A drawing of a rabbit wearing a mask that covers their eyes and ears. The mask has the features of a rabbit. A drawing of a rabbit wearing a mask that covers their eyes and ears. The mask has the features of a rabbit. In Figure 1 the rabbit’s face is concealed beneath a ‘cute’ anthropomorphic-style mask. Anthropomorphic images give human-like features to nonhuman animals. Here, the rabbit mask has forward-facing human-like eyes, whereas real rabbits’ eyes are positioned on the sides of their heads. Cute human-like images of other animals are commonplace, especially in children’s films, television programmes and picture books. However, the anthropomorphic masking of a rabbit’s ‘real’ face in Figure 1 is jarring, with the same effect as a destabilising use of written language. This illustration is a critique of how cute images of rabbits are so prevalent that they obscure the real rabbits that they supposedly represent. It therefore comments on how some images can shape knowledge about nonhuman animals and conceal more than they actually reveal. Decoding the meaning of images takes practice and may be contested. In this case, the intended meaning of the image is known, because the artist Hayley Wells was commissioned to create it for my jointly written book, Our Children and Other Animals (Cole and Stewart, 2014).So, if language and images can profoundly affect knowledge, we, as criminologists, need to take them seriously, even images as apparently trivial as a cute bunny mask. In this example the ‘cute bunny’ itself trivialises real rabbits, making recognition of them as victims of harm more difficult. Trivialisation is important in the context of the harms that humans perpetrate against other animals. It is to some of these harms that the next section turns.So to conclude Section 1: The recent animal turn expands the potential for criminology to attend to harms perpetrated by humans against other animals.The animal turn is a counterpoint to dominant humanocentric beliefs, which minimise the perceived importance of the victimisation of nonhuman animals.Humanocentric beliefs can be communicated, and contested, by the language and imagery used to refer to and represent other animals.2 Nonhuman victims of harmThe experience of being physically and/or psychologically harmed is unavoidable for all animals, whether human or nonhuman, but for criminologists, an increasing area of concern is avoidable harm generated by social arrangements, in short, social harm. Social harms result from contingent social arrangements – those that are not inevitable but could potentially be restructured to be less harmful.‘Livestock’ farming is contingent on human consumption of ‘animal products’ such as ‘meat’, ‘dairy’ and eggs. Social harms experienced by nonhuman animals are inflicted as a consequence of the legal, ‘business as usual’ operation of social arrangements or structures, ranging from scientific research, sport and entertainment, to ‘livestock’ farming. Examples are the experimentation on live nonhuman animals in the pharmaceutical industry, which is estimated to involve around 115 million nonhuman animals annually worldwide (Cruelty Free International, 2018) and the more than 2000 deaths since 2007 of horses on UK race courses at time of writing (Animal Aid, 2019). Social harms also afflict other animals as unintended collateral damage. For instance, motorised transport brings about the killing and injuring of other animals (as well as human accident victims), often described as ‘road kill’ (Soron, 2011). There is not enough space in this course to fully document these harms, so the focus will be on ‘livestock’ farming and fishing, the legal activities that kill the largest numbers of nonhuman animals. However, you should bear in mind the general point that many human activities that are currently socially accepted as normal, directly or indirectly harm other animals.2.1 ‘Livestock’ farming, fishing and social harmProfessor of Communication, Núria Almiron argues that ‘the exploitation of billions of nonhuman animals for food, has always been, and particularly is today, among the most profitable businesses on earth’ (2016, p. 28). The scale of these profits relates to the numbers of ‘livestock’ bred and killed.Box 1 The big picture – ‘livestock’ and aquatic animals‘Livestock’ animalsThree times more ‘livestock’ animals than humans are alive at any given time. This includes 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, 1 billion pigs and 1 billion sheeps, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) (Economic Forum, 2019).70 billion ‘livestock’ animals are slaughtered for human food globally each year; around 50 billion of them are chickens (Faunalytics, 2018).Aquatic animalsPrecise numbers of aquatic animals killed for human consumption are unrecorded, but even low estimates dwarf the figures for the killing of land-dwelling ‘livestock’ animals.790–2300 billion free-living fishes were caught for human consumption during the decade 2007–16 according to UNFAO (FishCount, 2019).In 2015 alone aquaculture (colloquially called ‘fish farming’) accounted for the killing of 48–160 billion fishes and 220–520 billion crustaceans (Fish Count, 2019).Different jurisdictions have different laws governing legally permissible harming of farmed animals, but all ‘livestock’ farming necessitates killing. This is obviously so for ‘meat’, but also applies to killing ‘dairy’ cows and laying hens when they are no longer able to produce enough milk or eggs to be profitably kept alive. These harms include slaughterhouse killing but also legal killing on farms in certain cases of serious injury or infectious disease, such as foot and mouth. These deaths are not included in the 70 billion ‘livestock’ animals slaughtered annually cited by Faunalytics (2018).
Figure 2 Cows who had been infected with foot and mouth disease being cremated in 2001
A photograph of a field with cows who had been infected with foot and mouth disease being cremated in 2001.A photograph of a field with cows who had been infected with foot and mouth disease being cremated in 2001.In the dairy industry, some male calves live for a few months before being killed to produce ‘veal’, but many are killed on farms soon after birth, because they are not profitable if raised to provide ‘beef ’. These cows have not been selectively bred to gain weight in the form of saleable flesh, so the male calves do not provide an economic return on the costs of raising them to maturity. In the egg industry, male chicks are also killed soon after hatching. It is unprofitable to raise them for their flesh, because of selective breeding that favours the egg-laying capacity of hens above all. Some of the legal harms other than killing in ‘livestock’ farming are described by Hunt (2015) and Masson (2009):confinement of some species of nonhuman animals in cages (such as those used for egg-laying hens and other birds), stalls, or barns, which restrict bodily movement and may cause physical and/or mental distressenforced body modifications, such as the amputation of pigs’ tails, the ‘clipping’ of piglets’ teeth, the castration of piglets or the partial amputation of hens’ beaks (sometimes called ‘debeaking’)increased incidence of injury or infections resulting from the farm environment, such as mastitis (a painful inflammation of cows’ udders)forced insemination of female ‘livestock’ animals, such as ‘dairy’ cows who are kept in a perpetual cycle of pregnancy and lactation until physically unable to produce milk at profitable levelsseparation of kin, such as the removal of calves from their mothers in the dairy industry so that the milk can be appropriated for human use, or the removal of lambs from their mothers to be slaughtered for ‘meat’.Different jurisdictions regulate to limit some of these harms to different extents, but harm is ubiquitous in all forms of ‘livestock’ farming and harms such as separation of kin are inevitable in order to obtain other animals’ milk, or the flesh of young mammals. These harms are not limited to physical injury or death, but also include mental and emotional distress. ‘Livestock’ farming is also associated with significant environmental harms that impact on free-living nonhuman animals (Hunt, 2015).2.2 Collateral social harmIn the previous section you saw statistics relating to the massive scale of killing involved by fishing and aquaculture. However, these figures are not comprehensive, as they exclude ‘accidental’ deaths, commonly referred to as ‘bycatch’ (Inoue, 2017). Note that ‘accidental’ is in quotation marks, to indicate that the routine operation of commercial fishing inevitably kills non-target creatures. You may recall that this is a defining feature of legal social harms; they are the outcome of routine practices that are ‘business as usual’, and not exceptional, unforeseeable incidents. To illustrate the scale of ‘bycatch’, Lisa Kemmerer and Bethany Dopp (2015, p. 164) report a 1997 UNFAO estimate that, ‘85 percent of any shrimp haul is bycatch’, the latter including sea turtles, seals and whales. Kemmerer and Dopp (2015) argue that bycatch has driven some non-target aquatic species close to extinction, and common fishing methods, such as the use of longlines (lines with baited hooks, up to 60 miles long) kill around 300,000 sea birds annually.2.3 ‘Livestock’ farming and environmental harmAll farming requires the use of resources, but ‘livestock’ farming tends to be more resource-intensive than alternatives. Two key farming resources are land and water. In terms of land, ‘livestock’ farming accounts for 70 per cent of all agricultural land worldwide. It also uses a third of all arable land, to provide crops to feed ‘livestock’. Providing this land exacerbates deforestation (Kemmerer, 2015), in turn eroding planetary capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a key greenhouse gas (GHG) responsible for anthropogenic climate change (that is, caused by human activity) (Garnett, 2013). By contrast, a recent research review concluded that plant-based diets could sustain the global human population from half the agricultural land currently in use (Chai et al., 2019). In terms of water, ‘livestock’ farming often depends on irrigation using finite fresh water supplies. Animal-protein production has been calculated to use more than four times as much water as the most intensively-irrigated plant-based protein production (Reynolds et al., 2014). Globally, ‘livestock’ farming is responsible for 29 per cent of agricultural fresh water use (Chai et al., 2019).
Figure 3 Thousands of cows being raised intensively to produce ‘beef’ in a concentrated animal feeding operation, in California.
A photograph of cows being raised intensively to produce ‘beef’ in a concentrated animal feeding operation, in California.A photograph of cows being raised intensively to produce ‘beef’ in a concentrated animal feeding operation, in California.Pollution is also a consequence of ‘livestock’ farming, particularly the intensive production methods which confine large numbers of nonhuman animals in a small space. For instance, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), enclose many thousands of animals in one facility, producing vast quantities of waste (manure and urine). Food campaigner Chris Hunt (2015) calculates that a 15,000-cow CAFO generates waste equivalent to a city of 315,000 humans. CAFO waste is discharged into the environment legally, for instance as fertiliser, or illegally as spills from artificial lagoons built to contain it, which can amount to millions of gallons. Spills may be intentional or accidental, for instance caused by storms, but regardless of cause, they directly kill fishes and other aquatic animals. They also cause eutrophication, a process by which the excess nutrients in CAFO waste stimulate the growth of algae on the surface of water. This blocks sunlight, which kills underwater plants eaten by aquatic animals (Hunt, 2015). Intensive ‘livestock’ farming also pollutes the air with hydrogen sulphide and ammonia (toxic to humans and other animals). You will note, these are all also examples of collateral harm.As you read above in relation to deforestation and CO2, ‘livestock’ farming is one of the major anthropogenic sources of GHGs. The production of methane and nitrous oxide is also a major contributory factor. ‘Meat and dairy production processes account for 80% of all GHGEs [greenhouse gas emissions] from the food sector and 24% of total GHGEs’ (Chai et al., 2019).One consequence of humanocentrism, is the tendency to consider humans as being apart from nature, which is treated as an inexhaustible resource for human use. This is especially evident in commercial fishing, where the indiscriminate killing of uncounted numbers of aquatic animals is accepted as routine. However, as the criminologist Gary Potter argues, ‘[f]rom a social science perspective, it becomes clear that the social world cannot be understood in separation from the natural world’ (2016, p. 7). Potter’s argument addresses one of the challenges of exploring environmental harms, which is that from a humanocentric perspective, they can seem rather abstract and remote from the suffering of specific individuals. This means that the exploration of environmental harms is an urgent task for criminology and particularly the emerging sub-discipline of green criminology (Spapens et al., 2016).Moreover, the scale of the social and environmental harms attendant to ‘livestock’ farming has increased as human consumption of ‘animal products’ has accelerated in recent decades. Globally, the number of other animals slaughtered for human food more than quadrupled in the 40 years between 1974 and 2014 (Ritchie and Roser, 2017), a period in which the human population did not quite double (The World Bank, 2019). This acceleration might be interpreted as an expression of a natural demand for ‘animal products’, but to do so would be to overlook the social processes that not only construct demand, but also make it appear to be ‘natural’, and therefore inevitable, rather than contingent.So to conclude Section 2: Large numbers of nonhuman animals are harmed as a result of the routine operation of many social structures. These can therefore be conceptualised as ‘social harms’.‘Livestock’ farming and fishing harm more nonhuman animals than any other human activity, resulting in hundreds of billions of deaths every year, as well as non-lethal harms that have physical, mental and emotional dimensions.‘Livestock’ farming and fishing generate environmental harms which include depletion of land and water resources; water and air pollution, including GHGEs; and collateral harms such as ‘bycatch’.3 The animal–industrial complexThe construction of demand for ‘animal products’ and the concomitant social structuring of harm against nonhuman animals can be analysed using the concept of the animal–industrial complex (AIC). This term was coined by Barbara Noske in her book Humans and Other Animals (1989). It refers to the harmful exploitation of nonhuman animals on an industrial scale, and how different industries are inter-related within legal, state-sanctioned frameworks, so that together they form a ‘complex’. More recently, the AIC was defined by sociologist Richard Twine as a ‘partly opaque and multiple set of networks and relationships between the corporate (agricultural) sector, governments, and public and private science. With economic, cultural, social and affective dimensions it encompasses an extensive range of practices, technologies, images, identities and markets’ (2012, p. 23).The AIC today is dominated by the agrifood industry, which in turn is dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs). TNCs may originate and be formally headquartered in one country, but operate in many, often on a global scale. In her analysis of the political economy of agrifood, Almiron highlights that the world’s two largest TNCs by sales, Cargill (based in the United States) and Nestlé (based in Switzerland), ‘are strongly dependent on “livestock”’ (2016, p. 29), respectively ‘poultry’ and hen’s eggs, and cow’s milk.Almiron (2016) highlights the close interconnections between agrifood and four other global industries:The seed industry and especially producers of genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds, which are primarily used for ‘livestock’ feed crops.The chemical industry, including pesticides (targeted at killing other animals who would otherwise consume crops intended for ‘livestock’ feed), fertilisers and herbicides.The pharmaceutical industry, which as well as killing tens of millions of nonhuman animals in experiments each year, also produces medicines to prevent or treat ‘livestock’ diseases. These diseases are harms generated by intensive farming conditions, such as crowding ‘livestock’ in confined, unsanitary spaces (Greger, 2006).The oil industry, which fuels mechanised farming methods, transportation, irrigation and fertiliser production.‘Livestock’ farming also depends on state-maintained transport infrastructures to move nonhuman animals to slaughterhouses, and then their body parts or the products of female reproductive processes (milk and eggs) to retail, which are themselves industrialised in the form of supermarket and restaurant chains. In turn, the retail industry depends on the media industry to advertise animal products (Nibert, 2016). However, Twine’s definition emphasises that the AIC is ‘partly opaque’, meaning that some of its components and their interconnections are less obvious. For instance, state involvement includes legislation such as ‘animal welfare’ or food safety laws, and procuring ‘animal products’ to feed hospital patients, school pupils, prison inmates and others in public sector care. States also provide financial subsidies for ‘livestock’ farming.Almiron (2016, p. 31) argues that ‘animal products’ are the most subsidised sectors of the global agrifood industry, receiving $52 billion in direct government grants in 2012 alone, among industrialised countries. State support also takes the form of establishing organisations to promote ‘animal products’. For example, in the UK, the dairy and egg industries historically received state support through the formation of the Milk Marketing Board (MMB) in 1933 and the British Egg Marketing Board (BEMB) in 1956. The organisations were interconnected with the media through the promotion of advertising slogans such as ‘drinka pinta milka day’ and ‘go to work on an egg’ (Molloy, 2011; Harrison, 2013). Publicly funded media promotion such as this, and direct advertising by agrifood corporations, have proved very successful in stimulating increased ‘animal product’ consumption (Nibert, 2016).
Figure 4 Advertisements for the Milk Marketing Board (1959) (left-hand side) and the British Egg Marketing Board (1957) (right-hand side).
Two images of advertisements. On the left, colourful text that reads: DRINKA PINTA MILKA DAY. On the right there is a cartoon of a child balancing on an image of an egg. The egg appears to be wobbling. Above is the text: Go to work on an egg. Two images of advertisements. On the left, colourful text that reads: DRINKA PINTA MILKA DAY. On the right there is a cartoon of a child balancing on an image of an egg. The egg appears to be wobbling. Above is the text: Go to work on an egg. The advertisements shown in Figure 4 may look simplistic now, 60 or more years after they appeared, but the message they convey is all the more powerful for that. Both sought to normalise the consumption of ‘animal products’ as a daily routine. The routinisation of food practices through cultural representations such as these is crucial to the perpetuation of the AIC.Part of the inter-related framework that allows the AIC to function involves Twine’s ‘affective’ dimension. This includes emotional attachments to consuming ‘animal products’, which are often deeply felt as core to consumers’ identities. For example, social science research has revealed the persistence of strong cultural associations between masculine identity and the consumption of ‘meat’ (Fiddes, 1991; Adams, 2004; Stewart and Cole, 2018). Images – also referred to by Twine – are central to maintaining these emotional attachments and identities. For instance, they may be triggered by advertising that encourages positive associations between family or romantic relationships and the consumption of ‘animal products’ (Stewart and Cole, 2018). You have seen that even everyday 1950s advertisements contribute to the construction of identities ‘fuelled’ by the consumption of ‘animal products’.The affective dimension of the AIC is crucial to its survival. The social harms outlined earlier are indeed ‘partly opaque’, in that the plight of ‘livestock’ receives scant media attention (Freeman, 2016), despite these harms being relatively easy to research. Analysing the affective dimension of the AIC is therefore crucial to understanding how it operates relatively unscrutinised, despite the scale of harms that it generates.So to conclude Section 3: The animal–industrial complex (AIC) is a key concept for analysing the interconnecting social structures that construct demand for ‘animal products’.The AIC is based around coalitions of transnational corporations (TNCs) whose profitability is dependent on the exploitation of nonhuman animals.TNCs in turn depend on state-maintained infrastructure, subsidies and legal frameworks to ensure their smooth operation.The AIC also depends on the media construction of positive associations between ‘animal product’ consumption and consumers’ identities and relationships.4 Sticks and stones? Power-knowledge, discourse and harmIn Section 1 you considered how language and imagery shapes perception of whether or not other animals are worthy of social scientific attention. This section picks up on the affective dimension from Section 3 and develops all these insights in relation to social philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories of power-knowledge and then discourse (1998). Foucault (1926–84) argues that power and knowledge are intimately inter-related.As an approach to this, consider the phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’. Of course, words can actually be very hurtful. You may have experienced hurtful name-calling – or felt ashamed for joining in with name-calling – in the school playground. The ‘sticks and stones’ phrase is used to reassure and build resilience to being victimised by insulting language. But insults can be psychologically and emotionally damaging, and may accompany, or be a prelude to, physical assault. Insults can ‘put someone down’, as being less worthy of care and concern. So, insulting language can be intrinsically harmful, but it also shapes knowledge of victims and makes them more vulnerable to further harm. This makes harm itself harder to recognise, because the victim is rendered less worthy of concern. For example, in the context of a culture in which other animals are viewed as subordinate to humans, calling people ‘dogs’, or ‘pigs’ attempts to reduce their moral worth and make it seem acceptable to victimise them. At its most extreme, animal-based name-calling has been used to render the victims of genocide as deserving of violence. For example, Nazi propaganda compared Jews with lice or rats, while Tutsi victims of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 were described as ‘cockroaches’ in propaganda prior to the violence erupting (Nguyen, 2019).Similarly, images can be used to make some groups of people seem less worthy of concern, to the extent of being legitimate targets of physical violence. Playground bullying therefore, shows how knowledge-claims (which translate into knowledge) about others are closely related to behaviour towards them, and vice versa: what is done to others is closely related to what is known about them. In a sense, this is obvious. For example, chickens are known as ‘food animals’ because they are killed to provide food for humans.By the same token, chickens are killed to provide food for humans because they are known as ‘food animals’ (Cole and Stewart, 2014). Again, this results from imagery as well as language: chickens are commonly represented as ‘food animals’ in the logos of fast food restaurants that sell their body parts. These diverse examples, from playground bullying to the killing of chickens, can therefore be interpreted and analysed within a common theoretical framework: Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge.4.1 Power-knowledge and the ‘disciplining’ of other animalsFoucault has been profoundly influential in the social sciences. Power is often assumed, argues Foucault (1998), to be repressive. It tends to be conceived as a resource used by powerful people, groups or institutions (such as the state) to stop less powerful people from doing something. By contrast, Foucault argued that power is productive rather than repressive: power does not stop things from happening, but rather it makes things happen. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault applies this insight to the experiences of criminals in nineteenth century prisons, arguing that prisons at that time were not devised to stop criminals from perpetrating criminal acts (this tends to be assumed when power is thought of as a repressive force) but were instead aimed at producing ‘docile bodies’ (1991, p. 138). By ‘docile bodies’, Foucault means that regimes disciplined prisoners to become docile and therefore useful citizens. A prisoner disciplined by a corrective penal regime could be remade into a productive working citizen, and therefore an asset rather than a burden to society. The practices by which prisoners were trained (such as the imposition of a strictly regimented timetable of daily activity) also produced knowledge about them. Prison authorities documented the extent to which prisoner’s behaviour changed in response to the prison regime, and this new knowledge could in turn reshape the treatment of prisoners. That is, power relations could be recalibrated in relation to knowledge produced about each prisoner.Importantly, Foucault argues that the principles by which prisoners were disciplined – the interconnected application of a training regime (power) and the recording of observations about their behaviour (knowledge) – were transferred outside the prison setting within which they originated. Foucault describes a growing ‘carceral archipelago’ (1991, p. 298), or network of state institutions, such as army barracks, schools and hospitals, in which disciplinary principles were applied to produce, respectively, ‘docile’ soldiers, pupils or patients.Foucault does not consider the extension of the carceral archipelago to nonhuman animals. However, its implications for how harms against nonhuman animals are understood, are profound (Chrulew and Wadiwel, 2016; Wadiwel, 2015). One of Foucault’s key innovations is the idea that because power is productive, not repressive, disciplinary regimes are focused on creating particular kinds of useful individuals (soldiers who obey officer’s commands, pupils who follow their teacher’s directions, for example). These insights have been applied to ‘factory farms’ as disciplinary institutions aimed at producing ‘docile’ nonhuman bodies (Cole, 2011; Novek, 2005; Coppin, 2003), that is, bodies disciplined so that they gain weight as efficiently as possible and thereby maximise profitability.To achieve this goal, ‘factory farms’ discipline nonhuman animal behaviour by restricting bodily movement so that food intake is converted into weight gain rather than being expended on locomotion or social interaction. If farms are considered as disciplinary institutions in Foucault’s sense, bodily movement is a ‘waste’ of energy (and therefore of feed and the money used to buy it). The bottom line is that unrestricted movement reduces profitability. Figure 5 shows the disciplining of pigs’ bodies along these lines.
Figure 5 Legally caged pigs in a ‘factory farm’
A photograph of legally caged pigs in a ‘factory farm’.A photograph of legally caged pigs in a ‘factory farm’.Simultaneously, the effects of power relations between the ‘farm’ and its nonhuman captives are recorded, so that a body of knowledge is built up about each animal. This knowledge is highly specific: individual animals in factory farms are ‘known’ according to how successfully they respond to the disciplinary regime – how much they eat, how much and how quickly they gain weight, and so on. This accumulation of knowledge can calibrate power relations to be yet more productive (adjusting the amount and type of feed, medication, temperature, and so on).However, these nonhuman animals are not ‘known’ in the sense of ‘knowing’ a specific person as a unique individual with their own biography and personality. As a contrast to the ‘factory farmed’ pigs, the image below shows a pig called Teresa photographed at a sanctuary in New York, having been rescued from a slaughterhouse. Teresa is one of the subjects of Isa Leshko’s book Allowed to Grow Old (2019).
Figure 6 Teresa, a 13-year-old Yorkshire pig. When this photograph was taken she had chosen to lie down on the straw after tiring herself out playing with a beach ball (Leshko, 2019, p. 95)