Are Animal Crackers Vegan?

Dating back to 1902, Barnum's animal crackers have been an American classic for generations. The original boxes came with a string and cardboard wheels so that the bears, elephants, lions, and tigers painted behind bars could be carried about by children encouraged to take on the role of ringleader. The animals were often shown vicious, wild, exciting, and in need of control. The cages separating the consumer from the wild beasts within were necessary and clearly defined.

In Our Children and Other Animals (2014), Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart argue that children's toys, media, and other products are carefully constructed to capitalize on children's interest in other animals, while also teaching them speciesism and dominance. To accomplish this, the violence inherent to speciesism is presented as unexceptional or erased altogether to the effect of normalizing human supremacy.

In support of this socialization process, the "wildness" of other animals may be emphasized to teach children that violent relationships with other animals is "natural," as is human dominance. However, oppression is increasingly framed as consensual, rather than forced. This approach surfaces is in Barnum's packaging today.

Gone are the angry, caged animals requiring harsh control. Today's box features sentimental images of animal families. This is a soft control. The bars become faint and fall into the background. Children can now imagine that the animals are there of their own will, their oppression desired and mutually beneficial. This ideology of consensual, happy, and willing participation is perhaps the most powerful in support of speciesism. It is not only circus animals who are reframed in this way, but other "zoo" animals. Over 50 species have been imprisoned in Barnum's cardboard railroad cars since 1902.

Some of the newer special editions show no bar enclosure at all. The animals are still controlled, boxed or within a snow globe, but the child is encouraged to understand this control as benevolent.

Are animal crackers vegan? While Nabisco's recipe is free of animal ingredients, Cole & Stewart's sociological analysis would suggest that consuming animal crackers is ritualistically anti-vegan, as it socializes speciesist sentiments and human supremacy in children. The work of vegan feminist Carol Adams supports this position, theorizing that Nonhuman Animals are routinely represented as willing, happy participants in order to repackage their consumption as something pleasurable, fun, and natural.

In the 1990s, Nabisco ran limited edition packaging that featured endangered species to raise awareness and funds, but even this intent to help was human-centered. Said the Nabisco product manager in a story with The New York Times:

What do people like about animal crackers? Biting off the heads! Our hope was that children will line them up, match them up with the names on the box, learn about them and then decapitate them.

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Dr. Corey Wrenn is a professor of Sociology specializing in the political structure of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement. She is founder of the Vegan Feminist Network and author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave 2016).

Our Children and Other Animals: Socializing Speciesism through Children's Media

This new book critically examines the socialization of the human domination of other animals, with a focus on the socialization sites of the family, mass media, formal education system and digital media. While the book focuses on the contemporary UK, it also attends to the historical formation of children’s relations with other animals in Britain, and to the inflection of UK popular culture by global giants in the construction of animal iconography, such as Disney and Nintendo.

A central argument of the book is that children’s ethical capacities are systematically distorted by the capitalist imperative to commodify nonhuman animals (as food, experimental tools, objects of entertainment and so on) and that an elective affinity therefore exists between the practices of commodification and the cultural products that distract children’s attention from those practices, at the same time as subtly legitimating them. The instrumentalizing imperative penetrates every aspect of the socialization process, disguised by the ‘cute’ anthropomorphic iconography of children’s culture, which can be found in food packaging, clothing, movies, magazines, teaching materials and online games that feature nonhumans as ‘pets’ or ‘farmed’ animals. This iconography paints a veneer of affectivity over human-nonhuman animal relations that allow the socialization of domination to proceed smoothly, focusing children’s affective concern for animals on fictional characters or relatively protected nonhumans, such as animal companions or members of iconic free-living species. Children’s unwitting complicity with the exploitation and violence that characterizes human uses of other animals is thereby facilitated.

The book also considers how these kinds of anthroparchal inter-species relations intersect with intra-human inequalities, especially of gender and age: ethical concern for other animals is initially encouraged in the socialization process, but is thereafter associated both with human infancy itself as an immature stage of human relationships with other animals, but also with femininity through the construction of a ‘fluffy nexus of sentimentality’ that articulates affective relations with ‘cute’ animals with girlhood. In this linking of infancy, femininity and affectivity for other animals, we argue that the seeds are sown of an anthroparchal, patriarchal and ageist adult culture’s disparagement of the animal rights and vegan movement as infantile, irrational and trivial. The book ends with a consideration of how the vegan movement is responding to the challenge of anthroparchal socialization, through the analysis of the emerging genre of vegan children’s literature. This new cultural development offers some hope that the socialization of the normality of domination can be challenged and that children’s capacities to forge ethical relations with nonhuman animals can flourish in a post-anthroparchal environment.

We hope that the book will interest critical animal studies and human-animal studies scholars across a range of disciplines, but especially within sociology. We are active members of the BSA (British Sociological Association) Animal/Human Studies Group (AHSG), regularly presenting our work at the BSA annual conference. We are pleased to report that attendance at ASHG panels and ad hoc sessions about animals are becoming better attended year on year, and we look forward to building on that momentum in 2015, when we’ll once again be panellists at the BSA conference, discussing some of the ideas from the book. One of our ambitions for the book is that it will foster connections with sociologists working in different areas of the discipline, especially childhood studies, the sociology of the family, education, popular culture as well as social theorists.

ASA members who are interested in the book can download the introduction chapter from the publisher’s website, free of charge. A podcast of us discussing the book, with fellow sociologist Dr Roger Yates, is available by clicking here.  A review by Corey Wrenn is available by clicking here.

We would be delighted to hear from any ASA members who are interested in our work and we can be contacted at:

Dr Matthew Cole, The Open University, UK: m.d.d.c.cole@open.ac.uk

Dr Kate Stewart, University of Nottingham, UK: kate.stewart@nottingham.ac.uk

STK Open Call: Exploring Species-Gender Intersections in DC Steakhouse

A new steakhouse  has opened in Washington, DC that relies heavily on sexualized women to glamorize animal flesh as sexy, trendy, edgy, and available.  Many of the photographs used to promote the restaurant utilize thin, young, and mostly white female models.  This is done to create a sense of pleasurable consumption. As Carol Adams has argued--sex and animal foods are often overlapped to give an impression to the privileged consumer that the products of oppression are given freely and happily. Just as patriarchy convinces us that women really want it (sex, rape, violence, humiliation, etc.), it also convinces us that other feminized bodies really want this violation, too. Indeed, this fetishization becomes marketable.

Unfortunately, what this means for women and animals is that the violence enacted against them is sexualized, romanticized, and normalized. Notice the disembodied woman in high heels with a meat cleaver--extreme violence is being associated with sexual desire. Given the epidemic levels of violence against women, this should be serious cause for concern. As for Nonhuman Animals, like the woman in this image, they are fragmented and only made visible in consumable pieces of chopped up flesh.  These images want us to stay focused on meat; they don't want us thinking about the woman or cow they were attached to. That isn't sexy--that makes us think, and thinking interferes with sales.

Customers can come to STK to get their meat served up pretty. The website is careful to frequently juxtapose human meat with nonhuman meat. Human and nonhuman bodies are presented as interchangeable, fragmented, and completely and utterly objectified.

Models hired to promote the restaurant are literally branded with the store logo, marked as STK property as cows are in the feedlots of STK suppliers.  Again, this logo is quite indicative of the close association between the oppression of women and other animals. With a pouty lipsticked kiss, the mass murder of Nonhuman Animals and the objectification of women is made flirty and sexy.

Sexualized women routinely show up in STK adverts as well, even when they have nothing to do whatsoever with the product. Notice there are not even any pictures of food or drinks in the Apple Pie Day advertisement. In the happy hour advert, it is suggested that female customers at STK drink booze in positions of sexual availability (the mixing of alcohol with the sexual availability of women, incidentally, is the symboblic language of rape culture).  Women are used as signifiers:  Enact your privilege here.

A sexualized woman is even used to sell dead animal parts for charity. Ironically, the charity, UNICEF, is concerned with childhood hunger...and the Western animal-based diet that STK satiates is one reason why this hunger exists. Third world nations are often left unable to provide food for their own inhabitants, as much of the food they grow is used as feed for those Nonhuman Animals destined for Western consumption.  The violence enacted on these colonized peoples, like that which is enacted on women and Nonhuman Animals, remains largely invisible behind the glamour of youth, beauty, sex, and money whipped up in STK campaigning.

The vegan-feminist critique featured in this essay is based on the work of Carol Adams.  Thanks to Ivy Collier for bringing this steakhouse ad campaign to my attention.

The Sexual Politics of Vegan Food

Carol Adams has written extensively on the sexual politics of meat, arguing that women and other animals are both sexualized and commodified to facilitate their consumption (both figuratively and literally) by those in power. One result has been the feminization of veganism and vegetarianism.  This has the effect of delegitimizing, devaluing, and defanging veganism as a social movement.

But this process works within the vegan movement as well, with an open embracing of veganism as inherently feminized and sexualized.  This works to undermine a movement (that is comprised mostly of women) and repackage it for a patriarchal society.  Instead of strong, political collective of women, we have yet another demographic of sexually available individual women who exist for male consumption.

Take a browse through vegan cookbooks on Amazon, and the theme of “sexy veganism” that emerges is unmistakable.

Oftentimes, veganism is presented as a means of achieving idealized body types.  These books are mostly geared to a female audience, as society values women primarily as sexual resources for men, and women have internalized these gender norms.  Many of these books bank on the power of thin privilege, sizism, and stereotypes about female competition for male attention to shame women into purchasing.

To reach a male audience, however, authors have to draw on a notion of “authentic masculinity” to make a highly feminized concept palatable to a patriarchal society where all that is feminine is scorned.  Some have referred to this trend as “heganism.”  The idea is to protect male superiority by unnecessarily gendering veganism into veganism for girls and veganism for boys.  For the boys, authors have to appeal to “real” manhood. Thankfully Meat Is For Pussies (A How-to Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass and Take Names) appears to be out of print.

The vegan movement also favors the tactic of turning women into consumable objects in the exact same way that meat industries do.  Hardee's might have nearly naked women writhing on automobiles with dripping hamburgers, but vegan organizations mimic this by recruiting “lettuce ladies” or “cabbage chicks” dressed as vegetables to interact with the public.  PETA routinely has nude women pose in and among vegetables to convey the idea that women are sexy food.  Vegan pinup sites and strip joints also feed into this notion.  It is the co-optation and erosion of what is essentially a women’s movement.  Instead of empowering women on behalf of animals, these approaches could be disempowering women by preserving a patriarchal framework.

Media, Power, Social Change, and the Feline Absent Referent

My colleague Cheryl Abbate who is a graduate student of philosophy and animal ethics at Marquette University in Wisconsin shared this bizarre news story with me (please click to watch the video).  PETA paid for a somewhat graphic image of a cat undergoing medical experimentation to be posted on buses to raise awareness about Nonhuman Animal testing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  In the clip, the news station frames the story as a question of obscene imagery and First Amendment rights.  The newscaster, the bus management, and the public are all presented questioning PETA's legal ability to post the imagery publicly.  Never once is the animal testing actually discussed.

Really, the image isn't even that graphic compared to the scads of absolutely horrific, keep-you-up-at-night, scar-you-for-life, secondary post traumatic stress disorder-inducing imagery that is out there (I just returned from a research trip to the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive and I'm still trying to recover from the images I saw).  But why has the news story focused only on the First Amendment when the big elephant in the room (or suffering orange cat in this case) is staring us right in the face?

If the viewers relied solely on what the news story presented, they'd never even know there was a problem with the systematic torture and killing of cats in their community.  The university's violence against Nonhuman Animals is completely ignored.  Instead, attention is drawn to the  violence to those humans made uncomfortable by the image or those worried about harm to their business.  An attempt to raise awareness about the interests of the vulnerable has been manipulated as a story about the interests of the privileged.

Research has demonstrated that vegan rhetoric is often distorted by mainstream elite-controlled media to either defame and dismiss veganism, or twist animal-positive ideas to support the status quo.  The media is an agent of socialization created and maintained by those in power.  In this case, the multi-billion dollar science industry and the large university get the privilege to shape reality.  These entities not only hold tremendous sway over the community, but they have also infiltrated the institution of media itself.  As we know, the media is run by powerful white men and their corporate interests.

Indeed, many social movement scholars question the ability for social movements to successfully utilize the media to disseminate messages of radical social change and equality.  On the other hand, the power of morally shocking imagery was also demonstrated.  Many concerned citizens have been contacting the university with complaints.  Fortunately, the news team and others working to maintain the existing power structure can't follow the buses around and try to deflect everyone's attention from Nonhuman Animal rights to First Amendment rights.

References

Cole, M. and K. Morgan.  2011.  "Veganphobia:  Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers."  The British Journal of Sociology 62 (1):  134-153.

Freeman, C.  2009.  "This Little Piggy Went to Press;  The American News Media's Construction of Animals in Agriculture."  The Communication Review 12 (1):  78-103.

Sampedro, V.  1997.  "The Media Politics of Social Protest."  Mobilization 2 (2):  1985-205.

Arrow Pierces Deer's Face and Lives to Tell the Tale: The Importance of Survivor Images

This morning, the story of a young deer in New Jersey who's face was punctured by a hunting arrow went viral.  The story ends happily enough: Through human intervention, he survived and lives to see another day.

While the news coverage was problematic for many reasons (mockingly nicknaming the deer "Steve Martin" after an arrow through the head gag he popularized, referring to him as "it," celebrating the wildlife department for saving him when the same agency is actually responsible for facilitating "hunts"), the shocking image is powerful enough to transcend speciesist media and offer a glimpse into the real horrors of killing Nonhuman Animals for "sport" and/or "food."

"Hunting" (I place the term in quotation marks to denote it as a euphemism) is like a private club or secret society for men who seek to consolidate their dominance in exclusive yearly meetings made inaccessible to the public.  Men convene in the woods to "bond," "appreciate nature," "get some fresh air," "catch up with friends," "learn life's lessons," etc.  All of these charming sentiments obscure the primary activity that differentiates "hunting" from a camping trip or a hike:  The intended slaughter of deers, bears, and other free-living animals.

Men use the seclusion of the back country to enact patriarchy in these male-only spaces.  The practice is reinforced with highly ritualized behavior.  "Hunters" spend thousands of dollars on licenses, guns, gun accessories, camouflaged dress, lures, etc.  Boys are initiated young and forced (killing is not usually a natural or desirable thing for children) to fire weapons at the Nonhuman Animals they once considered friends.  Killers often end the ritual by consuming the flesh of their victims.

For us advocates (women in particular) who are "uninitiated" in these secret male gatherings, killers assume that we "don't get it" or "don't understand" when we protest the violence.  Like all displays of male power, "hunting" is presumed necessary and any disagreement is thought to indicate ignorance.  This deflection of feminized resistance only reinforces "hunting" (a practice of male supremacy) as for men only and legitimizes male power.

Survivors offer a glimpse into this protected, hidden world.  "Hunting" classes recommend that killers keep their dirty work out of view of the public who would be offended.  Taxidermied corpses portray the animals still alert in life.  But survivors show us the horrors that the patriarchal pro-"hunting" ideology and murder-scene cleanups obscure.

Another survivor in Colorado.
At the time of the news report, wildlife authorities were seeking to help her.

The fact that many National Forest areas and parks practically shut down to the public for men to enter with weapons and inflict genocide on the innocent civilians of the woods demonstrates state-supported male entitlement to feminized spaces.  As eco-feminists explain, Nonhuman Animals and the environment, like women, are treated as resources that exist for men to pleasurably consume.  "Hunting" survivors are not unlike refugees living in farmed animal sanctuaries, rape survivors and slave narratives--they live to tell the tale of male violence.  They make the invisibility of oppression visible again.

See Brian Luke's Brutal:  Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals for more information on masculinity, speciesism, and "hunting."

Water and Watermelon for Dying Pigs

In the United States, the laws on transporting animals to slaughter are extremely lax.  The government suggests that transporters ideally keep trips under 8 hours, but at the very least give the animals a break from the truck once every 24 hours.  Animals are often deprived of food and water for hours or days because it will be wasted on a body that is about to be killed. Many drivers simply don't care or can't be bothered to let the animals out for a break. On the long transit to their death, these "food" animals are exposed to all elements, be it searing hot or so cold that the animals begin to freeze to each other and to the truck.  The journey is so brutal, an estimated 1 million pigs die in transit each year.

In this moment, these victims on route to the slaughterhouse are probably receiving the only bit of compassion they will ever know from humans, their last (maybe only) glimpse of sunlight, and certainly their only taste of watermelon. The ones trapped in the middle of the countless overheated, filthy bodies receive nothing. 

Photo by Anita Krajnc

As this image circulates across Facebook and advocacy networks, the response from viewers speaks to the power of emotion in narratives and photography.  Photographer Anita Krajnc writes:  "[ . . . ] if you haven't yet made the connection between the pleasure of your bacon and the misery of these animals' lives and death, may this image cause a change of heart."

Breaching the false divide between human and nonhuman/consumer and product, these women don't just ease the suffering of these pigs, they restore their personhood.  No longer faceless, nameless commodities, the pigs become individuals.  This image asks us to reconsider our relationship with so-called "food" animals.  Commodities or neighbors?  Friends or food?  Things or persons?  Rights-bearers or property?

Daisy enjoys some watermelon under happier circumstances.
Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood, WA.

Framing a Story

According to today's Merced Sun-Star, "The big rig carrying a load of turkeys overturned near Le Grand, knocking power lines down, the California Highway Patrol reports...It does not appear anyone was injured in the accident. Firefighters and Pacific Gas & Electric employees are responding for the power lines and Foster Farms has been called for the turkeys."

The same story was covered very differently by Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary, a farmed animal sanctuary in Central California whose volunteers raced to the scene of the accident to try to help save the injured turkeys. They reported on their Facebook page, "We spoke with California Highway Patrol officers and offered immediate rescue assistance for the injured turkeys at the crash site. CHP denied our offer to help."

Later, Harvest Home posted the following picture, along with the following: "The crash site is cleared. All that remains is blood, feathers and dirt on the roadside. The bird 'survivors' were hauled to Foster Farms' turkey slaughterhouse in Turlock to be killed later today."

I was struck by how radically different the newspaper--and how the Merced Sun-Star treated the story was no different from every other media account today--treated the story compared to how Harvest Home did. The paper emphasized the fact that there were no (human) injuries, and that power lines were damaged. Other media accounts discussed disruptions to the morning commute. But no media story mentioned the suffering or loss of life experienced by the turkeys, or the presence of the rescue group. 

Obviously, news is created, not "reported." It's not like news is just found, like pebbles, on the ground, to be scooped up by a reporter, and given to the reader or viewer each day in its pure form.

It's actively created and packaged each day by a team of reporters, writers, editors, and producers, all with their own agendas and interests, not least of which are the interests of the corporations who advertise in the newspaper or on the television station. Those interests must certainly be served. Perhaps reporting on the loss of life of the turkeys--both at the crash site, and, for the survivors, a few hours later at Foster Farms' processing plant, was not in the best interests of those advertisers.