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3 FROM MODERNITY TO POSTMODERNITY
Chapter 2 examined the historical transformations in humananimal relations which resulted in the establishment of many attitudes and values that are familiar to people today. Four key themes were already well formed by the beginning of the twentieth century: the sentimentalization of animals; the role of the modern state in regulating appropriate, civilized behaviour to animals (the anti-cruelty laws, for example); the demand for animal rights; and the growing significance of animals in human leisure. While these attitudes persisted into the twentieth century, much more has occurred in the field of humananimal relations. The twentieth century has transformed the nature of sentiments towards animals, added considerably more legal and institutionalized apparatus concerned with animal welfare, advanced the idea of animal rights to a mainstream debate and decentred the form in which humans engage with animals in leisure. In addition, the twentieth century has substantially changed the economic, political and cultural face of human associations with animals. This chapter will establish the pattern of such changes and suggest a framework for their understanding. In turn this will provide a more systematic guide for the analysis of particular sites of humananimal relations, five of which form the subject for the remaining chapters.
The most appropriate general framework for understanding twentieth-century changes in humananimal relations is a specifically adapted version of familiar theorizations of modernity and postmodernity. The work of Beck (1992), Giddens (1990, 1991), Harvey (1989), Lash and Urry (1987, 1994), Rojek (1995) and Urry (1996) will be drawn on. Although these theorists provide general accounts of social change in the twentieth century, saying almost nothing about humananimal relations, their work is still useful because it is to be expected that our relationships with animals are closely tied to historically specific social and cultural conditions. As we will see, it is possible to account for the new ways in which humans have related to animals in the twentieth century, and their growing significance in our lives, through an analysis of key economic and cultural changes.
The chapter is organized into three sections. The first outlines the main economic and cultural composition of the first half of the twentieth century. The economic manifestations of this period are often referred to as Fordism, but since Fordism and modernity are such closely linked ideas, our discussion will be made under the heading of Modernity, Fordism and Animals. The second section considers the later period of the twentieth century, after which the modernizing project and Fordism began to break down, but not disappear completely hence the rather tentative terms, postmodernity and post-Fordism. There is no sudden switch from one to another and so no date can describe the point of transformation, although most agree that radical change took place in the 1970s. The second heading then, following the style of the first, is Post-modernity, Post-Fordism and Animals. The concluding section takes a closer look at the ways in which more recent social change has affected the nature of our sentimental attachments with animals.
The impact of Fordism and post-Fordism on humananimal relations in the twentieth
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century provides a useful analytical tool, particularly in identifying important discontinuities and changes. A key difference to emerge from this analysis is the transformation of sympathetic but instrumental, anthropocentric relations under Fordism to increasingly empathetic, decentred relationships in postmodernity. Postmodern relations with animals are characterized by a stronger emotional and moral content, a greater zoological range of involvement and a demand for more regulation and order. During the early part of the century animal sentiments were widely established but modernization privileged human progress: animal exploitation, extinction and experimentation were the prices to pay for the greater (human) good. After the 1960s, this compromise began to fall apart. As the modernization project was abandoned, unparalleled development was accompanied by deregulation and the scaling down of social programmes. As the essentially moral dimension to modernity evaporated, the compromise with animals was revised (particularly by sections of the new service class), in a series of pro-animal developments and movements, combined with changes in the ways humans involved animals in their lives. It will be argued that the development of strong emotional attachments to animals can be accounted for in terms of the moral crisis and disorder of postmodernity. In particular, this chapter identifies three features of postmodernity which have been important in the organization of this response: misanthropy, ontological insecurity and risk/reflexivity.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, paternalistic capitalists and their middle-class urban managers imposed anti-cruelty legislations in order to regulate the recently urbanized rural working classes and restore a productive social order to the city. The changed humananimal relation had a clear social foundation. Similarly, over the past twenty-five years or so, a fraction of the educated middle classes has worked hard to revise the humananimal relation, but the sorts of values they have mobilized were precisely those associated with a more regulated social order in line with new social and economic conditions. It was a reassertion of older collectivist values which promoted the notion of social responsibility, social planning, justice and equality, combined with the more recent promotion of decentred sensibilities, multiculturalisms and planned sustainabilities (e.g. sustainable environments, sustainable economies and preventative human medicine). In a variety of ways, which this book aims to illustrate, animals grounded these ideas in a number of new projects and practices.
The morally worthy project of modernity, with its concern for human progress and emancipation, gave way after the 1970s to a culture dominated by economic rationalism, selfish individualism, ethnic conflict, consumerism and new right politics focused specifically on destroying the jewel of modernity: welfarism. Society became essentially disorganized, confused and morally ambiguous; individuals were less bound to one another by the moral ties of family, neighbourhood community and class. In short, it became increasingly difficult to identify clear, morally imperative relationships and regimes. In all sorts of ways, the care and love of dependent animals, whether as companions in our homes, managed wild populations, or animals involved in food production, have enabled people in late modernity to engage in morally good acts. Animals provide a clear, unambiguous feel-good factor in peoples lives and an object for human responsibility. In part then, change in the twentieth century can be understood as the normative extension of moral debates onto the parallel community of animals, but there is also a keen sense that the boundary separating the human from the animal
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was finally being eroded. This book suggests that humans began to build social and emotional ties with animals because it had became increasingly difficult for them to establish and maintain such ties among themselves.
MONIDERTY, FORDISM AND ANIMALS
In this section we concentrate on social change as it affected humananimal relations in the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Before we commence this examination, it will be useful to situate this period within the overall history of modernity.
Modernity can be divided into four periods or phases and, while never completely distinct, the division does help to clarify the development of key modernist ideas. In the first phase, which we can call the Enlightenment, modernity was little more than a small number of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and writers who hoped and believed that the world was controllable through scientific discovery and rational organization. In this period the idea that there was only one answer to any question (Harvey 1989: 27) was widely shared and the search was on, in disciplines such as economics, sociology, and the natural sciences, for universal laws and singular paths to progress.
The second phase (classical modernism) commences just before the second half of the nineteenth century, a period during which there was much political turbulence. People were beginning to question their faith in capitalist development as a blueprint and panacea for all human ills. Criticism, debate and experimentation characterized this period, leading to a total breakdown in the orthodoxy of the Enlightenment. Throughout Europe and the USA, modernism broadened and bloomed in every field. Divergence and difference characterized development and this common spirit led to an efflorescence of innovation in the arts, sciences and productive capacity in the first two decades of the twentieth century. During this period the first large corporations were formed from the proliferation of smaller companies. These were to play a vital role in developing mass production and consumption and transforming the cultural composition of the working class. While Western society benefited in all sorts of ways from the relativism and freedoms of this period, it lacked a clear sense of purpose: on the one hand a set of discontents manifested themselves in the despair, anomie and restlessness in the ever-growing metropolis; and on the other, a set of discontents based on perceived injustices, anarchy, inequality and disorder threatened to undermine its social and economic foundations.
The period of heroic modernism, between the wars, saw the search for aesthetic visions to provide a sense of purpose. Europe was war torn, economic crises deepened and through the perceived need for visionary solutions, destructive aesthetic visionaries were elevated to positions of power and influence.
Whereas this period was dangerously unstable, the period after 1945 (high modernism) was extremely stable. This stability was built on the political and economic hegemony of the USA, a long period of economic growth and full employment, city and suburban development, material plenty if not surplus, successful welfare programmes, the modernization of the Third World and the development of a global political economy.
Modernity is often described in terms of three principal themes or objectives:
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enlightenment, progress and emancipation (Crook et al. 1992; Harvey 1989: 1215). From the Enlightenment onwards, the comforts of religion and the limits on human control of nature were rejected in favour of human progress. Although modernity was neither orchestrated nor directed, it makes more sense to see it as a project (Habermas) or a trajectory (Crook et al.):
The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. The scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamity.
(Harvey 1989: 12)
Modernism is therefore selfishly human in orientation, self-absorbed in its clear sense of human materiality and interest. As an idea of the wealthier, educated classes, modernism was always aimed in part to improve the lot of the poorer classes. Until all humans were elevated from want and domination, the idea of radical reform of humananimal relations was impossible. Thus, Salts Animals Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892) was bound to fail when it was first published, despite its rhetorical title and ethical appeal. At that time, workers were frequently on the breadline, most children lacked adequate healthcare, women were not enfranchised, and blacks and indigenous peoples had no civil rights. Apart from the sorts of growing sentiments documented by Thomas in the English case and by Cartmill in the American, it was undoubtedly the case that animals must, in the last instance, take second place to humans.
Fordism is a particularly apt marker of change in the modernization of humananimal relations. The arrival of cheap motorized transport did away with horsedrawn carriages and, in a single stroke, removed the last animals to be in close, visible, daily relations of service to mainstream modern culture. This was the last instrumental relationship with animals that most people accepted as a necessary part of their lives and which served as a link to other instrumental relations, particularly with meat animals. The working horse, with its technical apparatus of harness, bit, reins and whip, was a powerful symbol of subjugation. Because it was so centrally placed in metropolitan life, it maintained a strong link with pre-modern, traditional rural and instrumental relations with animals. By the time of its demise it was already, of course, enjoyed with a sense of nostalgia. With the city finally cleansed of all pre modern relations with animals, it became very nearly devoid of animals altogether, with the exception of pets and a subset of tolerated species: city flocks of pigeons, waterfowl collections on ornamental lakes and ornamental rodents such as squirrels (rats with good PR) and chipmunks. Fordism ushered in this final separation, but it made possible an entirely new set of relations.
Fordism centres on the cultural vision of Henry Ford rather more than on the arrival of cheap motor transport. Fords vision went beyond the mechanics of production line manufacturing, control over the labour process through time and motion techniques and direction from corporate structures. His was a vision of capitalism in the round, but particularly of improvement and progress of the life style and conditions of his workers. His vision of modern capitalism involved morally upstanding workers relinquishing their autonomy in mass-production factories and benefiting from both higher wages and cheaper, mass
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produced goods. Ford believed that in this way it was possible to achieve an even, stable capitalism; affluent workers with good homes served by technical innovations; and economic growth and stability maintained by strong demand. The vision was only partly realized by Ford, corporate USA and large manufacturers elsewhere during the inter-war years, but it succeeded after 1945 for almost thirty years. Thus during the first part of the twentieth century the Western economy was erratic and the labour market highly segmented. In the USA and the UK wages in the corporate manufacturing sector rose steadily in real terms over this period although the spatial distribution of affluence was uneven. From the late 1930s, affluence grew and became more even and sustained.
In contrast to most of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century was driven by a more progressive, corporate and powerful capitalism in which the maintenance of high levels of consumption was achieved in most social classes. Fordism was the equilibrium of mass production and mass consumption. However, it tended to flourish in conditions which were regulated and planned by an expanded state and bureaucracy, such that the economy was attached to strong national goals and objectives (Lash and Urry 1987: 3). At the same time these national formations were dependent on favourable if not exploitative trade terms with less developed nations, formerly dependent parts of larger empires. Nations such as Canada, the USA and Australia had vast stores of cheap resources which were gradually developed into large-scale primary and manufacturing industries in the twentieth century. Although the economic and industrial bases of Fordism had profound effects on our relations with animals, the formation of mass markets, generalized affluence and mass popular culture had the greatest impact. However, affluence did not simply produce consumers and consumer cultures: combined with more free time it created the conditions for modern leisure and leisure cultures. Fordism was therefore a powerful ethos which had far-reaching consequences for human animal relations in the twentieth century. These can be summarized in the following interconnected features:
1 The spectacular extension growth of extensive potential grazing for the global and pasture livestock creation herd. in the new world resulting in a Technical and scientific development resulting in reliable long-term freezing of meat, the 2 possibility of long-distance exportation and substantial growth in Old World meat
consumption.
3 Technical industries, and exploiting scientific cheaper development grain prices resulting and proximity in new, to rationalized major markets. intensive livestock The rationalization and concentration of the slaughtering, butchery and meat packing 4 industries, resulting in new, fully integrated, production line systems, typically removed
from former urban locations.
5 Industrial overfishing fishing and depleted changed home continuously water stocks. in response to growing markets, resulting in The growth of a motoring and touring market eventually assumed mass market proportions. This stimulated demand for parklands, national parks, the establishment of parks and 6 wildlife regulated bureaucracies angling and with hunting, a remit and to educational provide trails information for walking and and activities riding, organized for visitors. and
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Status-confirming leisure activities were established by the wealthy and quickly copied by middle and working classes as incomes rose and costs decreased. As the amount of annual paid leave grew, so more opportunities arose for trips to outdoor locations and activities involving animals; walking in wild areas became the most popular 7 Australia; leisure activity; angling hunting becomes become a mass a mass (male) masculine popular culture culture in throughout the USA, New Western Zealand society; and birdwatching, nature study, zoological gardens and wildlife reserves became major popular leisure activities.
Higher wages supported the massification of pet keeping and pet populations expanded; 8 zoological range of pets widened; pets and animal leisure organizations provided basis for social identity. Increased interest in animals arising from hobbies and outdoor leisure stimulated the demand for mass media representations of animals; animals became principal characters in 9 cartoons and childrens stories; animals were given moral identity in media representations; films, cartoons and novels used by reformers to broaden the popular support for sentimental attitudes, anti-hunting, conservation and protection.
Animals, particularly indigenous animals, were adopted by nation-states as part of nation building, establishing national identity and distinction. The association of indigenous animals with nationalism led to further symbolic animal adoptions by national companies and corporations; animals were used in the mass media, especially childrens media, to 10 recommended inculcate patriotism, for school and curricula. nature This study established (particularly for the national first time nature) a mass, was standardized widely knowledge of national fauna and flora upon which citizens could assert a national pride, interest and, later, concern and responsibility. Designated organizations and appellations such as the National Trust in Britain and, later, World Heritage Areas demonstrate the link between animals and citizenship.
The foundation of international charitable organizations extended regulation, protection and Western notions of animal sentiments, especially to the Third World. Global interest 11 was elevated and maintained through popular animal documentary genre and Third World states imposed restrictions on indigenous peoples use of wild animal hunting in favour of managed international big game hunting tourists and safari parks.
Science laid a claim to expert knowledge and control over significant domains of animal regulation and policy (e.g. zoology, veterinary science, conservation, ecology, food and nutritional science). Science served to differentiate expert from popular knowledge and to distance laypersons from informed, significant or relevant opinion. The priority and status 12 weakened given to scientists and separated in this popular period sentimental and their attitudes central relation to animals to from the project the scientists of modernity use of them in pure or applied fields of science. Again, in this period the prior needs of social progress were expressed over and above the moral interests of animals, and the morality of the experimenters.
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Animal luxuries
The emergence of mass consumption rendered formerly luxurious commodities more commonplace. Two luxuries that were formerly the preserve of the wealthy were of particular importance to the development of humananimal relations: meat and leisure.
Throughout the Western world, meat eating was a key register of social progress (Burnett 1966). Meat eating grew dramatically from the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a result of the further extension of grazing in North America, South America and Australia; intensive animal rearing developments; improvements in freezing technologies that permitted long distance exports; and the growth in effective mass demand. The production of meat became subject to the same process of rationalization as any other commodity production under Fordist conditions. Factory production concentrated meat production in smaller spaces; controlled feed, water and temperature efficiently; enabled the health of animals to be monitored easily; and cut down on inefficiencies resulting from unnecessary animal movement. This particularly affected the rearing of pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks, but egg and veal production and some beef and dairy techniques were rationalized along similar principles. The slaughtering, butchery and packing of meat was also rationalized and spatially concentrated: the Chicago stockyards being the exemplar case. Meat was a food strongly recommended by governments and health authorities in all Western countries. It featured in all pictures of ideal diets and was recommended in ever-growing amounts. However, the newly affluent workers required very little inducements to eat meat: it was a preferred food and the sine qua non centrepiece of all Western meals (Douglas 1975: 25073). While meat was eaten unambiguously and vegetarianism considered eccentric for most of this period, the animals from which it came were surrounded in ambiguity.
Livestock, reared for their meat, were a highly ambiguous animal category throughout this period of modernity. On the one hand, as sentient feeling creatures and the object of human management, they were protected against cruel treatment. On the other hand, through genetic selection, husbandry and rearing they were also increasingly perceived as human products, the result of considerable human effort and therefore rightfully consumable like any other product. The ambiguity of domesticated livestock has been noted by others. Clutton-Brock (1995), for example, argues that through the domestication process, livestock animals are deemed by scientists to have lost their nature and are considered unsuitable objects for scientific study. Ingold (1994) notes how the truly natural was increasingly defined as untainted by contact with humans; that human contact and association denatures animals. Lévi-Strausss analysis of food is also useful in understanding our ambiguity to these animals. In structural terms they are neither true nature nor truly humanized (as are pets), but nature worked on by humans. Lévi Strauss shows that the category of edibility in Western society is, in part, defined in the same way. Pets, by contrast, are humanized to a considerable degree and are therefore inedible.
The paradox of livestock was marked by their spatial separation from humans. Livestock were completely removed from the British city in the first half of the nineteenth century. Until the passing of by-laws that prevented the keeping of animals within cities, pigs, chickens, rabbits and even milking cows were a part of city life. The new regulations marked a significant separation between humans and animals that was finally completed with the
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replacement of horses by motor vehicles. The slaughter and butchery of animals was an inner city and visible phenomenon until relatively late into the nineteenth century. In several stages, however, these industries were removed to outer areas and thence to greenfield sites in rural areas. The entire process of production, slaughter, butchery and packing was an entirely rural activity by the early twentieth century. The fragmentation of the production process was another new development of this period. Specialists emerged to cart animals to the slaughterhouse and thus separate the farmer from complicity in the killing. Husbandry was a wholesome, caring, nurturing industry, to be insulated from the stain of death and slaughter.
The entire farming enterprise was slowly reworked in the popular imagination along romantic lines: the obscurity and backwardness which attached to farming and rural life from the Enlightenment onwards was forgotten in favour of the nostalgic and pastoral. Farms were no longer sites of ignorant vulgarity: they were splendid survivals of a simpler, moral and natural living. The slaughterhouse itself was revamped and given the obscure euphemism abattoir (from the French to fell). It was subjected to a process of rationalization and production line systems were employed. Most workers were separated from contact with whole animals and the act of killing was divided between two separate tasks (stunning and bleeding) so that no person was completely responsible for deaths (Vialles 1994).
While meat consumption has a long history in Western society, meat has only relatively recently been eaten with such regularity, on such a scale, and by so many. In Europe meat was relatively scarce until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Before then it was a high status food and many ate it only occasionally, rarely, or on special occasions (Franklin 1997). As meat was understood to have superior nourishment qualities, as well as being a marker of status, its merits as a food were compelling. Cheaper and more abundant supplies of meat, following the expansion of the industry in the USA, Australia and South America, were a clear marker of social progress, particularly because, even as late as 1870, the possibility of food scarcity was still a major political concern (Bartrip 1988). Moreover, livestock were not covered by the logic used to protect and sentimentalize wild animals. Sentiments that accrued to wild animals were initiated by the acknowledgement of widespread destruction of habitat, diminishing populations and species loss. By contrast, in the nineteenth century livestock farming had prospered and spread and livestock were superabundant. However, better supplies arrived at a time when attitudes to animal abuse had reached generalized levels of repugnance. The superabundance and desirability for meat, combined with repugnance for killing, resulted in the ambiguity and reticence surrounding livestock animals. One resolution was spatially to separate the livestock industry from urban populations; another was to differentiate the animal from the meat. Such differentiation became increasingly more elaborate. In the earlier period butchers shops displayed meat in a form where the animals were recognizable as hung carcasses and part-carcasses or semi-plucked birds. At the end of this period, however, the animal was no longer recognizable from the displayed pieces in the butchers shops and supermarkets; the pieces were smaller, typically boned, skinned, plucked and filleted.
The second form of animal consumption to expand from its former elite status was in the sphere of leisure. Over the course of this period the growth of mass leisure significantly increased both the range and scale of humananimal relations. These can be summarized under
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three broad types or relation: pets, interest in and activities to do with wild animals, and hunting/angling. All three were first developed in their particular modern leisure form by the wealthy.
Pets were a narrow range of animals in the early twentieth century and more the preserve of the wealthier classes (Ritvo 1987: 1779), but they became socially ubiquitous and zoologically more diverse as the century proceeded. Pet keeping became subject to differentiation: specialty societies or fancies burgeoned first for animal species and then for the breeds within any one species. Shades of distinction and class went as far as colour on occasions. As a major field of consumption and leisure, social identity was easily transferred to the fancy or to the species or breed in a quasi-totemic fashion. In this period, however, the social identity invested in pets mirrored social class: the wealthy kept pet ponies, the larger and more exotic pedigree breeds of dogs as well as the toy breeds and the Asiatic breeds of cats. Working-class pets were more likely to be crossbreeds of cats and dogs, the more vulgar pigeons, fancy rabbits, mice and caged birds. Pedigree animals, especially dogs, were the outcome of a nineteenth-century innovation which clearly marked the established and emerging distinctions, rankings and hierarchies among their owners (Ritvo 1987: 8293).
Wild animals attracted enormous curiosity during this period, although interest varied considerably. Britain had eradicated most large and dangerous species in its own home territory and most people rarely saw its indigenous wild species except in books or in zoos. The surviving species lived in marginal areas, were nocturnal or semi-nocturnal or simply rare. However, they featured in many metaphorical stories which carried a variety of morally loaded messages on humanism, inequality, class conflict and nationalism. Indeed, indigenous animals were widely used as symbols of nation and citizenship. Also at this time, anthropomorphized, misanthropic and anti-hunting tales proliferated in Britain, as elsewhere. Misanthropic tales of the hunting of indigenous animals coincided rather awkwardly with other animal bestsellers: the colonial big game hunter stories, again ostensibly for children and teenagers. These contained several themes: the naturalization and dominance of Europeans in places such as Africa and India; the aggressiveness and danger of wild animals; the heroism of the hunter. Contemporary zoos housed these animals as dangerous captives (cages emphasized prison bars); like prisoners of war, they were put on public display for the entertainment of the victorious. The exotic wild animal became a source of exciting entertainment spanning all popular media: in childrens adventure and pictorial books, cinema features and films and later in the very popular television documentary. In the USA and Australia a similar pattern evolved with the exception that one class of exciting wild animals was indigenous and at large. As more familiar and acceptable symbols of nationhood, sensationalization gave way to sanctification. Indeed, the use of indigenous animals for national symbols and nation building shows how culturally specific and differentiated animal classifications became in modernity, in opposition to the flat uniformity of scientific classifications. Over this period wild animals began as a source of excitement/sensation/entertainment, often quite removed or distant from the animals themselves. But gradually, exciting entertainment gave way to new forms based upon study, education and tourism in which humans moved closer to their objects of interest. Natural history burgeoned. New natural history clubs and other societies such as birdwatching associations were founded early in the twentieth century. Walking, rambling and bushwalking
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clubs put natural history among their interests and concerns. Natural history was sold to children and adults in an ever-widening range of commodities: pictorial publications, equipment to support collection hobbies (butterfly nets, mounting equipment, birds egg identification books, for example), animal identification manuals, microscopes, aquatic study equipment, bird feeding stations and equipment, and so on. The interest was reflected in cinema features, typical of which were the animal drama documentaries made by Walt Disney. Television was launched at precisely the time when this form of interaction with and interest in animals was highly developed as a set of active pastimes. Building on this, television provided an increasing range of applications and rapidly realized the potential of animal programming to boost and maintain critical ratings at peak times of family viewing.
While the passive consumption of animals in leisure became a popular object of interest, other less passive activities thrived at the same time without any keenly expressed contradiction. Angling became extremely popular the single most popular participation sport in England, the USA and Australia even though it was essentially male. In these countries there is an undoubtedly masculine cult aspect to angling. This evokes the mysteries of ritual fishing trips between buddies, the essentially masculine father-to-son line of initiation and the ubiquity of local mens fishing clubs. In all three locations, the study of fish and their habitats and surrounds became part of the mysteries of fishing if not one of the most explicit reasons given for the pleasure gained. Only a few species were regularly eaten and, as we will see in Chapter 7, food-gathering motives gave way, albeit unevenly, to conservation and protection over the course of the twentieth century. Angling was very visibly class differentiated. Categories of fish and the valorization of different fisheries fractured along class lines and provided a rich source of cultural imagery for angling class cultures to develop. Hunting in Western societies has also become extremely popular, cultish and generalized as a masculine leisure pursuit. Over this period it was less confined to rural cultures (especially in the USA and Australia) and the social elite (especially in the UK and Europe). Increasingly, men from the city, beginning with a middle-class elite, began to take up hunting and to seek a place in the biotic order in the wilder parts of their country (naturalization). In the USA, Australia and New Zealand, for example, hunting became a mass male activity, affordable by all, and gained particular recognition as a significant ritual of male bonding between friends and fathers and sons. Educational, military, recreational and civilizing qualities were emphasized by the organized hunting fraternities, alongside semimystical references to Darwinian themes: the naturalness of killing, the need to express aggression, the need to hunt and so on. Summarizing we can offer the following characterization of humananimal relations in the first seventy years of the twentieth century.
First, the volume of interaction with animals has increased enormously. More animals were drawn into human contact either as pets, the object of nature study or in the hunting field. In addition to physical contacts, animals were principal subjects of media growth (entertainment and education) in the twentieth century.
Second, most of the interactions were explicitly anthropocentric: animals were clearly there for the pleasure and entertainment of humans and read explicitly for their leisure use value. Hence animals were a useful and popular educational stepping stone to the sciences. Conservation efforts were explicitly couched in terms of human consumption and needs for a
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nature in which to play and roam. Modern hunting and angling were physical extensions of the same idea. Meat was plentiful, guaranteed in supply and an essential food. It lost its status connotations and acquired a popular image reflecting the triumph of science and social progress.
Third, animals became central to the reconfiguration of leisure and identity in consumer society. At various levels of society animals became the signs and symbols of modern identities, including national identity, social class identification and individual identity through the formation of new societies (e.g. angling clubs, birdwatching groups, natural history associations, pet fancies).
Fourth, sentiments were generally distributed evenly. Human control and domination of animals and the caring manner in which it was to be conducted reached an agreed upon consensus or hegemony. Science, the state, the media and the leisure industries were four powerful authors in this hegemony.
Fifth, despite the relatively peaceful terms of this hegemony, it was unstable and contained contradictory logics, ambiguities and, ultimately, self-destructing tendencies. Meat, hunting and animal experimentation were not completely benign issues, but because they were so spatially separated from urban centres and so confined to class cultures, it took time for them to become widely known. The media could not continuously recycle the same animal programme formats. When the market for general knowledge of animals in their pictorial and geographical sense became saturated, they searched for new themes. In the 1960s, for example, the BBC turned to such issues as extinctions, animals facing danger from developers and principles drawn from ecology that challenged the possibility of separating human from animal interests in the global big picture. New programming such as Survival, Horizon and Disappearing World featured the plights of animals alongside those of indigenous peoples. The new sociations based upon specific leisure relations with animals began to reflect critically on the recreational and entertainment orientations of their leisure and to construct new fields of vision: the ecological, moral and ethical. Social identities formed from leisure and entertainment shifted to place the animal or the animal community as their object. Indeed, different leisure societies with such opposed interests as, say, bird-watchers and duck hunters, began to compete over the use of particular habitats and to lobby for new legislations. By the late 1960s the post-war cultural consensus was beginning to be challenged and to break down. In a period characterized by the arrival of liberation groups, it was not surprising that Singer chose the term liberation for the title of his book advocating animal rights. Animal Liberation (1990) was extremely successful and this alone demonstrated that views on humananimal relations were reaching beyond the consensus of modernity.
POSTMODERNITY, POST-FORDISM AND ANIMALS
Around the 1970s the fundamental pillars of Fordism and modernity began to look extremely shaky. The stable post-war economy collapsed and went into decline. The welfare state, built on the proceeds of economic growth and supported by both sides of politics, came under attack from the political right. The large manufacturing base of the West went into decline and
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liquidation. The economic and political relations of modernity were rigid and unable to adapt to the difficulties they faced. In the 1970s the countercultures and social movements of the 1960s grew in strength and entirely new issues, socialities and values, often explicitly opposed to the consensus of modernity, came into being and thrived. In the vanguard, of course, were artists and intellectuals, musicians and political activists. It was a very young, university educated vanguard. At the same time, another group of young people began to see an alternative means of achieving economic and political success. Grouped together, these new values and practices established something radically new which was given the label, very hesitantly (since everything now lacked strong definition), of postmodernity. As with the formation of modernity and Fordism, the implications for humananimal relations were going to be profound.
Postmodernity and post-Fordism are potentially very confusing concepts. In both cases they may be taken to mean something entirely new and different from modernism and Fordism, or merely new extensions of modernism and Fordism, containing much that continues unchanged. The confusion arises not only because these two propositions are opposed but because they are both true to some extent. It is important to remember that these concepts are being used to trace change in key patterns of economic and cultural life in the twentieth century. There are no seams to this historic change, there are no dramatic events that usher in a new age, there are no particular people whose dramatic contributions have recast social relations. Rather, there were limits to the social conditions and growth of Fordism and modernity; there were internal contradictions that rubbed and worked free towards new resolutions; there were developments in Fordism and modernity that undermined the foundations of both. The history and theory of this transition are well-worked themes in the literature (see, for example, Harvey 1989: Chaps 9, 10; Lash and Urry 1987: Chap. 9) and need not detain us much further here. What is important for our purposes is to get a clear understanding of the origins and nature of the key changes that affected humananimal relations.
The love of animals in the late twentieth century
The scene is set first by a brief consideration of three key changes in humananimal relations in the period since 1970: first, an extraordinary further growth in the range of activities associated with animals; second, the politicization of humananimal relations; and third the decline of meat eating in the West. This is followed by a consideration of the reasons for these trends. It is argued that we can only make sense of this bewildering set of changes by relating them to the general social conditions and sentiments of postmodernity.
If the massification and extension of leisure relations with animals occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, this trend continued with a new vigour after the 1970s. Whereas it was possible to identify human entertainment and progress (through education, for example) as the characteristic object of relations with animals in the first half of the century, after the 1970s it is possible to discern a more differentiated and decentred set of objects, chief among which was a desire for a closer relation with animals and nature, a concern for the animals themselves and their well being, a search for new ways of accommodating animals in the global economy, involving difficult choices between human and animal interests, and an
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increasingly therapeutic role for animals in a more privatized, individualized culture.
Getting closer to animals In the first half of the twentieth century it became increasingly easy to travel from the city to the countryside in order to see and interact with animals, while the city itself became nearly devoid of animal life. Most of this interaction was in organized leisure: weekend trips and holidays. After the 1960s, city dwellers extended their more enduring and close experiences with pets to include new urban interactions. For a start, urban nature was discovered in the parks, waste grounds, buildings, railway sidings, canals, and so on. Birds of prey, including kestrels and peregrine falcons, were discovered in major cities feasting on flocks of pigeons and starlings. Study groups were set up, minders protected their sites and schools and other parties came to visit. Schools and other institutions set up urban nature reserves on unused ground or redeployed former recreational areas. Suburbs were planned and built to include nature areas, complete with ponds, wooded areas, banks and other habitats. Populations of amphibians, birds and small mammals were encouraged. During the 1980s in Britain the fox, hedgehog and badger, which were all under threat in many rural areas, became established and secure in the city as animal lovers gave them breeding sites and food in their gardens. Grey squirrels and a wide variety of birds were given city tree nesting sites that were in decline in the country. According to The Times newspaper:
London is emerging as one of the richest places in Britain for wildlife, as intensive agriculture, development and neglect push many species in the countryside to the brink. Experts who yesterday launched a conservation strategy for the capital backed by the Government, councils and charities, said that the range of plants and animals in London was proving remarkable. Surveys indicated that many rare species on the decline elsewhere, including the water vole, dormouse, marsh warbler and green-winged orchid, were surviving in London. Some sites in the capital deserve as much protection as the Sussex Downs or the Fens it was said.
(The Times, 20 September 1996: 5)
In Australia at this time, suburban gardens underwent an extraordinary transformation: formal gardens of exclusively exotic European plantings gave way to a new fashion for Australian natives. Part of this Australianization of the suburb included finding space for animals. Possums, for example, formerly considered pests and removed from the city, were given nesting boxes and became the focus of much love and attention from their hosts. The Australian capital city, Canberra, built in the twentieth century, included in its plan the planting of thousands of trees to encourage parrots and other birds to live in the heart of the city. The emphatic message from all of this activity was that people wanted more animals and nature around them. Action days when local people are encouraged to gather along a river course or other site to clear it up, remove garbage, plant trees, install bird nesting boxes and so on have proved extremely popular. In addition, therapeutic motives were now as strong as the educational motives. This is evident in another 1980s development, city farms. Placed in inner city positions their purpose was to fulfil a number of therapeutic aims. Contact with animals was held to have beneficial effects on underprivileged urban children, many of whom, it was discovered, had never seen animals such as sheep, cows and chickens. Small groups were encouraged to take responsibility for feeding, cleaning and so on, and to benefit from cheap eggs, milk, yogurt and cheese. The elderly and infirm were brought in for an afternoon tea
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among the animals as a break from their isolated and housebound lives. The physically and mentally impaired, the depressed and mentally ill were encouraged to spend therapeutic time in the city farmyard.
The number of urban zoos and wildlife parks situated a short distance from large urban centres proliferated in this period. Again, the focus was quite new. The small, barred cages disappeared; the former emphasis on collections changed to one of specialism and breeding programmes, especially of endangered species. The mood of entertainment and spectacle shifted to one of empathy and moral support; the visitors paid large entry money in order to support worthy causes such as breeding and restocking programmes. An aura of dignified moral imperative prevailed. Increasingly, animals were kept in larger, micro habitats with an emphasis on their welfare and interests. Monotonous food regimes gave way to simulations of real diets; food was hidden and had to be found by the animals, encouraging natural activity and preventing boredom. Humans comported themselves with solemn righteousness; they observed behaviour and animal cultures rather than antics.
Television and video brought animals into the living room in greater quantities and in changing formats. As interest in animals broadened and became more significant than mere entertainment and general knowledge, so new TV formats emerged. Childrens TV continued to be dominated by animal characters and themes, but there was innovation such as the BBCs magazine The Really Wild Show in which punk-dressed presenters revealed the politicized terrain of humananimal relations in addition to a more hands on, interactive, custodial approach. The presenters were lay enthusiasts and activists rather than scientific experts (in contrast with, for example, Desmond Morris who presented Zoo Time in the 1960s, in his capacity as Curator of Mammals at London Zoo). This removed the barriers preventing much more than passive gazing and consumption, as had occurred in the 1960s. The Really Wild Show had a live, interactive audience of children who asked questions, handled reptiles and insects with care rather than with repugnance, and joined in a dazzling series of quasi scientific activities with a strong moral basis. Scientific barriers also came down in new pet shows, where much emphasis was on do-it-yourself pet care, preventative medicine and advice on how to make informed choices of pets. The experts were more often than not representatives from pet societies. Animal documentary formats grew in terms of air time (culminating with their centrality on special documentary channels) and their emphasis changed. Again, the stress was as much on endangerment from humans as it was on animals themselves; documentary makers moved away from the pre-1970s accent on mammals and towards all genera, including micro, nocturnal and subterranean fauna. Attenboroughs Life On Earth was the quint-essential expression and apotheosis of this trend. Documentaries could be on any aspect of human engagement: from the anti-McDonalds theme in farming and rainforest, restocking schemes and in-depth anthropologically styled approaches to the study of animals, through to documentaries shot in urban settings and back gardens or the home. Moreover documentary makers employed the fly-on-the-wall approach to bring the intimate lives of animals closer to humans, decentring humanity by further reducing the perceived distance between humans and animals.
Companion animals From the 1960s onwards, pet keeping grew very significantly. For
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example, in Britain the numbers of pet dogs grew from 4.4 million in 1963 to 6.3 million in 1987; over the same period, cat numbers grew from 4 million to 6.2 million (Council for Science and Society 1988: 1112). The morally questionable habit of keeping caged birds, popular enough until the 1960s, decreased considerably. The British budgerigar population dropped from 4 million in 1963 to 1.8 million in 1987; the importation of wild parrots halved during the early 1980s (Council for Science and Society 1988: 1315). The keeping of mini menageries grew in relation to affluence but also because the zoological range increased: stick insects, terrapins, tropical fish, ant colonies, snakes and lizards. Beehives, goats, chickens and other backyard farm animals all grew in popularity. Even where this new desire to be surrounded by animals did not run to menagerie keeping, there has been a trend since the 1970s of keeping dogs or cats in pairs. There are reversals in trends: the rat, loathed throughout modernity, is making steady progress as a pet, admired for its gentility and intelligence. The fighting dogs of the nineteenth century, which almost vanished in the twentieth, are currently voguish in some quarters. Indeed, the Staffordshire bull terrier was the tenth most popular dog breed in Britain in 1987, but relatively rare in the 1960s.
At some point over the past twenty years the term companion animal was coined and is rapidly becoming the politically correct term, while pet carries negative connotations of plaything, and entertainment value. Recent fashions in dog breeds confirm this trend: toy breeds were the most popular in the 1960s but in the late 1980s they were not even making the top 10 breeds sold (Council for Science and Society 1988: 12). However, this transformation is not cosmetic: in recent years the friendship and therapeutic value of pets has been vaunted as a significant discovery. The Council for Science and Society demonstrates a wide variety of applications from childrens socialization and substitute friends during difficult periods, to assisting the recovery from heart disease, bereavement, isolation and loneliness, and maintaining mobility. Pets are used in the treatment of depression and schizophrenia, the care of the elderly, the terminally ill, seriously handicapped, and prisoners (Council for Science and Society 1988: 2537).
There is also much evidence to show that pets have been drawn even closer into human society. New foods arrived in the 1980s featuring gourmet ingredients and recipes. Pet graveyards appeared, together with other (human) mortuary rituals such as obituary columns, church services and bereavement counselling. Pet psychologists, trainers and astrologers also became popular. In the 1990s the UK Times inaugurated a pet page, presumably because of new levels of public interest. We will argue in Chapter 5 that many of these changes in pet keeping suggest a movement from being regarded as mere companions and friends to becoming quasi or pseudo family.
Wildlife leisures Other leisure spheres involving animals demonstrate similar types of change. The rural leisure scene, which the new service class have made its own, has undergone profound change since the 1970s (Urry 1996). The consensus of the 1960s has given way to conflict and competition between rival groups. Bush walkers and nature lovers in the USA, Britain and Australia have maintained a spirited protest against hunters. Radical animal rights groups have taken direct action against organized hunters and shooters in addition to actions against fur farms, battery farms and animal experimentation establishments. In the 1990s their
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activity extended to disrupting anglers in Britain. But it is not simply extreme minority groups who are active in the protection of animals against hunters and others. Mainstream organizations with royal patronage, such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), are major players in animal politics. The Electronic Telegraph summed up the RSPB in the following terms:
How is it that a charity that was founded by amateur birdlovers to cherish and protect a defenceless part of the animal kingdom has become in certain quarters one of the most hated organisations in the country, as reviled, if not more so, than the taxman, the traffic warden, and the VAT inspector? A vast and august organisation that exudes authority and patriotism, the RSPB couldnt be anything but British. It is the ornithological Church of England, only much more successful. Founded in 1904, it is today not just the biggest conservation charity in Britain, it is the biggest and most powerful in Europe, with an army of 925,000 members. If anyone thought for a moment that the organisation was happy to let that figure rest, a large coloured board in the entrance to the RSPBs headquarters in a vast Victorian mansion, near Sandy in Bedfordshire, puts you right. Lets Make it a Million, the board urges in coloured print. The RSPB doesnt put it so crudely, of course, but the million members will help attract the millions. The societys income last year came to just under £35 million, a vast inflow by anyones standards, and in addition it owns or controls more than 240,000 acres of land throughout Britain.
(Electronic Telegraph 570: 14 December 1996)
Animal rights organizations also find themselves opposed to environmentalists and the green movement which, in places such as New Zealand and Australia, advocate the eradication of introduced, non-indigenous animals in favour of a preferred type of landscape and biotic community.
The anglers and hunters have not remained unchanged over this period, however. Some English foxhunters have switched to hunting an artificial trail. Hunters in Australia avoid popular censure, deeply affected by a nationalistic environmentalist discourse, by concentrating their efforts on introduced pest species. In the USA hunting ranches provide short-break, trophy-hunting experiences that involve killing stocked animals in fenced-off areas, rather than the socially more valued wild animals (Franklin 1996b; Hummell 1994). In some parts of the USA, the whitetailed deer, of Bambi fame, have been so protected from hunting that they have become an urban pest (New York Times 1996, reprinted in The Age 30 April 1996: 6). Clay pigeon shooting has grown relative to the shooting of real wild birds and less efficient methods, such as bow hunting, which keep the hunter in a low-impact, natural relation to prey animals, have grown in popularity, especially in the USA. In the Netherlands, hunters have to pass wildlife exams before being granted a licence, and afterwards they are required to carry out certain wildlife conservation activities as well as pest control. Anglers in all Western nations have significantly modified the aesthetics of their sport. Beginning with British coarse angling, the emphasis is more custodial and protective, with seemingly eccentric methods invented to reduce pain, harm and depletion. Fish are now routinely returned and rules to ensure safe treatment of captives have become increasingly refined. Great emphasis is now placed on the angler in the landscape as a knowledgeable, reflexive custodian, effecting positive outcomes in freshwater environments. Since these cannot be isolated from the wider landscape, anglers and their powerful associations are regularly involved in actions against rural and industrial polluters and are frequently the first to alert the public to the pollution of human water supplies. Again, what was once a sphere of idle, contemplative pleasure and entertainment has become politicized and, to borrow from Elias,
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civilized. Trout fishing, which involves a more sophisticated dovetailing of anglers with the aquatic biotic order, has grown rapidly at the expense of bait fishing; catch and release waters have increased in number and barbless hooks are now widely preferred.
The increase in contact with animals since the 1970s is nowhere more evident than in tourism and rural recreation. Making animal habitats visible and visitable, while at the same time ensuring a sustainable impact on the environment, is now widely preferred and in many ways cheaper than the staged entertainments and caged collections of modernity. Whale watching is a good example of this. Whales were scarcely a consideration up until the 1970s, but their rise in popularity and symbolic presence in the environmental movement testify to the zoological extension of sentiments in postmodernity and the enormous rise in energy given over to animal care. Whale watching began in vanguard sites along the Californian coast, but has now become a major tourist attraction around the world. All manner of aquatic animals that can be reached by unobtrusive boat parties are visited by caring tourists. Indeed many marine parks and heritage areas have been established in this period and national parks with a strong animal theme have thrived: photo safaris in Africa, diving holidays on the Great Barrier Reef and the Caribbean, Antarctic tourism. Other animal-based holidays have emerged: pony and camel trekking, ranching holidays, family holidays on sanitized working farms, rodeo workshops.
The demise of meat Meat eating has declined since the 1970s. First, the quantities of meat eaten have declined in response to health scares and raised thresholds of repugnance. Meat is no longer required to centrepiece meals or as a symbol of social progress; high consumption can indicate vulgarity. Meat is increasingly sold in marinades, stir fries or sauces as a pre prepared meal with exotic origins, thus further disguising its animal beginnings; new boutique meats and game have appeared with wild, free range, stress free or organic labels. Farmers facing declining prices for standard modern carcasses have diversified to accommodate new tastes and stimulate fresh demand. Emus are now raised in Britain and wild gannet culls fetch premium boutique prices. Fordist mass-production, factory meat systems have attracted substantial criticism and sections of the service class avoid their products. A substantial minority have become semi-vegetarian. The Maclibel case in which McDonalds was involved in a potentially self-damaging civil case against two London critics attracted enormous public attention and highlights the contentious as opposed to the celebratory status of modern meat-based fast food.
Second, vegetarianism has grown substantially in this period. Because of the reflexive nature of postmodern culture, the causes of this are multiple, varied and often highly individualistic and quirky. These include health and safety reasons, disgust at farming methods, moral, ethical, sentimental, ecological and religious reasons. Lupton (1996) is inclined to view vegetarianism as eccentric but, as a reflection of postmodern anxieties among the service classes, it is quite consistent with other trends in humananimal relations. For those not bothered about the new ethical arguments, the avoidance of meat eating altogether on health grounds may be seen as unnecessary, but they are left with increasing anxieties about the risks involved, and have continued surreptitiously to reduce their meat intake. Meat scares now seem a routine occurrence: cholesterol, salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE),
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Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD), and a variety of bacterial dangers: bST, E. coli and vanomycin-resistant entrecocci (VRE). The celebration of meat eating in modernity marked the triumph of mass production of sufficient animal protein. However, since the 1960s the industry produced the less-celebrated spectre of a meat glut. Fatty meat byproducts which had been introduced to raise profits from working-class consumption were tied unambiguously to heart disease, the treatment of which was very costly. New healthier forms of protein that were more efficient in terms of energy and land inputs, such as soya beans, soya bean products, other pulses, and nuts became widely available. Fish and sea foods that had declined relative to meat in the earlier part of the century were embraced with renewed vigour (Franklin 1996a).
The mood of increased concern coupled with the establishment of mass tender-hearted sentiments, the politicization of such concerns and increase in social movement type activities, the increasing desire to decorate the city with micro-habitats and contented animals, the perceived need to interact meaningfully with animals and to feel their benefits therapeutically are all postmodern trends, but how can they be understood socially? Is there a common meta narrative in postmodernity that sheds light on these developments?
The first attempt to produce an explanation for this explosion of positive humananimal relations came not from sociology but from biology, in Kellert and Wilsons Biophilia
Hypothesis:
Which sought to provide some understanding of how the human tendency to relate with life and natural process might be the expression of a biological need, one that is integral to the human species developmental process and essential in physical and mental growth . . . The biophilia hypothesis proclaims a human dependence on nature that extends far beyond the simple issues of material and physical sustenance to encompass as well the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction.
(Kellert and Wilson 1993: 20)
Clearly, the biophilia hypothesis was a product of its own time, inasmuch as it embarks from the multiplication of pro-animal and environmental issues since the 1960s and draws upon many New Age themes, including the reverence given to indigenous peoples cosmological relations with the biotic world. However, because the authors wish to create links between indigenous cosmology and the efflorescence of biophilia in the postmodern West, they do not dwell on the conditions producing each, but seek to impose an overarching, scientific narrative that renders history as merely the unfolding of natural propensities:
The biophilia hypothesis . . . suggests that when human beings remove themselves from the natural environment, the biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally well adapted to artefacts. Instead they persist from generation to generation, atrophied and fitfully manifested in the artificial new environments into which technology has catapulted humanity. For the indefinite future more children and adults will continue, as they do now, to visit zoos than attend all major professional sports combined (at least this is so in the United States and Canada), the wealthy will continue to seek dwellings on prominences above water amidst parkland, and urban dwellers will go on dreaming of snakes for reasons they cannot explain.
(Wilson 1993: 312)
Indeed, the origins of biophilia were formed in the somewhat mystical deep history of evolutionary time (Wilson 1993: 32). The notion of deep history is an inadequate device to place analysis beyond empirical-historical investigation and reduce history to genetics. Kellert
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and Wilson describe the biophilia thesis as daring, challenging, involving daunting assertions. [The] human inclination to affiliate with life and lifelike process is:
Inherent (that is biologically based) Part of our species evolutionary heritage Associated with human competitive advantage and genetic fitness Likely to increase the possibility for achieving individual meaning and personal fulfilment The self-interested basis for a human ethic of care and conservation of nature, most especially the diversity of life.
(Kellert and Wilson 1993: 21)
This thesis is fanciful and empirically flawed. If we can be clear about anything, it is that human sentiments to animals have altered in response to economic and cultural change. People may always have liked animals but history teaches us that they like them in profoundly different ways under different historical conditions. Indeed, we can situate the appearance of the biophilia thesis during the 1980s into clear currents of contemporary change in humananimal relations. Since it was written by scientists, it can perhaps be taken as a knowledge claim stimulated by the increasingly marginal and criticized place of science in a number of animal-related and environmental issues. Scientists have been held at least partly responsible for modern environmental destruction, rationalization of animal husbandry, genetic engineering and animal experimentation. The biophilia hypothesis restructures the relation between science and nature in a more positive light, and enables scientists to transcend a dangerously critical popular discourse by reducing it to core scientific principles such as genetics and evolutionary theory. It legitimizes contemporary sentiments through a genetically driven functionalist argument. While this may satisfy or even gratify some in the environmental movement, it is nevertheless an attempt to replace the reflexive morality of late modernity with a more fixed notion of humananimal relations that only science can properly reveal. However, the biophilia thesis contains a clue to a more fruitful line of inquiry. The love of nature and by extension animals clearly references human emotion, or rather the transference of human emotion onto nature. Under what conditions, we must ask, would nature and animals become objects for the transference of human emotions such as love, care, and protection? It is suggested here that three features of postmodern culture provide these conditions: misanthropy, ontological insecurity and risk-reflexivity.
Misanthropy Misanthropy as it is used here refers to a general antipathy to humanity as a species, rather than an individual dislike or hatred of people or others. Specifically, it refers to those who see humanity as disordered: a species which is out of control, deranged, sick or insane. This form of misanthropy was evident in the early part of the nineteenth century if not earlier, and reached a developed form among Romantics and social Darwinians. However, it remained an eccentric position for most of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. This is clearly because the modernity project cast human society in a very favourable light. Modernity was about providing adequate nourishment, clothing and medicine; people were to be educated, enfranchised and liberated; working hours were to be reduced, wages were to rise and luxury goods to be within the grasp of everyone. Modernity was a series of good works, and it was possible for most people to sense this directly through their
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own lives and in the lives of others. In the first half of the twentieth century the despoliation of nature, ethical uncertainties in dealing with animals, pollution and so on were evidently of great concern, but they were seen as the inevitable, regrettable compromise the price to pay for the greater (human) good.
A series of anthropomorphized anti-hunting books written in the first three decades of the twentieth century were influential in their own right but did not achieve Walt Disneys vast audiences for his pro-animal genre of cartoons and films, beginning with Bambi in 1944. These genres stirred mass public sympathies but did little to raise consciousness beyond generalized and fleeting feelings of regret and guilt. As urban dwellers most could claim a benign or indirect responsibility for the suffering of animals which occurred in distant, rural places. The Nazi holocaust and World War II were directly responsible for the eventual form in which humans were represented in Bambi. According to Cartmill (1993), Disney was also personally disturbed by a hunting incident during his childhood and remained firmly against it all his life. Disneys films always conveyed the essential goodness of animals and the unpredictable treachery of humanity. In comparison with humans, animals were good, peaceful, healthy and sane. Misanthropy derived from a critique of modernity and saw not progress but regression: humans were bad, sick, dangerous and deranged. Cartmill has shown that influential intellectuals such as Freud and poets such as W.H. Auden subscribed to and promoted such a view (Cartmill 1993: 158). Humans frequently played the villains or spoilers, although it was more evident in the war-weary, post-1945 period. This relatively benign, sweet view of animals as better sorts of people than people themselves influenced every generation of the twentieth century, although, again, the mass appeal of this literature spread more widely after 1945.
When the modernity project crashed in the early 1970s and the political economy of post Fordism became established in the 1980s, it was no longer possible to detect the greater good, while the human capacity to destroy the environment became more apparent. In place of full employment under the Keynsian economics of Fordism, there was mass unemployment, the long-term unemployed and the suggestion of an underclass. Entire regions were rendered idle and poor, while greedy new businesses made quick profits from asset stripping, takeovers and liquidation. New right politics ushered in greater levels of overt competition, less secure employment, lower pay, less industrial bargaining and worker control. Their principal political target was to reduce public spending associated with the welfare state. The era was characterized by greed, loss, instability, disorder and change. These conditions favoured the extension of misanthropy. Human destructiveness and ascendancy over animals was less easily condoned. The speed with which habitats were being destroyed, species were becoming extinct and populations endangered by pollution were identified with similar social processes. It became possible therefore to identify with animals under conditions of common adversity. The Green philosophy that human interests were directly tied up with those of animals became only too apparent. The essential goodness, sanity, and healthiness of animals stood in direct opposition to the values of postmodernity and provided a source of nostalgic longing. Thus, by bringing animals closer to human worlds, invoking a caring and loving relation towards them in which clear, morally good acts are identified and conducted, a philanthropic moral counterbalance is achieved in day-to-day life. Humans can be good and engage themselves in
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worthy acts.
In Giddenss discussion of life politics and the growth of environmental concern and action, he argues a similar line: that there are both institutional and individual implications for action; consumers must change their habits and practices as well as supporting organizations to promote change. But there is an emotional and moral content that is missing in Giddenss account which is essential to recognize in understanding postmodern humananimal relations. The difference between animals and environments is that the latter are perceived as abstract objects (e.g. the ozone layer, desertification), while the former are perceived as (anthropomorphized) subjects with many needs identical to those of humans.
However, the cultural centrality of animals in postmodernity is more complex than simply one of moral counterbalance. Animals can also provide emotional compensation for the loss of ontological security.
Ontological insecurity The churning nature of postmodernity, its lack of direction and plan and its distaste for government and bureaucracy creates, on the one hand, freedom, liberation and a perpetual state of change but, on the other, a sense of confusion, loss, unpredictability and anxiety. Giddens defines ontological security as a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual (Giddens 1991: 243). This sense of continuity and order is achieved for people everywhere not only through their ability to interpret and account for the actions and events around them (discoursive consciousness), but also because they possess a practical consciousness or a non-conscious, taken for granted set of assumptions that enables them to detect such things as normal behaviour and the expected responses and social compositions of everyday life: The notion of ontological security ties in closely to the tacit character of practical consciousness or, in phenomenological terms, to the bracketings presumed by the “natural attitude” in everyday life. On the other side of what might appear to be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action and discourse, chaos lurks. And this chaos is not just disorganisation but the loss of a sense of the very reality of things and of persons (Giddens 1991: 36). Saunders (1984), Marshal et al. (1985, 1987), Newby et al. (1985) have all used the notion of ontological insecurity to describe the essential state of privatism and social isolation of modern individuals and cultures in the West. Some transformations took place such as the decline of local community and the stretching of social networks over greater spaces. During the past twenty years, a wide variety of social ties have weakened or broken in response to new economic and social reorganization. Family and domestic organization have fragmented into more fragile, smaller and ephemeral units; strength of ties and permanence of relationship are often impaired. In a rapidly changing social environment, it is unlikely that strong, enduring interpersonal commitments will be made to substitute for the strong, morally binding ties that formerly held the family together in the earlier part of the century, or the worker to the company or union. Rather, friendship circles and the new socialities clubs, associations, networks and groups involve forms of sociability that are more shallow, short lived, voluntaristic and tied to specific sites and activities. The postmodern social identity is potentially more fragmented across a number of sites, never achieving the solidity and continuity of the early twentieth century.
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Giddens begins his book (1991) on social identity in late modernity with an illustration drawn from a recent study of divorce and remarriage. It is a good example of the double-edged nature of postmodern social change:
The sphere of what we today have come to term personal relationships offers opportunities for intimacy and self expression lacking in many more traditional contexts. At the same time, such relationships have become risky and dangerous, in certain senses of these terms. Modes of behaviour and feeling associated with sexual and marital life have become mobile, unsettled and open.
(Giddens 1991: 12)
One can extend the list of risks and dangers to all stages of the life cycle: the elderly can no longer rely upon familial support or company from their children and are more likely to be socially isolated; careers and housing markets can combine to make individuals put off having children altogether or until an income reduction is viable; few young adults can expect to secure a good job in their home town, among friends and relatives, and in a predictable and known local culture.
Under these conditions, individuals do not simply wallow in self-pity or suffer in isolation. Social identity becomes recomposed around new objects, and insecurities and anxieties find new forms of resolution. The self is no longer fashioned into a culturally specific and fixed set of contents, but becomes a reflexive project with trajectory and choice. Giddens and others understand the recent expansion of therapy as the result of these processes. We have already seen how animals have been used in a number of recent therapeutic applications, but the love of animals and the desire to have them closer to us can, in part, be related to ontological insecurities and new problems in establishing and maintaining enduring human relationships. Animals become substitute love objects and companions precisely because they can be involved in enduring relations of mutual dependency. Single person householders and childless partnerships frequently purchase an animal to love and keep them company and, as animals have been more routinely substituted for family, so attitudes towards them have changed.
In Chapter 5 it will be argued that recent trends in pet keeping can be understood as the extension of familial relations to non-humans. However, this relation is not confined to pets alone. One only has to think of the popularity of wild bird feeding during the depths of a cold winter to understand how this relation can be extended. Groups of Britons spend cold early spring nights assisting frogs and toads across perilous roads en route to spawning ponds (see Figure 3.1). Hunt saboteurs save their shorthorn, deer, fox and otter friends. Groups of Australian women across the country nurse and foster animals injured in bush fires. Birdwatchers everywhere get to know their birds. As a result of this increased familiarity, intimacy and interaction, the scientific principles by which we distinguish ourselves from animals have come under greater scrutiny and criticism. Jossica Newbys (1997) recent claim, for example, is that humans and their companion animals should be understood as a cultural unity a view which privileges the shared communications between humans and other animals rather than differences in the medium of their separate modes of communication (Newby 1997).
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Risk-reflexivity During the earlier part of the twentieth century, there were three types of space relevant to the consideration of animals: urban areas, intermediate development areas and marginal, wild areas. It was assumed that urban areas had been cleared of animals; that animals were in difficulty or under threat in development areas; and that they were relatively safe, if not protected by statute, in wild areas. There were vast, undisturbed tracts of land and ocean that were reservoirs of wild nature, and their existence provided a comforting buffer zone against the depredations of humanity, rendering the development zone a morally defensible compromise. From the 1970s onwards, this spatial trinity dissolved as encroachment into the wild areas grew apace. The Amazon was a benchmark of global change and over the past twenty years the decline of its rain forest areas has been a regular news update item. The pollution, overfishing and whaling of the oceans is another instance. The status of the whales changed from relative obscurity to huge popularity as their numbers dropped to the endangered mark. Perhaps even more significant is the way in which all wild areas have been brought under human control so that there simply are no areas beyond man. Put another way, there is no wilderness or perhaps no nature since everything everywhere is subject to human control. No animals are safe and their only hope of survival lies with the willingness of humans to take moral responsibility for their protection. This can also be put in a different way: animals have become a human moral responsibility. National parks and wilderness areas are not secure, guaranteed habitats: they contain much valuable timber and minerals which may be cashed in during times of rural recession, simply in order to secure the support of rural electorates. Increasingly then, the worlds animals have been brought closer to humans and the relationship has changed. Now they are just like all other categories of animals and humans have to make decisions about their future; the worlds animals are all dependent upon humans. So animals are cast as a permanent political fixture, and their consideration the duty of all citizens. An increasing number of people keenly feel the weight of this responsibility, and it is expressed in a variety of active ways.
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FIGURE 3.1
CONCLUSION
In the West there were areas everywhere under threat. These drew widespread public support and governments could enact tough new protective measures to maintain electoral popularity, particularly from the cities. Outside Western nation-states, new organizations like Greenpeace were active and drew massive support of every kind, simply because individuals everywhere
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were persuaded that they had an individual moral responsibility to act. Although frequently obscured by the environment or ecology blanket, there is no doubt that animals were the trump cards. Denuded, eroded and wasted landscapes, such as the Lake District in England with its dying trees, can unfortunately still look beautiful. This is because the Romantic movement developed an aesthetic taste for bare (essentially logged), rugged and open hills. However, a starving or dying animal or a struggling population can invoke much more sympathy than an unhealthy ecosystem, particularly when the development creating the risk is done for so little material return or long-term benefit. This is typically the case for woodchip or beef pasturage. However, in a broader sense, animals were also the litmus paper of environmental risk: for example, the rapid decline of the North Sea seal population in the 1980s was taken as symptomatic of the condition of the waters. In this way the moral responsibility for animals precipitated by the globalized human control of nature was tied in with environmental risk factors. As individuals and institutions acted reflexively on improving sources of global information, creating anxiety about and responsibility for areas further and further afield, they extended the love and care of animals on a global scale.
Risk-reflexivity is also triggered by the sense of natural imbalances and distortions wrought by science and technology and the modernist project. A key factor in decisions to eat less meat or become vegetarian is associated, in part, with the risks attached to the modernist mythology of a correlation between meat and health. Normative levels of meat and animal fat consumption were clearly a major cause of heart disease. Further risks have been found: the spread of salmonella in intensive production systems; BSE in cows reared on feed containing diseased animals; the entry of hormonal additives into human foods through meat and milk; the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria as a result of adding strong antibiotics to animal feeds. All of these incidents combine to reduce confidence and trust in scientific interventions in the food chain, and to create the growing demand for safer, more natural foods and diets.
Misanthropy, ontological insecurity and risk-reflexivity have been separated here for the purpose of exposition, but they are clearly related and coterminous in practice and they vary in salience among different groups and in different places. Certain groups of the service class, such as Savage et al.s (1992) ascetic-aesthetics will be influenced by all three, but the argument being advanced here is that these are now so generalized in Western society that few will remain completely unaffected. The postmoderns identified by Savage et al., for example, tend to follow trends set by the ascetic-aesthetics, but the ubiquity of these three characteristics is not dependent simply on the influence of taste and lifestyle, but also on central organizing institutions such as labour markets, health, education and the mass media. The general state of reflexivity in the postmodern society, or what Giddens calls institutional reflexivity, represents a dynamism that replaced the fixed areas of knowledge and practice in traditional society. It is driven by a continuous flow of new information and knowledge of changing conditions and there are very few areas of social life that can remain quarantined from it. You do not need to have studied health or biology to understand the risk of animal fats: it is referenced in product packaging, advertising and restaurants; it is regularly featured in popular magazines and newspapers and TV; medical practitioners take cholesterol readings and advise against high animal fat intake as part of routine healthcare. Not everyone will become a vegetarian on the basis of animal food scares, but the majority appear to have reduced their
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intake. Similarly, the processes creating ontological insecurity are not confined to a minority in society. Restructured labour markets, high house prices in high employment regions, geographical mobility to employment centres, rural depopulation and so on are systemic changes with very wide ramifications for humananimal relations.
Strict social constructionists, such as Hannigan (1995) and Tester (1992), might want to go further in their interpretation of this material. They would want to show that human action and morality towards animals is a projection of ideal relations between humans. No doubt a compelling argument could be made to show that the warm, companionate, caring relationships expressed towards animals by humans in postmodernity relate to a longing for such relations to be reestablished between humans. Although this view deserves serious consideration, and is certainly true at one level, critics would be correct to point out that such a conclusion seems to deny the integrity and morality of the humananimal relation, as if it were merely symbolic gesturing. Tester, for example, scoffs at the notion of humananimal relations on the grounds that animals are subjugated and incapable of rendering their understanding of the relationship in a manner that would be at all meaningful to humans. This has to be conceded, but the interesting point is that the literature is replete with examples of humans claiming the exact opposite: that a deep and meaningful relationship based on communication is possible between animals and humans (see Newby 1997). Such a view is well established in the lay literature and is beginning to find a respectable place in the scientific community. The launch of two new journals, Anthrozoos and Society and Animals, provides a forum for the development of these arguments. Although social anthropology is the discipline from which much of the symbolic analysis of humananimal relations derives (Douglas 1975; Leach 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1962; Willis 1974), setting the scene for a social constructivist orthadoxy, this is now under attack from a new generation of scholars. Recent debates in anthropology have questioned this orthodoxy with some powerful new theoretical reinterpretations of older material and new approaches in methodology (Descola and Palsson 1996; Ingold 1988; Rival 1993, 1996). Rival, for example, argues that the social constructivist position was based on interview material where the anthropologist searched only for the social logic of relations with animals. She argues that they rarely accompanied hunters on their expeditions or travels between camps, but it is in those situations that a more balanced view of their relations and understandings of animals can be made (Rival 1993).
It is not crucial to come down on one side of this argument or the other because it is possible for them both to be true: that is, relations with animals are indeed historically and culturally sensitive and, frequently, socially constructed. However, this is not to deny the moral and affective ties that exist between humans and animals at any one time. The latter seems to be worthy of more thorough empirical examination in contemporary Western societies, perhaps using anthropological methods of fieldwork which were designed to explore culture rather than behaviour.
The argument presented here makes a connection between some general conditions of postmodern sensibility and the general direction of change in humananimal relations since the early 1970s. But the historical transition from Fordism and modernity has also been analysed. This general framework will now be used to look at key areas of humananimal relations in more detail. Each of the following chapters considers a key area and examines it
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comparatively using the USA, UK and Australia as the main comparators.
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