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.