The Humane Myth: Le Sang des Betes

Gastronomica:

This 22-minute documentary established Franju as a formidable French filmmaker, and the slaughterhouse as a horror house within contemporary society. Here, a peaceful Paris suburb also yields an endless carnage of sheep, cattle, and horses, bludgeoned to feed meat-loving humans. Franju's work is viciously graphic and surrealistic, perfectly and simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

I think it is naive for people to think that industrial slaughter has made killing more humane or cruel than it was previously; in some ways it may have become even more "humane." Niether "Old MacDonald's farm" nor "humane" killing of animals ever existed ni the past. Both are romanticised images of a past that never was and never will be--just as is the "noble savage." Each are abject misrepresentations, revisionist apologetics, a denial of our own crimes.

Anyways, I think Franju's Le sang des bêtes (1949) may be one of the first documentaries on slaughterhouses and illustrates this point. I at least cannot watch the scene with the calves and not feel the perversity of such a relationship between humans and other creatures. Slaughter can never really be a compassionate and dignified act. At its worst, it is cruel, unnecessary, and arrogant. And at its best... well such only exists ni the abstract, an abstract whereby we intend only human character and experience, not the experience of the animal other who falls victim to our whims.

[Fastforward to 3:00, 7:50, 14:00 for the "best" of the worst examples. From 14:00 on, it's difficult not to be moved to anger andd/or tears or both. I think this video highlights the wrongness in killing naimals much better than Meet your Mea and similar videos that concentrate more on the suffering/welfare (it seems that death may even be a good thing in the case of those CAFO animals). Here we do not care how well the animals are treated before, we are regardlessly disgusted by the disloyalty and arrogance inherit within slaughter]

Got Sexism?: The Absence of Female Agency

What we learn from Gotmilk.com is that men do things with their bodies and women have things done to theirs; men produce things, women have things produced for them.

Slav, Igor and Sergie work their muscles to solve a puzzle; Mr. Osseous works the assembly line saving a valuable product, and Chuck assembles cartons for shipment. A nameless steer even drives the milk truck. On the other hand, Miss Dowdy needs to be *given* a makeover by blasting from a cannon into a pool of milk filled by the truck driver and Mother Hen needs your help because she is "tense and irritable" from her PMS. While the male animals are productive laborers, the female animals are either ditsy blonds or cruel old hens not worthy of the same honor, but still customers who need milk.

While the male animals perform all the labor in the games, the literal labor of female cows giving birth in order to begin lactating as well as the exploitation of their bodies' labor in producing all of the milk is completely absent. It is as Joan Dunayer writes in Animal Equality: within the dairy industry, "Milking is done to her rather than by her."

The political-economy of milk consumption (the hundred million dollar ad campaigns, the hundreds of celebrity spokepersons, the federal subsidization, the bias within school lunch programs and cafeterias, the killing of dairy cows who don't produce enough milk or are too expensive to feed, the veal industry, etc.) becomes absent and (cow's) milk becomes sold as "Nature's perfect food" (though goats milk is much more similar to human milk) eventhough few people in the world ever drank or needed "fresh," unsoured milk before the Industrial Revolution.