Accountable killing How do we reclaim an ethico-animal accountability in an era of pacifist-sanctioned corporatism?
“It’s because of you we killed three roosters last night; so much fun; so delicious. You taught Tania and she showed us. It was so much fun.” This is how a local man recently introduced himself to me as I entered a café in my hometown. His hetero-camp exuberance, his mediated vernacular, “so much fun”, could have easily been ignored, but instead it stayed in the room, as did his “it’s because of you we killed…” comment. His language choice seemed incongruous in the transition town in which we’ve both made our homes and yet so much part of a broader cultural view, where animals are solely for our pleasure and amusement, and resource accountability is someone else’s business. This opening scene, no doubt for some, is sounding very Portlandia – the TV series that parodies urban and back-to-the-land X and Y-gen hipsters wearing Derrick Jensen op shop woollens going about their day, making their choices. For those amused by such parody let’s localise the satirical trope Portlandia, bring it back to a local context and rename it Daylesfordia, where all of us in the café are performing versions of ourselves mediated by a colossal dependence on cheap crude oil, yet sense the end of it. It was only later I found out the fun-killing-rooster guy works as an entertainer on a cruise ship and on hearing this I instantly sensed a kind of Pee-wee Herman about him and somehow his camp intransigence, the thoughtless “fun” of his killing seemed more acceptable, the killing after all was for food. I would guess that many if not all in this room would say that killing an animal for fun, for sport is unacceptable and most would express some form of outrage towards duckshooting season for this reason. However moral outrage tends to shift to broader
acceptance if the hunter says I only kill to feed my kin and myself. Killing for food is as old as our species and much older in other creatures. By contrast killing purely for sport is fairly recent and it jolts our animal ethics. Killing for sport comes from the very ideology that attacks our creaturely selves, civility. Civility needs to entertain its landestranged subjects because we are no longer ecological playmakers but incarcerated workers and addict-consumers or those civility has rejected and can neither work or consume in any significant way. Killing as sport is a perversion of our former selves as ecological playmakers. Even though the majority of people in the rich countries can eat out of the oil drum by opening the fridge door some still want to express their predatory selves by blasting some ducks out of the water with industrially manufactured weapons. But a true predator takes life to enable life; sport is an aberration to this, it blurs the animal-ethical clarity of ecological predation. Killing for sport represents a deeply pathological mindset, one that has lost a proper relationship to death and dying. Similarly, killing an animal for food industrially, via slaughterhouse conveyor belts or eating fruits, grains and pulses farmed on such a scale that require the systemic destruction of soil faunas and autonomous birds and their habitats, signals a systemic unwellness that has been wholly normalised under the brutal industrial banner of supermarket idolatry. Leo Tolstoy pre-industrially pronounced that “A s l o n g a s t h e r e a r e s l a u g h t e r h o u s e s . . . t h e r e w i l l b e b a tt l e f i e l d s . ” And I would extend, as long as there is unaccountable resource consumption there will be permanent technoscientific war. In other words, as long as there are vegans, vegetarians and omnivores driving and flying around the planet, consuming far away foods and technologies and thus causing all the associated suffering these activities ordinarily inflict, we will be a species that harms unaccountably. The correlation that slaughterhouse killing has to torture is well expressed and understood, and for the great majority of us industrial slaughterhouses are unacceptable, at least in theory. However, it seems likely that most of us don’t make the assumption that our café, restaurant, supermarket, tuckshop, or romantic dinner meat has anything to do with such torturous violence, let alone make the assumption that our grains, pulses,
nuts and fruits, including the wine sitting on our romantic dinner tables, have anything to do with the wholesale gassing, poisoning, shooting and incinerating of wild birds. Interior designers do not usually style cafés and restaurants to demonstrate the brutality behind the food they serve. The places in which we get our food are emptied of the pain and suffering of others so as we can take pleasure. The practice of locavorism attempts to reappear our resources so as we can be once more witnesses to the production of our basic needs. If more of us witnessed the production of our resources, could monitor what is actually going on with our food supply, systemic violence against animals would decrease proportionately. This is not just a project for those who eat meat, but those who eat anything that has come by a truck, is packaged or refrigerated. But this is not easy in an urbanising world. Cities demand we remain oblivious to the will of others because cities favour mainly one species. The city is the most anthropocentric of human tropes and the more full of people they become, the more difficult it is to have a close association with the land, its diverse interrelationships and its fruits. Likewise if monotheism, another essential anthropocentric trope for the mission of civility, was more animist we wouldn’t see such widespread violence against other animals. But one-god ideology is hardly in the business of animal inclusivity. The politics of transition towns, which quite simply involves the slow, step-by-step and conscious move from what poet Gary Snyder once called the ‘oil pipeline philosophy’, is not a politics of doom and unhappiness. Fun, in the accountable sense of the word, and play, are very much activities of this movement. For me transition concerns becoming diverse societies of ecological playmakers again, and corporatism is composted, along with boring work. Like its parent permaculture, transition concerns positive activism. Killing your own rooster fed from your diverse garden ecology and roasted with the fruits of that garden, or nearby community garden (that you are actively involved in and walk or ride to), is the means to making a meal that has relied on few if any fossil energies, plastic packaging, pesticides or refrigeration. This, of course, is a significant anticorporate, pro-biota politics. A politics of direct, everyday action and one that speaks, walks, digs and chops the fuel for one’s meaning, for making life non-industrially. This poethical politic of everyday accountability and reruralisation doesn’t necessarily engage
with two-party politics but rather works up from the household economy first, the community economy second before such domestic and achievable transitions can begin to reshape the state, national and global economies as tertiary political domains. If 20% of Australia’s human population rapidly became locavores, it would smash corporate profit requirements and send most, if not all, bankrupt. It would help stop the spread of GMOs and other noxious so-called solutions to world hunger that are false solutions and just corporate profiteering. But let’s not confuse locavorism with ecoconsumerism. Eco-consumerism is just another market requiring the growth of the monetary-military economy. Accountable resource consumption requires dropping out, giving up on middle-class privileges, fast-tracking ecological knowledges and, dare I say it, moving to the country. To do this in collectives would be a social advantage; bring your love miles with you. A 20% exodus of people from cities would prick the bubble of immoral real estate prices and rents, free up land to grow food ecologies and generally make them more liveable places for humans and non-humans alike. This could in fact help speed up the already on its way descent economy that we desperately need to overt total planetary ruination and run away climate choas. Currently the global economy – that giant radiating fridge in the sky that we affluent folk can access wherever we are and dip into its violent resources and services whenever we wish to – is the dominant economy and it’s still politically and ideologically supported by many who either fail to imagine or want alternatives. Such is the legacy of our industrially funded modern school system that insists we all become incarcerated workers and addict-consumers, rather than ecological playmakers. But this politics of state, corporation, symbol, money, image, entertainment and city-centrality is systemically part of the problem of ecological crisis, which is inherently the problem of the global pool of oil that has enabled such rampant and unaccountable economic growth. It is civil symbolism and privatisation – precursors of the corporate form – that have spawned the raft of anthropogenic tremors and traumas, industrial spills and holocausts, reshaping our climate while our once ecological minds dissolve into callous and cruel
consumers numb and oblivious to our heavy footprints and our systemic and unaccountable damages. We forget we were each aboriginal beings not all that long ago, that is we once belonged to place, and we all had a proper relationship to living and dying, conceiving and killing, fun and play, knowledge and technology. The global-poolof-money world now ensnares many privileged and not so privileged folk into transported resource modes, and because city dwelling is now at such a high degree it is often impossible to imagine growing our own food let alone killing it or belonging to land that we love and would defend as tenaciously as though it were our own kin. The digiindustrial urbanisation of human populations is only ever spoken about as a foregone conclusion, as an inevitable progress, but this ideology involves oil, barrels and barrels of cheap crude oil, and other damaging fossil energies and extracted minerals, tearing the world apart so some can have smart phones and cars, mass entertainment, overseas trips and a smorgasbord of food and shopping options – vegan, vegetarian and omnivore shopping options. Aggregating cities and now the megacities are also forms of nineteenth and twentieth century pollution ideology. The more people are removed from the diverse biotas that fuel’s civility’s wealth, the more civility can exploit them without protest and struggle. We can’t properly defend what we don’t see and sense and live close to. Pollution ideology precedes industrialisation; it goes back to the first municipal dump in ancient Greece marking the beginning of the Anthropocene. We have only been able to domesticate just a handful of animals over the past twelve thousand years, including old-as-the-dinosaur roosters, as part of our own domesticated history. But the great majority of animals have refused to be domesticated in one way or other. As John Zerzan reminds us, the enslavement of these few animals has been the enslavement of ourselves into the bargain – domestication is the precursor to class warfare that begins with a fence and carries into systemic privatisation, prisons, torture, genocide and permanent oppression. There is little difference in the architecture of assembly lines in sweatshops and the assembly lines in battery egg farms; only the conditions for human animals are marginally better.
Cities have always been and today remain progenies of agriculture. Without industrial agriculture industrial cities could not exist. Industrial civilisation – that is culture dependent on cutting open far away soils and rock – has lost sight of the land that nourishes it and provides its wealth. Growing and killing is now wholly outsourced to farmers, factory workers, miners and soldiers working in far away lands, and somehow pacifists, especially on the left of politics, believe an ethical victory has been won because many of us can now live without witnessing the violence that belongs unconditionally to such digi-industrial activity. But it is nonsense we live in a digital age. We still live in an agricultural age shrouded in industrial energy inputs. Without these fossil energies, which in turn are dependent on permanent war and damage, we could not have wind farms and solar panels, so patting ourselves on our backs for ‘going green’ is just more civil delusion. While running ourselves and our fellow species to the cliff’s edge we can celebrate our alternative technologies and give ourselves awards for our technical brilliance. But by dismissing ecological knowledges and by embracing more and more technology we have turned ourselves away from witnesses and stewards of land to groundless slaves or slavemasters, or both at once in the case of the middle classes. An app might tell us what bird belongs to a particular birdcall, but it will never enable us to perform ecologically; an app relies technological hardware that in turn relies on mined resources, destroying environments and habitats and driving bloody wars. To return to the subject of domestication: If domestication is akin to slavery why then do I keep, fence in and regularly kill chickens and roosters and teach others to do the same? This seems contradictory. And similarly what will I do when my 10-year old mobile phone finally falls victim of planned obsolescence and I refuse to replace it? My answers lie with transition. The first step towards an accountable food supply, and accountable tools and resources more generally, involves non-monetised economies; it involves moving towards an economy of home place, not state. This goes for my future modes of communication. Money makes exchange veiled and indirect. In almost all climate regions of the world a vegan diet would not be sustaining without cheap fossil fuels and thus
systemic violence attached to it, so if we know we need in our diets a little animal protein (be it eggs, insects or meat) in order to relocalise all our basic resources, then how we go about obtaining this nutritional energy becomes the next considerable question. It takes time to transition to an accountable food supply and contradictions and ethical dilemmas will avail themselves early on in our transitions. Keeping roosters, free-ranging them in a garden forest and allowing them to perform their social and ecological functions with a brood of hens is a basic first step to providing an accountable protein. We keep chickens for their invaluable eggs and nitrogenous shit for the garden and occasional meat. In return they get a safe environment, healthy food to forage for and reproduce according to their own will or desire. While this is all still a form of slavery we have deemed it better to witness the lives and occasionally cause the deaths of our main protein source than fully participating in the monetised-militarised economy. On such a small non-monetised scale, love can still exist; nurture and accountability can flourish. Ethically I am opposed to fences; pragmatically I fence in our chooks and rooster so as they are protected from foxes and roaming dog packs that occasionally come together in our neighbourhood. Ethically I am opposed to factory farmed and processed meats; very occasionally I eat some either out of politeness (civility) or in a moment of lapsed consciousness. But ultimately I know that hunting an animal with non-industrial weapons, in one-on-one predation, to be one of the most ecologically intelligent modes of protein gathering alongside forest food gardening and foraging. Stalking an animal allows me to be an animal, makes me more acutely aware of my creaturely self and more aware of the habits and character of my creaturely other, my prey. Hunting equally makes me aware of my status as prey, as meat and blood for others, even if I’m only fed upon and not necessarily killed. Most humans, if they are lucky, start life with the richest of animal proteins – colostrum then raw human milk. When we become a civil child and then adult consumers, leaving our creaturely selves behind, we begin to eat food that has no ecological significance to us. Bananas and coffee in Melbourne is a form of civil insanity, but Melbourne is known as a coffee capital, whatever that means. Meat consumption for many in Australia is more
than a once daily enterprise and yet the only animals many of us see and sense are cats and dogs. The amount of meat consumed has necessitated technologies that speed up animal growth to keep up with demand. This abuse of animals based on growing profit has significantly contributed to the great debts of animal suffering, human ill-health and broader environmental catastrophe – pollution, toxicity, cruelty and waste that vegetarians and vegans so often legitimately raise. Capitalism must grow demand, even fabricate the illusion of demand, in order to grow supply otherwise it will fail as a system. As the poet Stephen Collis asks, how did we go from meeting our needs to excess and waste? And after one short line break he answers: “History of plastic. History of capitalism.” And I would spell out: these are the histories that belong to unaccountable violence. According to anthropologist Richard Wrangham we (or our primate relatives) began eating meat around 2.3 million years ago, which radically grew our brains. As scrawny primates the added protein and fat didn’t go into muscular development so as we could run like a lion or a leopard, it went into developing brain tissue. And then about half a million years ago we started cooking which made a range of foods including meat and roots immanently more digestible and more efficient to process, freeing up surplus energy to further grow our brains. Wrangham writes in his book, Catching Fire (2009) that “[i]n primates the tendency to use energy saved by smaller guts for added brain tissue is particularly strong, presumably because most primates live in groups, where extra social intelligence has big payoffs.” [2009:113] By mastering fire as our first great technology we outsourced our energy and by doing so slowly changed our physiology. Our jaws, teeth and guts shrunk as cooking did much of the work for us. Sure we lost a little nutrition from our new cooked diet, but the energetic gains were enormous. That we are technical animals says Bernard Stiegler (2004) is why we are a species who questions. The transmission of historical data is enabled through aggregating memory supports found in technical prostheses – arrow heads, baskets, axes and now smart phones, bananas trucked to Melbourne, almonds from California and drone missiles – and with technical transmission comes questioning, and with questions, so it goes, we have
ethics and politics, poetry and philosophy. But I would also argue, alongside indigenous sensibilities and influenced by writers like Deborah Bird Rose, that ethics are not only ascribed to technocratised animals. Animal ethics clearly exist across species. Rose (2011) issues to us the point that the way a dog comes forward to us wagging his tail is a universal ethic of welcome and greeting. The collective pain of a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, expressed as intensely shrill crying en masse, having witnessed the death of one of their kin, is another example of such universal ethics – outrage, grief, care. I witnessed this ethic a few years ago as the hunter that caused the outrage and grief. But I defend my actions; I was operating as an ecological playmaker. My family thanked and ate the bird; we have not had one cockatoo ravage our food garden since this event. They are extremely intelligent animals. As it grows in density and diversity many smaller autonomous birds make their homes in the garden, they are welcome as they aren’t so destructive and they mutualistically kill pest species. Many ecological playmakers autonomously use this food garden ecology as habitat and as a foraging commons. We are beginning to understand our home place as a shared domain with unpredictable interrelationships. When my eleven-year-old son reads Tintin comics he giggles joyously. Tintin in the Congo is his current read. Drawn by his pleasure I venture over and he asks me to read with him. He’s on page 12; Tintin has just landed in Africa. On page 13 after narrowly escaping being chomped Tintin inserts a rifle into the guilty crocodile’s jaw and walks off leaving her to suffer the indignity. On page 16 Tintin kills fifteen antelope and jests to his trusty companion Snowy, “Well, at least we’ll have enough meat.” On page 17 Tintin kills a monkey for its skin in order to make a disguise for himself. We don’t see or sense the monkey’s wasted remains; only the joke of Tintin in a monkey suit is represented on the page. On page 18 Tintin tricks and beats with the end of his rifle another monkey who thinks Tintin is one of his kin, further insulting his animal intelligence not to sense his own kind. By page 19 he has come in contact with local tribes people who are all depicted to look like stupid monkeys. By page 22 co-hero Snowy has bitten the tail off a lion and by page 24 Tintin is leading the noosed creature to the village saying, “Perhaps we could tame him…” On page 31 Tintin blows a snake’s head off with his rifle. On page
32 the villain of the book – it’s asserted there’s only one bad white guy – beats Snowy over the head, ties up Tintin and hangs him from a tree over another crocodile infested river. On page 33 a Christian missionary paddles by with a number of monkey-like converts in his canoe, shooting all the crocodiles in sight that are subsequently left to die. A bloody massacre comically floats upon the river and our hero Tintin is saved once more. On page 34 another large serpent comes into the picture and eats Snowy whole. Tintin maims the snake to free Snowy then leaves it to choke after he stuffs its tail down its throat. As they wander off Tintin cheerily says to Snowy, “Come on, let’s find the good father from the mission…” On page 37, in the mission schoolroom, where the primitive ‘monkeys’ are being taught to be civil humans, Tintin rescues the frightened tribes children from a free-roaming leopard. He tricks the once again stupid beast into eating a chalkboard sponge, gives him a drink to wash it down so the sponge quickly swells up in the leopard’s belly, causing severe abdominal pain. Tintin kicks the suffering leopard out the door. Over the page, a very angry Jimmy MacDuff, “supplier to the greatest zoos in Europe!” marches into the classroom. He chastises Tintin with an idiotic morality fit only for a true capitalist, “You’ve been ill-treating my poor tame leopard!” By the bottom of the same page Tintin is already in another animal harming scene and running for his life after an elephant he has shot comes after him. He escapes by running up a tree, gets out his magnifying glass and burns the angry elephant’s head with the help of the Congo’s penetrating sun. The elephant retreats for a few pages. On page 41 another monkey finds Tintin and Snowy sleeping in the heat of the day, he grabs Tintin’s gun to play with it and accidentally fires it killing the elephant. On page 42, after the monkey had run off frightened by the gunshot, Tintin marches proudly back to the mission with two enormous tusks. The comic continues on in this way for another twenty pages, my son’s giggles had previously brought me so much joy, as I was caught up in my simplistic civil prejudices believing that literacy somehow makes us intelligent. Somehow I missed out on reading Tintin when I was younger and never knew the utter normalised abuse of colonial violence represented in Georges Prosper Remi (AKA Hergé)’s children’s books, which are still so popular in our local library today. Tintin in the Congo first appeared in print in
a Brussels newspaper in 1930 where it was serialised over the course of the year in the children’s supplement. In Adam Curtis’ third groundbreaking programme The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, from his epic three-part TV series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, he illustrates the relationship between Belgium’s violent colonialism in the Congo from 1885-1960 and the continuation of colonial mass death there today. He details how Europeans strategically instigated such bloody hatred between previously tense but never genocidal ethnicities, the Hutus and Tutsis like a Tintin-led expedition of death only not pictorially jokey, but real and bloodfilled tragedy. Curtis argues that European superiority – under the banner of another civilising mission – extended that war into the nearby Congo where today the raw materials for our computers and mobile phones are sourced, mined, raped and murdered for; an industry that continues to perpetuate permanent war. These minerals are called Blood Minerals, coltan being the most desired by western corporations and their digital consumers. Tintin and our mobile phones – vegan, vegetarian or omnivore smart phones – belong to the same linage of loveless destruction that begins with civility’s fenced farms and so far ends with drone missiles, gas fracked and acid job biotas. War is an obvious component of civility – agriculture begat cities, cities begat technoscientific warfare – but where does pacifism fit into all this? What do I mean when I use the phrase ‘pacifist-sanctioned corporatism’? Pacifism is a middle class ethic that calls for universal non-harm while enabling corporate harm to proliferate and our acceptance of it to aggregate. Pacifism is thus a false ethic, a loveless ethic that relies on the monetised state and its militarised controls. The most sustainable human societies are bioregional gift economies embedded in the intelligence of the land, where the land and its many inhabitants are our teachers and technology plays a minor role. Resource skirmishes between species and tribes are part of life, but these violences are nothing in contrast to permanent techno-scientific warfare that the industrial civil-state must enact to grow itself. Reverting to bioregional violence and leaving behind permanent planetary warfare may seem like an impossible idealism, an unclimbable romance, but it’s not. It’s an achievable reality and a necessary one if we are to cease being hopeful technocults or apocalyptic fatalists and just go along with the status quo. It is only a matter of time
before we have to get serious about violence again, we can mask it no longer. The monetised state supports unaccountable violence against animals and biospheres for profit. The forms of this violence are many and varied and are what enables our current modes of living. Pacifism contributes significantly to maintaining the status quo, maintaining our standard of living within a digi-industrial agri-technoculture because it protects corporate abuse by agreeing with the state that under no circumstances should people fight back; that people should never use weapons violently to protect their environments from corporate abuse or use weapons to feed themselves. Pacifism sanctions the monetised state’s endemic violence, while helping to disarm local and indigenous peoples of place and autonomous activism. Each year the civil state’s of the anthropocentric world destroy more and more life so as we can be hyper-mediated hipsters prancing civility’s high streets thumbpumping our smart phones, employing our eco apps and brands, believing the solutions to the world’s problems lies with better and better technology. This is the great delusion of our time. Unless we can reencounter an earthly presence, become accountable killers and regenerators of local, fenceless lands again, we will remain at war with the worlds of the world. This project of accountable violence involves thinking seven generations forwards again. If our species has this much time on earth, which is likely though in much fewer numbers, then how do we transition to economic accountability again? How do we stop our veiled and systemic violence and accept oneon-one predation as contiguous with a creaturely epistemology, once again schooled by the land and by the play we make on the land? I believe that in order to kill off civil corporatism we have to become accountable creatures of place again. We have to grow, fend and kill as ecological playmakers. While some will enact their transition in the cities while there is still some affluence, this really calls for a permacultural reruralisation in an era of fossil energy decline and depopulation. Such things are inevitable as resources, especially mined resources dwindle this century, but are we going to remain fixed to our disposable ideologies and civil mindsets until the last drop of crude oil is syringed into our veins? Will we go along with pacifism-sanctioned corporatism until this ideology
looses all its oily privileges and we are forced to become animals of place again? Or will we begin our transitions, backgrounding technology, foregrounding ecological knowledges and work towards reopening the commons, stewarding it by a post-spectacle, free-to-learn sensibility? In an attempt to make clear my argument I conclude with a few more similar questions. Are there times when direct violence is not only ethical in the fullest animal sense of that word, but also absolutely necessary in stopping the systemic abuse of the worlds of the world and all the diverse creaturely communities that dwell in them? Shall we go along with corporatism until it has no more oil to feed itself and the planet lies desolate and empty, or will we reclaim the sensible – our gardening, hunting and foraging senses – and build non-monetary communities around resource accountability again?
Patrick Jones, Daylesford.
This lecture was first presented at Melbourne Free University on the 30 May 2013 as part of a free series of lectures on Animals. Please note this paper is in draft form and does not include full references as yet.