Critical Animal Geographies

Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World

Kathryn Gillespie, Rosemary-Claire Collard, Kathryn Gillespie, Rosemary-Claire Collard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138791503
• eBook ISBN: 9781317649267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of animals' lived experience and human-animal encounter. It works toward a more radical politics and theory directed at the shifting boundary between human and animal. Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures with original case studies in order to see how efforts by some humans to control and order life – human and not – violate, constrain, and impinge upon others. Central to all chapters is a commitment to grappling with the stakes – violence, death, life, autonomy – of human-animal encounters. Equally, the work in the collection addresses head-on the dominant forces shaping and dependent on these encounters: capitalism, racism, colonialism, and so on. In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.

1 Introduction

Rosemary-Claire Collard and Kathryn Gillespie

DOI: 10.4324/9781315762760-1

The cow lies on the manure-covered floor of a holding pen at the dairy market sale behind a farmed animal auction yard in California's Central Valley. Her past as a typical dairy producer is easily visible on her body in the scars on her hide, the blood and milk leaking from her udders, her docked tail and ear tags, and her emaciated appearance. A sticker with a barcode is stuck haphazardly to her side with #743, her identifying numbers at the auction. She lies on her stomach, her back legs splayed out behind her, unable to rise. She struggles several times to get to her feet and each time collapses with exhaustion, breathing heavily, saliva foaming at her mouth. Other cows mill around her until an auction employee comes and herds the others into the adjacent pen. He binds her rear ankles together with a rope and prods her to stand. She is unable to rise. The employee leaves her in the pen. She will not be sold at the auction. Because she cannot stand, she will be categorized as a ‘downer’ and shot with a firearm at the end of the day. A ‘deadstock’ hauler will be called to pick up her body and deliver her to a rendering facility where her body will be reduced to useable commodity products.

. . .

In the packed stands of a hot barn, hundreds of auction goers at the Lolli Bros Livestock Market Exotic Sale in Macon, Missouri, lean forward in their seats to glimpse the next round of objects wheeled out into the auction ring for sale. It is a line-up of beige plastic cages. People quiet down until all you can hear are the muffled squawks and shrieks of hundreds of parrots and other birds in an adjacent room, having already been sold. The cages now in the ring look like medium-sized dog kennels, stacked two on two. A buzz of excitement ripples through the audience when long, thin, dark fingers slip out through the slats in several cages. Half a dozen adult spider monkeys are crouched in cages too cramped for them to stand. The first monkey on the auction block is a nineteen-year-old female who lost her right eye eight years ago and had two middle fingers half amputated. “But all her lady parts work,” the auctioneer assures the crowd. She sells for $2,500. These monkeys are all ‘proven breeders,’ no longer small and docile enough for display, or to be cuddled, diapered and fitted with pink dresses and camouflage overalls. Their value is as ‘breed-stock,’ producing $10,000 babies to be sold at next year's auction, maybe the one in Texas, or Ohio.

Taken from our research on political economies of cows in the dairy industry (KG) and exotic pets (RC), these two snapshots introduce the project of this book: to understand the spatial, political-economic, and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounters. In the spirit of this project, these vignettes focus on animals as they move through the live animal auction – a power-laden space that determines animals’ fate at the point of sale. They also draw attention to the violent power relations at work in human-animal relations. This violence is carved into the bodies of the cow with barcode #743 and the captive spider monkey, visible in their physical degradation and the cow's inability to rise from the floor of the auction yard. This violence is standard, woven into day-to-day operations in these facilities and economies. It goes unremarked upon, let alone is it mourned.

Live animal auctions in the United States are places where the geographical dimensions of power and hierarchy between humans and other animals can be seen in stark detail. Nonhuman animals are subjected to various modes of bodily control in the space of the auction yard where they are exchanged as commodities and used in the production of new commodities. Animals sold at auction come from myriad conditions, move through the auction space in strategically manipulated states of (im)mobility and captivity, and are destined for a range of uses as they leave the auction yard. Farmed animals, like the cow with barcode #743, are sold and bought at auction to be used as commodity producers (e.g., for breeding, milk production, semen production) and as commodities themselves (e.g., to be slaughtered for ‘meat’). Even animals raised on small-scale so-called humane farms are often subjected to the violence of the auction yard. Animals at the exotic animal auctions, like the nineteen-year-old spider monkey, are sold and purchased as companions; as spectacles in petting zoos, menageries or private game ranches; as breeders; as performers in the film and entertainment industry; and as scientific testing subjects, with some of these uses overlapping at any one time and several animals passing through several of these roles over the course of their lifetimes.

At farmed and exotic animal auctions, animals are transported – sometimes from across the United States – and collected in one space for a day or two (or even just a few hours) before being re-dispersed around the country. Farmed animals arrive at auction in transport trailers and are unloaded and herded into a series of chutes and holding pens behind the auction yard. Here, they wait while potential buyers walk through and assess the value of their bodies and (re)productive potential. Sometimes farmed animal auctions are single-species auctions, organized by their commodity potential (e.g., dairy market, cull market, feeder sales, etc.); other times they are multispecies auctions, attracting a more diverse crowd with interest in various farmed animal species. Exotic pet auctions are typically held in farmed animal auction yards. Smaller animals, like monkeys or snakes, are sold in cages, whereas larger animals, like zebras or camels, are herded through the auction ring like cows at the farmed animal auction. Where farmed animal auctions are mundane, ordinary places, the exotic pet auction transforms these venues into places of spectacle and display. Audiences of thousands gather to pace the catwalk above a sea of penned zebras and exotic ‘hoofstock’; others wander the labyrinth of cages at ground level, where they can look a skittish baby camel in the eye. Some of the biggest attractors are the various trailers or side rooms that act as ‘warm rooms’ for hundreds of caged birds, snakes, reptiles, and tortoises. Baboons, monkeys, and predators, like servals (mid-sized African wild cats) and bears, are also big crowd-pleasers if they are permitted for sale.

The auction space is designed to control these animals: pens, cages, and the auction ring itself are constructed to display and subordinate the animal. Containment and controlled mobility are both integral modes of controlling the animal. In other words, animals are contained in pens, cages, chutes, and trucks at auction in order to keep them captive. But their efficient and controlled mobility is necessary to keep the flow of capital moving through the auction yard. Thus, each piece of fencing is often hinged and moveable, ready to convert to a pen (for containment) or a chute (for efficient movement) (Gillespie 2014). Further, the display of the animal is a crucial part of the commodification process in the front and back of the auction. Before the auction begins, buyers wander through the rear holding pens observing the animals on display, making evaluations and decisions about which animals they will bid on. The space and design of the auction facilitates display and visibility of animals from all angles: for example, the thin, horizontal bar fences permit people to peer inside pens, catwalks are elevated above the holding pens, and stadium-style bleachers give audience members an unobstructed view of the ring from every seat in the auction house.

Subordination is necessary for the animal to circulate as capital. The management and control of animal bodies can be seen in the aggregate – moving animal herds in and out of the auction yard with efficiency – and in the individual animals, like the spider monkey and the cow with barcode #743, whose bodies are subjected to intimate forms of violence, control, and subordination at the auction yard. The auction is also a node in a commodity circuit that more broadly engenders and depends on control at the level of animals’ bodily space. In the dairy industry, breeding practices characterized by sexualized violence and a kind of gendered commodification of the animal, driven by efforts to maximize profits and efficiency, have defined the body space of the cow through genetic selection for milk quality, quantity and flavor, body size, reproductive potential, and temperament (Gillespie 2013). In the exotic pet trade, animals’ wild lives, in which they move through space freely and engage in complex social practices with their kin, are fundamentally transformed the moment they are captured and transported worldwide to be a caged companion. Often, these animals experience varying degrees of bodily modification, such as having teeth or claws removed, wings clipped, and tracking tags inserted under the skin. Cows used for dairy and exotic pets are thus both subject to profound degrees of spatial control, not only over their movement through confinement but also over the space of their own bodies.

Entangled material and discursive performances at the auction are also central to the animals’ commodification. The auctioneer's incessant calls and the interruptions in this hum when the auctioneer speaks to the audience or comments on the animal on display are integral to the discursive construction of the animal-as-commodity. This banter is light and jovial, littered with jokes and laughter that work to normalize the subordinate position of the animal. The lightheartedness surrounding animals’ commodification and the violence to which they are subjected highlight the paradox of their valuation: their lives are disposable even as they are central to the circulation of capital. Farmed animal auctions are mundane and animals sell with little fanfare, although some auctions have live bands playing music and most have restaurants where buyers and spectators enjoy a meal of animal-derived foods before and after the sale. At the exotic pet auction, the auction itself is a raucous spectacle. Ring men jokingly attempt to mount bison and make a pretense of using chairs to spar with horned animals; small children ride zebras and camels; and occasionally women enter the ring to hold animals like baby lemurs, kinkajous, and bearded dragons in their cupped hands, lifting them high in the air as they walk around the ring, occasionally bringing the animals down to their faces for a kiss or snuggle.

In different ways, the performance and display at the farmed animal auction and the exotic pet auction are integral to the logic of human dominance exhibited in these spaces. Farmed animal auctions erase the violence of commodification through the everydayness of the auction yard, the jovial nature of farming communities coming together in this place, and the routine efficiency with which they sell the animals. Exotic pet auctions, by contrast, obscure these violent interspecies relations through the spectacular dimensions of the performance, the exotic nature of the animals and their fetishization, and the construction of the auction as a special event (these auctions are held only a few times a year). Both types of sales reveal the auction as a space involved in the reproduction of a capitalist system that renders animals sellable, buyable, breedable, displayable, and, eventually, killable.

The broader political economic conditions under which the auction is made possible are defined by a global system of capitalist exchange that renders ‘nature’ commodifiable. Animals, as part of this nature, are categorized as resources to be used in the accumulation of capital for human producers and consumers. Auctions are places that reveal the socially constructed and variable nature of economic value, which is determined at auctions by the conditions of the commodity, the conversations between buyers and sellers, and the context in which they are sold (Smith 1989). The collective means by which value is assigned at auctions – performed in front of an audience of tens to thousands – means that they often act as a legitimating force for commodities whose value or status is politically, economically, or ethically uncertain (Smith 1989). For this reason, observing the auction event is to observe the maintenance or remaking of particular commodity forms (Gillespie 2014; Collard forthcoming). In this process of capitalist exchange, the animal is subordinated anew. As the spider monkey enters the auction ring, and is observed, bid on, and sold, her history as a proven breeder and the fact that “her lady parts still work” promise that she will be re-entered into the commodity circuit, involved in the future reproduction of dominant/subordinate human-animal relations.

The ethical and political dimensions of the commodification process can be obscured in the auction space by the perceived ‘perfect market’ nature of auctions, their operation as either a mundane practice or a spectacle, and the normalization of animal use through various activities and performances at the auction. But auctions are, as various scholars have argued, actually deeply sociopolitical spaces (Smith 1989; Geismar 2001; Garcia-Parpet 2007). This is occasionally evident during concerted political efforts at auctions, such as circulating petitions ensuring people's ‘right’ to own exotic animals. Even more fundamentally, auctions are – like other economic practices and commodities themselves – formed in and through political, ethical, and social processes. Ethical and political dimensions are particularly important when the commodity is a living being who suffers continually in service to capital accumulation. These animals are “lively commodities,” whose lively nature ensures their ability to suffer and simultaneously determines their commodifiability (Collard and Dempsey 2013). In the case of the spider monkey, her value as a lively commodity was tied to her reproductive potential, in spite of the fact that she had missing fingers and a missing eye. Although most exotic pets’ lively value is tied to their encounterability more than their reproductive capacity (Collard 2014), the spider monkey's liveliness enabled her to produce new lively (and encounterable) commodities through the reproductive process. The cow with barcode #743 had commodity value when she arrived at auction to be sold for meat, but her value quickly declined when she collapsed in the pen and could not rise, as ‘downed’ animals are not fit for human consumption. Her body would be rendered into useable byproducts in order to eke out the last bit of capital from her life and death.

As animals continue to be commodified through myriad processes and places under capitalism, the auction is one place where uneven power relations between humans and other animals are readily displayed. The banal violence at the auction is a site through which to understand the invisibilized violence present in humans’ everyday use of animals. Auctions are places of capitalist exchange, they are places of encounter between humans and other animals, and they are places where the animals themselves are both displayed and subordinated. Given these multiple dynamics and auctions’ inheren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Politics
• PART II Intersections
• PART III Hierarchies
• Index