Review Paper 3: Sociological Images

Sensational Cases of Animal Rights/Vegetarian Activism

The three articles that I have chosen to review each involve media created to voice animal rights or vegetarian activism. This is a meaningful topic to me as I have been a happy vegetarian since I was 14 years old. My personal decision to stop eating meat came about after studying the contemporary meat industry in school; its impact on the environment and treatment of animals. Today I am still very content with my choice, and try to be conscience of where my food comes from and how it is produced. While just and compassionate treatment towards animals and the environment are something I like to encourage, everyone contributes in their own manner differently, and in no way do I want to force my beliefs upon others.

I completely understand how self righteous phrases such as, “oh, I’m sorry I can’t eat that—I’m a vegetarian” and “that’s a nice bag…but is that leather?” can sound, and hope to avoid such situations with a positive, non-extremist approach. I would say that vegetarians are often discriminated against for being “holier-than-thou” when it comes to lifestyle choices. I definitely value voicing my individual opinion, but who wants to be that stereotypical pain in the neck vegetarian?

Activism is wonderful, but sometimes--often in the case of animal rights or the environment—can get a bit carried away and contradict what are thought of as pacifist, compassionate values. The media described in these articles are interesting examples of activism turning over-sensational or even offensive. This article, titled “PETA’s Holocaust On Your Plate”, revolves around a striking 2003 PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaign that compares meat eaters and modern agricultural practice to Nazis and the holocaust. The first photograph is of a banner headed by the words “Baby Butchers”, and below a picture of child camp prisoners on the left, with slaughter house-caged piglets on the right. The second declares “To Animals, All People Are Nazis”. In this one, two photographs have been cut and placed together so that it appears that Jewish prisoners peering out of their bunk beds and rows of chickens lined behind bars, are facing each other. The author of the article notes that many viewers found the campaign advertisements very offensive, not surprisingly. It seems paradoxical that PETA, in attempting to promote love and fairness towards animals, would use something as devastating and horrendous as the Holocaust to illustrate its point. Also, by demonizing people who eat meat, these advertisements, though certainly attention grabbing, will more likely repel viewers from the organization than intrigue them.

The second article, “WOMEN AS MEAT DEMONSTRATION” is also about a PETA campaign. It shows a photograph of demonstration where women in nude colored bikinis lie crumpled, still, and covered in fake blood in giant plastic “meat packages” with mock labels included on the ground. Surrounding the women are signs that say “Meat is Murder”. These women are like the bloody chunks of flesh we can but at the supermarket, I get it. However, as the author of the article brings to attention, these near naked women are highly sexualized and objectified.

PETA has a history of using the enticing female body to help promote its message, and here, the women are meat! It is easy to understand that because this image of bloody, saran-wrapped women is so alarming, it is thought to be able to shock viewers into paying attention. Certainly effective in that sense. I understand that sensationalist scare tactics are sometimes necessary. In a way, this campaign idea is clever. But I question how clearly one might connect this to the idea that the packages from the supermarkets were once part of living animals, and instead just see it as “whoa—hot girls in a freaky demonstration”. Is this not a bit macabre? I do not mean to discredit PETA for its mission, research, and achievements, but I am unsure whether this campaign is conveying the right message.

I find the third article, “Animal Farm: Representing the Industrial Food System” particularly interesting because the media is visual arts. Nathan Meltz, an artist and graduate student based in upstate New York, has demonstrated his views on the meat and agricultural industry through unique mechanical-livestock of the “early modernist German machine aesthetic”. By creating pigs, cows, and chickens from bolts and screws, Meltz seeks to illustrate the effects of technology on the environment. The animals in his pictures are sad, waiting, and lost in a crowd of many (one major problem with commercial livestock farms is that will process one kind of animal, leading to mass “wiping out”). I personally liked his animation titled “The Chicken Coup”, a roughly ten minute long haunting depiction of a chicken’s life and death in a slaughterhouse. I find it stirring, and impressive that the artist can procure sympathetic sentiments in the viewer through mechanical chickens. I think that because this video is an animation, it affects the viewer differently than a graphic, messy live slaughterhouse film might.

The above examples of activism reach varying degrees of radical sensationalism. It is not to hard to understand why the terms “vegetarian” or “vegan” cause so much eye-rolling and annoyance. There is in this conflict a certain degree of misunderstanding, as well, on both sides—omnivores should not immediately right off vegetarians as radical and pretentious, and vegetarians should not demonize or treat meat-eaters like barbarians. It is too difficult to effectively voice a value, even if there is substantial support behind it, if the images are offensive.