One winter in the late 1960s I worked as a seasonal employee in a small family-run factory and slaughterhouseâBaughanâsâin Colchester, Essex. On the sides of the delivery van that ran between the factory and its retail shop in the town centre, Baughanâs advertised itself as a âHigh Class Pork Butchersâ. Its specialty: pork pies and sausages.
My workdays at Baughanâs were divided into mornings and afternoons. In the mornings I made saveloy sausages. This I did with the aid of a fearsome mechanical grinder, into the top of which I shovelled equal amounts of filling and the boiled body parts of slaughtered pigs. The filling comprised heaped onions, carrots, salt, sage and spices combined with day-old pies, bread and cakes that had been returned to the factory from the retail shop, unsold and stale. The pigsâ body parts included their brains, livers, hearts, kidneys, entrails, skin, gristle and fatânearly everything, that is, except for the animalsâ bones, heads, âtrottersâ (feet) and âbeersâ (ears), sold separately as special treats for domesticated dogs. The grinder thoroughly mixed, chopped and compressed all these ingredientsâfilling and animal parts, bothâbefore ejecting the minced product onto trays to be wrapped in reddened casings fashioned from pigsâ intestines. Not for nothing did Baughanâs promote saveloys as âsavouryâ and âhighly seasonedâ pork sausages!
In the afternoons my job was to dress the heads of a dozen or so decapitated pigs. Armed with stout scissors and an electric razor, I had to shave the pigsâ heads so as to remove all evidence of their facial hair and bristle. Suitably dressed, a celebratory green apple stuffed into each pigâs gaping mouth, their heads were destined to adorn local dining tables at Yuletide and Christmas.
For a long while I suppressed all memory of my time at Baughanâs the Butcher. My self-stifling in this regard was rudely broken through, however, when, nearly a decade ago, I was confronted with the image of a decapitated pigâs head in a painting by the eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth. The image appears in a detail in Hogarthâs 1745 oil on canvas The Ladyâs Death. In it a skeletal dog frantically snatches a disembodied pigâs head from a festive dining table. Alerted to the need for some overdue, if painful self-reflection, I discovered soon thereafter that the display of pigsâ heads was an ancient English custom that had been practised in East Anglian Essex by the Saxons and perhaps even earlier by the Celtic warrior Boudicaâshe, the rebel queen who had led the massacre of Roman soldiers and the suspension of their imperium in Colchester and London.
As it happened, my jarring introduction to the decapitated pigâs head in Hogarthâs art coincided with an invitation to participate in a panel on green criminology sponsored by the United Nations (UN) at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology. My intention there was to provide a platform for dialogue between the nascent green movement in criminology and a variety of UN agencies which, in their everyday policy-making work, profess to promote the welfare of animals. But my plans in this regard were interrupted and then largely abandoned when, as part of my preparation for this task, I felt obliged to revisit the original wording of the UNâs Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, the first two articles of the Declaration are as follows:
- 1.All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
- 2.Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Aside from questions about what human rights are or might be and about the persistent gap between their presence in a document of rights and their widespread absence on the ground, of Article 1 it must be asked: Why does the UN persist in declaring that the only beings worthy of entitlement to rights are those named human? If human beings are âendowed with reason and conscienceâ, then what might this imply for the status of humans who are moral patients, that is, those who are brain dead or in advanced stages of Alzheimerâs disease or congenital analgesia? If the UN is steadfast in its view of the criteria for those who belong to the community of rights holders, then the situation of those humans who are in a coma, for example, is surely very precarious indeed. Because comatose humans are often said to have lost their reason, their conscience and their sentience, then presumably it follows that they must thereby forfeit their status as beings and as bearers of rights. On this view one has to worry whether comatose humans might be sacrificed in scientific experiments or used in blood sports.
There are numerous nonhuman animals (henceforth, âanimalsâ) about whom it might accurately be said that their capacity to suffer pain or even to reason is no less than that of humans who are in a coma or who are of a very young age. So, why are comatose or new-born humans regarded as members of a moral community whose members act towards each other in a âspirit of brotherhoodâ when animals with similar capacities are not so recognized? Moreover, in contradistinction to all other capacities, such as the capacity to suffer pain, why is the ability to reason elevated to its position as the sole criterion of rights? One answer to this question is surely that through the dogma and power of speciesism we humans tend to exclude animals from our moral community and instead to position them as insensible Cartesian automata that largely exist as our property and who may be used and abused accordingly.
Along similar lines it must be asked about Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Why are animals excluded from the UNâs sheltering umbrella which, as a matter of principle, is extended to âeveryoneâ without regard to ârace, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other statusâ? Why does the UN exclude animals other than humans from its seemingly inclusive embrace of everyone, as in â[e]veryone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration ⌠without distinction of any kindâ? Isnât it about time for the UN to reconsider its self-declared privileging of human lives over and above those of all other animals? So, ultimately, the UN must be confronted with the question: Rights for whom?
This Book
Murdering Animals: Writings on Theriocide, Homicide and Nonspeciesist Criminology crisscrosses the intersections of animal rights theory, criminology and the history of the fine and performing arts. It is the first text in any discipline to argue that if the killing of an animal by a human is as harmful to her as homicide is to a human, then the proper naming of such a deathââtheriocideââoffers a remedy, however small, to the extensive privileging of human lives over those of other animals. Whether the focus is on prose, painting, poetry or a play, each chapter addresses the killing of animals by humans, except for Chap. 6, the repeatedly threatening images of which unfold as the homicide of a father seemingly twice committed by his son. Though each of the chapters can stand alone, I hope it is not too fanciful to suggest that each also leads into the next and at strategic points dissects the others.
Chapter 2 (âTheriocide and Homicideâ) proceeds on the assumption that in much the same way that humans have moral rights, so also do all other sentient animas. In particular, they have the right to life, the right to respectful treatment and the right not to be treated as property. The site where animalsâ right to life is most extensively violated is the modern slaughterhouse. Modernist sensibilities require that, almost from the moment of its invention in early nineteenth-century France, the slaughterhouse operates according to the principles of invisibilization. Geographically, slaughterhouses have been moved away from urban areas to spaces where, behind brick and mortar and concrete, their noisy and bloody operations are hidden away. Linguistically, their killing work has been accompanied by the invention of a vocabulary of speciesist euphemisms designed to obscure their aim and characteristics.
The chapter suggests that in major respects there are structural similarities between the killing of humans and the killing of animals. Although with just one word and without too much ambiguity all those actions, lawful or otherwise, whereby one human kills another can be named homicide, there is currently no such unitary term for the killing of animals. Yet, if the killing of an animal by a human is as harmful to her as homicide is to a human, then the proper naming of such a death offers a remedy, however small, to the extensive privileging of human lives over those of other animals.
âTheriocideâ is the name recommended here for those diverse human actions that kill animals. Like the killing of one human by another (e.g. homicide , infanticide and femicide), a theriocide may be socially acceptable or unacceptable, legal or illegal. The major and often intersecting types of theriocide are identified as cruelty and neglect; state theriocide; factory farming; hunting and blood sports; the trade in wildlife; vivisection; militarism and war; pollution; and climate change.
Inevitably, Chap. 2 provokes the question of whether theriocide might on occasion be tantamount to murder. This is confronted directly in Chap. 7. In between, Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 6 operate as so many canvases that are explored to see how, historically and cross-culturally, theriocide and homicide are severally made and unmade in legal cultures and in works of art, literature and theatre.
Chapter 3 (âHunting Worlds Turned Upside Down? Paulus Potterâs Life of a Hunterâ, with Janine Janssen) was prompted by what is surely one of the most daunting tasks facing a nonspeciesist criminology, namely, the need to disengage discourse on animal abuse and animal cruelty from the historical dominance of human interests. The chapterâs focus is a case study of Life of a Hunter, an extraordinary if rather obscure painting executed at some point between 1647 and 1650 by the young Dutch artist Paulus Potter (1625â54). Nowadays adorning a wall in the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, Life of a Hunter boasts fourteen rectangular panels and multiple narratives. It depicts a hunter and his hounds who have been captured by the very animals who had earlier been his quarry. The hunter is put on trial by the animals, condemned to death and roasted alive. The animals are about to eat his flesh.
Life of a Hunter encourages several questions. Foremost among these are: What did Life of a Hunter mean to Potter and to the paintingâs audience? When and where did its viewpoint of an âupside downâ animal trial originate? Was its moral ...