The Human Gaze: Part 2

For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.
-- Peter Cheeke, Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture

2: The (Industrial) Food Chain

Don’t get me wrong. I eat meat—and with pleasure. I tell you this straight out because the subject is animals and I don’t want you to mistake me for a vegan fundamentalist. I am not a PETA person. But I have—thank you, Michael Pollen—begun buying my meat from a local farm that pastures its livestock. So at least I know the pork I eat came from a once-happy pig.

The plight of the cows abused in that Humane Society video clip—and it is, by anyone’s definition, abuse—can be traced back, through a not-so-circuitous route, to the 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes. The man who brought us cogito ergo sum also bequeathed us the mechanistic view of the world—and of animal behavior—that has shaped so much of how we live now.

Descartes understood animals as automata whose behavior was a response to stimuli, not the result of consciousness. Human beings, by contrast, were possessed of a mind (consciousness, self-awareness), through which they could reason and act. The Cartesian legacy includes the mind-body problem—in a nutshell, the question of the relation between the mind and the body, spirit and matter—and, not coincidentally, feedlots and factory farms.

“It is more probable,” Descartes wrote, “that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically than that they all have immortal souls.”

An argument can be made that the video clips of those California cows represent the exception in the industrial approach to animal agriculture. It is, precisely, abuse—a violation of what is deemed proper, a mis-use. In this line of reasoning, the problem is not the general treatment of feed cattle but this particular instance of mistreatment, not the entire feedlot system but this singular feedlot.

Turn then to the Dutch photographer Jan Van IJken’s Dierbeer… (Precious Animals…) series. Van IJken covers the gamut of the industrialized world’s relations with animals: the dog show, the hunt, the veterinary surgery, the rescue home, the animal lab, the circus, and the breeding factory all make an appearance. Perhaps because he’s Dutch or perhaps just because he’s bewildered, Van IJken strikes a determinedly mild tone throughout. No “meat is murder” rhetoric for him.


But as you leaf through his book, you can see his puzzlement right there on the page—particularly, I might add, if you don’t speak Dutch, in which case the puzzlement is dizzying indeed. The first spreads look as though a mild-mannered Garry Winogrand (if such a person were possible) had done a tour of Dutch animal shows—the cat show, the cattle judging, the dog show. Next comes the requisite selection of oddballs: the woman who founded Swieneparredies (literally Swine Paradise), where pigs enjoy free run of the household, poses with an enormous ten-year-old hog. At a koeknuffelen (cow-cuddling session), three contented, formerly stressed-out Amsterdam cops curl up with an assortment of Holsteins, all of whom maintain their composure admirably. And in a formal garden, a man and his goose dance together, with arms and wings outstretched respectively.

But then the darker chapters appear. You find yourself in the breeding “farms,” with a ringside seat for the castration of two-day-old piglets, the clipping of chicks’ beaks, the cutting off of a piglet’s tail, and the artificial insemination of a bull. As the text notes, this last may well be the most opzienbarende, resounding, image in the book: the first thing you notice is a bull, staring straight at you. Contained in a narrow pen barely its own size, the beast looks none too happy, and when you examine the rest of the scene, you understand why. What’s going on here is, I gather, a common practice in cattle breeding: bull-on-bull sex. Rather than having its way with an artificial cow (not convincing enough) or a real one (too liable to injury), the stud bull mounts another bull, its sperm collected in “een nepschede,” a humbug sleeve.


While that particular image might leave you feeling a tad queasy, the others speak of something far worse. For instance, when you realize that the chicks’ beaks are clipped so the birds won’t peck at each other when they’re crammed together in total confinement, you might begin to rethink that Chicken McNugget order. Likewise, the piglets’ tails are cut—without anaesthesia—to prevent them from biting one another’s tails—like the intra-chick pecking, a habit acquired in the close quarters of the factory farm.

Van IJken’s tone is even-handed: all the pictures, of the pampering and its opposite, are straightforward photojournalist shots. It’s precisely in that back-and-forth, in the counterpoint of cosseted dogs and ill-treated pigs, that he makes his point—the same point that Michael Pollan was driving at when he wrote the following: “There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.”

The Human Gaze

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

1. The Food Chain









As flesh eaters, we can’t afford to be squeamish.
-- Frederick Sommer

My grandparents, living in North Plainfield, New Jersey—hardly exotic climes—kept horses in the barn out back and hens in the chicken coop. For my father, who could recall watching his mother kill chickens for the evening meal, the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” was more than cliché, carrying with it the vivid memory of the twitchy death throes of decapitated White Leghorns. Dad never had any question about where dinner came from.

Nor, it would seem, does Alessandra Sanguinetti—at least judging from the evidence of her On the Sixth Day series, shot at a number of small farms in Argentina. Sanguinetti offers up a decidedly unsentimental view of the life and death of the animals destined for your dinner plate.

Few of us are as clear-sighted anymore as Sanguinetti and my dad. Of course, we know the source of the chicken nuggets and the coq au vin. But our knowledge is largely abstract. We’ve never seen the blood flow. Or for that matter seen the scratching dance of hens in the barnyard or heard their mild-mannered clucking or the incessant—and incessantly annoying—crowing of the rooster.

The farms where Sanguinetti worked are family-run or tenant farms and the agriculture small-scale and intimate. Squint your eyes and you might even mistake these pictures for pastoral views.

Except that Sanguinetti’s is no Arcadian refuge. Death is ever-present, routine. Of the 60 images reproduced in the series monograph, some 20 depict blood, guts, and the business of slaughter. Sanguinetti doesn’t shy away from showing us what slaughtered animals look like: we see a newly killed pig lying in a pastoral field and then two others strung up for butchering; a rabbit, skinned, hanging in the shadows of the barn. Nor does she spare us from the act of the kill: in one shot, a farmer aims his gun squarely at a grazing cow; another shows a farm wife draining out the blood of the chicken whose neck she’s just slit. One particularly unnerving image shows a farmer washing up his bloodied hands while his dog looks greedily on.

The human animal is not the only predator, though: dogs corner a hog and gnaw on a calf’s head; cats spring at sheep’s entrails and prowl around the farmers’ dinner spread. Even the chickens seem to be going after someone’s remains.

While blood-soaked, Sanguinetti’s vision incorporates more than death and its aftermath. She shoots at the animals’ eye level, with the result that we get a sense of their daily routine, if you will—of the forced sociability of farm life. In one shot, a flock of ducks scrambles for food while a cow stares out at the viewer and a turkey looks on from the wings. In another, a chicken waits for its chance at the corn cob being devoured by a hog. A baby chick, perched on a truck bed, surveys a barnyard full of chickens, four or five turkeys, and two dogs.

By and large, these pictures are the ones that we conjure when we say the word farm. Although a little muddier, a little messier and a whole lot bloodier, these scenes are close relatives of the ones we encountered in the picturebooks of childhood.

Sanguinetti’s is the long-past world John Berger evokes in his essay “Why We Look at Animals.” “A peasant becomes fond of his pig,” Berger writes, “and is glad to salt away its pork.” Explicating how far we have traveled from that world, the passage continues, “What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.”

More recently, Verlyn Klinkenborg published a gemlike piece in The New York Times about the two pigs he and his wife are raising for slaughter. “I talk to the pigs whenever I’m in their pen,” he writes, explaining his reasons for doing so: first, he loves them and, second, “taming them means it will be that much easier … to kill them swiftly, immediately.”

In gentling tones, Klinkenborg cautions against moral outrage. Admitting to qualms about “the whole thing,” he points out that, “compared with the bargain most Americans make when they buy pork at the supermarket, this is beauty itself.”

Browse on over to YouTube, search for “Abused Cows at California Slaughterhouse,” and you’ll get a picture of just how bad a bargain that is.