Animal Person has a great post up on the nigh-intentional stupidity of the reigning discourse on farm animals versus pets (I originally typed "poets" instead of "pets," which is sort of where I'm going with this). David Scott, the chairman of the Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture, grants some empirical validity to the foundation for animal activism, but then backtracks just as quickly into what seems to me to be sheer anti-logic. My point isn't to castigate him for being, in my view, a dumb man, but to note how this divides the two main responses I get from meat eaters.
It seems to me that people of some sophistication grant everything I say as true and accept that they are "morally" in the wrong in a logical sense but still in the right in a social sense. People of less sophistication seem more willing to argue that I am wrong, or that there has to be some loophole or categorical difference that will cause social and logico-ethical standards to align. Now, this might just be a permutation of the general division of the labor of combat, assigning ironic deference to the ruling class and the task of violence to the under class--and this is the general explanation I would advance. But at the same time, the categories for dividing these strategies of judgment fall under the heading of Art or aesthetics, so that even if we are dealing with, at root, a sociological explanation, this explanation would itself be split between the dialectical/argumentative and antinomic/ironic methods exhibited by the question. That a sociological explanation needs to borrow from aesthetics certainly does it no discredit--many aestheticians wish someone would find a use for their work. What is discredited, first and last, is the belief that animals or art--pets or poets--can be subsumed under a single method of appreciation. They share a fate.
Continental Breakfast podcast
1 week ago
Part of the answer, surely, is that pets aren't animals! Pets are, in Haraway's terms, cyborgs: sometimes they seem like animals (when they shit on the carpet - "bad dog!") and sometimes they seem like humans (when they curl up next to you when you're feeling like shit - "good girl!"). Cows, however, are merely animals, except when they manage to break through their mere animality with some dumb accident, like falling out of a truck on a highway leading city workers to give it a name while they wait for someone to pick it up resulting in a newspaper article about "Jenny the cow who fell off the truck on the highway - what will happen now?"
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