TAMING THE ‘KINGDOM’: What shall we do with our vainglorious aspirations?
Free-living animals are not competitors to subdue and tame in order to accommodate our desires. Animal advocacy is complicit in the domestic ideal. We’ve tried to enhance the standards of pet-keeping, hoping to rehabilitate our bad domestication habit. We’ve tried substituting the word guardian for owner, or companion animal for those whose lives we in fact control. We’ve been marketing vegan cat food. Respect for other animal communities is about freedom from, not integration into, human society.
LEE HALL: The first human beings on Earth were bad ancestors. Our longing for redemption from the biblical Fall percolates through many generations of writings and arts. There’s Edward Hicks’s famous Peaceable Kingdom, with its echoes of Isaiah 11:6. The painting is contested artistic territory, because of the people in the background. “Hicks idealized the encounter between British colonists and Indigenous people,” says the Brooklyn Museum, “creating fictions of harmony.”
The Isaiah story itself is riddled with idealized fictions of harmony. Lions and wolves lie down beside goats and lambs, evidently starving to live up to the “peaceable” ideal. Or perhaps God would abolish their carnivorous natures?
Either way, it’s doom and gloom for natural predators, who now take their marching orders from a little child. What could lie ahead? Cattle-breeding, sheep herding, wolf-trapping, bull-riding, horse-breaking, lion-taming, snake-charming… Homo sapiens devise unlimited torments for our cohabitants on this planet…
‘Oh, believe me, my cat runs the house’. I can’t believe you… respect for other animal communities is not about letting them run the house. It’s about freedom from—not integration into—human society… Animal advocacy is complicit in the domestic ideal. We’ve tried to enhance the standards of pet-keeping, hoping to rehabilitate our bad domestication habit. We’ve tried substituting the word guardian for owner, or companion animal for those whose lives we in fact control. We’ve been marketing vegan cat food…
Pets are a relatively new twist on an old tale, as humans have long colonized other habitats and evolution itself. Some 50,000 years ago, our human primate ancestors moved outside their equatorial lands, armed with blades and harpoons. Eventually they developed the weapons of mass domestication, overpowering indigenous ecologies with their hoes and their grazing animals… Free-living animals become competitors to subdue and erase. In their place, we produce tame animals that accommodate our desires. Is this peace?…
In a continual feedback loop, the imposition of domesticated life on the planet creates conditions that threaten the coping skills of the free. That’s where we are. Earth in the Anthropocene is a place where free animals have been stripped of their birthright to evolve in their age-old habitats. Nor can domestication replace that evolution. It only perverts it. We’re civilizing animals to death as well as driving them extinct.
Well, you might object, that genie has left the bottle. Yes, well, you and I are that genie… if, somehow, we shift the human mindset, and if, somehow, we survive this time of melting ice caps, storms, droughts, and surging heat… If there’s a chance, surely it depends on the human capacity to become respectful members of Earth’s great biological community. SOURCE…
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