HUMANE CONDITIONS ANIMAL KILLING AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL LIBERALISM IN POST-WAR

CULTURE

Robert McKay, University of Sheffield

I wish gratefully to acknowledge the support of the Animals and Society Institute Fellowship when working on material included in this paper and the comments on earlier versions from fellowship participants in 2010, including Tom Tyler and Susan McHugh, and from Brett Mizelle.

THE ONE WHO WAS CAUGHT

‘Steer Flees City; Swims To Jersey’, New York Times, 11 June 1954

THE ONES WHO WERE SHOT

Fred Myers, one of the co-founders of The Humane Society of the United States.

Mr. Agee is tall, faintly rustic in appearance, with slightly walled eyes. He is gentle when not aroused, and always kind to animals. James Agee, ‘James Agee by Himself’ [1942], Esquire, 60.6 (1963), 149, 289-290 (p. 149).

THE ONE WHO CAME BACK

James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, first published in Harper’s Bazaar, July 1952, reprinted in Encounter, 55 (April 1958)

“‘All who are put on the range are put onto trains. All who are put onto trains meet the Man With The Hammer. All who stay home are kept there to breed others to go onto the range, and so betray themselves and their kind and their children forever. “'We are brought into this life only to be victims; and there is no other way for us unless we save ourselves.' “Do you understand?” Still they were puzzled, she saw; and no wonder, poor things. But now the ancient lines rang in her memory, terrible and brave. They made her somehow proud. She began actually to want to say them. “'Never be taken,'” she said. “'Never be driven. Let those who can, kill Man. Let those who cannot, avoid him.'”She looked around at them. “What else?” her son asked, and in his voice there was a rising valor. She looked straight into his eyes. “'Kill the yearlings,'” she said very gently. “'Kill the calves.'” She saw the valor leave his eyes.

James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 432–33 (Agee’s italics).

James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, first published in Harper’s Bazaar, July 1952, reprinted in Encounter, 55 (April 1958)

For as he walked along in this sudden and complete loneliness, he tells us, this wonderful knowledge of being one with his race meant less and less to him, and in its place came something still more wonderful: he knew what it was to be himself alone, a creature separate and different from any other, who had never been before, and would never be again. He could feel this in his whole weight as he walked, and in each foot as he put it down and gave his weight to it and moved above it, and in every muscle as he moved, and it was a pride which lifted him up and made him feel large, and a pleasure that pierced him through (p. 426-27).

James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 426–27.

Reading through the creaturely prism consigns culture to contexts that are not exclusively human, contexts beyond the anthropocentric perspective. It recognises in culture more than the clichéd expression of the “human condition” but an expression of something inhuman as well: the permutations of necessity and materiality that condition and shape human life. A work’s formal qualities as well as its conceptual and historical contexts are fundamentally stamped by this altered perspective.

Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 5-6.

The elementary beginning of true reason, that is, of reason which involves not merely the forebrain but the entire being, resides I should think, in the ability to recognise oneself, and others, primarily as human beings, and to recognise the ultimate absoluteness of responsibility of each human being. […] I am none too sure of my vocabulary, but would suppose this can be called the humanistic attitude. [Among those who preserve a living devotion to it] few seem to have come by it naturally, as a physical and sensuous fact, as well as a philosophical one; and few still give any evidence of enjoying or applying it with any of the enormous primordial energy which, one would suppose, the living fact would inevitably liberate in a living being.

James Agee, Review of Shoeshine, Dir. Vittorio De Sica, in Agee on Film, vol. 1 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969), p. 278.

Shoeshine. Dir. Vittorio De Sica. 1946. Lopert Pictures

A little bridge ran crosswise above the fences. [The Man with the Hammer] stood on this bridge with His feet as wide apart as He could set them. He wore spattered trousers but from the belt up He was naked and wet as rain. Both arms were raised high above His head and in both hands He held an enormous Hammer. With a grunt which was hardly like the voice of a human being, and with all His strength, he brought this Hammer down into the forehead.

James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 427.

• He was upside down and very slowly swinging and turning, for he was hanging by the tendons of his heels from great frightful hooks, and he has told us that the feeling was as if his hide were being torn from him inch by inch, in one piece. And then as he became more clearly aware he found that this was exactly what was happening. Knives would sliver and slice along both flanks, between the hide and the living flesh; then there was a moment of the most precious relief; then red hands seized his hide and there was a jerking of the hide and a tearing of the tissue which was almost as terrible to hear as to feel, turning his whole body and the poor head at the bottom of it; and then the knives again (p. 428).

I have asserted that a great cruelty exists. It is hard to find words that can evoke reality behind that simple statement. Here in the senate we have got used to big numbers and when I say that more than 100 million animals are subjected to unnecessary cruelty every year, I am afraid that I may sound merely statistical. But we are morally compelled, here in this hour, to try to imagine — to try to feel in our own nerves — the totality of the suffering of 100 million tortured animals. The issue before us today is pain, agony and cruelty — and what a moral man must do about it in view of his own conscience.

Congressional Record, July 29th 1958, Volume 104, pt. 12 (Washinton, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1958), p.15381.

Hubert H. Humphrey in 1958

in the Nazi camps, we find those who had been citizens, members of the community, now stripped of every legal protection and right by means of the declaration of a ‘state of exception,’ whereas in the factory farm, we find those who never were members of the community nevertheless afforded at least some minimal protection (as in humane slaughter laws, for example), even if those laws are in fact minimally enforced.

‘Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 6 (2010), 8 –23 (p. 20).

the division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organise the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, pp. 15–16.

beyond the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘the Animal’ or ‘Animal Life,’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say ‘the living’ is already to say too much or not enough) a multiplicity of organizations of relations between the living and the dead, relations of organization or lack of organization that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of figures of the organic and the inorganic, of life and/or death.

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. by David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28.2 (2002), 369–418 (p. 399).

I think human beings might do exceedingly well to learn from animals and hope to come half-way up to them, rather than exert themselves in distinguishing themselves from them.

James Agee, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New York: George Braziller, 1962), p. 121.

Map of escaped steer’s route through New York. Total distance 6.1 miles.

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