The quote above is taken from “Mickey and the Beanstalk”, the second half of WDAS’s Fun and Fancy Free (1947). This short film opens with images of fertile fields that are inhabited by happy, free-range, farm animals living comfortably in small numbers. However, the fields become barren overnight after an antagonistic giant steals the town’s magic harp. As a result, three humanoid farmers – Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck – become starving and destitute. All they have left is their farm and cow. Upon hearing this, the little girl listening to the story optimistically exclaims: “At least they had milk”.1 It is then apparent that even though the three farmers are starving, they have not eaten their dairy cow. Instead, the farmers share a vegan meal: a tiny slice of bread and a single bean. However, after going mad with hunger, Donald Duck tries to kill their cow with an axe. He is stopped by Mickey and Goofy, who are both horrified by Donald’s murderous intentions. Upon hearing that Donald planned to kill their cow, the little girl announces that this is terrible given that the cow was their “best friend”. One of the ventriloquist’s puppets then suggests several gruesome and cartoonishly-dramatic ways that the farmers could kill their cow, such as by pushing her off a cliff whilst she sleeps. This is when Mortimer Snerd states: “If you’re gonna kill the cow, I don’t wanna hear the rest of the story”. Of course, the dairy cow is not killed or harmed in any way. Therefore, “Mickey and the Beanstalk” depicts a farm cow as a character worthy of a life without harm. It also implies that farmers do not harm animals, even in desperate circumstances. Both of these points are unrealistic given the harsh reality of agriculture both today, and when Fun and Fancy Free was produced and set.
This first chapter will explore WDAS’s portrayal of animal farming. This will include analyses of meat production, dairy farming, farmhouses, farmers, and the various animals that usually live on farms in WDAS films. These concepts will be studied alongside theories of romanticism and speciesism, two techniques often used to justify, attenuate, and hide the harsh realities of modern animal farming. This chapter will also note the influence that the “collapse of compassion” has upon farm animals. Part I of this chapter will explore the history of animal farming, and the common and notable cultural representations of it. Part II will list how often farm locations, farm animals, and the products of farming (such as meat) have been depicted in WDAS films. Part III will analyse farming in WDAS films, concluding that WDAS is complicit in keeping the “happy farm” myth alive. It will also look at the limited way in which WDAS has depicted characters that eat farm products, such as meat. Finally, Part IV will examine Home on the Range (2004), a WDAS film set on a dairy farm. This film supports many of the misconceptions about the farming industry that are commonplace in cultural representations, the tone of which is shaped by romanticism and comedy. This chapter will conclude by arguing that WDAS’s portrayal of farming has been consistently unrealistic and saccharine, even though over the past one hundred years, industrialisation and striving for efficiency (under capitalism) have been detrimental to animal welfare.2
Part I: The History and Romance of Animal Farming
The exact number of animals reared and slaughtered annually for meat and dairy production is so large that it can only be roughly estimated to the nearest billion. In 2011, the approximate number was 70 billion land animals worldwide (Khazaal and Almiron 2016: 375). This is larger than the number of animals killed for hunting, shelters, and research combined (Brown 2011: 23). The only industry responsible for more animal deaths is the fishing industry (Safina 2018). The population of living farm animals is about four times that of humans (Khazaal and Almiron 2016: 375). Most of these animals are denied meaningful protection and treated as nothing more than machines (Perry and Brandt 2008: 118). For example, most chickens in factory farms are unable to stretch their wings, a natural behaviour for birds (Leder 2012: 73). However, despite the staggeringly high numbers involved, farming is not the area of animal harm that attracts the largest amount of human concern. Three factors contribute to this lack of concern. The first reason is speciesism; the animals involved in food farming do not score on the higher-level of the socio-zoological scale. The second reason is because of the “happy farm” myth; romantic images of animal farming generally suggest that modern farms are happy and wholesome places for animals to live at. This misleading image is frequently repeated and is often at the forefront in WDAS films set in rural narratives, as this chapter will evidence. The third reason is because farm animals are rarely individualized; this factor leads to the “collapse of compassion” effect. To summarize, speciesism, romanticism, and the “collapse of compassion” effect have resulted in the problems with animal farming being widely ignored.
After the last Ice Age came the Neolithic Revolution (around 10,000 BC) in which humans changed from hunter-gatherers to farmers (Pringle 1998: 1446). During this period, humans began to settle close to each other and develop complex social bonds. These social bonds are what would subsequently become early human civilizations (Norwood and Lusk 2011: 18). As a result of farming, human societies began to produce healthier children, which allowed societies to grow much larger than they had previously, and at a much faster pace (Pringle 1998: 1446). In the past, not all regions had huge amounts of animals and land suitable for farming: therefore, early farming somewhat shaped the future wealth of many countries (Norwood and Lusk 2011: 13). Today, around 38% of the Earth’s ice-free land is used for farming, with about 70–75% of this land being used to farm animals (Deckers 2016: 22).
During the past 10,000 years, most humans would have been farm workers of some kind. For example, in the fourteenth century, 76% percent of people worked in farming, but today just 26% of all workers globally work in agriculture (Van der Zee 2018). Additionally, in developed countries, this number drops even further. For example, in the UK, only 2% of people are directly employed by the farming industry (Van der Zee 2018). However, this does not mean that farming has declined; in fact, more animals than ever before are killed as part of the farming industry’s routine operations. This decrease in employment is because agriculture has become industrialized; many of the jobs previously undertaken by humans are now performed by machines. Traditionally, farm animals were used to assist in farm labour, as well as to provide meat, dairy, and so forth (Leder 2012: 74). However, the rise in farm technology meant that animals were no longer needed to help with the labour; they were only needed for the products they could produce, and this shift led to the development of factory farming. The first species to be factory farmed was the chicken, then pigs, and more recently cattle (Van der Zee 2018). The increased production scale of factory farming requires that these animals live shorter lives, and also that they weigh more. For example, since 1925, the life of a farmed chicken has dropped from 112 days to 48 days, while their weight has risen from 2.5 pounds to 6.2 pounds (Van der Zee 2018). Because of this efficiency, the cost of meat and dairy has dropped considerably (Brown 2011: 23). For example, the price of chicken has decreased by 110 percent over the past fifty years (Norwood and Lusk 2011: 39–40). The efficiency of modern agriculture quickly became more profitable than the more humane, free-range, farming alternatives. However, these shifts have been detrimental for the animals involved. For example, Brown (2011) suggests that modern factory farms have no regard for the individual needs of the animals (2011: 23). This has been repeatedly demonstrated through the many exposé videos that have been produced by undercover animal rights activists (for example: PETA 2019f). As a result, factory farming is often compared to infamous examples of the poor treatment of humans in history, such as the prisoners in the gulags, or the way that privileged classes once colonized indigenous peoples (Plumwood 2012: 57, 72). In general, there are very few laws protecting farmed animals, and the ones that do exist are inconsistent. For instance, in America, the Humane Slaughter Act prohibits the unnecessary suffering of farmed animals, but this act excludes birds, which is problematic because more chickens are slaughtered for food per year than any other land animal (Norwood and Lusk 2011: 60–1). Thus, chickens, the most commonly-farmed species of land animal, can legally be neglected and mistreated in American farms.
As with some other forms of animal harm and objectification, humans are negatively affected by the farming industry. The majority of slaughterhouse3 employees in America are low-paid, young, single, men (Fitzgerald et al. 2009: 160; Schlosser 2004: 149). It is claimed that large farms (also known as megafarms) are purposefully built near deprived areas, presumably to attract people who are more willing to work in poor conditions for low-wages (Deckers 2016: 16). It is noted that the rate of suicide amongst farm workers is three times the national average in America (Schlosser 2004: 146). It is also claimed that the annual staff turnover rate in the meatpacking industry is around 400 percent, with the average worker leaving or being dismissed within three months (Schlosser 2004: 160). In fact, Adams (2010) argues that the staff turnover rates amongst slaughterhouse workers are the highest of any occupation in America (2010: 80). Moreover, a 2018 Guardian article claimed that American meat plant workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than other US workers, with an avera...