of her situation: “As a solitary specimen of a major prey species of the saltwater crocodile, I was standing in one of the most dangerous places on earth.” Guiding the canoe steadily and carefully to avoid the shore, Plumwood saw with alarm that what she had thought was a stick ahead of her was actually a crocodile lurking at the surface of the water. In retrospect, Plumwood imbues her story with an element of fate: “Although I was paddling to miss the crocodile, our paths were strangely convergent.” Before she could change tack, the crocodile began to strike at her small vessel. “For the first time,” Plumwood writes, “it came to me fully that I was prey.” Just as she was steering the canoe to shore to get out onto dry land “the crocodile rushed up alongside the canoe, and its beautiful, flecked golden eyes looked straight into mine.” In the next instant the animal had Plumwood in a tight grip, dragging her underwater.
Plumwood attempts, with hindsight, to make meaning of her thoughts during the three death rolls that followed:
In its final, frantic attempts to protect itself from the knowledge that threatens the narrative framework, the mind can instantaneously fabricate terminal doubt of extravagant proportions: This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake. This desperate delusion split apart as I hit the water. In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time “from the outside,” as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizable bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death.
Against the odds Plumwood remained conscious through these short bursts of terror (“The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle,” she explains, “so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim’s resistance quickly”) and managed to come back for air after each roll. Following the third, she scrambled her mangled body up the shore, away from the river and crocodile. But she was far from her trailer and had sustained serious wounds. In the goriest segment of the story, but also one of the most telling, Plumwood stops to inspect the extent of her physical injuries: “The left thigh hung open, with bits of fat, tendon, and muscle showing, and a sick, numb feeling suffused my entire body.” In this moment of relief mixed with fear and pain, Plumwood sees part of her own body as raw meat.
Yet the experience of being torn physically and existentially proved to Plumwood that she was something more than meat:
As my own narrative and the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. The thought, “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!” was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Reflection has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food.
Plumwood does not call her story “Being meat,” though that would have been a catchier title. The point of her account is precisely that “being prey” — potentially food for another being — is not the same as “being meat” — being nothing more than food. The realisation that one can be meat and also be a complex being led Plumwood to conclude that other beings — including the ones that people typically eat — can be our food and more than our food. The act of violence is not in predation itself, but in treating other creatures as mere meat.
In order to put her traumatic experience into words, Plumwood had to overcome the pressures and powers of dominant narratives about animal attacks on people. Although “[f]ew of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it,” Plumwood was determined not to play the heroine. When the camp ranger finally found her and she began the long journey to hospital, Plumwood overheard the rescuers’ boastful plans to return to the river and hunt down the crocodile. She resisted this plan forcefully: “I was the intruder,” she writes, “and no good purpose could be served by random revenge.” Having survived the attack, Plumwood faced a threat of a different kind — “the cultural drive to represent it in terms of the masculinist monster myth: the master narrative.”
The imposition of the master narrative occurred in several ways: in the exaggeration of the crocodile’s size, in portraying the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization. The events seemed to provide irresistible material for the pornographic imagination, which encouraged male identification with the crocodile and interpretation of the attack as sadistic rape.
There are echoes in this quotation of Carol J. Adams’s thesis in The Sexual Politics of Meat.2 But Plumwood rejects what she sees as the reproduction, in Adams’s work, of the dualistic thinking that characterises the master narrative. In the American ecofeminist tradition of Adams and others, Plumwood claims, all hunting is condemned as predatory, violent, masculinist and morally corrupt, set in opposition to a supposedly more ethically and environmentally sustainable female gathering culture. Hunting and gathering thus correspond to a preexisting assumed male/female dualism. This model ignores forms of hunting that may not be based on the instrumentalisation of animals, and idealises and universalises women’s gathering activities, overlooking evidence of female hunters, for example in some Indigenous societies.3 Drawing on examples from Australian Aboriginal culture, Plumwood is careful neither to associate hunting exclusively with men nor to demonise it or predation.4 Her point is that in the mainstream Australian media the crocodile attack could be readily assimilated into a patriarchal plot that anthropomorphised the crocodile as a sexual hunter and reduced her, Plumwood, to a victim devoid of agency.
While challenging the masculinist adventure tale foisted upon her by the Australian press, Plumwood reminds the reader — and herself — of her arrogance at venturing into crocodile waters without seeking the advice of “the indigenous Gagadgu owners of Kakadu.” Plumwood’s rendering of her own tale, like much of her philosophical writing, is indebted to the teachings of Aboriginal Australians. From them she learned the value of stories as collective, transgenerational meaning-making, as well as a holistic way of thinking about death that “sees animals, plants, and humans sharing a common life force.”5 She contrasts this worldview with Western anthropocentrism and individualism, and “Being Prey” presents a forceful challenge to those traditions. As the philosopher Matthew Calarco writes, the importance of Plumwood’s tale lies in her “effort to think not simply her death as such, but her willingness to accept her indistinction from the world around her, the loss of her human propriety.”6 For Calarco, “Being Prey” is a radically anti-anthropocentric account of what it means to be human, one that makes room for being animal and being food for others.
Val Plumwood’s contextual vegetarianism
Plumwood’s reflection on the shattering experience of being prey provided one basis for her particular kind of ecofeminism. At the heart of this lies a critique of dualistic thinking, the Western philosophical tradition that divides the world into a series of hierarchal binary oppositions: reason/nature, man/woman, human/animal, human/nature, European/Other and so on.7 Plumwood identifies what she calls “ontological” vegetarianism or veganism — which categorises some beings as food and others as not food — as an extension of, rather than a challenge to, such dualisms.8 Her critique of ontological veganism focuses on two areas of thought: utilitarian and rights philosophies, on one hand, and American cultural ecofemimism, on the other. Plumwood argues that utilitarian and rights theories are extensionalist, that is, they extend moral consideration — and with it the status of not food — to those animals most similar to human beings. While human omnivores draw the line between what is food and what is not at the boundary between humans and all other beings, including other animals, Plumwood accuses thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan of moving the distinction further along the chain, replacing the human/animal dualism with a another binary opposition: sentient/non-sentient, or those deserving rights and moral consideration/those not. Some animals are thus afforded moral status while the majority of the other-than-human world is excluded from the moral community. The
