Memes about animal resistance: Here’s why you shouldn’t laugh too quickly
While meme lovers project emotions and perspectives onto animals, animals do in fact engage in resistance. Despite humans' colossal efforts to repress them, nonhuman animals still manage to escape from slaughterhouses, break out of zoos, circuses, aquatic parks, stables and biomedical laboratories. Critical animal studies scholars contend that all these actions demonstrate nonhuman animals' yearning for freedom and their aversion to inequity..
ALEXANDRA ISFAHANI-HAMMOND: Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast. One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts. A surfboard-snatching sea otter in Santa Cruz, California has also claimed the media spotlight. Headlines dub her an “adorable outlaw” “at large.” Memes conjure her in a beret like the one donned by socialist revolutionary Ché Guevara. In one caption, she proclaims, “Accept our existence or expect resistance … an otter world is possible’…
So while meme lovers project emotions and perspectives onto these particular wild animals, scholars of critical animal studies suggest that nonhuman animals do in fact engage in resistance… Despite humans’ colossal efforts to repress them, nonhuman animals still manage to escape from slaughterhouses. They also break out of zoos, circuses, aquatic parks, stables and biomedical laboratories. Tilikum, a captive orca at Sea World, famously killed his trainer—an act at least one marine mammal behaviorist characterized as intentional.
Philosopher Fahim Amir suggests that depression among captive animals is likewise a form of emotional rebellion against unbearable conditions, a revolt of the nerves. Dolphins engage in self-harm like thrashing against the tank’s walls or cease to eat and retain their breath until death. Sows whose body-sized cages impede them from turning around to make contact with their piglets repeatedly ram themselves into the metal struts, sometimes succumbing to their injuries.
Critical animal studies scholars contend that all these actions arguably demonstrate nonhuman animals’ yearning for freedom and their aversion to inequity… Sharing memes that cheer on wild animals is one thing. But there are more substantive ways to demonstrate solidarity with animals. Legal scholars support nonhuman animals’ resistance by proposing that their current classification as property should be replaced with that of personhood or beingness…
Solidarity with nonhuman animals is consistent with democratic principles — for instance, defending the right to well-being and opposing the use of force against innocent subjects. Philosopher Amir recommends extending the idea that there can be no freedom as long as there is still unfreedom beyond the species divide: “While we may not yet fully be able to picture what this may mean, there is no reason we should not begin to imagine it”. SOURCE…
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