When you hear the word ‘cow,’ what words come to mind? This may appear to be a weird exercise, but our answer to it can reveal something about our perception of farmed animals. ‘Beef’ and ‘milk’ are likely to be two of the first words we think of. However, our immediate associations of ‘cow’ with ‘milk’ and ‘beef’ are rarely coupled with a recognition of the fact that an individual animal must be exploited to obtain these products; rather, it is symptomatic of our failure to recognise the individual animal outside of the animal-industrial complex. Entire animal identities are shaped by our consumer relationship to them through a linguistic process designed by the animal agricultural industry. The way we talk about the animals we eat conceals the unappetising reality of meat production; for our purposes, it can also reveal the mechanisms used to oppress these animals as well.
What, exactly, is meant by ‘animal identities’? This is not an attempt to delve into the debate as to the status of animal consciousness, as was recently stimulated by the New York Declaration of Animal Consciousness. Rather, it refers to the recognition of animals as individuals with unique interests, rather than the homogenous species-based groups our current relationship is based upon. When we acknowledge animals as having individualised interests—namely, an interest in their own treatment—we can see the shapes of their identities without the obscuring lens of species-based perception. This approach to animals invites us to recognise beef not as a product made from cows but as a distinct, heterogenous group; it encourages us to think about the cow who, when alive, had her own subjective experience of reality which was contingent on her own unique circumstances. This recognition of subjectivity of animal experience necessarily challenges the ‘fact’ of the deindividualized farmed animal identity and therefore the assumed disposable status of animal individuals. ‘Cows’ as a homogenous group occupy neat boundaries of identity as interchangeable milk-producing units; a ‘Cow’ recognised as an individual breaks free from the boundaries we impose on her. On this latter view, her interest in her own treatment is necessarily brought into our moral consideration in the same way that we consider the ethical treatment of the dogs many of us keep as pets. Her identity as a milk producer appears not as a natural consequence of her animal existence, but instead as the imposed consequence of her animal existence under a system of human dominion.
Carnist Culture Woes
Whenever we choose to eat animals recreationally, we are engaging in an ethical system that prescribes little value to animal life and well-being. Our unconsciousness to the fact we are doing so is the product of what Melanie Joy calls ‘carnist culture,’ the prevailing ideology that eating certain animals and their bodily secretions is unquestionably natural, normal and necessary. The animal agricultural industries have a vested interest in maintaining this unconsciousness. After all, an estimated 86% of consumers do consider the welfare of animals to be important and therefore have the potential to confront the ethical system in which they unknowingly participate.
Language manipulation is a device employed by the meat industry to sustain consumers’ psychological dissociation between animal products and animal individuals. Akin to commodity fetishism—the view that products have an intrinsic value and the social relations between commodity, produce and consumer are disjointed—animal bodies and products are linguistically presented to consumers as mystical objects removed from the processes of violence and labour to which they are subjected. As an abstract fetish, the products of exploited animals relate to symbolic notions of ‘naturalness,’ tradition, health and masculinity more than they do to the identities of animal individuals. Propagation of this ideology through animal industry language paints a wider fantasy of paternalist human-animal relations in the mind of consumers; the control of farmed animal lives is perceived as a natural, necessary and even noble consequence of human moral supremacy.
Moral distance must also be placed between the consumed being and the consumer for the paternalistic view of human-animal relations to be preserved in the public consciousness. Individualised, animal identities must be eroded and replaced with homogenous, predetermined ones. Within a framework of language that describes subjugated animals as ‘livestock,’ destined for ‘processing’ at ‘meat plants,’ the animal-individual is reduced to a lower moral status that is perceived as a natural, inevitable consequence of human dominion. Advocates for animal liberation therefore appear to challenge a boundary that not only delineates the ‘proper’ treatment of animals, but the moral separation of humans from animals.
The euphemistic fragmenting of a farmed animal’s existence from birth to death sustains this moral distance. In other words, the linguistic framework of the meat-industry ‘deanimalises’ its subjects, blurring the line between animal-individuals and inanimate machines. For example, the palatable euphemisms of ‘beef’, ‘veal’ and ‘pork’ replace the conscious bodies of cows and pigs that precede these products. Animals in the meat industry are not ‘slaughtered,’ rather they are ‘processed.’ The physical concealment of slaughterhouses has coincided with a verbal one; ‘meat plants,’ ‘processing facilities’ and ‘pork/beef/chicken factories’ are now industry standard terms. This linguistic obfuscation of the individual animal identity and the exploitation it endures extends into our visual interaction with animal products. The animal body does not bear any resemblance to its previous occupant by the time it enters the consumer’s physical space. It is—more often than not—headless, eviscerated and, most importantly, clean. Marketing emphasis on hygiene, both visually and linguistically, dissociates the commodified animal body from its organic origins.
Welfarist Language & Moral Commodification
The ‘deanimalisation’ of the consumer fantasy is not without assistance. There is increased awareness of animal ethics issues by consumers, threatening to bring the interests and needs of individual animals into the consumer consciousness. Unlike the mechanisms of deanimalisation, the adoption of welfarist language by the animal agricultural industry does invite us to think more directly about animal individuals and their conditions; the ‘Red Tractor Assured’ label evokes imagery of ‘British’, idyllic, small-scale farms, whilst ‘RSPCA Assured’ denotes the imagery of farmed animals living harmoniously with farmers. General welfarist language such as ‘free-range’ and ‘organic’ bleed into a single statement of paternalistic animal-human relations: eating animals and their products is not wrong because there is a right way to commodify an animal.
This ‘moral’ commodification is still intrinsically linked to the assumed natural, merciful dominion of humans over animals. Although no longer reduced to machines, the farmed animal identity becomes an outlet for notions of supposed human moral nobility, compassion and supremacy. The moral distance placed between humans and animals finds strength in the supposed benevolent dominion humans exercise towards animals. Consumers are encouraged to engage with the refined fantasy that farmed animals ‘give’ their bodies and biological products in return for the ‘compassionate’ care of the humans that rear them out of what would be their otherwise helpless natural states.
Welfarist language as used by the industry does not just affirm an ethical framework for human-animal relations; it also works to obscure the reality of the violence subjected to farmed animals. Free-range laying hens are ‘depopulated’ (whole flocks sent to slaughter) or ‘euthanised’ (asphyxiated on the farm) before they reach two years old due to an economically unsavoury drop in their egg production. Billions of male chicks are ‘culled’ (killed) globally by gassing or ‘maceration’ (live grinding) in the egg industry due to being economically unviable for both free-range and battery producers. Cows who are ‘downers’ or ‘spent’ (exhausted from repeat pregnancies) on even the most high-welfare dairy farms are sent for ‘euthanasia’ at ‘processing plants’ (killed at slaughterhouses). Pigs are ‘processed’ (asphyxiated by gassing) at around six months old in the pork industry. Of these terms, ‘euthanised’ and ‘culled’ perhaps stand out as the most deceptive terms of the welfarist lexicon. Both terms seem to present the fates of exhausted or economically disposable farmed animals as an act of human compassion, not a consequence of an industry whose function is to commodify animals’ bodies. This is exemplary of how welfarist language disguises the fundamental human decisions made in the animal agriculture industry and it does so to warmly degrade the moral worth of animal individuals.
Liberating the Farmed Animal Identity
Sharp bolt cutters are needed for the farmed animal identity to be liberated from this cage of industry language. The language that activists use to articulate the perspectives of farmed animals is crucial to this liberation, although inherently difficult given the non-verbal nature of animal communication. One way in which some vegan activists have used language to better reveal individual animal identities that are masked by a ‘carnist culture’ is through analogy to human identity and exploitation. This comparison is frequently insensitive to the complex and unique forms of oppression that both humans and animals face. When animal rights activists describe the annual slaughter of over 78 billion farmed animals as a ‘Holocaust,’ the oppressive forces of fascism that seek to eradicate a group of humans for their identity are conflated with the extinguishing of animal identity for the purposes of commodification. This form of analysis helps no one. Analysis of the structural parallels between human and animal oppression are rejected in favour of visual comparisons; in Holocaust examples, activists (most infamously PETA) fixate on optical comparisons of transport, killing and confinement methodology. This inelegant form of comparison may tell us what happens to animals exploited in the agricultural industry but does no work in articulating why it happens. Cutting through industry language can only be done effectively where the actual mechanisms of animal oppression are central to advocacy; the individual animal must be brought into our consciousness to dispel the connotations of inferiority and disposability homogenous constructions of animal identities invite. It is only through self-reflection as to why we think and, most importantly, talk about certain animals that consumers are more likely to engage with the animal individuals they see in factory farm and slaughterhouse footage. This approach also affords dignity to the animal experience, which is recognised as morally compelling independently of its relation to the human experience.
The oppressive mechanisms of fascism are no better understood when conflated directly with animal-based oppression. Veganism calls on advocates to be opposed to unnecessary violence to all animals; we are often so lost in our advocacy for non-human animals that we forget human animals in our work too. Advocacy for all non-human animals should not come at the cost of furthering subjugation of humans; nor should veganism as a cause be used to muffle the realities of human-based oppression. The ‘vegan’ uniforms of IDF soldiers, which has been proudly endorsed by some activists, is an example of vegan ethics being appropriated as a veneer for human based oppression; it need not be elaborated why the idea of a ‘vegan army’ is a contradiction of terms. We must be not only vocal critics of when this does occur, but also sensitive to when our own language enables its occurrence. Whilst the offence felt at human-animal comparison is in some contexts a product of speciesism, we must be mindful of the practical impact such dehumanisation tools have upon minority groups. Jewish, disabled, Romani, racialised and LGBTQ+ people continue to face the practical consequences of dehumanisation and all too often fight to be recognised as human. Resistance to human-animal comparison is justified when it has been historically tied to persistent oppression; activists are hardly ‘validating’ speciesism by recognising this. This is not to say that language referring to forms of human oppression should be entirely avoided when discussing the farmed animal identity. Alex Hershaft, a Holocaust survivor and animal rights advocate, has produced examples of advocacy work that meaningfully finds parallels between antisemitic mechanisms of dehumanisation and the erasure of farmed animal identity. These parallels thoughtfully draw on both the mechanisms of human and animal oppression to provide not only a useful empathy-generating device when communicating the farmed animal experience; they also reveal a deeper understanding and space for catharsis with respect to human based oppression.
Similarly, ecofeminism has a defined tradition of relating the mechanisms of misogyny with the exploitation of farmed animals by demonstrating, for example, how the dairy and egg industries have put the mystification of the human female body and sexuality to profitable use. The assumptions that female cows produce milk continuously and that hens ‘naturally’ produce as many eggs as they do are reaffirmed by an industry language that highlights the ‘femaleness’ of the animals it exploits. It is not uncommon to see industry marketing that describes farmed hens and female cows as ‘our girls’ or even anthropomorphic sexualised imagery in product advertisements. The female body—whether human or non-human—is affirmed as a commodified space via this marketing process and the ‘mysteries’ of female reproduction and sexuality are obscured even further. ‘Femaleness’ is imputed into the constructed identity of hens and female cows that is made inseparable from their deanimalised, ‘machine’ like status. Think back to our initial exercise: ‘cow’ also has gendered connotations to ‘female’ laziness, attitude or body-type; ‘sow,’ is another gendered insult that references female pigs used for breeding, alluding to an animal whose exploitation is contingent on her reproductive system. Whenever we use these insults to dehumanise women, we also consolidate the ‘female-machine’ status of the exploited animals we reference. Understanding ‘farmed animals’ as a political underclass with which humans (in this case, women) can be approximated reveals much about the patriarchal model that views ‘humanness’ as being inherently male, ‘civil’ and white. Here, we are not saying that the oppression suffered by both female-farmed animals and human women are the same nor claiming that the oppression faced by the former to be a simple form of misogyny. Rather, we are drawing parallels between the language used to disempower, mystify and commodify the female body to unveil the mechanisms of both human and animal-based oppression.
Cutting Loose
The bolt-cutters of vegan philosophy can be used to liberate many cages. I often reflect that it has helped me in liberating my own as a woman and queer person. My existence is followed by a narrative of inevitabilities and predeterminations that surround my physical body and sexuality: that my ‘femaleness’ is of a certain nature and dictates my body to be used in a certain way; that I am a sexual object and not subject; that my body is inherently pornographic for the consumption of another’s gaze. Misogyny makes an animal of me. But I do not seek to distance myself from animals to escape this status. Doing so only reinforces the homogenous construction of animal identity. When I feel a radical sense of empathy for exploited female farm animals I will never meet – my only contact with them being parts of their bodies or products on supermarket shelves – I strangely feel a similar sense of empathy for myself. The injustice of speciesism brings the injustice of misogyny into sharp focus. As in the case of exploited animals, sexual violence is not an inevitable, natural consequence of being a woman. It only appears so through the language we use. It does not take a complete, overnight devotion to veganism in order to pick up your bolt-cutters. It requires only a perspective that is open to seeing the invisible animal individuals we interact with daily, in our food, our entertainment, our clothes and, even, in the way in which we speak.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 13: Language.
Hazel Peters is a second year undergraduate law student at Worcester College, Oxford.