A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis

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      © Jerry Drave, Song for a Lost Home, digital illustration, 2018.

       @illusdrave

      It is no great stretch to suppose that we learned how to dominate and brutalize our fellow humans by practicing first on domesticated animals, controlling every aspect of their reproduction before violently ending their lives. The connections are blatant: Southern plantation owners treating humans like livestock; Black Americans “animalized” in various ways by white supremacists to this day; Jewish people transported to the Nazi death camps in cattle cars; the US Department of Homeland Security literally caging children they’ve separated from their parents; Donald Trump saying of “undesirable” immigrants, “These aren’t people, these are animals.” A figure like Trump draws power from victimizing others, in this case by denying these “aspiring Americans” their fundamental needs.

      To come to terms with the various ways in which the “Viking or Victim” psychology has affected our emotional and creative lives, we must acknowledge that we ourselves have practiced cruelty by proxy. Behind the bacon is a creature who has suffered tail and ear clipping and castration, all without anesthesia. Behind the breakfast omelet is a system in which the boy chicks, “useless” to the industry, are thrown into a trash can or ground up in an industrial macerator, and in which chickens’ beaks are cut or burned off (again, without painkillers) to prevent them from pecking each other out of sheer frustration inside their tiny battery cages. Behind the milk is a mother whose children have been taken from her again and again until she is too worn out to continue—so that she may very well be inside your hamburger as well. All of these animals endure excruciatingly painful lives in cramped and filthy conditions (lying or standing in their own and others’ feces) before they are slaughtered on dis-assembly lines. If you are brave enough to search for it, you may find footage of slaughterhouse workers kicking the animals who struggle, screaming and cursing at them, stabbing at their soft bellies with pitchforks. These men, in turn, have been bullied by their corporate overlords.

      Here is the truth of it then: I would be teased and mocked at school, and then I would come home and consume fried eggs and meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, and tall glasses of milk. I was complicit in a system of cruelty I thought I would have done anything to overturn if only I were older and stronger and smarter. Now I have grown into that person, and I want to know why we who are brave enough to be vulnerable don’t recognize the feelings of the most vulnerable creatures of all. We artists are supposed to understand better than anyone how cruel it is to mock or bully people who don’t think or act or look like we do. It is our empathy that allows us to render our characters alive enough to cheer for, real enough to cry over, but something’s not connecting. In 2010 a scientific study (organized by the neuroscientist Massimo Filippi) indicated that the brain activity of those who accept the moral argument in defense of animals is more responsive to images of both human and animal suffering than that of meat eaters. In reaction to the torment of another, the vegetarian brain lights up where the omnivore’s brain does not.

      In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t put too fine a point on it: citing bull and dogfighting, gladiatorial combat, boxing, and other displays of culture, he writes that “cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills.” This is true not just of the pint-sized brutes who terrorize the schoolyard—already living a stereotype at the age of seven or ten—but of those who have not refined their critical thinking to the point that they are able to discuss our treatment of animals without resorting to hostility or contortioned logic. Ashley Capps wrote a poem about a cow she saw in a pasture every day for months until one day she wasn’t there and never would be again—“A hip pulls / loose, shoulders dismantle in the hands / of some masked worker. There is nothing / in this world that loves you back”—and to dismiss these lines as sentimental would not be a “sophisticated” response.

      Most humans are able to look back with a sense of perspective on the insults and bruises they’ve received. I was lucky to have parents, stepparents, and other family members who consistently nurtured my self-esteem, and I never had cause to feel unsafe or unloved. They told me life would get easier, and it did: as I grew up, I cared less and less what anyone might think of me, my writing, or any of my other creative efforts. It’s never going to get easier for the animals, though. They can’t ever transcend their tormentors so long as people like us are still eating and wearing the products of their bodies. As German activist Malte Hartwieg says, “You like farm animal rescue stories, but you’re not vegan? СКАЧАТЬ