Death: ‘Growing’ and Killing Animals

Abstract

In her essay, ‘Being Prey’, the ecofeminist activist and philosopher Val Plumwood, reflects on her experience of being hunted and attacked by a crocodile. Whilst the crocodile has its jaws around her and is spinning her underwater in a ‘death roll’, Plumwood has a distinctly humanocentric moment. She experiences outrage on realizing that this Other animal is attempting to eat her. In the West, we do not imagine that our lives might end with someone taking a bite out of us; or by having our necks broken so that our killer might enjoy a more relaxed meal.

…in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we are also food for others is reflected in many of our death and burial practices of the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up…

(Val Plumwood, 1999)

In the case of dogs and cats, you could make the argument that domestication was mutually beneficial. They got companionship,security, food, warmth, playmates, and even love. We got many of the same things back (minus food – since rarely did humans eat the animals with whom they played and shared their homes). But in the case of farm animals, the relationship never approached anything like an even exchange. We took their eggs, their milk, their flesh, their skin, their work, and in exchange they got, as far as I can see, the short end of the stick. While we protected them from predators, this was only because we, a more powerful predator, had already earmarked them for our own exploitation.

(Jeffrey Masson, 2004: 8)