The very first vegan activism I ever did was with Anonymous for the Voiceless. In areas of high foot traffic in the city, some of our number donned Guy Fawkes masks and strapped TVs to our chests while the rest stood off to the side with fliers and information cards to hand out to passersby. Most people took care not to look at us while walking by, often shielding the eyes of their children, but some stopped to watch the slaughterhouse footage that was on our TVs.
Thus my first activism experiences primarily comprised approaching strangers to seize the opportunity to talk to them about factory farming while they were actively watching the gory fruits of it. Sometimes we hosted this spectacle at my college campus, where the most common reaction was uncomfortable laughter and/or recording the display for Snapchat.
The strategy of using slaughterhouse footage to attempt to persuade people to be vegan is a popular one.
There was a sense I had, before I went vegan, that these videos were inherently manipulative. This skepticism, of course, gave me the perfect excuse to avoid exposure to any material about humanity’s treatment of animals in the food system and otherwise.
Recently, I read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others.
The essay/book explores the implications and effects of the wide dissemination of graphic photos and videos of war in modern society. While the focus of the essay was human-on-human violence and war photojournalism, I found myself constantly thinking about how Sontag’s observations paralleled the general reactions to slaughterhouse footage.
The essay begins with a reference to Virginia Woolf’s 1938 Three Guineas, which poses the question: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”
Sontag believes that war is doomed to persist with the human race, but Regarding the Pain of Others is more concerned with the ways in which photography affects and is affected by people’s perceptions of different conflicts. In an age where visual evidence of human suffering from war is ubiquitous–the nightly news plays in almost every home, and uncensored videos are disseminated on social media without warning– have our attitudes towards violence changed? Is there something morally questionable about the consumption of such images, especially by those who are far removed from the violence?
Denial
Sontag observes that in general, when photographic evidence of atrocities committed by their own side is surfaced, people will often jump to claims of fabrication and manipulation. She uses the example that, after the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War gained infamy, the Fascists attempted to claim that it was the residents of the town themselves who had caused the destruction by planting explosives.
If this can be mapped onto slaughterhouse footage, it makes sense that so many people react to slaughterhouse footage by declaring it to be fake, manipulated, or exaggerated. After all, they are, in effect, regarding videographic evidence of atrocities committed by “their side” as consumers of animal products.
Passivity
Another common response to slaughterhouse footage is varying sentiment along the lines of “that’s awful, but we can’t do anything about it.”
This is also a common reaction to seeing war photography. Sontag questions whether we become voyeurs when we bear witness to suffering that is far-removed from us.
She also argues that exposure to suffering can also make people feel powerless.
“Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder—and make abstract”
It’s debatable how much power we have to intervene to stop atrocities like war. For example, as an American, my tax dollars have been paying for genocide for nearly three years now. One could resist by refusing to pay taxes, but that action, without massive coordination from other citizens, would have a minuscule impact on Gaza while also putting them in prison, so the trade-off isn’t worth it.
We still have a responsibility to resist, but in comparison to this situation, the ease of fighting against animal exploitation is extreme.
First, abstaining from animal products involves negligible harm to the person doing so. It is entirely safe and healthy to follow a plant-based diet; humans are not obligate omnivores, especially with modern nutritional science and food systems. Second, people have considerably more control over what they eat than they do over their government’s foreign policy.
However, despite this, I think that viewing footage of factory farms still makes people feel that they are powerless to change anything— or at least it makes that seem like a salient excuse for inaction. The videos people see are often made up of spliced-together clips of vast numbers of animals undergoing extreme suffering. When trying to put the number of victims into perspective, too, the numbers are beyond the human ability to visualize effectively.
Although it has often been said that the ubiquity of horrifying images in modern life is what makes people desensitized to them, Sontag argues that the desensitization has more to do with people’s perception that they cannot do anything to combat the injustices they see.
“People don’t become inured to what they are shown—if that’s the right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.
With animal rights, the action to take is about as cut-and-dried as it gets. It’s important to push back against the idea that nothing can be done.
Empathy
Sontag makes the interesting point that the feelings of empathy elicited by viewing images of war can give people a false feeling of absolution from their role in the political situation that led to the war.
“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence…. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
I think there are two parallels here to people’s reactions to slaughterhouse footage. First, with both war and slaughter, insofar as people recognize their role in causing suffering, they are likely to view it as a necessary evil.
When viewing the unpleasant consequences of warfare, the average citizen is likely to believe that it is sad but necessary because [insert American exceptionalist/Western chauvinist narrative here]. Similarly omnivores are quick to claim that slaughter is necessary because humans “require” meat.
Second, in both cases, insofar as people recognize abuses “beyond the pale”, there is often a perceived responsibility differential.
If the US commits a war crime, an American citizen (assuming they ever hear about such an incident) is likely to view it as the result of a bad apple, not an inevitable consequence of the state violence they may politically support.
In the case of animals, the perceived responsibility differential is lessened by the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a person over the age of five who doesn’t know that you have to kill animals to get meat. However, people often react in horror to the conditions animals are kept in on factory farms, or the inhumane methods of killing. “Well, it should be done humanely and respectfully,” they say. The blame still shifts away from the people viewing animals as commodities and towards the companies, for killing them in the wrong ways.
The engineered psychological distance between consumers and animal agriculture furthers this. People in highly industrialized nations, the nations with the worst treatment of animals, are hardly ever exposed to slaughter. They instead pick up plastic-wrapped, processed chicken at the grocery store like any other commodity, with no need to think about its origin.
And maybe, even with full acknowledgement of our responsibility, true empathy is out of reach. We will never know what is it truly like to be a pig in a farrowing crate or a chicken spending her life in a hard wire cage. The last paragraph of Regarding the Pain of Others is as applicable to the case of animals as it is in the original essay’s context:
“‘We’—this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
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