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Book Review
| Killing Animals. By the Animal Studies Group. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. x + 217 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.
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| Modern technology has allowed people to do many things faster and on a larger scale. Such things most strikingly include the transformation of landscapes and the manufacture of goods. As the authors of the essays collected in this provocatively titled volume point out, they also include the killing of animals. The contributors represent a range of fields (anthropology, art history, literary and cultural studies, geography, and philosophy), and their contributions address the main traditional modes of mass animal killing (slaughtering and hunting) as well as one distinctively modern mode (euthanasia in animal shelters). Several essays address the representation of animal killing in art and literature. Although the introduction expansively promises to explore "ways in which societies past and present manage the concept of animal killing in various cultural arenas," the essays all focus on Anglophone cultures of recent centuries, and mostly on Britain at present or in the not-too-distant past (p. 5). This emphasis on the contemporary resonates with the volume's fundamental assertion that recent developments have made a difference of kind in the way animals are killed and in what it means to kill them, not just a difference in degree. The most interesting essays in the volume deal with distinctively modern topics. They also admit the difficulty of finding practicable solutions for the complex moral questions they raise. |
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In "Slaughter in Modernity," Jonathan Burt examines the concern for "humane slaughter" that emerged with the industrialization of meat production in the late nineteenth century. Tracing this issue through the intervening period, he argues that the sharp focus on the actual killing allows even people apparently concerned with animal welfare to ignore many other aspects of the process (which are less subject to melioration) that culminates in slaughter. He identifies a direct relationship between fluctuating condemnations of religious slaughtering practices as inhumane and fluctuating levels of xenophobia. Burt discusses Jewish, Islamic, and Sikh rituals as the targets of such condemnations; if he had included the western hemisphere in his purview he might also have mentioned Santería. |
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Clare Palmer's "Killing Animals in Animal Shelters" poses similar problems in terms of the act of killing. But the fact that the slaughtered animals are pets rather than potential dinners introduces a distinctive set of problems, which she addresses with directness and clarity. She wonders about the standing of these animals, which leads her to question the easy distinction often drawn between neutering and euthanasia, as well as the widespread assumption that dogs and cats are essentially pets, an assumption that radically devalues the lives of their feral conspecifics. |
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Steve Baker's "Animal Death in Contemporary Art" poses another basic question: What does art really have to say about the killing of animals? He acknowledges that no satisfactory answer is available, but nevertheless offers a thoughtful account of the difficulties presented by the search for one. He is particularly sensitive to the morally problematic features of art that takes the suffering of animals as its grotesque subject, and of art that incorporates dead animals (or pieces of them). Differential reception is a significant issue in all the essays in this volume, although not all the authors acknowledge it; it is especially important with regard to the politically charged and often intentionally offensive artwork that Baker analyzes, and he handles it with deft awareness. |
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The editors of this volume are also its authors. In the preface they claim that this protracted collaboration distinguishes their collection from most others, which "originate as a series of separately planned conference papers" (p. viii). It would be nice if this claim were justified, since the "collected essays" genre could certainly use some improvement, but in fact the essays in this collection show ordinary levels of disjunction and disparity. |
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Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at M.I.T. She is the author of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard, 1987) and The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imaginations (Harvard, 1997). She is working on a book about the Victorian environment. |
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