Animals and Modern Cultures

A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity

Adrian Franklin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9780761956235
  9780761956228
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781446222966
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The dramatic transformation of relationships between humans and animals in the 20th century are investigated in this fascinating and accessible book. At the beginning of this century these relationships were dominated by human needs and interests, modernization was a project which was attached to the goal of progress and animals were merely resources to be used on the path towards human fulfilment. These relationships are increasingly being subjected to criticism and a new field of interest in human-animal relationships has opened up. We are now urged to be more sensitive and compassionate to animal needs and interests, to understand their mindedness and how their lives and ours are entangled.

This book focuses on social change and animals, it is concerned with how humans relate to animals and how this has changed and why. Moreover, it highlights, through chapters on companion animals, hunting and fishing, animal leisures such as birdwatching and wildlife parks, and the meat and livestock industries, how attitudes and practices towards animals vary widely according to social class, ethnicity, gender, region and nation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Interest in human–animal relations has expanded considerably over recent years in both intellectual, political and policy terms, but to date there is no text that draws this material together or reflects on its meaning, significance and future. This is partly due to the range of disciplines which have an interest in it and their specificities. Zoology has begun to take a strong interest in human–animal relations (e.g. Kellert and Wilson’s 1993 ‘Biophilia thesis’) and joins other life sciences such as sociobiology, psychology and veterinary science. Geographers have also become concerned through engagements in environmental and ecological issues (see Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995, dedicated to animals and society). The disciplines with a more established track record in understanding human–animal relations are social anthropology, history and philosophy, but there have been few common points of departure or common objectives. Indeed from a sociological point of view these very separate and insular academic projects are among the many types of behaviour and assumptions in modernity that require explication and explanation.

This book takes a broad critical look at the intellectual content of human–animal relations in modernity, as well as a broad ranging survey of the many ‘contested’ sites of human–animal relations. The main aim is to stimulate a critical means of comprehending the complexities of human–animal relations in modernity and to introduce key topic areas, debates and research. Above all, this is a twentieth-century social change essay. It aims to explain how and why human–animal relations have changed in the twentieth century and to identify the social basis of those changes.

The field of human–animal relations is fast becoming one of the hot areas of debate in the social sciences and is beginning to occupy the centre stage once held by ‘the environment’. A mere glance at recent literature shows that this new area is advancing on several fronts. These include, for example: the philosophy and politics of animal rights (Benton 1993; Midgely 1979, 1994); the sociology of animal rights (Tester 1992); histories of human–animal relations (Ritvo 1987, 1994; R.H. Thomas 1983); the social anthropology of human–animal relations (Cartmill 1993; Ingold 1988); animal foods and animals in diets (Bourdieu 1984; Douglas 1975, 1984; Fiddes 1991; Franklin 1996a; Goodman and Redclift 1991; Mennell 1993; Twigg 1983; Vialles 1994); animals, nature and gender (Gaard 1993; Norwood 1993); hunting and fishing sports in modernity (Cartmill 1993; Franklin 1996a, 1996b; Hummel 1994; Ritvo 1987); pets or companion animals (Serpell 1986, 1995; Serpell and Paul 1994); animals, tourism and zoos (Bostock 1993; Mullan and Marvin 1987). Human–animal relations are also an important dimension in recent papers setting the agenda for a sociology of nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1995; Murphy 1995).

While this list establishes a growing diversity of interest in human–animal relations, in recent years much of the literature has been either historical in scope or focused around familiar pro-animal rights positions deriving from moral philosophy. There is, however, much exciting new material emerging in the UK, USA and elsewhere from research projects across a wide range of disciplines (including sociology, anthropology, veterinary science, sociobiology, zoology, nutritional science, medicine, environmental studies, political science) that is more detached and reflective of contemporary issues, but which has yet to be brought together in a coherent framework. There are some edited collections, for example, Manning and SerpelFs Animals and Human Society (1994) and a collection in Social Research (1995) edited by Arien Mack from the high profile New York conference ‘In the company of animals’. However, like many collections, they are lightly edited samplers that do not advance a self-conscious narrative structure or argument other than general pro-animal themes. Some of the more theoretically informed and less emotionally charged accounts (e.g. Cartmill 1993; Ritvo 1994; Tester 1992) tend to be historical and deal largely with nineteenth-century social change. Even though Tester’s analysis is sociological and a powerful invective against the naive philosophical bases of animal rights, it is mainly a discussion of the social origins of demands for animal rights rather than a ‘complete’ sociology of human–animal relations. If anything, his analysis points to the need to expand the analysis of human–animal relations beyond grand historical narratives (e.g. R.H. Thomas 1983) and to the essentialism of structuralist approaches towards a more precise understanding of global and local cultural milieux.

The scope for a sociology of human–animal relations is therefore much wider than that stimulated by history or philosophy. Some of this scope is established by the increasingly contentious and conflictual nature of human–animal relations across a number of sites in the twentieth century: from animal husbandry and the food industry, to pet keeping, animals and tourism, animals and sport, and changes in taste for animals and fish as foods. While the claim is often made that animal sentiments or tender-hearted romanticism have extended progressively into the twentieth century, this is difficult to reconcile with twentieth-century demands for meat, modes of meat production, habitat loss, the sustained popularity of hunting and fishing sports and the expansion of animal experimentation.

This is the paradox that lies at the centre of a sociology of modern human–animal relations and it will be used as a central organizing theme for this book. As the book unfolds it will become clear that the possibility of consistency in the realm of human–animal relations is less likely than differentiations. For any one culture the ‘animal world’ is never seen as an indivisible category, but as an historically constituted and morally loaded field of meanings that derive from the human habit of extending/imposing social logics, complexities and conflicts onto the natural world, and particularly onto animals other than ourselves. In modern nation-states the possibilities for differentiations in meaning and practice in human–animal relations are multiplied by the social differentiations that stem from class, ethnicity, region, gender and religion (among others). The book unpacks this sociological approach, discusses the full range of theories that have been used to understand human–animal relations and provides concrete illustrations and examples. A sociology of human–animal relations would also include how animals are/have been appropriated socially into a range of modern human projects: the use of animals in establishing and manipulating national identity and citizenship; the use of animal categories as signifiers of taste, belonging and distinction; the use made of animals and categories of animals in framing moral and ethical debates (e.g. in popular television documentaries and children’s books). However, the main cut and thrust of this book is to identify and explain the changing nature of twentieth-century human–animal relations.

Although animals are caught up in and used by different sociations and social identities in the West, it is also clear that at the end of the twentieth century animals are thought about, used and related to in a very different manner from the beginning of the century. Using modernization and postmodernization theory, this book identifies how these broad social forces of change have brought about a wide range of industrial, ethical, conceptual and emotional changes in our dealing with animals. It will be claimed that:

• an increasing range of animals has been drawn into closer, emotional association with modern cultures;
• the categorical boundary between humans and animals, so fiercely defended as a tenet of modernity, has been seriously challenged, if not dismantled in places;
• the social cause of these changes can be located in at least three processes that frame the postmodern condition: misanthropy, risk and ontological insecurity.

Whereas modernization was predicated on the essential potential goodness of humanity and built upon the twin goals of progress and democracy, in the latter part of the twentieth century these goals have been deemed unaffordable luxuries of a bygone period. In modernity, humanity was closely tied to a series of good works and improvements, bound together in various ways by the centrality of collective will. Animals figured in the modern project principally as a resource for human progress. The destruction of habitat, the enslavement into medical research and the creation of industrial husbandry regimes were perhaps regrettable to those in the know, but they were always justified through their contribution to the greater (human) good. As the modern project collapsed, so also did the sanguine view of humanity.

In the late twentieth century a generalized misanthropy has set in: according to this view humans are a destructive, pestilent species, mad and out of control. By contrast, animals are essentially good, balanced and sane. However, they are also seen as victims of a greedy, uncaring, global economy; a form of suffering with which many humans can closely identify. In identifying with animals as common victims, of course, the socially constructed ‘scientific’ division between humans and animals is weakened, particularly since the common adversary is an abstract, economistic but nonetheless human cultural formation. Under these conditions, new ideas which isolate animals from exploitation (the animal rights path) or produce the means for peaceful, non-violent coexistence (the ‘Greenpeace’ path) have appeared and thrived throughout the West. This highly emotional identification with animals, combined with a heightened understanding of them as cultural species (as opposed to merely mechanical beings at the mercy of their instincts), demonstrates that the social constructivist approach is inadequate to the task of a complete understanding of our dealings with animals in late modernity. Yes, humans impose an essentially socially constructed set of meanings and understandings on the animal community (through metaphor and metonymy), but that does not confine the understanding or the relationship to one of social construction.

This problem with social constructivism has been highlighted recently by Kate Soper (1995), Tim Ingold (1988) and Laura Rival (1996). In other words, we are not merely working through what it is to be properly human, using animals as the material for that exercise; we have also broken down some of the necessary conditions whereby animals can be merely metaphor and metonym of the social. Such close identification with animals about the commonalities of existence, material needs and the global-political contexts of risk has weakened the notion of difference.

In a related manner, the modernization of animal resources, particularly as foods, was originally conceived of as providing the basis of a universal healthy diet. Protein had been in short supply at various times and places in nineteenth-century Europe and the regular consumption of meat was a mark of wealth and rank. When meat was made available to all in the twentieth century, its link to strength and vitality and significance to growing children was emphasized. However, as we shall see, over the course of the twentieth century the livestock and meat industries became ever more intensive, large scale and rationalized. New cheap foods made from the excreta and bodies of used animals were recycled into husbandry systems. As a result of these developments and the decline of tight risk management under former welfare state umbrellas, the livestock and meat industries were swamped under serial outbreaks of human diseases resulting from the consumption of meat, eggs and milk products. Some of them were entirely new and related to the new technologies (e.g. BSE). This meddling with nature, together with the collapse of former risk management regimes has created a widespread anxiety about meat and livestock systems and instability for the industry.

But the association of animals with this heightened sense of risk in post-modernify goes further than meat and foods. Like the miners’ canaries, animals provide a register of environmental safety. In part, the increased love and care of wild animals has been associated with growing anxieties about pollution of the air, soil, waterways and seas. Again, as common inhabitants of a fragile and threatened planet, the former separation of animals (into wild areas) and humans (into ‘habitable’ areas) figures less in contemporary thinking. There are no wild areas beyond the control and management of humans (the so-called wilderness areas are highly managed, for example) and, as a result, wild animals join with those other species, pets and livestock that have been drawn into the human world for much longer.

Animals that have shared domestic space with humans have been subject to the third process of postmodernity. Historically, no other category of animal has been drawn so close to humans, but a close look at change in the latter half of the twentieth century reveals an extraordinary humanization of these animals. Eccentric examples are the very stuff of newspapers in late modernity – even the UK Times newspaper now boasts a pet column. From gourmet pet foods to pet bereavement counselling, to pet health products such as specially designed cat toothbrushes or pet toilets in parks, it is clear that pets have at least become treated like humans. However, it will be argued that our new behaviour to pets relates to new tensions in relationships between humans, particularly those longer term domestic and community relationships. We are not behaving towards animals in an eccentric manner; we are in fact, substituting pets for a range of close human ties.

An important part of the ontological security of individuals in late modernity is linked to familial, friendship, neighbourhood and community ties. These are the relationships that provide the day-to-day norms and cultural exchanges for most people. However, these are also the relationships at most risk from changes in the post-Fordist, neo-liberal economy and from new flexibilities and freedoms in the creation and dissolution of domestic relations.

As we shall see, pet surveys reveal their special significance among those people affected by either the absence or the loss of close ties, or those for whom enduring ties with localities of belonging have been severed. However, while in the 1960s a close relationship with a pet was widely considered dissocial and the cause for some concern, in the 1990s the development of very close, human styled relationships with animals is normative and, indeed, therapeutic. Animals are now considered important for our health, happiness and our recovery from physical and mental illness. Again, the boundary (or the significance of the difference) between humans and animals is challenged by the fluidity and interchangeability of humans and animals in friendships, companionships and love.

This book comprises nine chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 are historical and theoretical while the remaining six are concerned with substantive topics. Chapter 2 is the scene-setting, historical chapter and describes key changes in relations between humans and animals over the main period of modernity up until the twentieth century. A consideration of the Christian ‘dominion’ view of human–animal relations, specifying their nature and content, is explored. The collapse of dominion thought that is associated with Enlightenment thinkers and the rise of science is outlined. The place of animals in the economy, diet and home are considered alongside intellectual change. As industrialization and urbanization expanded in the eighteenth century, the twin but contradictory development of compassionate sensibilities and a rationalized expansion of industrial meat production began to take shape. These two notions will be later traced into the twentieth century in the form of a series of projects culminating, on the one hand, in the factory production of meats, fish and eggs, genetic manipulation of livestock, global and horizontal integrations of animal production, marketing and fastfoods, and exhaustion of seafood supplies; and, on the other, in the establishment of national parks and conservation areas, protection and rescue of wild animal species, the establishment of global pro-animal organizations and the politics of animal rights.

The idea behind this chapter is to discuss, in broad terms, the main theoretical traditions in this area and to focus particularly on those that promise the means to understand the nature of change and continuity in the twentieth century. In order to do this the book combines a theoretical understanding of the way in which animals are incorporated into human and social projects with accounts of social and cultural change in the twentieth century. This approach will be used as a framework in each of the substantive/topic chapters. The modernizing account by K. Thomas (1983) is contrasted first with an application of Elias’s (1986, 1994) civilizing process theory and second with Cartmill’s (1993) idealist historical account that identifies neo-romanticism and neo-Darwinian ideas as the principal cause of divisions and conflicts over human–animal relations in the early twentieth century.

The weaknesses of these theories are discussed using, among others, the critical work of the American historian Harriet Ritvo (1987, 1994) and the work of the British historical sociologist Keith Tester (1989, 1992). Ritvo’s critique centres on the significance of variations in human–animal relations, about which these theories have little to say. Her critique suggests that the only way we can understand change is by looking closely at the local and culturally contingent nature of change. Tester’s critique is more penetrating. While acknowledging the critical significance of the historical and cultural variations, he builds on the contributions of social anthropology and Foucault to identify the essentially human and social content of human–animal relations in modernity. By suggesting that all cultural groups use animals to think through human conflicts and problems, Tester’s analysis requires us to look closely at those who propose and enact change in human animal relations, and the relationship between their views and social divisions of the day. Tester’s approach was never applied rigorously to an analysis of change in the twentieth century, but class and cultural divisions and conflict were identified as the critical social contents of much reform in this area. As we consider more recent change we must add the salience of gender, ethnicity and nation. Tester’s framework will be broadened in order to consider the links between changing human–animal relations and theories of postmodernity – in the same way that earlier change was linked to modernizing themes.

Chapter 3 sets out the main analysis of the twentieth century using modernization and postmodernization theory as a framework. The application of Fordist production techniques and the expansion of consumption and mass markets, are tied into attitudes to animals as a social, progressive resource. Animal-related leisures also expanded and were shaped by the progressive needs of humanity: animals were therefore entertaining (in zoos and circuses), exciting (as in fishing and hunting), or picturesque (as in tourism). In the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since 1970, this anthropocentric, human progress-orientated view of animals began to change. We start to see the consolidation not only of sentiments, but also of an emotional content and concern not hitherto apparent. As an explanation of these new developments this chapter considers the significance of three postmodern phenomena: misanthropy, risk and ontological insecurity.

Chapter 4 considers the zoological gaze, or the manner in which viewing animals has been organized socially over time. Gazing at animals has been a significant entertainment in modernity, although it has changed in form from the early travelling ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Good to think with’: Theories of human–animal relations in modernity
• 3 From modernity to postmodernity
• 4 The zoological gaze
• 5 Pets and modern culture
• 6 Naturalizing sports: Hunting and angling in modernity
• 7 Animals and the agricultural industry: From farming to animal protein production
• 8 Animal foodways
• 9 Animal rites
• References
• Index