brdgt | cognitive disconnect

Clark wrote this great piece on the Zanesville story, Terry Thompson, Exotic Animals and Store-bought Chicken Parts:

[UW-Madison English Grad student, Emily Clark, reflects on the recent Zanesville animal tragedy in light of her research in Critical Animal Studies. Emily is currently completing her dissertation on the ethics of representing bodies that can not or will not speak for themselves with the support of an AAUW fellowship. In 2008-09, she co-organized the Mellon Workshop, "What is the Posthuman? " at the Center for the Humanities.]

The final paragraph of an Oct. 21, 2011 New York Times article about the Zanesville animal tragedy, in which Terry Thompson released 56 animals on the grounds of his home and then killed himself, ends with a question: “In addition to the mystery of why he let his animals loose knowing they would probably be killed, Mr. Thompson left behind another puzzle: store-bought chicken parts, which he fed his animals, were left in the driveway not far from his body. Friends said he usually fed the animals while they were in their cages .” Reading this, I thought about that 62 year-old, white, male, human body, lying on a driveway alongside chicken bodies disassembled into parts, and very soon to be joined by lion, tiger, bear and monkey bodies, and was reminded that in the end we all become “meat.” Some of us, however, are undeniably more meat than others. Those puzzling chickens, whose description as “store-bought parts” manages in less than a breath to deny them status even as animals, much less a part in the tragedy of this story, are most definitely meat, at least according to overwhelming force of our cultural logic. How bodies become “meat” and our responses to that process or event is a primary indicator of the value we ascribe to various lives. Thompson shot himself, taking his own life, an act that will certainly be mourned by many. The exotic animals he owned were shot by Muskinghum County police officers, who have expressed both sadness and outrage at the animals’ deaths and at their own role as executioners. National reactions to the story have been, similarly, sadness and outrage, along with a certain fascination and morbid voyeurism. But how did those chickens die? Is their death a tragedy? It’s difficult to imagine anyone shedding tears over reports of a “chicken part” appearing in a grocery store. But the deaths of these exotic animals, or “beasts” as one report called them, is a tragedy, or at the very least, deserves notice. Why?

Animals such as lions, tigers, bears and most primates maintain a certain kind of celebrity status. They generate human interest; crowds visit zoos to see them. Children’s movies personify them. Exotic animals are also valuable possessions, in part because they are in limited supply. Exotic animal owners collect these possessions, joining a community of other collectors, some of whom have altruistic interests. Often these collectors, like the Thompson’s, take in animals that have been abandoned by owners who lost interest in or the ability to care for the animals once they were no longer cute babies but instead teenage and mature tigers, lions, monkeys, and so on. Regardless of their motives, however, these animal owners are part of a community that exists because of the commodification of animal bodies, and that perpetuates that commodification. In some ways it is better if this commodification is overt; humans who own exotic animals with the purpose of displaying them for profit are regulated to a greater degree; humans who own exotic animals and do not display them for money, like the Thompson’s, are frequently left alone.

Regulations, or stricter regulations, while an appealing moral to want to append to this story, would not in fact have made much of a difference. Much has been made of Terry Thompson’s recent release from prison, yet that was for weapons licensing violations and had nothing to do with the animals. Much has also been made of his supposed history of abuse, but in fact the main charges involved his working animals (horses and cows) and their apparent disregard for the boundaries between his and his neighbors’ yards, and did not involve the dozens of large animals that spent their lives living in cages on his property. In fact Thompson had recently been observed by veterinarians and experts from the nearby Columbus Zoo, who “found nothing wrong " according to county prosecutor Michael Haddox. Haddox told the Zanesville Times Recorder after the 2008 inspection: "I'm not going to tell you that the animals out there are taken care of like you or I might take care of one of our pets, but there is no one that can say their conditions are violating any statues of law. " Implicit in Haddox’s statement is the prioritization of pets; they receive the gold standard of care, a standard which does not apply to the vast majority of animals. Of course Haddox’s belief in there being a way that “you or I” would take care of our pets ignores the extremely broad spectrum of pet ownership. Domestic animals like dogs and cats may live in a caring home where they are supposedly part of the family but they may also live in situations where they are being raised to breed, to fight, to race, or simply to be an emotional resource for their owners. This last purpose is not limited to companion species like dogs and cats; Thompson’s wife is reported as feeling that the many caged animals on their property were “like her kids.”

It seems extremely likely that the lions, tigers, bears, and monkeys that the Thompson’s clearly cared about would perhaps have preferred not to spend their lives being drafted into the simulation of a parent-child relationship with this rural Ohio couple. The photos released of the crowds of dead animal bodies stacked up next to and on top of one another are not necessarily more disturbing than the photos of those animals who did not escape their cages, or who were tranquilized and retrieved. Staring out from behind the bars that define the overwhelming majority of their “life” it is difficult to decide whose fate is worse: the 49 animals that were killed relatively quickly, or those that remain in captivity, incarcerated. And to return to those chickens again: who among us wants to think about how they spent their lives? What cages constrained them? What did their death scene look like?

What this story reveals, and what is being obscured by coverage that focuses on Thompson’s individual pathology (which seems troubled, at the very least), or by polemics about the need for stricter regulations for exotic animal owners (which seems practically necessary), is that this case is exemplary of the cognitive disconnect that we human animals voraciously defend regarding our relations to other animals, be they exotic possessions, household pets, and most especially store-bought chicken parts. This cognitive disconnect is made possible both by the stories we tell ourselves about those relations and by the blindness we impose on ourselves, all signs of hypocrisy, bad faith, and schizophrenia, to the contrary.