‘Animal Gulags’: Slow violence against animals in racing and zoos
Zoos, horse racing, and greyhound racing events are sites where animals are not typically seen as being subjected to violence. Their violences are largely silent or ‘smoothed’, an effect of practices based on relations with animals understood as not intentionally harmful or routinely framed as exceptional within otherwise legitimate relations of use. Actually, these sites are potentially more insidious than factory farms or research facilities for their persistent normalizations, if not enthusiastic support.
PAULA ARCARI: There is currently little consensus on what constitutes violence towards animals, though most Animal studies scholars and advocates would agree that one of its most consistent features is the mechanisms of concealment used to downplay or negate the various ways violence marks animal/human relations. The focus of the article is on sites where animals are consumed as visual spectacles, at zoos, and in greyhound and horse racing, and show how this consumption is premised on a perceptual lacuna between understandings of violence and violent effects…
Together with similarly organised spaces that facilitate other ways of consuming animals—literally (as food, clothing, medicines), scientifically (as research/test subjects), and emotionally (for sport or companionship)—zoos and racing events are conceived as accelerators or “mills of brutality” that intensify violent effects on nonhuman animals, generate collective legitimation for violations of their subjectivities, and disperse this legitimacy more widely to shape, sustain, and reinvigorate the anthropocentric hegemony of animal exploitation.
Drawing on the medical notion of hypertrophia as an “excessive growth or accumulation,”1 these sites are conceived as ‘hypertopia.’ Literally places of excess, hypertopia are where the majority, if not all, practices are organized around and towards the exploitation of animals, locally magnifying and solidifying the hegemonic order so that it takes on an exaggerated form. They provide the converse to Foucault’s heterotopia, defined as counter-sites that at once represent, contest, and invert the societies of which they are part.
Exemplaries of these ‘mills of brutality,’ also characterized as ‘geographies of hell’, ‘animal gulags’, animal deathscapes, and ‘ungodly’ constellations of violence, are primarily slaughterhouses, factory farms, and vivisection laboratories. These are sites where animals are subject to especially violent practices and so justifiably draw considerable attention from media, advocacy groups, and scholars. However, a focus on physical violence can reinforce the perception that this is the only kind of violence occurring in animal-based industries that is unnecessary/unacceptable, and that such violence can be mitigated, leaving the context of animal use unchallenged. Acts of violence within these places are thus routinely framed as exceptional within otherwise legitimate relations of use.
This focus also gives rise to a sense that, from the animals’ perspective, physical violence is the only or most concerning kind of violence. Generating an understanding of the lives of commodified animals as characterized by slow, protracted violence as much as exceptional moments of ‘fast’ violence could offer a more radical challenge to their wider contexts of use. Where fast violence is spectacular and active, slow violence, “occurs gradually and out of sight,2 a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”.
Zoos, horse racing, and greyhound racing events are sites where animals are not typically seen as being subjected to violence. Their violences are largely silent or ‘smoothed’, an effect of practices based on relations with animals understood as positive, benign, or, at minimum, not intentionally harmful. These sites are therefore potentially more insidious than factory farms or research facilities for their persistent normalizations and ambivalent associations, if not enthusiastic support. Equally as brutal, they are the quiet(er) handmaidens of anthroparchic orders, operating behind a “veneer of peacability”…
The essential effect of violence towards animals is the violation of their subjectivities, enabled by their designation as ‘animal’, property, and resource. Based on interviews and observational research, I used indicators of this violation—the aggregation, negation, instrumentalisation, narrativisation, and re-capturing of animal’s subjectivities—at zoos and racing events to examine how, within hypertopic arrangements, slow and also fast violence can be visible but remain unseen, or are seen through ‘encoded eyes’.
Notably, acknowledgements of certain discomfiting effects of both slow and fast violence, however memorable, tend to be mitigated by the constructed legitimacy and authority of the associated industries, and thence their practices, which leverage, benefit from, and further legitimate broader, ethically-infused discourses of welfare, care, education, and conservation. These instrumentalised and persistently speciesist discourses are built upon, and located firmly within, the triadic scaffold of animals’ violability and could thus all be understood as ‘mechanisms of control’ within practices based on using animals, shaping their teleoaffectivities in ways that aim to foreclose inappropriate conceptions and recognition of animals’ subjectivities…
In sum, unsettling speciesism and anthropocentrism requires more than critiques of fast violence. Extending understandings of what constitutes violence against animals is therefore proposed as a means of launching a more serious challenge to practices that continue to pass as mostly benign and benevolent. In order to move towards an absence of violent effects on animals, consensus is needed first on the conception of these effects as violence, and then on the practices that constitute them. It is not assumed that eliminating violence equates to animals’ liberation or freedom from oppression, but it is surely a necessary condition. SOURCE…
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