’ rights organizations in the United States was called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) founded in 1973.There are several stories about why the name COYOTE was chosen but the most popular one is that there was a parallel to be drawn between how coyotes are used as “scapegoats” by ranchers and others — and nowadays even in cities like Toronto and Vancouver — for everything that’s going wrong and also how prostitutes are blamed for everything that’s going wrong in our neighborhoods. So a year ago I just felt this coyote presence crawling into my life and I decided that I had to explore that metaphor more profoundly. I think there is a link between how coyotes are treated and how prostitutes are treated and perceived. But I have an issue when people appropriate another group’s oppression to make a statement about their own if they’re not going to also speak about that other group’s oppression.46
Yapping Out Loud explores examples of violence against sex workers through seven monologues, two of them featuring linguistic and visual images of wild canines:
Coyotes are very powerful animals, beautiful animals. And they can also be intimidating animals. You cannot help but feel something when you’re in the presence of a coyote either on video or in real life. Just like prostitutes also. When people are in our presence, we can come across as powerful people. So I wanted to have this very beautiful and strong and grounded coyote presence.47
Ross’s coyote metaphor does not insist on parity or even similarity between the persecution of coyotes and sex workers. Her description of feeling “this coyote presence crawling into my life” is an example of what the late Gloria Anzaldúa, in her short essay “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman,” called the “working of […] the imagination act(ing) upon the body.”48 For Anzaldúa, images and words communicate with the body’s organs, reshaping them in the process. The way our imaginations work, the kinds of metaphors we choose or have imposed upon us, can make us sick. This is especially true of racist and other oppressive metaphors (for example, comparing people of colour to animals). But metaphors can also heal and open the way for transformation. One task of the poet is to cure societies by purging dead, harmful metaphors and replacing them with new, healing ones:
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