The darker side of cat lives

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature

a strange convergence arose in 2007 as Animal Planet, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications, hired Marjorie Kaplan as president and general manager to rebrand network's image and boost its ratings. Following on heels of popularity of Discovery's Deadliest Catch, a fishing show where crews encounter rough seas and salty personalities, Animal Planet was charged with creating highoctane, human-interest stories that could raise viewership for station.1At same time, Paul Watson, founder of nongovernmental organization (NGO) Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was conceptualizing how his group's direct actions against illegal Japanese whaling in Southern Ocean might make good television. Watson, who has remained one of savviest activists in mobilizing video and film around animal rights campaigns since he first worked with Greenpeace in early 1970s, reflected, The biggest show on Discovery at time was about a bunch of men going into very rough waters in very remote areas and catching crabs. I said, 'Well, you know, we can go into even more remote waters, even rougher waters with worse weather conditions, and save whales' (Goh).As a result, in November 2008 Whale Wars premiered on Animal Planet. Within a year, it became network's most-watched show and helped raise viewership by over 15 percent (Crupi 6). Along similar lines, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society halved Japanese whaling during series' first four seasons and forced Japanese to temporarily stop whaling by February 2011 (Oliver). All in all, it appeared that good television and effective activism could coexist.In this article I investigate some of ways in which Sea Shepherd and Paul Watson employ a spectacle-driven activism in order to popularize their anti-whaling message and produce fodder for a reality television series. In particular, I locate two central themes and accompanying desires that connect certain anarchist-inflected brands of direct-action activism with commercial television: (1) reassertion of patriarchal authority and hierarchy in a seemingly feminized neoliberal age; and (2) attempt to establish a nonalienated life where work, leisure, and nature seamlessly interconnect. Whale Wars provides an interesting moment where a certain strain of direct action, activist media-making, and commercial television production converge. Unlike most research that contrasts radical media against commercial productions, an analysis of first five seasons of Whale Wars will explore how certain elements of each feed into one another and, more specifically, will demonstrate how reality television mobilizes a belief in a spectacle-based activism that simultaneously promotes and undermines such animal rights campaigns. Overall, Whale Wars demonstrates promises and pitfalls when such activism gains access to commercial mass distribution.2Image Events and Neoliberal Citizenry of Reality TelevisionAs Kevin DeLuca notes, groups such as Greenpeace, Animal Liberation Front, and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rely primarily on direct-action image events to sustain, popularize, and build upon their activism. In a society of spectacle where one is awash in a constant sea of imagery, animal rights campaigns have used dramatic direct-action stunts in order to garner media coverage that challenges the hegemonic discourse of industrialism and received meanings of ideographs progress, nature, humanity, reason, and technology (DeLuca 51-52). Activism and spectacle suddenly become coterminous. Media coverage serves not as a byproduct of such activism but as a key ingredient in organizing it, popularizing its message, and hopefully forcing those who abuse animals and/or earth to stop under global public pressure and scrutiny.This type of image-based activism has been on ascendency since 1970s. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed back in 1970, [t]he question is therefore not whether media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. …

Can zoos offer more than entertainment?

Energy production is, without doubt, a subject of enormous economic importance and interest in North America. Consequently, energy topics are widely reported in American and Canadian news media. This article provides a comparison and analysis of Canadian and American newspaper reporting about one North American energy megaproject: the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project. The central feature of this project, if it goes ahead, will be a 1,220 kilometer natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the sparsely populated Mackenzie River Delta of Canada's Northwest Territories to market. The Mackenzie Gas Project is currently under simultaneous regulatory review by Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) and a specially convened Joint Review Panel (JRP). The latter is charged with considering the environmental and social effects of the project for the communities along the proposed pipeline route. Because the affected communities are largely indigenous, so are five of seven members of the panel. The review process has taken longer than initially anticipated, but is expected to wrap up by the end of 2007 and result in governmental approval for the energy project. This will clear a major hurdle in the decades-long drive by energy companies to develop these natural gas reserves. The Mackenzie Gas Project story concerns a diverse set of issues, including environmental protection and regulation, economic and social health of northern indigenous communities, North American energy security, financial and commodity markets, corporate investments and profits, economic integration of the United States and Canada, international relations, and consumer issues, among others. Yet the reporting about the proposed pipeline has been framed narrowly as a struggle between the proponents and opponents of economic development. Significantly, reporters have been both puzzled by and at pains to explain to readers the positions of the several indigenous communities that appear at times to both support and oppose the development. There are two key points of this coverage. First, the indigenous communities are not recognized as part of the public and thus do not hold a interest in whether or not the pipeline is built. Rather, indigenous communities are presented as either obstructions or economic opportunists or both. Second, the economic interests of the multinational corporations that aim to build and profit from the pipeline development are rarely mentioned. I became interested in reporting about the Mackenzie Gas Project generally, and about indigenous peoples specifically, after reading feature stories in two U.S. papers: the Christian Science Monitor (Walker 2001) and the New York Times (Krauss 2003a). The focus of both stories was the supposed incongruity of aboriginal participation in the development project. In Krauss's New York Times account, northern aboriginal communities have been driven into an unholy alliance with pipeline developers as a result of animal rights campaigns by environmental activists. Using language intended to remind readers that northern indigenous peoples are hunters, Krauss describes the animal rights campaigns as snared the native populations in sanctions and labels their accusations against the environmentalists as having hit like harpoons to the soul. He completes the image of indigenous peoples as primordial hunters in a modern world with a visual metaphor, a photograph of a dog sled moving across the tundra; in the background looms an oil or gas derrick. The photo caption reads: A symbolic scene in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Their livelihoods in danger, Native Canadians are welcoming oil, gas and mining interests. Walker's Christian Science Monitor story, which is far more positive, concerns the ways that northerners are learning to work with the oil and gas industry. It, too, cannot avoid the allusion to hunting: an accompanying photograph shows an Inuk (singular of Inuit) standing beside a snowmobile. …

The article outlines some of the historical traces for the eco-crisis that presently threatens the first and most outstanding national park in Africa, homeland of the mountain gorilla. After a short description of the site, the article presents the Congo Reform Movement’s campaign against the bloody suppression in the Congo Free State around 1900, often referred to as the Red Rubber-regime. The Congo Reform Movements “Atrocity Meetings” are considered to be the first human rights campaign, because they established the rhetorical models that we find today in Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Global Witness. The article argues that we can detect similar and highly problematic structures in the animal rights campaigns which took on a global scale in the 1970s – initiated among others by Dian Fossey and her famous and infamous fight for the protection of mountain gorillas in the Virunga mountains. Both human rights campaigns and animal rights campaigns share a responsibility, I argue, for the eco-crisis at Virunga. Finally I present the documentary Virunga from 2014 as a model and as a rhetorical alternative.

Introduction to the special edition on overabundant macropods

The article outlines some of the historical traces for the eco-crisis that presently threatens the first and most outstanding national park in Africa, homeland of the mountain gorilla. Texts and films about Virunga reiterate the same rhetorical figures that are frequently discussed in connection with Conrad’s description of the Congo River, thus showing the long-term political effects of the “discours conradien”. After a short description of the site, the article presents the Congo Reform Movement’s campaign against the bloody repression in the Congo Free State around 1900, often referred to as the Red Rubber-regime. The article argues that we can detect similar and highly problematic rhetorical structures in the animal rights campaigns, which took on a global scale in the 1970s – initiated among others by Dian Fossey and her famous and infamous fight for the protection of mountain gorillas in the Virunga. Both human rights campaigns and animal rights campaigns share a responsibility, the author argues, for the eco-crisis at Virunga. Finally, he presents the documentary Virunga from 2014 as a model and as a rhetorical alternative.

Despite its central role in the study of social movements, research on political and cultural opportunity is problematic. The vague definition and broad applicability of the concept of opportunity make it difficult to identify all the opportunities that exist in a given protest situation. Furthermore, most analyses take place at the broad levels of culture and the state, which can obscure additional, localized factors that create opportunity for protest to occur and succeed. A practice-oriented approach to studying political and cultural opportunity addresses some of these problems. Using data from a study of the outcomes of four animal rights campaigns, I examine opportunity across the campaigns by focusing on the practices targeted for change and the reasons why people engage in them. Viewing opportunity in this way highlights both structural and cultural elements of opportunity structures in national as well as local contexts.

Pro-test action in Oxford

Animal rights campaigners and scientists working with animals completed anonymous questionnaires in which they were asked to report, not only on their own beliefs and ideas about the animal experimentation debate, but also on those they perceived the opposing group to hold. Both groups of participants tended to have a negative and somewhat extreme view of the other. But they did have an accurate grasp of the arguments and defenses commonly offered on both sides of the debate, and showed some agreement concerning the relative capacity of different animals to suffer. Differences appeared in the level of the phylogenetic hierarchy at which participants thought animals might be capable of suffering, and in their decision-making processes regarding the admissibility of animal experiments.

Among the determinants of social movement success, the characteristics and responses of nonstate organizations under attack by protestors have been overlooked. We examine three campaigns by animal rights groups against experimentation, in 1976–1977, 1987–1988, and 1988–1989. The first two campaigns stopped the research, while the third did not. One influential set of factors was the preexisting vulnerabilities—e.g., unpopular practices, internal factions—on the part of targeted organizations. Another was the strategic responses of these organizations, especially the avoidance of “blunders.” A growing countermovement, thirdly, affected the organizations' ability to respond effectively and avoid blunders. As a social movement expands and strengthens, it encourages counterorganizing and a hardening of resistance, so that many social movements may actually be less successful as they become larger and more visible.

In 2015, the World Health Organization published a report on the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat (IARC, 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology 16(16). 1599–1600), attracting intense interest from both the general public and the scientific community. This study combines corpus approaches, Systemic Functional Linguistics and discourse analysis to investigate and compare scientific and animal rights movement reactions to the IARC 2015 report. Scientific reactions are exemplified by three research papers published immediately after the report; responses from animal rights campaigners are investigated through an analysis of texts taken from the website of the nongovernmental organization PETA. The aim is to explore how discourse not only describes, but also constructs meat carcinogenicity, in texts produced by two discourse communities (scientists and animal campaigners) which, for entirely different reasons, have an important stake in this issue. Qualitative (close reading) and quantitative (corpus-based) methods are combined, focusing on vocabulary, grammatical metaphor, and Appraisal (Martin, Jim and Peter White, 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). The results show a high level of hybridity, discursive erasure (Stibbe, Arran, 2012. Animals erased: discourse, ecology, and reconnection with the natural world. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), and some substantial differences in the discourse reactions to the IARC report by the two sources, reflecting the ideologies and ethical assumptions they espouse in their approach to the announcement that red and processed meat can cause cancer.

Protest in Progress/Progress in Protest

Each year in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, a ceremony is held by the Zulu people in honour of the “first fruits”. A certain part of what is known as the Ukweshwama ceremony involves the ritual killing of a bull by young Zulu warriors with their bare hands. The ritual is opposed by certain animal rights campaigners, who believe it is cruel to the animal which is sacrificed. A highly polarized debate has arisen between those opposed to any form of cruelty to animals on the one hand, and those seeking to defend ancient cultural practices on the other. The purpose of this article is to explore whether or not ancient rituals such as the ritual bull-killing at theUkweshwama ceremony have a place in the modern world, and to interrogate the implications of the dispute which has arisen for the development of South Africa’s constitutional democracy. The article is in two parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of the importance of cattle within traditional Zulu culture and traces the public controversy surrounding the bull-killing ritual in KwaZulu-Natal. It also examines the legal arguments put before court on the issue, and discusses the origins in antiquity of certain of the main myths and rituals concerning bulls and bullkilling. Part Two compares and contrasts the respective controversies surroundingthe Ukweshwama bull-killing ritual on the one hand, and Spanish bullfighting on the other. It also examines the wide range of positions adopted by philosophers and legal scholars vis-a-vis difficult questions of animal rights and cruelty to animals. The twosides of the argument are weighed up and tentative conclusions reached.

Each year in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, a ceremony is held by the Zulu people in honour of the “first fruits”. A certain part of what is known as the Ukweshwama ceremony involves the ritual killing of a bull by young Zulu warriors with their bare hands. The ritual is opposed by certain animal rights campaigners, who believe it is cruel to the animal which is sacrificed. A highly polarized debate has arisen between those opposed to any form of cruelty to animals on the one hand, and those seeking to defend ancient cultural practices on the other. The purpose of this article is to explore whether or not ancient rituals such as the ritual bull-killing at theUkweshwama ceremony have a place in the modern world, and to interrogate the implications of the dispute which has arisen for the development of South Africa’s constitutional democracy. The article is in two parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of the importance of cattle within traditional Zulu culture and traces the public controversy surrounding the bull-killing ritual in KwaZulu-Natal. It also examines the legal arguments put before court on the issue, and discusses the origins in antiquity of certain of the main myths and rituals concerning bulls and bullkilling. Part Two compares and contrasts the respective controversies surroundingthe Ukweshwama bull-killing ritual on the one hand, and Spanish bullfighting on the other. It also examines the wide range of positions adopted by philosophers and legal scholars vis-a-vis difficult questions of animal rights and cruelty to animals. The two sides of the argument are weighed up and tentative conclusions are reached.