Extra-Credit Blog_Chi-ming Yang “Trial thing: Dogs, Porcelain and Chinese Export Art”

Yang’s lecture was very interesting and definitely related to topics we have covered this semester. She analyzed the role of dogs throughout history, especially in art. Dogs where a status symbol and where breed to achieve specific traits. This is very similar to our first discussions about the apple in The Botany of Desire. The apple was grafted to create a sweet apple for eating.

The dogs were importing and breed for desirable shapes and sizes, particularly the toy dog. It is very interesting how humans have manipulated nature for their own preferred aesthetics. The animals were more like object rather than individual beings with their own teleology. Dogs were painted in painting and sculptures where created so people could immortalize this symbol. It seems they are trying to prolong the life of the dog through breeding and through art.

In class we mostly focused on plants rather than animals, but most of the same concepts of dominating and changing plants applies to animals, particularly dogs. Dogs were domesticated for human’s pleasure, similarly to the grand garden of Versailles as a status symbol. The garden was created in a certain way to be the best garden, just like the goal of breeding of dogs. We still continue this process today. Maybe we need to be more accepting of nature and quit changing everything that does not please us. Nature does have its own goal and I’m starting to realize how we really don’t let that happen. Something as simple as dog breeding doesn’t phase me because it’s so common, but if we stop and think, this could be very wrong. Nature should be left to its own means. After all, nature can be very beautiful and we should accept this beauty.

P.S.: Fish can Feel Pain

They said it here. Does this mean that "catch and release" fishing practices are just sadistic?

Lining room vs family room

Most people have a living room that they use a couple times a year, where the family room is used all the time.  Wouldn’t it be more cost effective and sustainable to combine these rooms and create one slightly larger nicer room?  The homeowner would get more use out of it and would be able to enjoy a greater space.  The downsides are that you would have to clean when someone comes over, where you could just close the door to the family room.  The other downside is that when you go to sell your home you will have one less.  However, the home would cost less and might have a higher bang for your buck.  This seems like a great thing, but then why have people not already done this.  It goes back to older times when you brought over friends and family, with the goal to impress them by taking them to your nice sitting room and having a conversation.  This has never happened at my home, does it happen elsewhere, so why still the two rooms?  We are holding on to old customs, where today we are a more relaxed culture that could probably give up a living room.  This change is starting to slowly happen through modern open concept design, where the living room, kitchen, and dinning room are combined in one larger open space.  This also allows the home to feel larger and potentially more luxurious then it would with all the separate smaller rooms.

Owning Nature

I watched a part of a documentary called "the future of food" on hulu.com the other day and was amazed at what i heard. The Mansanto Company genetically engineered canola seed that was resistant to round-up. This would allow the seeds to be planted, sprayed with round-up, and have only the canola seed survive. This seed found its way into thousands of farmers fields as a result of wind and animal dispersal. A lot of seed present in farmers fields is believed to have fallen off trucks hauling large quantity of the seed. The Mansanto Company then went around collecting samples from farmers fields and threatened to sue any farmer that had canola plants that came from their seeds growing. Thousands of farmers paid the company to avoid lawsuits and destroyed their stockpiles of seed. The reason they were able to do this was because the company had patented the seed. This result was even held up in the court of law, with the judges saying it was the farmers responsibility to make sure the seed wasn't growing in their field. Personally I find this amazing and wrong. I feel it should be the company's responsible to contain their seed. If it is on the farmer the company could easily spread their seed simply for the purpose of suing the farmer. I don't see how the Mansanto Company can own a plant, it seems unethical. The dispersal of the seed can't be controlled or stopped. If this type of trend would continue nothing would be allowed to grow without copyright payments being made to a company every time a tree or plant reproduced. This whole idea seems unethical to me and another problem farmers shouldn't have to deal with.

Visualizing Animals

The abstracts presented on the theme of "Engaging with Animal Subjects: Ethical and Ecological Concerns" during the Finding Animals conference yesterday were very interesting to listen to. Cary Wolfe with his "Animals Before the Law" excerpt from what I understood is a book he is planning to finish this summer, made some highly stimulating points. He compared the mass murder of people during the holocaust to the way humans treat animals who are slated for food production. The big difference that can be seen here is that people need animals for food in order to survive. The holocaust was extremely immoral in that the Nazis did not need to exterminate people in order to survive. If the country was to all of a sudden become vegetarian, there would simply not be enough food supply to provide everyone with enough vegetarian food. One of the main requirements of a human diet is protein. Protein is needed to regenerate and repair human nerves tissues and bones. Yes, protein can be obtained through vegetarian foods such as grains, but it is not nearly enough. Proteins from grains are incomplete proteins. To receive a necessary amount of protein from vegetarian foods, several different vegetarian food sources need to be combined. So, eating animals for the obtainment of protein is the most efficient way of helping us survive. Finding the most efficient way to survive seems to be in the basic instinct of every creature. Valuing human life above all others is engraved in our DNA in order to help us remain alive as a species. Killing our own species on the other hand does not help humanity survive as a whole, but rather hinders survival while creating no benefit to anyone.

  The second talk by Gregg Mitman was also very significant. He explained how nature has recently come to be portrayed based on human feelings and emotions. He used the film "March of the Penguins" as an example, saying that Morgan Freeman's narration constantly attributes human characteristics to the penguins. He also explained how companies and corporations are changing the way nature films are made by solely focusing on what would be entertaining to the human mind so that they could make the most profit. He used the most popular video on YouTube from 2007 as an example. The video currently has 40,000,000 views. Battle at Kruger  portrays a very intense battle between different animal species. Click the link to watch for yourself. Greg reasoned that the video was so popular not because it was a nature video, but because it had all the necessary elements that entertain humans. With nature films becoming more and more about entertainment value, the real and important educational values of nature are lost in the process.

The third and last talk by Donna Haraway did not appeal to me as much. She seemed to convey a number of different points instead of focusing on a single subject. One of the main things she seemed to be advocating was the relationships between humans and animals that allow them to coexist together. She talked about the Churro sheep that were almost wiped out at one point. The commitment and dedication of different people in order to revive the species created a better way of life for both the people and the sheep. She also explains how Asian Water Buffalos are used for trophy shootings, as safari trophy animals. The buffalo becomes a sort of an icon and is constantly needed for both humans and for itself, since humans reproduce the animal, helping it to survive as a species. 

For those of you who didn't attend the finding animals conference, especially the segment "engaging with animal subjects: ethical and ecological considerations", you really missed out on some great stuff, although I'd have to agree with Hillary that portions of it went way over my head (especially the academic humor). And our exit wasn't the most graceful. What I found really interesting about this segment was that it affirmed something I've been thinking all semester-that our political philosophy has a pretty big influence on our environmental philosophy. The first speaker, Cary Wolfe, made a terrific comparison of our current factory farming practices to Nazi Germany and the holocaust. He reasoned that in the same way that totalitarian state promoted genocide was the ultimate conclusion of authoritarian and nationalistic trends of the 1800s, current factory farming practices are the ultimate conclusion of our attitudes of domination and exploitation of nature forwarded by the industrial revolution. He concluded that just as the ideology and logic of fascism was challenged and defeated, the logic and ideology behind our cruel treatment of animals will eventually be defeated as well. He also referenced peter singer's utilitarian views when talking about the Spanish parliaments passage of ape rights laws.

The second speaker, Gregg Mittman, discussed how animals are portrayed in the mass media. He talked about how conservatives attached their values of traditional marriage and child bearing to the documentary march of the penguins, and how animal sex was more heavily represented in the 90s on tv than the so called ' blue chip documentaries' This seems to suggest that the majority of us have an anthropomorphic view of animals and our relationship to them, and that we will continue to impart our political and social vaules onto the environment and nature. While it may be hard not to do so, this presentation, like our class, showed me that there are actually many different takes on environmental philosophy that don't invovle a purely human centered view. Mittman also discussed a project he was working on invovling a tribe in africa that lives among elephants and is in constant battle with them for survival on a changing terrain. I believe that this scenario functions as a sort of microcausum of the battle between human society and all of nature. The solution that the scientists seemed to be trying to implement was a combination of techinques like advanced tracking and studying the elphants combined with things like bees nests on wire to protect crops from elephant. Instead of trying to separate the people and the elephants, or the people killing all of the elephants, the scientists wanted to find ways for them to live together in the same place in relative harmony, where both people's and elephants interests are considered. I think that the mentality this solution adopts will be necessary to solve our current environmental crises.

Animals Before the Law

I also attended the Finding Animals panel yesterday afternoon. I felt so sophisticated hanging out with all of the cool trendy people who attended, even though I didn't get some of the inside jokes everybody else laughed at.

I'd like to unpack a little bit of the first paper by speaker Cary Wolfe. The paper is Animals Before the Law, about which the Chair of the program, Sushmita Chatterjee called "absolutely timeless." I think she referred to it with those words because of the connection Cary made to an issue of old to today.

Cary used the term "biopolitics" often in his paper. I understood that term to mean the political influence and regulation of certain biotechnologies. He compared modern-day slaughterhouses to the function of Nazi concentration camps. He talked about the genocide of the holocaust, and how we can't compare slaughterhouses to genocide because they are different by definition. Genocide is the attempt to remove an entire group/species completely, which was attempted by the Nazis during the holocaust. However, Cary thinks the slaughterhouses today are worse than the holocaust, because entire populations of a certain animal are not attempted to be eradicated; it's only some at a time, and there is no end in sight for this problem.

Another interesting fact Cary mentioned is that Henry Ford got the idea for the assembly line from a Chicago slaughterhouse. Here is an example of biopolitics, as factory farming becomes political when essentially the birth of modern cars occurs as influence of such farming practices, if you can even call it that. This proposed the question, are we going in full circle here? First, the holocaust is a mass-murder of millions of people. Next, slaughterhouses become efficient and are able to mass-murder millions of animals. Then, the assembly line technique is adopted from the previously stated slaughterhouses, and produces the birth of the American automobile. Genocide still occurs in the world, like in Rwanda, Darfur and the Bosnian Genocide in the mid-90's. So when I say full circle, I mean unfortunately mass-killing is still taking place, and is being influenced in different ways by the new technologies made available. Cary feels so strongly against mass-murder of animals in slaughterhouses that he compares them to the holocaust and genocide. Painting such a vivid picture was definitely effective, and caused me to think of factory farming in a different and more serious way.