it may complicate the project of building cross-group alliances in the context of fighting ‘interlocking structures’ of domination.”37 But I don’t think these two elements are so easily separable. It is precisely because these comparisons fail to address “interlocking structures” of domination that they are morally unjustifiable. In order to be morally defensible they would have to give full recognition to the different forms of violence referenced in the comparisons, including recognition of the ongoing forces of racism. This is where the analogies used by PETA and Steiner differ from the more carefully contextualised comparisons of Spiegel and Patterson, which are attentive to how “interlocking systems” of violence affect different species, including human beings.38
Kim is right that, ultimately, the uncritical circulation of images and words that imply or directly make comparisons between factory farming, animal experimentation and Nazi death camps is politically counterproductive. One reason for this is that competitive comparisons can never do justice to either element being compared. We cannot extend solidarity to other animals by pitting their needs against those of different groups of people. Competitive comparisons obscure the details that we need to understand in order to appreciate what is at stake in confronting violence against different groups. It feels almost absurd to have to point out that the forced breeding, raising and slaughter of farm animals for human consumption on a mass scale is not a form of genocide.39 This does not mean that it should not be opposed. PETA spokespeople claim that they make comparisons with the Holocaust and slavery in order to drive home the point that people, too, are animals, and that we have a moral obligation to all animals, not just to our own species.40 This is an important argument. But their campaigns can also be read to imply that other animals are only worthy of our consideration if we can imagine them as suffering as people have. Moreover, photographs or words that present animals as little more than distressed victims may actually reinforce rather than challenge anthropocentric attitudes by implying that human beings are the heroes who should save poor helpless creatures. When presented with endless images of animal suffering we get no sense of animals as complex beings with agency. Nor are we enlightened about the institutional powers behind animal agriculture, why the slaughter of animals for meat continues to rise precipitously throughout the world today, and how we might end this.41 If the reason for using comparisons between different forms of oppression is to encourage people to rethink our relationship to animals in the present and to stop abusing them, the analogies we need are those that open people to new information rather than close us down. And even this is not sufficient: it is not enough that comparisons raise awareness about violence against other animals. They need to do the work of challenging oppressions against people too. Only then can we rid ourselves of the competitive logic which, as Spiegel so convincingly argues, can only support master narratives and the forces of oppression against all beings.
From dreaded comparisons to strategic images
It is never good enough to stop at a critique of bad language or representations. One task of activists is to consider in what contexts particular comparisons might work well, and what kinds of language and images we might use most effectively to promote positive change. Used with careful consideration, provocative representations might promote reflection that prompts people to treat animals in more humane ways. The historian Hilda Kean emphasises the importance of visual imagery in changing attitudes and actions towards animals in the past. Focusing on the rise of campaigns against cruelty to animals in Britain in the nineteenth century, she argues that there was a close relationship between the act of seeing the mistreatment of animals and campaigning to end it. Similarly, in her discussion of the English live export protests of the 1990s, Kean insists that demonstrators were affected both by witnessing the suffering of caged veal calves as they were transported to ports and airports, and by the hidden cruelty they imagined the animals would undergo at the end of the voyage.42
According to the artist and critic Steve Baker, animal advocates should not be in the business of recycling old images, but instead should try to create new ones that will promote more ethical inter-species relations. In a world saturated with images of animals, Baker wonders “whether and how things might be changed — to the advantage of the animal — through the constructive use of representations.” In his book Picturing the Beast, Baker makes a useful comparison between two posters used by the British Royal Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (RSPCA) for the launch of its advertising campaign for dog registration in 1989. The first poster — which, significantly, Baker does not reproduce — features a picture of “a huge pile of dead dogs.” The photograph “(i)conographically,” and presumably on purpose, recalled images of heaps of human bodies from concentration camps, similar to the one described above, and, according to Baker, “understandably caused controversy and offence.” A second poster — which does appear in Baker’s book — shows a photo of a black bin bag (a “doggy bag”) filled with something and tied at the end. Although this second image was “superficially, more restrained” than the first, Baker argues that by “the very act of leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations to picture the final body which the bag concealed, thus denying them the catharsis of responding to its literal depiction, the image arguably remains more potent and more horrific than the pile of dogs.”43 Baker implies that a political image may have more currency when used in a way that trusts the human viewer to make the imaginative link herself rather than having it thrust upon her.
When animal advocates turn expressions like “eternal Treblinka” into slogans, carry signs emblazoned with the word “Auschwitz,” or circulate photographs of dead chicken bodies in heaps, they literalise and force analogies, reifying them and presenting them as perpetual truths. In so doing, they simplify the historical specificity of the Holocaust and of the exploitation of animals alike. While representations of violence committed against animals have a certain shock value that may motivate people to change, such images also carry dangers. When they try to impose a particular message on an image or word, animal advocates do something similar to anti-pornography feminists: they tell us that there is only one way of interpreting the images around us. If we sincerely want to change what Baker calls the “contemptuous attitudes and painful practices to which animals are still too often subjected,” we may be better off with powerful but subtle representations of animals that allow room for people’s careful contemplation and consideration.44 All vegans would do well to keep this in mind when we choose the images and language we use.
Alternative animal metaphors
Baker’s approach to images that might help to disrupt anthropocentric attitudes acknowledges that people’s understanding of animals always relies to a certain extent on our imaginations. We understand animals as symbols as well as living beings. This is apparent in the use of animal metaphors in language. While some metaphors reduce both human and other animals to one-dimensional stereotypes, others may help people to identify with animals in more positive ways, and even to challenge the boundary between human and other species. An example of the former is those metaphors used to deride certain groups of people by associating them with despised creatures. When political activists call the security forces “pigs” they mean to insult the police, but they denigrate the real animals as well. The expression “fat cats” similarly degrades the wealthy people who are meant as its target, but insults and belittles felines and fat humans in the process. The English language is full of such metaphors. Even when they have a poetic ring, they do little to help us to understand animals as living beings worthy of our care.
The performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross has used her art “to ask some hard questions regarding our use of animals as ‘metaphors’ for human suffering.”45 In her description of preparing for and writing her one-woman performance piece, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, Ross provides a useful contrast between animal metaphors that draw attention to human causes without adequately taking into account the experiences of animals, on one hand, and those that offer the potential for transforming human-animal relations, on the other hand:
One of the first and most
