1. Abattoir: The Spectacle of Slaughter

Braddock, Alan C.

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1. Abattoir: The Spectacle of Slaughter

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

Is Earth an abattoir—a planetary slaughterhouse? A few data points to consider...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.2

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23299

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismMosaics, RomanSlaughtering and slaughter-housesBataille, Georges, 1897-1962Animal sacrificeColosseum (Rome, Italy)Hunting in artRoman Villa of Casale (Piazza Armerina, Italy)

1. Abattoir: The Spectacle of Slaughter

abattoir, n. A slaughterhouse; a place where animals are killed for food. Etymology: < French abattoir, abatoir slaughterhouse (1806; earlier in sense “breach in a wall” (16th cent. in Middle French in an apparently isolated attestation)) < abattre to strike down, kill (see abate v.) + -oir

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Is Earth an abattoir—a planetary slaughterhouse? A few data points to consider:

• State of Qin defeats State of Zhao at the Battle of Changping, 260 BCE: 400,000 Zhao killed or executed.1 Masayuki Sato, The Confucian Quest for Order: The Origin and Formation of the Political Thought of Xun Zi (Boston: Brill, 2003), 54.

• Roman genocide against Carthage, end of the Third Punic War, 146 BCE: 145,000 killed, 55,000 enslaved.2 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 51.

• Gladiatorial combat entertainments in the Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater), Rome, 80–470 CE: 9,000 animals killed during one hundred days of inaugural celebrations in the year 80 under Emperor Titus; 11,000 animals killed to celebrate Emperor Trajan’s victory over the Dacians in 107. No definitive data exists on overall death toll of the Roman “games,” held in various arenas from the second century BCE to the sixth century CE, but many hundreds of thousands of humans and nonhumans likely died.3 J. Donald Hughes, Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 97; Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (London: Profile Books, 2011), 94, estimate that eight thousand humans were killed in the Flavian Amphitheater every year.

• Korean kingdom of Goguryeo defeats invading army of imperial Chinese Sui dynasty at the Battle of Salsu, 612 CE: nearly 300,000 Sui killed.4 Ki-Baik Lee, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 47.

• Byzantine massacre of Latin residents, Constantinople, April 1182: 50,000–60,000 killed.5 Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107; Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahadeh, The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Islamic World (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Center, 2001), 60.

• European genocide against Native Americans, 1492–1600: 50 million–60 million killed by war, enslavement, and imported diseases; mass deaths indirectly contribute to the Little Ice Age, according to some scientists.6 Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492," Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13-36.

• French Catholics massacre Huguenots for several weeks beginning on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, Paris and environs: 10,000 killed.7 Gerard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to al Qaeda, trans. Edward Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, and Jesse Browner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 89.

• Peasant revolt led by Zhang Xianzhong in Sichuan, China, 1644–47: hundreds of thousands killed.8 Kenneth W. Swope, On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China during the Ming-Qing Transition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 2; Michael Dillon, China: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379.

• Napoleonic Wars, 1803–15: 3 million–4 million combatants and civilians killed.9 Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 122.

• Qing dynasty defeats Christian Taiping Rebellion, China, 1850–64: 30 million–50 million killed.10 Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012), xxiii.

• Qing dynasty defeats Islamic Dungan (Hui) Revolt, 1862–77: 8 million–20 million killed.11 James B. Minahan, Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2014), 73; Ho-dong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1862–1877 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).

• World War I, 1914–18: 8.5 million combatants, 13 million civilians, and 8 million horses killed.12 John Graham Royde-Smith, "World War I: Killed, Wounded, and Missing," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing

• Russian Civil War, 1917–22: more than 8 million combatants and civilians killed.13 Dinah Shelton and Howard Adelman, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, 3 vols. (Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 2:646.

• Turkish genocide against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians, 1894–1924: 2 million killed.14 Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019).

• World War II, 1939–45: 15 million–25 million combatants and 45 million–55 million civilians killed.15 “Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National WWII Museum (New Orleans), https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war; “World War II Casualties by Country,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country.

• The Holocaust, 1941–45: 4.7 million–7.4 million Jews and others killed in Nazi death camps.16 David M. Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2008), 447.

• Korean War, 1950–53: 2,859,574 combatants and civilians killed.17 CNN Editorial Research, “Korean War Fast Facts,” CNN, June 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/asia/korean-war-fast-facts/index.html.

• Nigerian Civil War (Biafran War), 1967–70: 2 million combatants and civilians killed.18 Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Books, 2012); Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 158.

• Vietnam War, 1955–75: 1.3 million–4.3 million killed.19 “How Many People Died in the Vietnam War?,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-in-the-Vietnam-War.

• Cambodian genocide, 1975–79: 1.7 million killed.20 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 547.

• Rwandan genocide, 1994: 1 million killed.21 Omar Shahabudin McDoom, “Contested Counting: Toward a Rigorous Estimate of the Death Toll in the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 83–93.

• Congo Civil War, 1998–present: more than 5 million killed.22 Jeffrey Gettleman, “The World’s Worst War,” New York Times, December 15, 2012.

• Iraq War, 2003–present: 288,000 killed (as of November 2022).23 Iraq Body Count, https://www.iraqbodycount.org/.

• Syrian Civil War, 2011–present: 477,749 combatants and civilians killed (as of May 2021).24 “Factbox: The Cost of Ten Years of Devastating Civil War in Syria,” Reuters, May 26, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/cost-ten-years-devastating-war-syria-2021-05-26/.

• U.S. gun violence in 2020: nearly 44,000 killed (including 24,000 by suicide).25 Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler, “Shootings Never Stopped during the Pandemic: 2020 Was the Deadliest Gun Violence Year in Decades,” Washington Post, March 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/.

• Plant and nonhuman animal species at risk of extinction by 2100: 1 million.26 “1 Million Plant and Animal Species Are at Risk of Extinction, U.N. Report Says,” NPR, May 6, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/06/720654249/1-millionanimal-and-plant-species-face-extinction-risk-u-n-report-says.

• Nonhuman animals slaughtered for meat globally (excluding fish) in 2018: 70 billion.27 “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts” (based on U.N. FAO data), Faunalytics, October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. See also University of Oxford, “Our World in Data: Number of Animals Slaughtered for Meat, World,” https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/animals-slaughtered-for-meat?country=~OWID_WRL.

The list above only samples some of the most glaring historical statistics about anthropogenic mass death. It suggests that our planet has been a colossal killing field since the development of human civilization. The numbers grow exponentially with the beginning of European colonialism, but large-scale slaughter clearly predates modern capitalism and colonialism. Carnage against nonhuman life has been astronomical. As the final items on the casualty list reveal, humans today kill far more animals annually for meat—seventy-plus billion, not counting fish—a figure that surpasses all the other historical human slaughter tolls combined. Moreover, approximately one million species of wildlife may go extinct by the end of this century in what scientists call the Sixth Mass Extinction, an ongoing process of biological annihilation resulting from habitat loss, climate change, and other anthropogenic causes. Since the word “ecology” originates etymologically in the ancient Greek oikos, meaning house or household (see Introduction), then “abattoir” arguably characterizes that house as one of slaughter, where mass killing functions as a planetary paradigm of human behavior—a grim “universal” of sorts.28 Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter Raven, “Vertebrates on the Brink as Indicators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 24 (2020): 13596–602. On the etymology of “ecology,” see Introduction.

Historians generally define “abattoir,” or “slaughterhouse,” more narrowly as a distinctly modern institution for producing meat. First imagined in France during the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, they say, the abattoir came into being circa 1800 under Emperor Napoleon (1769–1821) as one of his many nation-building initiatives. By the end of the nineteenth century, the abattoir attained mechanized form as a mass-production factory, most famously at Chicago’s enormous Union Stock Yards, where firms such as Armour, Morris, and Swift slaughtered approximately four hundred million animals between 1865 and 1900. Gustavus Swift’s innovative “disassembly line” process even influenced mass production in other industries, notably automobile manufacturing. Writing in 1922 about how he developed his moving assembly line system for building cars at Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford (1863–1947) observed, “The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.” Nazi architects of the Final Solution took note as well, designing death camps with railways, concentrated holding areas, and other mechanisms of mass killing pioneered by the American meat industry. According to Rudolf Höss (1901–1947), the Nazi commandant at Auschwitz, this camp was “the largest human slaughterhouse that history has ever known.” Thus the abattoir helped usher in both the Second Industrial Revolution and the Holocaust.29 Höss quoted in Stephen F. Eisenman, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2013), 186. Ford quoted in Ray Batchelor, Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism and Design (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), 47. On the influence of the “disassembly line” process at Swift and Company’s Chicago slaughterhouse on Henry Ford’s innovative assembly line automobile production, see also David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 14–15. On the historical development of the abattoir/slaughterhouse as an institution, see Paula Young Lee, ed., Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press in association with University Press of New England, 2008). See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 209–56; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 207–59; and Dominic A. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For 1865–1900 slaughter data, see Mark R. Wilson, “Union Stock Yard & Transit Co.,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: Newberry Library, 2005), http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2883.html.

An institution of such vast proportions and influence inevitably gained a wide cultural purchase. Occasionally, the abattoir has attracted critical attention, as in Upton Sinclair’s celebrated muckraking novel The Jungle (1906), portraying Chicago’s slaughterhouses as a nightmare of death, filth, and degradation for workers and animals alike. For the most part, however, the abattoir gradually became normalized as part of everyday life and consciousness, often serving as a metaphor to express various ideas. For example, in his Human Comedy (1829–48), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) compared the hapless character Lucien to an animal escaped from a slaughterhouse (“Lucien était là semblable à l’animal que le billot de l’abattoir a manqué”). In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), a novel by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Mr. Chuckster expresses surprise when Mr. Swiveller arrives to work at the eponymous junk shop before the usual hour, saying, “You’re devilish early at this pestiferous slaughter-house.” During the American Civil War, Alexander Gardner (1821–1882) produced several “Slaughter Pen” photographs showing dead soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863 (fig. 1). In the 1890s, Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), the son of a tanner, painted a series of pictures of German slaughterhouse interiors as a philosophical expression of artistic realism and anatomical truth (fig. 2). Early in the twentieth century, an American diplomat named Leslie A. Davis (1876–1960) wrote a report to Congress referring to the Armenian Genocide as a “slaughterhouse province.” Kurt Vonnegut’s popular sci-fi war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), recounted the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces in World War II through the fictional protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. More recently, Amnesty International called the Saydnaya Military Prison in Syria a “human slaughterhouse” where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings of Syrian citizens. Such expressions metaphorically stigmatize the mass killing of human beings, but they do so without necessarily calling into question the institution that gave birth to the metaphor or pondering its planetary implication.30 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906); Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine: Scènes de la vie parisienne: Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, in Oeuvres complètes, 26 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1869–76), 9:346; Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale (London: Chapman and Hall, 1841), 110; German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981), 70 (on Corinth); Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Susan Blair (New Rochelle, N.Y.: A. D. Caratzas, Orpheus, 1989); Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Delacorte, 1969); Amnesty International, Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria (London: Amnesty International, 2017).

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Description: Slaughter Pen, Foot of the Round Top, Gettysburg by Gardner, Alexander; O'Sullivan,...

Fig. 1. Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, Slaughter Pen, Foot of the Round Top, Gettysburg, 1863. Albumen silver print, 6 7/8 × 8 7/8 in. (17.4 × 22.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Description: At the Slaughterhouse by Corinth, Lovis

Fig. 2. Lovis Corinth, At the Slaughterhouse, 1893. Oil on canvas, 30 11/16 × 35 in. (78 × 89 cm). Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Eschewing metaphor, the present chapter interprets the abattoir as paradigmatic of human behavior by asserting that Earth itself is, and has long been, an anthropogenic house of slaughter. On this planet, mass killing by Homo sapiens has become routine, even banal, not just in certain egregious historical contexts such as the Holocaust or various genocides but also in ordinary life, as human beings around the world condone and facilitate the annihilation of billions of beings every year, mostly nonhuman, with devastating social and environmental consequences. In an effort to defamiliarize this condition while offering ecocritical insight, I explore the art and ecology of slaughter over a long arc of time. Treating the abattoir as a planetary paradigm, the analysis here pays particular attention to creative works that reveal visual patterns and infrastructures of anthropogenic mass killing as a normalized system. By using a broad historical perspective with attention to complex interrelationships, I hope to reveal certain recurring configurations in the spectacle of slaughter and thereby call their normalcy into question.

MYTH AND GRANDEUR

Let me begin by quoting a writer who briefly examined the abattoir from such a perspective almost a century ago. In 1929, the French surrealist writer Georges Bataille (1897–1962) published the following entry on “abattoir” in his journal, Documents, as part of his “Critical Dictionary.” Bataille was not interested in producing a conventional dictionary with static definitions of words. Instead, he wished to reveal their dynamic social and historical implications:

slaughterhouse.—The slaughterhouse is linked to religion insofar as the temples of by-gone eras (not to mention those of the Hindus in our own day) served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing. The result (and this judgment is confirmed by the chaotic aspect of present-day slaughterhouses) was certainly a disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows. In America, curiously enough, W. B. Seabrook has expressed an intense regret; observing that the orgiastic life has survived, but that the sacrificial blood is not part of the cocktail mix, he finds present custom insipid. In our time, nevertheless, the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.31 “abattoir.—L’abattoir relève de la religion en ce sens que des temples des époques reculées, (sans parler de nos jours de ceux des hindous) étaient à double usage, servant en même temps aux implorations et aux tueries. Il en résultait sans aucun doute (on peut en juger d’après l’aspect de chaos des abattoirs actuels) une coïncidence bouleversante entre les mystères mythologiques et la grandeur lugubre caractéristique des lieux où le sang coule. Il est curieux de voir s’exprimer en Amérique un regret lancinant: W. B. Seabrook constatant que la vie orgiaque a subsisté, mais que le sang de sacrifices n’est pas mêlé aux cocktails, trouve insipide les mœurs actuelles. Cependant de nos jours l’abattoir est maudit et mis en quarantaine comme un bateau portant le choléra. Or les victimes de cette malédiction ne sont pas les bouchers ou les animaux, mais les braves gens eux-mêmes qui en sont arrivés à ne pouvoir supporter que leur propre laideur, laideur répondent en effet à un besoin maladif de propreté, de petitesse bilieuse et d’ennui: la malédiction (qui ne terrifie que ceux qui la profèrent) les amène à végéter aussi loin que possible des abattoirs, à s’exiler par correction dans un monde amorphe, où il n’y a plus rien d’horrible et où, subissant l’obsession indélébile de l’ignominie, ils sont réduits à manger du fromage.” Georges Bataille, “Abattoir,” Documents, no. 6 (1929): 327–29. English translation by Annette Michelson in October 36 (Spring 1986): 10.

Not unlike the obscure author whom he cites—William Buehler Seabrook (1884–1945), an eccentric American occultist fascinated with pagan religion and cannibalism—Bataille was interested in the spiritual and material dimensions of slaughter, viewed in broad historical terms. Knowing that human beings in the past often sacrificed other animals en masse at religious altars, he saw the industrial slaughterhouse as a modern reincarnation of such ancient institutions. Bataille’s text did not mention visuality explicitly, but his dictionary entry included illustrative photographs taken by Eli Lotar (1906–1969) showing dismembered animal parts and pools of smeared blood at La Villette, a huge slaughterhouse built during the late nineteenth century in the northeastern outskirts of Paris (figs. 3, 4). Bataille evidently intended these images to reveal something about “the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows.”32 Joe Ollmann, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2016); Kyri Claflin, “La Villette: City of Blood (1867–1914),” in Lee, Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, 27–45.

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Fig. 3. Eli Lotar, [Untitled photograph], published in George Bataille, “Abattoir,” Documents (Paris), no. 6, November 1929, p. 328

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Fig. 4. Eli Lotar, [Untitled photograph], published in George Bataille, “Abattoir,” Documents (Paris), no. 6, November 1929, p. 330

Bataille neither cited nor illustrated any sacrificial “temples of by-gone eras,” but he probably had in mind ancient edifices such as the Altar of Hieron, built during the third century BCE by a Greek tyrant named Hieron II (ca. 308–ca. 215 BCE) at Syracuse on the island of Sicily (fig. 5). Said to be the largest altar erected in antiquity, it honored the god Zeus and served as a monumental expression of Hieron’s own real-world wealth, power, and ambition. The altar also hosted an annual Festival of Liberation featuring the sacrifice of 450 bulls in one day, according to the ancient writer Diodorus Siculus (ca. 90–30 BCE). When visiting the altar ruins a few years ago and learning of this massive bloodletting, I struggled to imagine not only the sounds and smells generated by so much killing but also the sheer logistics of moving that many living beings in an orderly procession to slaughter as well as the subsequent distribution and disposal of corpses.33 On the Altar of Hieron, see Caroline Lehmler, Syrakus unter Agathokles und Hieron II: Die Verbindung von Kultur und Macht in einer hellenistischen Metropole (Frankfurt: Verlag Antike, 2005), 138–43; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, vol. 4, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 375 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11.72.2, page 313.

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Fig. 5. Altar of Hieron, Syracuse, Sicily, 3rd century BCE

Yet, as Bataille knew, sacred bloodletting on a large scale was not unique to antiquity or the West. At a Hindu temple in Bariyarpur, Nepal, religious believers of the local Madhesi community still sacrifice massive numbers of water buffalo, goats, pigeons, and other animals every five years in celebration of the Hindu goddess Gadhimai. Estimates of the nonhuman death toll at the Gadhimai Festival in 2009 range from 250,000 to 500,000. Despite growing protests by animal rights activists and some government officials, this ancient tradition proceeded without interruption in 2014 and 2019, albeit with somewhat reduced killing. A photograph by Kuni Takahashi of the Associated Press captures the festival’s convergence of new and old by showing a Ferris wheel in the distant background at right behind the massive foreground scene of ritual slaughter—a juxtaposition made even more jarring and vivid through the color digital medium (fig. 6). Such an image and festival raise difficult questions about conventional historical distinctions between antiquity and modernity, along the lines discussed by Bruno Latour in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993). For Latour, the notion of stark differences between modern and premodern are largely a matter of faith, imagination, and politics.34 Olivia Lang, “Hindu Sacrifice of 250,000 Animals Begins,” Guardian, November 24, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/hindu-sacrifice-gadhimai-festival-nepal; Anil Bhanot, “The Gadhimai Sacrifice Is Grotesque,” Guardian, November 25, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/gadhimai-animal-sacrifice-nepal; Manesh Shrestha, “Death and the Goddess: The World’s Biggest Ritual Slaughter,” CNN, December 1, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/world/asia/nepal-gadhimai-ritual-slaughter; “Gadhimai: Nepal’s Animal Sacrifice Festival Goes Ahead Despite ‘Ban,’” BBC News, December 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50644035; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Description: Untitled by Takahashi, Kuni

Fig. 6. Kuni Takahashi (Associated Press), [Untitled photograph], published in Aristos Georgiou, “The Largest Mass Animal Sacrifice in the World is About to Begin,” Newsweek, November 27, 2019

In a similar vein, Bataille regarded ancient religious sacrifices and the twentieth-century industrial abattoir as conceptually related in their mythic dimensions and “ominous grandeur,” even as he diagnosed what he saw as certain distinctive conditions of modernity. According to Bataille, today’s “flabby world” of privileged “propriety,” with its “unhealthy need of cleanliness,” had largely banished systematic mass killing from public spaces. Indeed, the abattoir was “cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship,” despite its obvious centrality to the diet of his French contemporaries. Modern “good folk” in polite neighborhoods had retreated into “exile” far from the slaughterhouse while nonetheless condoning its industrial system of mass death. In other words, Bataille knew that twentieth-century social structures and sanitation had segregated meat production from consumption in separate spaces, exemplifying capitalism’s logic of compartmentalization and hierarchy. Nevertheless, he sensed the entanglement of past and present, as well as workers and consumers, in a vicious circle of death where everyone had blood on their hands. The abattoir thus embodied a fundamental condition of implication.

Bataille was no environmentalist or animal rights activist, but his analysis of the abattoir as an institution at once “mythic” and inescapably real still resonates today in critiques of the meat industry. For example, in Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (2009), sociologist Timothy Pachirat cites Bataille in examining how the industrial slaughterhouse transforms oceans of sentient individual beings into abstract commodities through a relentless system of spatial segregation, temporal partitioning, and strategic visual management. Combining vivid firsthand description of his five-month stint in Omaha, Nebraska, as a slaughterhouse employee with theoretical critique informed by Bataille, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Norbert Elias (1897–1990), and other philosophers of modernity, Pachirat provides a jaw-dropping exposé about an institution “hidden in plain sight” where “sequestration and surveillance . . . exist in symbiosis as mechanisms of power in contemporary society” oppressing both animals and workers. Echoing Bataille’s sense of paradox and contradiction, Pachirat notes how modern slaughterhouse operations unfold through a series of contrived oppositions: “visibility/invisibility,” “inside/outside,” “alive/dead,” “clean/dirty,” “upstairs/downstairs,” and “supervisory/production,” all framed by a disingenuous inspection routine that actually conceals transgressions in order to facilitate relentless productivity and profit. Pachirat also observes the unexpected presence of myth and ritual pervading this industrial regime, as when he notes “the mythologizing of the work of the knocker,” an employee with an aura of “almost supernaturally evil powers” who uses a hydraulic bolt-gun to knock each cow unconscious by violently penetrating its skull and brain at the beginning of the slaughtering process. Elsewhere, in assessing the ineffective inspection procedures, Pachirat says, “What makes the entire ritual even more farcical is that everyone . . . knows that it is simply not possible to sanitize a knife after each cut [per Food and Drug Administration regulations], given the line speed and confined platform space.” Despite some attempts by inspectors to maintain standards, “the entire script is played out again” repeatedly with minimal intervention. Most striking and pertinent for our purposes is Pachirat’s subtle attention to the skewed cultural politics of visuality in the abattoir. On one hand, “The contemporary slaughterhouse is ‘a place that is no-place,’ physically hidden from sight by walls and socially veiled by the delegation of dirty, dangerous, and demeaning work to others tasked with carrying out the killing, skinning, and dismembering of living animals.” On the other hand, “Although these actions further decrease the visual resemblance of carcass to animal, they also produce a massive concentration and accumulation of smaller body parts, an incredible visual spectacle.” Relevant to art historians and environmentalists alike for its striking synthesis of participant observation and visual-spatial analysis, Every Twelve Seconds stands out in a growing body of recent scholarship focused on interpreting the slaughterhouse as an institution emblematic of modernity. Although Pachirat does not explore the gargantuan problems of pollution and environmental injustice associated with today’s meat industry—issues addressed later in this chapter—his book has much to offer ecocritical art history.35 Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1, 3–4, 14–15, 47, 53, 61, 70, 76, 80, 159, 203, 290n2.

In the remaining pages, I build on the insights of Pachirat while taking seriously Bataille’s historical perspective in exploring the planetary spectacle of slaughter and mass death across two millennia. Tracing such a sweeping trajectory, however briefly, is necessary in order to fathom the visual and material violence of large-scale anthropogenic killing—both in the past and in ongoing forms countenanced by so-called good people today. Specifically, I compare art associated with mass slaughter in two contexts that appear at first glance to be unrelated: the ancient Roman arena and the modern industrial abattoir. As I will demonstrate, these seemingly disparate sites have much in common, conceptually and operationally if not historically. Above all, I contend that an imperial “politics of sight” and industrial ecology govern both. The specific orientation of politics and industry varies somewhat depending on the context, but a comparison reveals some surprising echoes and similarities. There can be no question that aesthetics and visuality have played a key role in both contexts. Historical and contemporary art illuminate this visual arc of carnage and its ecocritical implications. In the end, the present chapter argues that art provides a broader planetary understanding of “abattoir” as a global condition of anthropogenic mass killing writ large, in which industrial slaughter—especially of nonhumans—poses an existential threat to the survival of life on Earth.

CARNARIUM—SPECTACLES OF SLAUGHTER IN THE ROMAN ARENA

In 2014, during a visit to the Borghese Gallery in Rome, I encountered a series of ancient Roman mosaics representing gladiators fighting each other and killing animals (figs. 7, 8). Archaeologists had excavated and transported the mosaics in 1834 from the ruins of an estate called Torrenova, built outside the city during the fourth century CE. These works of art were startling to me for several reasons. For one thing, they plainly demonstrated an aesthetic taste for vivid representations of slaughter as artistic decoration in a domestic setting. Moreover, the mosaics even celebrated the depicted killers, identifying the gladiators by name with inscriptions testifying to their fame as renowned arena performers. For example, in figure 7, “Bellerefons” has just slayed “Cupido,” whose death the artist indicated with the symbol “ø”—a canceled zero. As with other aspects of “modernity,” cancel culture has a much older history than many people probably realize. In figure 8, “Melitto” spears a leopard in the chest, producing a stream of blood that pools on the ground below while several other big cats lie dead nearby, all anonymous and unmarked. Regardless of species, the mosaic medium renders slaughter as an ornamental spectacle, reifying all the combatants in colorful tesserae of stone and glass for privileged viewers to admire in the comfort of a well-furnished villa. It turns out that such aesthetic displays, which mirrored and even sometimes documented actual public entertainments in antiquity, provided lavish embellishment for domestic spaces of wealthy Romans across the empire from North Africa to northern Europe and beyond (figs. 9–14).36 Sofia Barchiesi and Marina Minozzi, The Galleria Borghese: The Masterpieces (Rome: Scala, 2006), 13. For an especially insightful discussion of such art (though not addressing the Borghese Gallery mosaics), see Shelby Brown, “Death as Decoration: Scenes from the Arena on Roman Domestic Mosaics,” in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 180–211.

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Fig. 7. Gladiator floor mosaic, Roman, 4th century CE. Torrenova, Borghese Gallery, Rome. Photograph by Alan C. Braddock

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Fig. 8. Gladiator floor mosaic, Roman, 4th century CE. Torrenova, Borghese Gallery, Rome. Photograph by Alan C. Braddock

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Fig. 9. Floor mosaic, Roman, 2nd century CE. Mosaic, 18 ft. 10 in. × 13 ft. (5.7 × 4 m). Archaeological Museum, Tripoli

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Fig. 10. Floor mosaic, Roman, from Sollertiana Domus, 3rd century CE. El Jem Museum, Tunisia

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Description: Floor mosaic with arena scenes (munera and venationes)

Fig. 11. Floor mosaic with arena scenes (munera and venationes), Roman, 3rd century CE. Museum Schlosspark, Bad Kreuznach, Germany

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Description: Floor mosaic, detail of bear and bull

Fig. 12. Floor mosaic, detail of bear and bull, Roman, 2nd century CE. Mosaic, 18 ft. 10 in. × 13 ft. (5.7 × 4 m). Archaeological Museum, Tripoli

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Description: Floor mosaic, detail showing Execution by animals (Damnatio ad bestias)

Fig. 13. Floor mosaic, detail showing Damnatio ad bestias (Execution by animals), Roman, 2nd century CE. Mosaic, 18 ft. 10 in. × 13 ft. (5.7 × 4 m). Archaeological Museum, Tripoli

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Fig. 14. Floor mosaic, detail showing Damnatio ad bestias (Execution by animals), Roman, 2nd century CE. Mosaic, 18 ft. 10 in. × 13 ft. (5.7 × 4 m). Archaeological Museum, Tripoli

For nearly a millennium between the second century BCE and the sixth century CE, ancient Romans staged violent shows they called “spectacles” (spectacula) involving the killing of humans and nonhumans in public arenas, often on a mass scale. These popular events, also known as “games” (ludi), embodied Roman beliefs about justice, virtue, religion, and patriotism. They were deeply political proceedings as well, in which leaders, citizens, and noncitizens negotiated power and identity. Typically held to mark important public occasions such as festivals of the gods and military victories, the deadly exhibitions evolved various conventions and nomenclatures to create a sense of pageantry, drama, and order. A few of the many surviving mosaics from around the Roman Empire illustrate and embody important facets of this spectacular culture of slaughter, which had assorted names and conventions. For example, Munera gladiatoria featured enslaved and professional human gladiators fighting each other for survival, money, freedom, and glory (see figs. 7, 9, 11). Venationes included the killing of domestic and imported wild animals by specially trained hunters or by each other (see figs. 8–12). Displays of capital punishment, or summa supplicia, took diverse and visceral forms in the arena: burning alive, crucifixion, and damnatio ad bestias, or the lethal exposure of particularly heinous criminals and prisoners of war to lions, leopards, bears, and other fierce nonhuman predators (see figs. 13, 14). The Romans regarded such doomed convicts as noxii, meaning noxious, dangerous, and therefore subject to violent disposal by the state. To enhance audience appeal and frame the proceedings with cultural exempla, executions and other violent events sometimes unfolded as dramatic reenactments of myth and history, described by one scholar as “fatal charades,” with appropriate scenography, choreography, and costumes.37 Scholarship on the Roman arena is vast and growing. See, e.g., David Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021); Iain Ferris, Cave Canem: Animals and Roman Society (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Amberley, 2018); Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998); K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Reenactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73; and George Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1937).

The ancient Latin word arena referred to the sandy ground of an amphitheater, circus, or other large setting for assorted spectacles. Not all arena events were violent, but audiences flocked to chariot races, gladiatorial combats, and animal hunts in great numbers. State-sponsored executions occurred between, or as part of, these exhibitions whenever appropriate victims became available. Rome’s largest venue, the Circus Maximus, originated as a private arena for the city’s elite under King Tarquinius Priscus during the seventh century BCE, but it grew over time to accommodate 150,000 spectators for public chariot races and bloody spectacles by the late republican period. At the Flavian Amphitheater, opened to the public in 80 CE and known today as the Colosseum (after a colossal statue of Nero that once stood nearby), 50,000 spectators could watch gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, executions, and mock—yet still deadly—battles staged on land and sea. The Colosseum’s elaborate theatrical infrastructure included tiered seating by social class, hydraulic pumps for flooding the arena, and elevators connecting the stage to underground chambers and passageways for storing and transporting the various combatant-performers, human and nonhuman. Located in the center of Rome, the Circus Maximus and Colosseum were only the largest such venues. More than two hundred other arenas were scattered across the vast Roman Empire, which, at its height in the second century CE, extended far beyond Italy to encompass most of Europe, the north coast of Africa, and the Middle East to the Caspian Sea. Even before the empire during the Republican period, wealthy and powerful Romans often sponsored games in makeshift or self-built arenas to draw attention to themselves. For example, in 186 BCE, a prominent general named Marcus Fulvius Nobilior celebrated a recent military victory in Aetolia (Greece) by hosting a series of games. According to the Roman historian Livy (64 or 59 BCE—12 or 17 CE), this ten-day “spectacle” included “a large number of performers from Greece” as well as “a lion and panther hunt”—one of the earliest venationes held in Rome, featuring exotic imports.38 Bomgardner, Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, xxii, 25; Ferris, Cave Canem, 110; Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 41; Nathan T. Elkins, A Monument to Dynasty and Death: The Story of Rome’s Colosseum and the Emperors Who Built It (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 3; Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 42; Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure, 47; Livy, History of Rome, vol. 11, trans. J. C. Yardley, Loeb Classical Library 313 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 39.22, page 269.

Over time, Roman arena spectacles became more elaborate and deadly, especially during the late Republic and early Imperial period from the first century BCE to the early second century CE. A vivid literary reflection on the arena’s abundant mortality in those years comes from the writer Petronius (ca. 27–66 CE), whose fictional novel Satyricon contains a telling passage in which the character Echion enthusiastically describes an upcoming show sponsored by a wealthy Roman named Titus (not the emperor):

Just think, we’re about to have a splendid spectacle in three days during the holiday. Not simply a troupe of gladiators from the local training school, but a bunch of experienced gladiators who’d been freed after valuable service. And our friend Titus thinks big and is hotheaded; it’ll be either this or that, but at least something. I’m on familiar terms with him, and he’s not given to half-measures. He’ll provide really good gladiatorial sword fighting, no running off to fight another day, but a butcher’s shop in front of our eyes, so that the whole amphitheater can see it.39 Petronius, Satyricon, trans. Gareth Schmeling, Loeb Classical Library 15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 45.4–6, pages 149–51.

Although Petronius was a writer of satirical fiction, his text clearly confirms the spectacular nature of violence in the Roman arena as an established audience attraction and expectation. Moreover, he used a striking metaphor to describe the arena as a place that conflated human and nonhuman flesh: carnarium. Rendered as “butcher’s shop” in the English translation above by Earnest Cary for the Loeb Classical Library, carnarium appears in other scholarly interpretations as “slaughterhouse.”40 For “carnarium” as slaughterhouse, see, e.g., Michael J. Carter, “Bloodbath: Artemidorus, Αποτομοσ Combat, and Ps.-Quintilian’s ‘The Gladiator,’” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 193 (2015): 41; and William Arrowsmith, “Luxury and Death in the Satyricon,” Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and Classics 5, no. 3 (1966): 314. Referring to the Colosseum in particular as a “slaughterhouse” has become a kind of set piece in recent historical scholarship and popular writing. On the Colosseum as “slaughterhouse,” see Jérôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, 2nd ed., trans. E. O. Lorimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 244; and Bernard Frischer and Steven Zucker, “Ruin as Abattoir, the Colosseum,” Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History, July 19, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/ruin-abattoir-the-colosseum/.

Apart from literary texts such as Satyricon, ancient historical records in the form of episodic eyewitness testimony and more-or-less reliable secondhand reports reveal body counts that reached astonishing heights in the Roman arena, especially under the emperors, who competitively sponsored grander and grander spectacles to assert their authority and maintain public favor. While revealing a pattern of recurring carnage, the ancient sources single out for special attention several extraordinary events that confirm the normalization of slaughter and escalating scale of violence during the empire. For example, in Res Gestae, a retrospective compendium of his official acts, Emperor Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) proudly declared:

Three times in my own name I gave a show of gladiators, and five times in the name of my sons or grandsons; in these shows there fought about ten thousand men. Twice in my own name I furnished for the people an exhibition of athletes gathered from all parts of the world. . . . In my own name, or that of my sons or grandsons, on twenty-six occasions I gave to the people, in the circus, in the forum, or in the amphitheater, hunts of African wild beasts, in which about three thousand five hundred beasts were slain.41 Augustus, The Acts of Augustus as Recorded on the Monumentum Ancyranum (Res Gestae Divi Augusti), trans. Frederick W. Shipley, Loeb Classical Library 152 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 13.22, page 383.

When the Flavian Amphitheater opened in 80 CE, Emperor Titus (39–81 CE) held one hundred days of inaugural games—gladiator combats, beast hunts, and executions—in which “animals both tame and wild were slain to the number of nine thousand,” according to the historian Lucius Cassius Dio (155–235 CE). The same writer reported how Emperor Trajan (53–117 CE), in marking his military triumph over the Dacian kingdom in 107 CE, “gave spectacles on one hundred and twenty-three days, in the course of which some eleven thousand animals, both wild and tame, were slain, and ten thousand gladiators fought.” An early biographer of Emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE), writing under the pseudonym Aelius Apartianus, said, “At Athens he exhibited in the stadium a hunt of a thousand wild beasts.” Emperor Commodus (161–192 CE), unlike his father, Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), fervently promoted the games and even performed in the arena on numerous occasions—a fact creatively interpreted in the film Gladiator (2000) directed by Ridley Scott. Styling himself as a new Hercules, Commodus specialized in slaughtering exotic and rare animals from his own collection, including elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, lions, leopards, tigers, and bears. Cassius Dio claimed to have witnessed these performances himself and observed the emperor kill “a hundred bears all by himself” in one day by “shooting down at them from the railing of the balustrade.” Another historian, Herodian (170–240 CE), reported that “wild beasts were brought from all over the world for him to kill . . . from India and Ethiopia, from the North and South they came. All of them, if any were previously unknown, were now on show for the Romans to see as they were killed by Commodus,” including one hundred lions speared by the emperor with the same number of javelins at a single event. In a particularly disquieting passage, Herodian described Commodus decapitating ostriches by shooting them with crescent-tipped arrows in order to watch them continue running swiftly, headless, around the arena. As a fitting conclusion to his violent megalomaniacal reign, Commodus died by strangulation at the hands of an assassin—his personal wrestling partner—in 192 CE.42 Cassius Dio, Roman History, vols. 8, 9, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 176, 177 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925, 1927), 66.25.1 (Titus), 68.15.1 (Trajan), 73.15.2–6 (Commodus emulating Hercules), and 73.18.1 (Commodus killing bears), pages 8:311, 389, 9:85, 107; Aelius Apartianus, “Hadrian,” in Historia Augusta, vol. 1, trans. David Magie, Loeb Classical Library 139 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), page 59; Herodian, History of the Empire, trans. C. R. Whittaker, Loeb Classical Library 454 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1.15.4–6, 1.16.11, pages 101, 103, 121. Ridley Scott, dir., Gladiator (Scott Free Productions / DreamWorks, 2000).

STRANGE RAVENING CREATURES

The largest and most spectacular group of ancient Roman mosaics, located in the ruins of a fourth-century CE villa in central Sicily, offer remarkable insight into the expansive political ecology of imperial resource extraction on behalf of the arena. Near the town of Piazza Armerina, the Villa Romana del Casale occupied the center of a large rural estate surrounded by agricultural fields and adjacent mountains (fig. 15). Its stunning decorative mosaics span more than thirty-seven thousand square feet and fifty rooms comprising the elaborate one-story structure, which included a dramatic triumphal entrance, peristyle courtyard, bath and sauna complex, large audience hall, dining room, and numerous bedrooms for residents and guests. The ornamentation in these spaces has survived largely intact thanks to a mudslide that inundated the villa during the twelfth century, forcing the abandonment of the site while preserving most of the mosaic pavement and even some wall decorations. Historians and archaeologists have studied the villa extensively since the early twentieth century. Although the identity of the owner remains unknown, the magnificence of its architecture and mosaics—including their iconography, style, and facture—strongly suggest a wealthy patron associated with the Roman imperial government and the lucrative enterprise of exotic animal commerce.43 Patrizio Pensabene and Enrico Gallocchio, “The Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” Expedition 53, no. 2 (2011): 29–37; Gino Vinicio Gentili, La Villa Romana di Piazza Armerina Palazzo Erculio, 3 vols. (Osimo, Italy: Fundazione Don Carlo, 1999); R. J. A. Wilson, Piazza Armerina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Andrea Carandini, Richerche sullo stile e la cronologia dei mosaici della Villa di Piazza Armerina ([Rome]: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1964).

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Fig. 15. Villa Romana del Casale, 4th century CE. Piazza Armerina, Sicily

Some rooms in the Villa Romana del Casale feature decorations with geometric designs or athletic and mythological subjects, but the predominant theme concerns hunting, capturing, and transporting wildlife from the farthest reaches of the empire. This emphasis on live animal capture and shipment appears most elaborately in the villa’s grandest decorative space: a 230-foot corridor with floor mosaic known as The Great Hunt (fig. 16). This enormous work of art depicts dozens of human hunters on foot and horseback using ropes, nets, and other tools to catch lions, leopards, tigers, ostriches, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, camels, gazelles, bison, elephants, deer, and boars—a geographically diverse array of species originating in North Africa, Europe, and Asia (figs. 17, 18). Such an opulent display of biodiversity recalls another passage in Petronius’s Satyricon:

The triumphant Roman was now in control of the whole world, the seas and lands and wherever the sun and moon shone, yet he was still hungry. Now the heavily loaded ships drove the sea-lanes before them and assailed the waves, in search of some hidden remote bay, or some land that could yield yellow gold, all such places being the enemy. . . . Wild animals are hunted down in their forests as game for the Circus, and near Jupiter’s shrine in far-off Africa the lion is pursued and captured to ensure that this beast with its precious and deadly saber teeth is available at all times. Strange ravening creatures weigh down our boats, like the prowling tiger shipped in a golden cage to drink the blood of men to the applause of the crowd.44 Petronius, Satyricon, 119.14.5–20, pages 335, 337.

Indeed, some vignettes within The Great Hunt show dramatic encounters between hunters and prey that mirror and foreshadow the violent venationes of the arena (fig. 19). Meanwhile, other hunters dutifully transport caged animals on wheeled oxcarts (fig. 20) to a pair of boats, one docked at a western port (possibly Carthage) and the other in the east (perhaps Alexandria)—important imperial provincial cities on opposite ends of the Mediterranean (figs. 21, 22). At each location, geographically appropriate animals (ostriches and an elephant, respectively) symbolically embark at one side of the vessel and then disembark at a central depot probably intended to represent a port on the Italian coast, where the Romans corralled them in stockyards called vivaria. These compositional details fictively condense long-distance shipping and commodity chains into a concise two-step visual narrative of importation. Framing The Great Hunt conceptually and geographically are a pendant pair of apse mosaics, one at each end of the long corridor, representing female personifications of important places indicating Rome’s imperial reach in acquiring exotic animals: India (or the East), with tiger, elephant, and tusk; and Mauretania (or the West), with bear and leopard.45 On The Great Hunt mosaic, see Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 31–32; Gentili, Villa Romana, 3:76–108; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 14, 24–25, 32, 39–41, 45–48, 52–53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 74, 82, 84, 87–89, 93, 97, 101. On Roman vivaria, see Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure, 174–76.

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt

Fig. 16. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters capturing a tiger, gazelle,...

Fig. 17. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters capturing a tiger, gazelle, and bison, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters capturing a rhinoceros

Fig. 18. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters capturing a rhinoceros, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of injured lioness attacking a hunter

Fig. 19. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of injured lioness attacking a hunter, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters transporting caged wildlife...

Fig. 20. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail of hunters transporting caged wildlife in oxcart, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Description: Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail

Fig. 21. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

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Fig 22. Floor mosaic showing the Great Hunt, detail, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

The Villa Romana del Casale’s decorative theme of animal exoticism, acquisition, and transportation relates directly to the Roman arena and its spectacles of slaughter by representing behind-the-scenes infrastructure that made the shows possible. As a monumental artistic project, the mosaic program constitutes its own spectacle as well. Although the villa contains no surviving image actually showing combat or hunting in an arena, another large room near the bath and sauna complex displays an elaborate depiction of chariot races at the Circus Maximus in Rome. Instead of celebrating slaughter specifically in the arena, perhaps the villa owner wished to emphasize his distinctive role in acquiring and delivering its living material. In any case, echoing a broad scholarly consensus, archaeologists Patrizio Pensabene and Enrico Gallocchio affirmed that The Great Hunt mosaic depicts “the capture of animals destined for the venationes, or beast spectacles,” in the imperial capital. In effect, this huge work offers an artistic summa of a key industry supporting Rome’s voracious appetite for violent public entertainments. By connecting the logistical and geographic dots between animal acquisition and delivery, the mosaic implicates both villa and arena in a larger imperial ecosystem of resource extraction and provision. To be sure, the mosaic celebrates such activities as a clear sign of Roman imperial power and wealth, consistent with other art discussed in this chapter. Indeed, the animal enterprise evidently had positive pedagogical significance for the Romans as well, judging from mosaics in still another room of the villa, where children appear avidly engaged in killing more animals, demonstrating virtuous inculcation in the skills of hunting while humorously modeling a youthful version of the arena venatio performance (fig. 23).46 Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 32. For discussion of the child hunting imagery, see Gentili, Villa Romana, 148–55; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 50–55.

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Description: Floor mosaic, detail of children hunting animals

Fig. 23. Floor mosaic, detail of children hunting animals, 4th century CE. Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

Complementing the villa’s exotic iconography of Roman imperial animal hunting, stylistic and mineralogical evidence confirms that the mosaic artists and even the stones they used to decorate the complex originated abroad—mainly in North Africa. As the art historian Katherine Dunbabin observes in a classic study based on meticulous comparative analysis, “It is not just a question of resemblance or of a general influence, but of identity of style,” such that “whole teams must have been introduced from one or more North African centers, bringing most of their material with them.” After all, Dunbabin points out, central Sicily was actually closer to Roman Carthage (in modern Tunisia) than to the city of Rome. These North African connections have led other scholars to suggest that the villa owner was Gaius Ceionius Rufius Volusianus (ca. 246–330 CE), a wealthy Roman senator, military commander, and urban prefect who served as governor of Africa under Emperor Maxentius early in the fourth century CE. Regardless of who owned the villa, it clearly embodied the ecology of empire on multiple levels—mosaic imagery, makers, materials, and economics.47 On North African artists and materials, see Dunbabin, Mosaics of North Africa, 197–98; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 32. For discussion of the villa owner, see Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 35.

NOW THEY CAN NOWHERE BE FOUND

The Roman arena and the related animal industry produced not only public spectacles and decorative works of art but also ecological transformations across the Mediterranean observed by several authors in antiquity. For example, during the regime of Emperor Augustus, Strabo (63 BCE–23 CE) wrote in his treatise on Geography:

The whole country from Carthage to the Pillars is fertile, though full of wild beasts, as is also the whole of the interior of Libya. So it is not unlikely that some of these peoples were also called Nomads for the reason that in early times they were not able to cultivate the soil on account of the multitude of wild animals. But the Nomads of to-day not only excel in the skill of hunting (and the Romans take a hand in this with them because of their fondness for fights with wild animals), but they have mastered farming as well as the chase.48 Strabo, Geography, vol. 1, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library 49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 503.

Strabo’s statement reveals important environmental information about North Africa at a time when the Romans were rapidly developing the region for agriculture and animal extraction. As the ancient geographer suggests, both the Romans and the Indigenous Berbers viewed wildlife as an obstacle to the cultivation of crops. Hunting animals in the region therefore served a double purpose by supplying beasts for venatio spectacles and protecting agriculture. Over time, this constellation of activities produced scarcities noted by subsequent writers. In the fourth century CE, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330–ca. 391–400 CE) bore witness to such changes: “For many ages after [the time of Cicero in the first century BCE] more hippopotami were often brought to Rome. But now they can nowhere be found, since, as the inhabitants of those regions conjecture, they were forced from weariness of the multitude that hunted them to take refuge in the land of the Blemmyae.” The Blemmyae were mythic, headless people with eyes on their chests who lived on the fringes of the empire according to legend, so the reference to them here by Ammianus suggests a literary convention for describing something elusive, rare, or even extinct—“nowhere to be found.”49 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 315 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 291. On the Blemmyae, see Jessie A. Maritz, “From Roman Africa to Roman America,” Classical World 106, no. 3 (2013): 465, 471.

On rare occasions, ancient writers even offered critical reflections about anthropogenic impact on biodiversity, as did another fourth-century writer, Themistius (317–ca. 388 CE), in his tenth Oration: “He who completely destroys is considered as offending against hunting. And so then we spare the most savage beasts which nature itself—and not the Ister or the Rhine—separates from us, so that they might be preserved and continue in their race; and we are displeased because elephants have been removed from Libya, because lions have disappeared from Thessaly, because hippopotamoi have been gotten rid of from the marshes of the Nile.”50 Themistius, Oration 10.139d, trans. Laurence J. Daly, “A Mandarin of Late Antiquity: The Political Life and Thought of Themistius” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1970), 241–42.

In “Precepts of Statecraft,” the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch (46–after 119 CE) disparaged the political use of “gladiatorial shows” as a means by which despots “lead the common people or rather curry favor with them.”51 Plutarch, “Precepts of Statecraft,” in Moralia, vol. 10, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 321 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 802D, page 181. A follower of the ancient vegetarian Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE), Plutarch also strongly criticized the slaughter of animals in general, citing their intelligence and the wasteful cruelty of consuming their flesh. For example, in his essay titled “Beasts Are Rational,” Plutarch declared, “Driven on by luxurious desires and satiety with merely essential nourishment, [man] pursues illicit food, made unclean by the slaughter of beasts; and he does this in a much more cruel way than the most savage beasts of prey. . . . Animal intelligence, on the contrary, allows no room for useless and pointless arts.”52 Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” in Moralia, vol. 12, trans. Harold Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library 406 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 991D, page 525.

An even more remarkable text by Plutarch, titled “On the Eating of Flesh,” pointedly flipped the ethical burden of justifying slaughter by placing it onto meat eaters:

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?53 Plutarch, “On the Eating of Flesh,” part 1, in Moralia, vol. 12, 993A–B, page 541.

Commenting on the early history of humankind, Plutarch acknowledged the necessity of primordial men to eat flesh as a last resort, but he felt this unnatural practice had become obsolete with the advent of agriculture: “What wonder if, contrary to nature, we made use of the flesh of beasts when even mud was eaten and the bark of trees devoured. . . . But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you?”54 Plutarch, 993F, 12:545.

Such criticism in antiquity was rare, however. As the historian David Bomgardner explains, the twin benefits of hunting and agriculture proved irresistible to most Romans and their colonies. According to Bomgardner, “The destruction of habitat for agricultural exploitation, the widespread performance of venationes in the amphitheatres of North Africa, the export of animals for the arenas of the empire and the organised hunting of animals by the aristocracy all contributed to the shortages of supply that began to make themselves felt by the late third century.” Although the absence of precise data makes it impossible to estimate wildlife population accurately, Bomgardner discerns “in the workings of the Roman administration of North Africa a consistent aim to maximize the productivity of this vitally important agricultural region of the empire.” As further confirmation of these trends, he quotes an epigram written by the sixth-century Latin Carthaginian poet Luxorius, connecting the dots between agricultural improvement and animal hunting for the arena: “The countryside marvels at the triumphs of the amphitheatre and the forest notices that strange wild beasts are there. The many farmers look at new struggles while ploughing and the sailor sees varied entertainments from the sea. The fertile land loses nothing; the plants grow in greater abundance while all the wild beasts fear their fates here.”55 Bomgardner, Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 369; Luxorius quoted at 370–71.

WHAT CIVILIZING PROCESS?

Reading Bataille and viewing the Borghese Gallery mosaics (see figs. 7, 8) piqued my interest in this seemingly alien world of ancient Roman slaughter and spectacle, industry and empire. The more I learned about that world, however, the less alien it looked. The Roman arena actually appears to be a strangely honest premonition of the present, especially when considering the anthropogenic death tolls and ecological impacts cited at the outset of this chapter. Such an impression contradicts the prevailing scholarly view of history. According to this view, the world today exists in a state of modernity irrevocably shaped by centuries of civilization, a complex cultural evolution that supposedly resulted in a decisive shift in human behavior and sensibilities away from the violent proclivities of antiquity toward a new, less violent and more regulated regime. Discussing this “civilizing process” in his book on Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, historian Donald G. Kyle invokes the sociologist Norbert Elias as a key authority, saying:

To the degree that we moderns now feel reservations about such customs [that is, violence in the Roman arena], we have been influenced by a “civilizing process” whereby there has been a broad change in manners and notions of decent behavior since the late Middle Ages. In recent centuries external factors, such as modern police and penitentiaries, and an internal factor, a conditioned psychology of abhorrence of excess violence, have contributed to a gradual shift in the parameters of embarrassment and shame, including reduced levels of interpersonal violence, increased sensitivity to pain, and an aversion to cruelty. . . . The civilizing process, nevertheless, remains incomplete.56 Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 5.

Pachirat also cites Elias to make a similar point about “modernity” in analyzing the industrial slaughterhouse and its skewed “politics of sight.” As Pachirat observes, “Norbert Elias in his monumental work The Civilizing Process, posits ‘segregation, removing out of sight, [and] concealment as the major method of the civilizing process . . . hiding ‘behind the scenes’ of what has become distasteful.”57 Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds, 9–10.

To put this another way, the violence of mass slaughter is still acceptable in modernity as long as certain people—Bataille’s “good folk”—do not have to see it. Whereas the ancient Romans deliberately produced spectacles of slaughter for public consumption, powerful interests today try to conceal mass killing in order to shield the sensibilities of privileged people, who prefer not to countenance the realities they condone. Whereas most ancients were happy with their implication in systems of slaughter, moderns apparently are not. As I will now suggest in the concluding part of this chapter, modern concealment of mass slaughter is becoming increasingly untenable, thanks in part to the work of certain contemporary artists.

ACTIVIST ABSTRACTION

Not unlike ancient mosaic decorations that revealed the imperial infrastructure supporting Roman arena spectacles of slaughter, twenty-first-century artists have begun to take an analytical approach in exposing the structure and organization of the modern meat industry, albeit with a decidedly critical orientation. Uncannily, in both contexts—the ancient carnarium and the modern abattoir—aesthetics, ecology, and politics of sight have intertwined in shaping perceptions of mass killing. Now the dissident attitude, which was a rarity in antiquity, may be gaining the upper hand. Glimpses of an emboldened resistance started to appear forcefully in art of the late twentieth century.

For example, a lithograph by Sue Coe titled Feed Lot (1991) innovatively confronted the stark realities of modern factory farming in confined animal feeding operations, or cafos, which today prepare billions of animals globally for slaughter as meat every year (fig. 24). Coe has addressed such conditions as part of her broader engagement with issues of social and environmental justice since becoming an artist in the 1970s. Raised in Staffordshire, England, near an industrial slaughterhouse, Coe studied at the Royal College of Art in London and moved to the United States in 1972. She has produced an enormous body of paintings and prints, often selling her work to benefit animal rights organizations and other activist groups. Usually, her pictures visualize injustice and assign blame with blunt-force social realism, as in the cover image for her book Cruel, showing blood from a slaughtered calf symbolically transforming into profit in the form of gold coins amassed by a stereotypical corporate tycoon who sits between piles of money and bones (fig. 25).58 Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation (New York: OR Books, 2012). For more on Coe, see Stephen F. Eisenman, The Ghosts of Our Meat: Sue Coe (Carlisle, Pa.: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 2013). On cafos and industrial meat production, see Bill Winders and Elizabeth Ransom, eds., Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019); Jody Emel and Harvey Neo, eds., Political Ecologies of Meat (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Daniel Imhoff, The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Berkeley: Watershed Media/University of California Press, 2010).

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Fig. 24. Sue Coe, Feed Lot, 1991. Lithograph, 18 5/16 × 14 1/8 in. (46.6 × 35.9 cm). Galerie St. Etienne, New York

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Fig. 25. Sue Coe, Cruel, 2012. Color lithograph. Reproduced on cover of Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation (New York: OR Books, 2012)

In a rare departure from such realism, Coe’s Feed Lot does something different. This picture renders the violent economic forces of industrial agriculture with poetic abstraction. Animals destined for systematic slaughter crowd the pictorial field, extending to the horizon. Watched over by an anonymous human worker with back turned to the viewer, the cattle lose individuality as they diminish in size through implied distance, morphing into repetitive patterns of units connoting their transformation into commodities. In this way, Coe relates artistic perspective to the emotional distancing and ethical limits of human vision that enable the mass killing of sentient beings. The dark sky and somber monochromatic tonality of the print suggest environmental pollution associated with industrial agriculture, which produces not only meat but also enormous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen runoff, aquatic dead zones, antibiotic resistance, and other negative ecological effects, not to mention unimaginable suffering for nonhuman animals as well as human workers and nearby residents. Coe’s subtle artistic reinterpretation of Christian traditions about stewardship and hope—with the worker recalling a Christlike shepherd and the distant factory perverting the Kingdom of Heaven—creatively indicts the cafo model of agriculture as morally corrupt.59 For a discussion of Coe’s Feed Lot as an example of “muckraking,” see Allison Carruth, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 132–32.

A similar logic of abstraction informs the work of U.K.-based Belgian artist Mishka Henner, who produced a series of pictures titled Feed Lots in 2012–13 using appropriated satellite photographs of real, gargantuan cafos. In one example, the artist cropped and color enhanced an aerial image of a Texas feedlot to focus attention on the stadium-sized manure lagoon adjacent to holding pens where thousands of cattle await shipment to a slaughterhouse (fig. 26). A detail of the picture (fig. 27) reveals abstract patterns in an enormous system of animal confinement, waste, and slaughter, prompting reflection about the scale and operations of this particular facility but also the environmental implications of an entire global network of meat production and distribution, of which this represents only one part. Interviewed about such images, Henner said the following:

I first came across these feedlots on Google Earth and had no idea what I was seeing. The mass and density of the black and white dots seemed almost microbial. To understand what they were I had to learn about the meat industry and its methods for maximizing yield in the minimum amount of time for the highest profit. It used to take five years for a cow to reach its mature weight, ready for slaughter and processing. Today, since the structures and processes of feed yards have been perfected, that has been reduced to less than 18 months. Such speed requires growth hormones and antibiotics in cows’ diets, and efficient feedlot architecture. Farmers can turn to reports to help calculate the maximum number of cattle that can fit in each pen, the minimum size of run-off channels that carry away thousands of tons of urine and manure, and the composition of chemicals needed to break down the waste as it collects in lagoons and drains into the soil. Different chemical mixes explain the varying toxic hues of each lagoon. These pictures were made by stitching together hundreds of high-resolution screen shots from publicly accessible satellite imaging software. The results are prints of great clarity and detail that capture the effects of feedlots on the land. The meat industry is a subject loaded with a moral and ethical charge. But when I think of these pictures, I don’t just see gigantic farms, I see an attitude toward life and death that exists throughout contemporary culture. These images reflect a blueprint and a horror that lie at the heart of the way we live.60 Mishka Henner, “Op-Ed: How the Meat Industry Marks the Land—in Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-marks-on-the-land-html-20151222-htmlstory.html; also available at the artist’s website, https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots.

Bracket, for a moment, Henner’s particular ethical point of view and consider how his structural analysis of an industry recalls the work of North African mosaic artists at the Villa Romana del Casale in the fourth century. Despite the obvious differences of space, time, and “attitude,” both artistic projects disclose “methods for maximizing yield in the minimum amount of time for the highest profit” in managing animals as commodities for mass slaughter. Both projects use a comprehensive, systematic approach in addressing an international industry with substantial agricultural and environmental implications. Moreover, both projects visualize complex spatiotemporal relationships on a large scale “by stitching together hundreds” of image fragments in one form or another—mosaic tesserae, digital screen shots—in producing works of “great clarity and detail.” The haunting echoes here across millennia suggest not so much a decisive shift through a supposed “civilizing process” but rather an ongoing, centuries-old negotiation of art, ecology, and the spectacle of slaughter.

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Description: Coronado Feeders, Dalhart Texas by Henner, Mischka

Fig. 26. Mishka Henner, Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas, 2012. Archival pigment print, 70 7/8 × 59 1/8 in. (180 × 150 cm)

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Description: Coronado Feeders, Dalhart Texas, detail by Henner, Mischka

Fig. 27. Mishka Henner, Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas (detail), 2012. Archival pigment print, 70 7/8 × 59 1/8 in. (180 × 150 cm)

Now let us consider another recent artistic example in more detail. On June 22, 2015, Canadian activist Anita Krajnc led a group intervention in Toronto to give water and comfort to pigs while bearing witness to their suffering from stress and heat exhaustion in a transport truck destined for an industrial slaughterhouse. It was one of many such inventions by Krajnc and her group, Toronto Pig Save (TPS), but on this occasion she was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and released on bail pending a court decision. Krajnc and her cause attracted international media attention. She was eventually acquitted at trial in 2017, when the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that her actions did not interfere with slaughterhouse operations or jeopardize safety. The Save Movement, which Krajnc cofounded in 2011, has since grown into a global organization of loosely affiliated local groups operating on six continents engaging politics of species and climate justice. The movement has been catalyzed in part by photographs taken by Krajnc and fellow activists to document their interventions (fig. 28). Journalists have written much about her activism and legal battles, but the specific visual character and significance of Save Movement photographic imagery has received little attention.61 Ian Purdy and Anita Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness! ‘Come Closer, as Close as You Can . . . and Try to Help!’: Tolstoy, Bearing Witness, and the Save Movement,” in Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 45–70, esp. 48–49; David Millward, “Woman Who Watered Thirsty Pigs Faces Threat of 10 Years in Jail,” Telegraph (U.K.), November 29, 2016; Ashifa Kassam, “Judge Dismisses Case of Woman Who Gave Water to Pigs Headed to Slaughter,” Guardian, May 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/04/canada-anita-krajnc-pigs-water-case-dismissed.

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Description: Anita Krajnc gives water to an overheated pig on way to slaughter by Garlin, Elli

Fig. 28. Elli Garlin, Anita Krajnc gives water to an overheated pig on way to slaughter, 2015. Digital photograph.

The remainder of this chapter examines Save Movement photography as an activist art practice that critically exposes the meat industry for causing untold suffering to livestock animals, notably pigs, whose cognitive and emotional capacities are often compared with those of dogs. Such photography also serves a related ecological goal of the movement by highlighting the industry’s enormous role in exacerbating climate change. As Krajnc observes in an essay explaining Save Movement aims and founding principles, “Those living in ‘advanced industrialized countries’ use a disproportionate share of environmental space (e.g., a greater share of the global atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse gases) and have profited in the past and present from environmental damage by not paying for the full costs of our consumption and wealth generation. As a result, we have an added duty to act.”62 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 53.

Since the late 1990s, long before she helped found the Save Movement, Krajnc has raised awareness about climate change and other environmental issues in tandem with human and animal rights. In her doctoral dissertation in political science at the University of Toronto, she wrote, “Efforts to end discrimination based on such arbitrary factors as race, sex, sexual orientation, ability, age, and species (in the case of animal rights) are essentially moral struggles, and involve similar ideals, namely, freedom, equality, and justice.” She draws inspiration from historical leaders of nonviolent progressive activism, including Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), and Martin Luther King Jr. By using photography to address animal cruelty and climate change as interconnected problems of social and environmental justice, Krajnc and her peers model an intersectional ecological approach to activism.63 Anita Krajnc, “Green Learning: The Role of Scientists and the Environmental Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2001), 8. On the intelligence and sentience of pigs and dogs, see Barbara J. King, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of the Animals We Eat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 143–65.

Epitomizing this approach are certain photographs taken by Krajnc depicting a partial view of a single pig, whose eye appears through an ocular opening in the transport truck wall. In such pictures, Krajnc creatively emphasizes animal subjectivity by making a captive being’s sentience the focal point of a framed “portrait”—a term she uses to describe many of her Save Movement images. The most powerful example of these, in my opinion, is Krajnc’s striking photograph of a sow, Portrait Mother Earth (2015), the unique title of which associates this pig with a planetary sense of environmental concern and animal personhood (fig. 29). Is this mere anthropomorphism or something else? For me, Krajnc’s picture functions differently from conventional humanized animals seen in Disney films and other popular imagery. Rather, her photograph challenges portraiture’s conventional humanism and expands its limits, inducing empathy by forcefully asserting the self-awareness, intelligence, and emotional capacity of pigs as sentient creatures to whom we have an ethical obligation. Sentiment obviously enhances the appeal of Portrait Mother Earth, but the image avoids saccharin excess by confronting beholders with glaring truths: the global meat industry engineers, confines, transports, slaughters, and commodifies millions of these individual beings as “pork” every day and more than a billion each year. Through its carefully conceived abstract composition—isolating the sow’s pensive face and eye while eliding most of her body—the photograph produces a restrained sense of affective depth that avoids aesthetic detachment, cloying mawkishness, or spectacular violence for knee-jerk emotional appeal.64 Matthew Zampa, “How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?,” Sentient Media, https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/; Bas Sanders, “Global Pig Slaughter Statistics and Charts,” Faunalytics, October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-pig-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/.

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Description: Portrait Mother Earth by Krajnc, Anita

Fig. 29. Anita Krajnc, Portrait Mother Earth, December 31, 2012. Digital photograph.

Portrait Mother Earth fulfills what Krajnc calls the Save Movement’s “central strategy,” namely “bearing witness” to meat industry violence in a way that “politicizes the transport trucks en route to slaughterhouses, making them noticeable,” and “draws attention to the animals suffering.” But Portrait Mother Earth accomplishes more than that. The picture recalls another statement by Krajnc regarding how “images of the animals in death trucks crying out, ‘Face us! Help!’ break the disconnect of cellophane and plastic wrapped ‘meat,’ ‘dairy,’ and ‘eggs’ with the incalculable pain and horror of individual animals wanting to escape confinement, torture, and death.” By giving the lie to “plastic wrapped ‘meat,’” Portrait Mother Earth critically addresses the commodifying impulse of industrial capitalism, which relentlessly abstracts and fetishizes specific living beings and social relations, fictively transforming them into what Karl Marx (1818–1883) described in Capital (1867) as “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Krajnc’s photograph thus appropriates capitalism’s abstracting impulse in order to expose it and turn it on its head. That is, by visually reducing a specific animal’s body to only a face with sentient eye, the image abstracts the pig, momentarily creating species confusion, inviting the viewer to identify with this other being. The picture conjures a generalized sense of subjectivity that is neither strictly human nor pig, represented through a technique best described as anti-speciesism, not anthropomorphism.65 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 45; Karl Marx, Capital (1867; reprint New York: Penguin, 1990), 165.

If Krajnc strategically dabbles in capitalism’s tendency to abstract and generalize, her photograph paradoxically invites empathetic response. As such, it counteracts the meat industry’s profit-driven transformation of other-than-human animals into commodities divorced from subjectivity, personhood, and labor. Think of the countless anthropomorphic advertising images of pigs and other creatures the industry uses to promote popular beliefs about their happy, willing availability for consumption as meat. Critiquing such consumer imagery, Nicole Shukin has observed,

Animal signs are anything but self-evident. Confronting their fetishistic functions in cultural discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries begins with a determination to excavate for the material histories of economic and symbolic power that are cunningly reified in them. Animal signs function fetishistically in both Marxian and psychoanalytic senses; that is, they endow the historical products of social labor to which they are articulated with an appearance of innate, spontaneous being, and they serve as powerful substitutes or ‘partial objects’ filling in for a lost object of desire or originary wholeness that never did or can exist, save phantasmatically.66 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3.

Krajnc’s Portrait Mother Earth could not be more different from such phantasmatic fetishism, because the picture’s activist abstraction helps “excavate the material histories” described by Shukin. As I explain shortly, Save Movement photography promotes this process of excavation by revealing the hidden logistics and public footprint of industrial meat. Also, by indexing living beings destined for slaughter, the images reframe photography’s temporality in other-than-human terms. Last, by situating the animal subject within a transport truck powered by fossil fuels, Save Movement photographs implicate the vehicle itself as a metonym for an industrial commodity chain that wreaks climate havoc and injustice. Often figured by Krajnc and her fellow activists as an unbearably overheated microclimate, the truck stands for the larger enterprise of meat production that adversely impacts the planet with greenhouse gas emissions.

THE SAVE MOVEMENT

Before scrutinizing Krajnc’s photograph, I will briefly trace the origins and history of the Save Movement she cofounded. As Krajnc explains, the movement draws inspiration from her reading of Tolstoy on vegetarianism and bearing witness as well as the modern history of nonviolent social movements, which she studied in graduate school. In her dissertation on “green learning,” quoted earlier, Krajnc distinguished scientific knowledge operating in the silos of “epistemic communities,” such as academia or government, from “broad based societal learning” of nongovernmental organizations. Such societal learning, she contends, “promotes public education which results in (1) public pressure on governments and intergovernmental bodies to adopt new or better policies, and (2) the transmittal of an ecological sensibility in global civil society, which further enhances environmental protection.” In drawing this distinction, Krajnc foreshadowed her activism with the Save Movement, which focuses on “the transmittal of an ecological sensibility in global civil society.” Her advocacy of “public education” outside “epistemic communities” also anticipated Save Movement photography as a provocative tool of visual instruction, deriving power from social engagement beyond the professional institutions of “art” even as it appropriates the aesthetic discourse of portraiture.67 Krajnc, “Green Learning,” i.

After completing her doctorate, Krajnc wrote academic articles and reviews based on her dissertation. By 2010, though, she moved away from academia into full-time community organizing and direct action. She recalls how

TPS was formed in December 2010, after Anita Krajnc walked with Mr. Bean, a lanky beagle and whippet mix adopted from Animal Alliance of Canada’s “Project Jessie,” along Lake Shore Boulevard [in Toronto], coming face to face with seven or eight transport trucks during rush-hour traffic. Each truck was crammed with inexpressibly sad and scared pigs, their little snouts poking out of the portholes, and their expressions enquiring, “Why?” The ensuing TPS group’s mission was simple: to make slaughterhouses have glass walls and thereby politicize the death trucks and slaughterhouses, help make the unseen seen, and to encourage activism, advocacy, and community organizing.68 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 46–47.

Her comment about making “the unseen seen” concisely summarizes Save Movement photography as a form of visual activism, countering the spectacle of commodified industrial meat in abundant cellophane packages. The images have been shared publicly and promoted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), but the movement’s emphasis on bearing witness distinguishes Krajnc and her group from more militant organizations such as the Animal Liberation Front or Mercy for Animals, whose members have engaged in the illegal release of nonhumans from captivity and posed as workers in order to document slaughterhouse operations. Besides taking photographs, Krajnc’s group organized the exhibition Art to Save Pigs, co-curated with Ian Purdy at Brock University’s “Thinking about Animals” conference in 2011—an event Krajnc describes as the “de facto public launch” of TPS and the Save Movement.69 Purdy and Krajnc, 47. See also “Art to Save Pigs,” Toronto Pig Save, http://www.torontopigsave.org/art-to-help-save-pigs/; “22 Heartbreaking Photos from Pigs’ Journey to Slaughter,” https://www.peta.org/features/heartbreaking-pig-transport-photos/; and Peter Young, Liberate: Stories and Lessons on Animal Liberation above the Law (N.p.: Warcry Communications, 2019).

Since 2011, Krajnc has focused on local interventions while helping to develop a global network of decentralized community organizations, whose goals are varied and evolving. In addition to pigs, Save activists raise awareness about the industrial slaughter of cows, chickens, turkeys, lambs, calves, and rabbits. The movement has expanded rapidly, forming fifty groups in North America, Europe, and Australia by 2015 and double that number by 2016. According to Krajnc, today there are “about 900 Save groups worldwide.” This exponential growth owes much to their decentralized structure. As Krajnc explains, “The movement is organized around loose anarchic principles rather than a hierarchical, top-down form” in order to be “welcoming to new members” and “facilitate the rise of a global movement.”70 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 59, 64. For “900 Save Groups Worldwide,” see Toronto Pig Save, https://torontopigsave.org/about-us/.

In January 2015, shortly before her arrest, Krajnc and TPS initiated a “climate vegan campaign” with public teach-ins, street art, and an Earth Day vegan food giveaway at Toronto’s city hall. The purpose of this new initiative, says Krajnc, was to highlight the fact that “it is not possible to reach international targets aimed at avoiding catastrophic climate change without a rapid radical dietary shift toward a plant-based diet.”71 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 65. The organization’s website offers this general mission statement: “Our goals are to raise awareness about the plight of farmed animals, to help people become vegan, and to build a mass-based, grassroots animal justice movement.”72 “What Is the Save Movement?,” https://veganactivism.org/pages/the-save-movement. Meanwhile, the affiliated Climate Save Movement makes this declaration:

Animal agriculture and fossil fuels are devastating our planet. We need to take drastic and immediate action. This year [2020] and decade are crucial if we are going to stop runaway climate chaos with areas of the world too hot to live in, with disease vectors spreading, ecological and agricultural systems breaking down and possibly leading to mass starvation, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events from hurricanes, floods, forest fires to droughts and sea level rise. Animal agriculture is a leading source of climate chaos, generating more greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) than all cars, trucks, planes, ships and other transportation modes combined and responsible for critical land use changes: deforesting the world to produce animal feed.73 “Climate Save Movement,” https://thesavemovement.org/climate-save-movement/.

The Save Movement’s wide-ranging integration of animal activism, environmentalism, and climate justice provides a useful case study in intersectional activism.

MEAT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

At first glance, the Save Movement’s attention to climate change in tandem with animal issues might seem strange or misplaced. Discussions in the United States about the causes of climate change have tended to revolve around fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with automobiles, airplanes, or other modes of transportation. Before the covid-19 pandemic, the Environmental Protection Agency identified transportation as leading all other sectors in generating 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, followed by electricity production (28 percent), industry (22 percent), commercial and residential heating (12 percent), and agriculture (9 percent). This American perspective skews understanding, however, for when climate change is viewed globally, agriculture and related issues of land use actually account for 24 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions—second only to electricity and heat production.74 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Total U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in 2017,” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions; “Global Emissions by Economic Sector,” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data#Sector.

Data compiled in 2018 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggests that agricultural livestock production in particular generates 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)—a figure expected to grow considerably as the world’s human population increases and more people adopt a Western-style diet heavy in meat and dairy. Other scientists have offered more alarming statistics, citing not only direct emissions but also climate effects of deforestation and carbon sequestration loss resulting from accelerating livestock production in South America and elsewhere. According to a report by the World Watch Institute from 2009, “Livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.” Regardless of the precise GHG figure and how to frame it, scientists agree about the upward global trend. A study from 2017 at Michigan State University observed, “Global demand for livestock products is expected to double by 2050, mainly due to improvement in the worldwide standard of living.” Whether this constitutes an improvement is debatable in light of the associated climate impacts. In 2019, a report by Harvard University’s Farmed Animal Law and Policy Program declared, “Unabated, the livestock sector could take between 37% and 49% of the GHG budget allowable under the 2°C and 1.5°C targets [of the 2015 Paris Agreement], respectively, by 2030.”75 Emissions Due to Agriculture: Global, Regional and Country Trends, 2000–2018, FAOSTAT Analytic Brief 18 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2020), [3], https://www.fao.org/3/cb3808en/cb3808en.pdf. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” World Watch, November–December 2009, 11. M. Melissa Rojas-Downing, A. Pouyan Nejadhashemi, Timothy Harrigan, and Sean A. Woznicki, “Climate Change and Livestock: Impacts, Adaptation, and Mitigation,” Climate Risk Management 16 (2017): 146. Helen Harwatt, “Including Animal to Plant Protein Shifts in Climate Change Mitigation Policy,” Climate Policy 19, no. 5 (2019): 533.

Reports about the coronavirus originating in or near a Wuhan, China, animal market have prompted new criticisms of the global meat industry by advocates of plant-based food, including the Save Movement. In a video posted on their website, Earth appears to be on fire and ravaged by infection as news reports link the virus to the Wuhan market, where animals were bought, sold, and slaughtered in close proximity with humans. In one passage, the video narrator intones, “The taste of animal flesh is not only harming animals but threatening our survival as a species. In a plant-based world, the opportunities for viruses and diseases to spread are far less great.” A closing caption reads: “Phase out fossil fuels. End animal agriculture and fishing. Reforest the earth.” As of this writing, scientists still debate the precise etiology of covid-19, but most studies, including one published in Nature on March 17, 2020, confirm that zoonotic transfer, or animal-to-human transmission, played a key role—very possibly at Wuhan. These developments temporarily galvanized the vegan food movement, which saw skyrocketing sales of plant-based alternative meat products, until inflationary pressures slowed the market in 2022.76 Animal Save Movement, “The coronavirus Explained: Where Did This Deadly Virus Come From?,” 2020, https://thesavemovement.org/coronavirus-pandemic/. Kristian G. Andersen et al., “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Medicine, March 17, 2020; Maria Chiorando, “US Vegan Meat Sales Skyrocket 280% amid Coronavirus Crisis,” Plant-Based News, March 25, 2020; Martine Paris and Deena Shanker, “Once-Hot Fake Meat Sees Sales Slide on Price and Being Too ‘Woke,’” Bloomberg, September 26, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-26/vegan-meat-sales-fall-with-high-prices-wokeness-turning-off-shoppers.

As we have seen, even before the pandemic, a mounting chorus of scientific reports already attributed substantial GHG emissions and other climate change vectors to the meat industry. These included rising methane emissions from livestock animals themselves, seventy billion of which were slaughtered worldwide in 2016, according to the nonprofit research organization Faunalytics (using FAO data), as well as carbon dioxide exhaust associated with their transport and other sources. This says nothing about impacts on water consumption and land use. Destruction of rain forests to create ranch land and cultivate animal feed grains further exacerbate GHG emissions by reducing the planet’s carbon-absorbing capacity. Still other impacts, such as biodiversity loss from monoculture and environmental injustices facing human residents forced to endure pollution and health problems living near or working in factory farms and slaughterhouses, do not even enter into climate change calculations. Perhaps the starkest irony about industrial meat production concerns its massive use of grain and land simply to feed livestock before slaughter, inefficiently converting one quantity of caloric energy into a lesser quantity in the form of meat. A destructive constellation of Western cultural tastes and economic biases favoring unsustainable consumption of flesh thus drive an expanding neocolonial system of industrial meat premised on waste, inequity, and greed—all at the expense of the planet and its disenfranchised inhabitants, both human and other-than-human.77 Faunalytics, “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts,” October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. On environmental justice and other negative externalities of industrial meat, see Annie Speicher and Matt Wechsler, dirs., Right to Harm (Hourglass Films, 2019), DVD, 75 min.; Winders and Ransom, Global Meat; Emel and Neo, Political Ecologies of Meat; and Imhoff, CAFO Reader.

THE PUNCTUM OF DEATH AND TIME

Let us now return to Krajnc’s Portrait Mother Earth and Save Movement photography in order to reflect further on how they engage these issues (see fig. 29). Unlike more familiar and shocking imagery produced inside slaughterhouses by activists working for other organizations, Save Movement photographs document the transport of livestock animals in trucks on public streets. Many Save Movement pictures are disturbing nonetheless, for they often show thirsty, anxious pigs foaming at the mouth and/or bleeding from orifices and wounds sustained at the industrial feedlot or in transit. Additional photographs depict activists bearing witness, giving water to the pigs, holding signs, and speaking with passersby. Instead of exposing violent actions on the killing floor or at the cafo, Save Movement images represent an interstitial stage in the process of meat production, revealing how its commodity chain insidiously extends beyond the barricaded private fortresses of cultivation and slaughter into the broader public sphere. Not unlike the mosaics at Piazza Armerina, the photographs thus perform an ecological function by connecting the dots in an otherwise hidden economy of food, disclosing a banal, logistical transition between living beings and dead meat—a transition dependent upon fossil fuels.

Furthermore, by highlighting that transitional moment before slaughter, Save Movement images reconfigure in other-than-human terms certain dynamics of temporality and mortality that prominent cultural critics have long associated with photography. For example, in her classic study On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag (1933–2004) wrote: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. . . . Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”78 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15, 70.

Sontag’s violent references to “slicing,” “freezing,” “melt,” “destruction,” and “death” eerily acquire new meaning in this context, where industry renders certain living beings “things.” Krajnc and her fellow activists did not intend to comment on Sontag’s famous text, but their images nevertheless invite us to reimagine such critical vocabulary, including the “vulnerability of lives,” in broader, more-than-human terms. Likewise, Save Movement photographs prompt new reflection on influential observations about time and mortality by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) in Camera Lucida (1981): “The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents. . . . Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”79 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 85, 87.

In another memorable passage, Barthes meditates on Alexander Gardner’s photograph taken in 1865 of Lewis Payne, a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (fig. 30). Arrested, imprisoned, and awaiting execution, Payne sits shackled in confinement, looking directly at the beholder. Barthes describes what he calls the “punctum,” or an unintended element that “pricks” his attention, in this photograph of Payne: “He is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose . . . the photograph tells me death in the future.”80 Barthes, 96.

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Description: Washington Navy Yard, D.C., Lewis Payne by Gardner, Alexander

Fig 30. Alexander Gardner, Washington Navy Yard, D.C., Lewis Payne, 1865. Digital photograph from original negative, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Krajnc’s Portrait Mother Earth projects death in a disconcertingly similar manner through the figure of a condemned animal staring at the viewer. Although no connection of influence links these two photographs taken 150 years apart, each manifests uncanny power as memento mori, or reminder of mortality, registering “time’s relentless melt” (Sontag) as well as the “horror” of “an anterior future of which death is the stake” (Barthes). Both Payne and this sow are long since dead, but their images remain as lasting tokens of their doomed living presence before the camera. The key difference, of course, apart from ideological questions of guilt and innocence regarding each subject, is the fact that Krajnc’s photograph recasts the critical dynamics of mortality and temporality articulated by Sontag and Barthes in other-than-human terms for activist purposes in behalf of species and climate justice. Whereas Payne was guilty of conspiring to murder a U.S. president, Mother Earth confronts us as the innocent victim of an industrial system that is killing the planet. Even so, I would argue, by introducing momentary confusion about species identity (as noted earlier), Portrait Mother Earth avoids the sort of obviousness and conventionality that Barthes associated with “enthusiastic commitment” or studium in photography—a related term denoting cultural framing and motivation that counteracts the idiosyncratic unpredictability of the punctum. An “enthusiastic commitment” surely motivates Anita Krajnc and the Save Movement, but this does not overwhelm Portrait Mother Earth by rapidly exhausting visual interest. In my experience—in classrooms, lectures, conversations—viewers find the picture both striking and compelling enough to linger upon it.

Some readers might object that my interpretation distorts the critical intentions of Sontag and Barthes by adapting them inappropriately to a photograph of an animal. The same readers may also find this adaptation moralistic. Yet such objections, which I frequently encounter when discussing animal ethics, oddly never seem to arise regarding humans caught up in the same structures of representation, revealing a double standard. Is Gardner’s nationalistic photograph of Payne any less culturally framed or moralizing in pursuing its aims than Krajnc’s Portrait Mother Earth? I think not. Regarding Barthes in particular, of all critical theorists he would probably have been amenable to the semantic drift I propose, given his poststructuralist, anti-intentionalist inclinations in Camera Lucida, “The Death of the Author,” and other texts. Like Gardner, Krajnc demonstrates the power of photography to certify presence while exposing the punctum of death and time. No more or less “enthusiastic” about “commitment” than Gardner, Krajnc “pricks” our attention in confronting an industrial process that endlessly slaughters animals for meat while exacerbating climate change.81 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. For the “anterior future” in other portraits of condemned nonhumans, see Aline Smithson, "Yun-Fei Tou: Memento Mori," Lenscratch, November 24, 2014, http://lenscratch.com/2014/11/yun-fei-tou-memento-mori/.

POSTSCRIPT: DECOLONIAL VEGANISM VERSUS CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHY

I conclude with a decolonial perspective on Save Movement vegan advocacy, which raises important environmental justice questions about their intersectional activism. Veganism, a plant-based philosophy of abstinence from animal products, constitutes a guiding principle of the movement, as it does for PETA, the Humane League, Mercy for Animals, and other organizations, along with a growing number of nonactivist individuals. Activists and nonactivists alike often embrace veganism for its overlapping benefits: counteracting violence against animals, promoting environmental justice, improving health, and more. In recent years, veganism has attracted more diverse adherents, some pursuing it for personal reasons while others build coalitions campaigning for animal rights, environmental causes, and/or cultural self-empowerment. Still other vegans have adopted militant activist practices that tend to be exclusionary.82 Julia Feliz Brueck, Veganism of Color: Decentering Whiteness in Human and Nonhuman Liberation (N.p.: Sanctuary, 2019); Aph Ko and Syl Ko, Aprho-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism by Two Sisters (New York: Lantern, 2017).

The Save Movement ardently campaigns for species and climate justice in opposition to industrial meat production, but it espouses a fundamentally peaceful, nonviolent, and apparently inclusive approach to vegan activism. The movement’s mission statement mentions wanting “to help people become vegan,” adding, “We use a non-violent, love based approach to community organizing . . . inclusive and welcoming to all.” Precise information about membership diversity does not appear on the Save Movement website, but the existence of nine hundred local groups on six continents confirms its international scope. And while the number of Save organizations in North America and Europe far exceeds those elsewhere, the presence of several hundred groups in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa indicates that the movement is thriving beyond the so-called Global North.83 “What Is the Save Movement?” https://thesavemovement.org/animal-save-movement/; “List of Save Groups,” http://thesavemovement.org/list-of-save-groups/.

At first glance, the Save Movement’s expansive growth mirrors the trajectory of Euro-American imperialism. Yet as a decentralized organization committed to nonviolence, it must be distinguished from imperialism, including militant animal activism that alienates, excludes, and colonizes. A notorious example of such militant activism occurred when the Progressive Animal Welfare Society and other groups aggressively contested the Makah Tribe’s reassertion of whaling rights for subsistence and spiritual reasons after a hiatus of several decades, upon the gray whale’s removal from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1999. Militant activists opposed delisting and all hunting, arguing that killing any whales was unnecessary. They also cited the cynical involvement of Japanese industrial interests, which supported the Makah as a self-serving ploy to loosen International Whaling Commission restrictions. For these activists, it did not matter that the Makah worked closely with the commission to develop sustainable and culturally respectful hunting procedures.84 Makah Tribe, “The Makah Whaling Tradition,” https://makah.com/makah-tribal-info/whaling/; International Whaling Commission, “Description of the USA Aboriginal Subsistence Hunt: Makah Tribe,” https://iwc.int/makah-tribe; Frank Hopper, “Makah One Step Closer to Hunting Whales: Animal Rights Extremists Continue to Oppose It,” Indian Country Today, May 7, 2019. On Japan’s whaling industry, see Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 174–76.

Examining the Makah whaling controversy, political scientist Claire Jean Kim argues, “race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power” at a time when neoliberalism “has escalated the war on racialized others, animals, and nature in the name of concentrating wealth and privilege in the hands of a tiny elite.” In scrutinizing this power, Kim opposes “single optics” in favor of “a multi-optic approach that takes different forms of domination seriously.” Accordingly, constructive work is being done to bridge differences and build coalitions between Indigenous people and some vegan activists, for example. Though challenging, such coalitions offer promising opportunities for achieving decolonial activism in behalf of animal rights, veganism, and human environmental justice. Instead of harassing Indigenous communities, the Save Movement uses intersectional strategies to contest a far more destructive target: industrial meat production, which annually slaughters seventy billion land animals for food worldwide while generating 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—at a time when the Sixth Mass Extinction proceeds apace, with the United Nations predicting the annihilation of one million species (plants and animals) this century.85 Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), cover, 8. See also Melissa Legge and Rasha Taha, “‘Fake Vegans’: Indigenous Solidarity and Animal Liberation Activism,” Journal of Indigenous Social Development 6, no. 1 (2017): 63–81. Darryl Fears, “One Million Species Face Extinction, U.N. Report Says,” Washington Post, May 6, 2019.

Corresponding with Anita Krajnc, I asked her about the Save Movement’s position on Indigenous hunting and whaling. She said this:

We haven’t taken a position on whaling by indigenous peoples as we see the main problem is with factory farms and commercial whaling. We do have a Whale Save group in Iceland and Norway, for example. We do stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples. We work with Amazon Watch and Extinction Rebellion for example. In 2019 we supported and participated in their awareness raising and direct actions worldwide and financially contributed 15,000 USD towards a PSA [public service announcement] for Amazon Watch featuring Amazonia indigenous leaders.86 Anita Krajnc to Alan C. Braddock, email message, December 8, 2019.

By standing in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and working with organizations like Amazon Watch and Extinction Rebellion, the Save Movement offers an intersectional model of activism. Such activism differs dramatically from that of exclusionary militant groups whose narrow focus on animal rights as an end in itself ignores historical inequities and asymmetries of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. While still evolving, the Save Movement imagines environmental justice expansively as a trans-species project. Bearing witness to the sentience and suffering of livestock animals within a broader imperative to oppose fossil fuels and associated inequities faced by humans and nonhumans, Anita Krajnc and her colleagues invite all to join the cause in behalf of Mother Earth.

A brief concluding comparative example highlights the distinctive orientation of Save Movement imagery. During 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Jo-Anne MacArthur and Keith Wilson published the book Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, compiling pictures by forty photojournalists representing nonhuman beings in various deadly and deplorable conditions around the world—mostly in slaughterhouses, but also in scientific research facilities, religious mass sacrifices, poorly maintained private zoos, and exploitive entertainment scenarios. The images are unsettling and difficult to view. Exemplifying their intensity, a photograph by MacArthur shows cattle killed, and about to be killed, in a Turkish slaughterhouse (fig. 31). An introductory statement explains the book’s purpose: “Hidden shines a light on the invisible animals in our lives: those with whom we have a close relationship and yet fail to see. The animals we eat and wear; the animals we use for research, work, and for entertainment; the animals we sacrifice in the name of tradition and religion. Hidden is a historical document, a memorial, and an indictment of what is and should never again be.”87 Jo-Anne MacArthur and Keith Wilson, eds., Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene (New York: Lantern, 2020).

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Description: Stunning is not always effective. Hanging from a chain, a conscious steer writhes in...

Fig. 31. Jo-Anne MacArthur, “Stunning is not always effective. Hanging from a chain, a conscious steer writhes in agony and fear before having its throat cut, Turkey,” 2020.

As that statement and the book’s title suggest, Hidden offers an exposé intended to break down the wall of public invisibility that Timothy Pachirat identified as characteristic of the industrial slaughterhouse and its “politics of sight.” Augmented with assorted statistics about the monumental scale of slaughter in various abattoir facilities around the world, the book expands the scope of Pachirat’s study visually and geographically. In that respect, Hidden also participates in the broader arc of aesthetics and attitudes traced here, from ancient spectacles of imperial slaughter to modern sensibilities of discomfort toward cruelty, which historians have associated with the civilizing process. A foreword by the prominent actor and activist Joaquin Phoenix frames Hidden as part of an activist “battle” against “powerful enterprises” that “exploit entire communities and wreak havoc on our planet.” Accordingly, says Phoenix, MacArthur and her peers are “like conflict photographers documenting war and other humanitarian crises.” Such a statement concurs with a key point of the present chapter, namely that Earth is an abattoir of large-scale conflict.88 MacArthur and Wilson, 27, 210.

Although the makers of Hidden deserve credit for their unflinching courage in confronting and documenting the cruelty of mass slaughter, the book also inadvertently exposes the shortcomings of some activist art. For one thing, its visceral realism produces a visual spectacle strangely reminiscent of public slaughter in the ancient Roman arena, despite the authors’ radically different motivations and attitude. Though undoubtedly galvanizing to some activist viewers, this kind of imagery may produce unhelpful voyeuristic fascination as well as alienation and resignation among others, for whom its hopeless, unrelenting exploration of violence is simply too intense and emotionally exhausting. Not unlike Bataille’s use of bloody slaughterhouse photographs by Eli Lotar, the imagery in Hidden seems calculated mainly to shock privileged “good folk” who remain comfortably in denial or otherwise insulated from the realities depicted. Such a strategy serves a limited purpose in revealing the violence of slaughter, but without any admixture of optimism or productive cues for positive change, the book risks causing paralysis rather than mobilization. Moreover, whereas Save Movement photographs represent pigs and other nonhumans as fellow beings with subtly abstract compositions that challenge speciesism, those in Hidden cast other animals solely as pitiful victims of human violence and cruelty.

Last, in contrast to both the Save Movement’s inclusive global invocation to love and Pachirat’s sympathetic portrayal of fellow slaughterhouse workers, Hidden stigmatizes people who slaughter animals around the world without adequately contemplating their predicament—their implication—as corollary casualties of the global meat-industrial-complex. This uncritical, asymmetric representation of working people, combined with the book’s vague assertions about a collective “we,” creates obscurity about the relations of production and consumption. MacArthur and Wilson’s project thus misses an opportunity to engage broader, transspecies politics of environmental justice encompassing animals, workers, and consumers (of both meat and images). It is precisely the latter, more inclusive, approach that both activism and ecocritical art history ought to employ in order to reshape the planetary abattoir shared by all of Earth’s inhabitants.

Epigraph: “abattoir, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/137.

1 Masayuki Sato, The Confucian Quest for Order: The Origin and Formation of the Political Thought of Xun Zi (Boston: Brill, 2003), 54. »

2 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 51. »

3 J. Donald Hughes, Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 97; Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (London: Profile Books, 2011), 94, estimate that eight thousand humans were killed in the Flavian Amphitheater every year. »

4 Ki-Baik Lee, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 47. »

5 Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107; Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahadeh, The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Islamic World (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Center, 2001), 60. »

6 Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492," Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13-36. »

7 Gerard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to al Qaeda, trans. Edward Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, and Jesse Browner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 89. »

8 Kenneth W. Swope, On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China during the Ming-Qing Transition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 2; Michael Dillon, China: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379. »

9 Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 122. »

10 Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012), xxiii. »

11 James B. Minahan, Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2014), 73; Ho-dong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1862–1877 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). »

12 John Graham Royde-Smith, "World War I: Killed, Wounded, and Missing," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing »

13 Dinah Shelton and Howard Adelman, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, 3 vols. (Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 2:646. »

14 Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). »

15 “Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National WWII Museum (New Orleans), https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war; “World War II Casualties by Country,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country. »

16 David M. Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2008), 447. »

17 CNN Editorial Research, “Korean War Fast Facts,” CNN, June 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/asia/korean-war-fast-facts/index.html. »

18 Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Books, 2012); Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 158. »

19 “How Many People Died in the Vietnam War?,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-in-the-Vietnam-War. »

20 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 547. »

21 Omar Shahabudin McDoom, “Contested Counting: Toward a Rigorous Estimate of the Death Toll in the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 83–93. »

22 Jeffrey Gettleman, “The World’s Worst War,” New York Times, December 15, 2012. »

23 Iraq Body Count, https://www.iraqbodycount.org/. »

24 “Factbox: The Cost of Ten Years of Devastating Civil War in Syria,” Reuters, May 26, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/cost-ten-years-devastating-war-syria-2021-05-26/. »

25 Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler, “Shootings Never Stopped during the Pandemic: 2020 Was the Deadliest Gun Violence Year in Decades,” Washington Post, March 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/. »

26 “1 Million Plant and Animal Species Are at Risk of Extinction, U.N. Report Says,” NPR, May 6, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/06/720654249/1-millionanimal-and-plant-species-face-extinction-risk-u-n-report-says. »

27 “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts” (based on U.N. FAO data), Faunalytics, October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. See also University of Oxford, “Our World in Data: Number of Animals Slaughtered for Meat, World,” https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/animals-slaughtered-for-meat?country=~OWID_WRL. »

28 Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter Raven, “Vertebrates on the Brink as Indicators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 24 (2020): 13596–602. On the etymology of “ecology,” see Introduction. »

29 Höss quoted in Stephen F. Eisenman, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2013), 186. Ford quoted in Ray Batchelor, Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism and Design (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), 47. On the influence of the “disassembly line” process at Swift and Company’s Chicago slaughterhouse on Henry Ford’s innovative assembly line automobile production, see also David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 14–15. On the historical development of the abattoir/slaughterhouse as an institution, see Paula Young Lee, ed., Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press in association with University Press of New England, 2008). See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 209–56; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 207–59; and Dominic A. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For 1865–1900 slaughter data, see Mark R. Wilson, “Union Stock Yard & Transit Co.,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: Newberry Library, 2005), http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2883.html. »

30 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906); Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine: Scènes de la vie parisienne: Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, in Oeuvres complètes, 26 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1869–76), 9:346; Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale (London: Chapman and Hall, 1841), 110; German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981), 70 (on Corinth); Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Susan Blair (New Rochelle, N.Y.: A. D. Caratzas, Orpheus, 1989); Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Delacorte, 1969); Amnesty International, Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria (London: Amnesty International, 2017). »

31 “abattoir.—L’abattoir relève de la religion en ce sens que des temples des époques reculées, (sans parler de nos jours de ceux des hindous) étaient à double usage, servant en même temps aux implorations et aux tueries. Il en résultait sans aucun doute (on peut en juger d’après l’aspect de chaos des abattoirs actuels) une coïncidence bouleversante entre les mystères mythologiques et la grandeur lugubre caractéristique des lieux où le sang coule. Il est curieux de voir s’exprimer en Amérique un regret lancinant: W. B. Seabrook constatant que la vie orgiaque a subsisté, mais que le sang de sacrifices n’est pas mêlé aux cocktails, trouve insipide les mœurs actuelles. Cependant de nos jours l’abattoir est maudit et mis en quarantaine comme un bateau portant le choléra. Or les victimes de cette malédiction ne sont pas les bouchers ou les animaux, mais les braves gens eux-mêmes qui en sont arrivés à ne pouvoir supporter que leur propre laideur, laideur répondent en effet à un besoin maladif de propreté, de petitesse bilieuse et d’ennui: la malédiction (qui ne terrifie que ceux qui la profèrent) les amène à végéter aussi loin que possible des abattoirs, à s’exiler par correction dans un monde amorphe, où il n’y a plus rien d’horrible et où, subissant l’obsession indélébile de l’ignominie, ils sont réduits à manger du fromage.” Georges Bataille, “Abattoir,” Documents, no. 6 (1929): 327–29. English translation by Annette Michelson in October 36 (Spring 1986): 10. »

32 Joe Ollmann, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2016); Kyri Claflin, “La Villette: City of Blood (1867–1914),” in Lee, Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, 27–45. »

33 On the Altar of Hieron, see Caroline Lehmler, Syrakus unter Agathokles und Hieron II: Die Verbindung von Kultur und Macht in einer hellenistischen Metropole (Frankfurt: Verlag Antike, 2005), 138–43; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, vol. 4, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 375 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11.72.2, page 313. »

34 Olivia Lang, “Hindu Sacrifice of 250,000 Animals Begins,” Guardian, November 24, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/hindu-sacrifice-gadhimai-festival-nepal; Anil Bhanot, “The Gadhimai Sacrifice Is Grotesque,” Guardian, November 25, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/gadhimai-animal-sacrifice-nepal; Manesh Shrestha, “Death and the Goddess: The World’s Biggest Ritual Slaughter,” CNN, December 1, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/world/asia/nepal-gadhimai-ritual-slaughter; “Gadhimai: Nepal’s Animal Sacrifice Festival Goes Ahead Despite ‘Ban,’” BBC News, December 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50644035; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). »

35 Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1, 3–4, 14–15, 47, 53, 61, 70, 76, 80, 159, 203, 290n2. »

36 Sofia Barchiesi and Marina Minozzi, The Galleria Borghese: The Masterpieces (Rome: Scala, 2006), 13. For an especially insightful discussion of such art (though not addressing the Borghese Gallery mosaics), see Shelby Brown, “Death as Decoration: Scenes from the Arena on Roman Domestic Mosaics,” in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 180–211. »

37 Scholarship on the Roman arena is vast and growing. See, e.g., David Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021); Iain Ferris, Cave Canem: Animals and Roman Society (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Amberley, 2018); Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998); K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Reenactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73; and George Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1937). »

38 Bomgardner, Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, xxii, 25; Ferris, Cave Canem, 110; Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 41; Nathan T. Elkins, A Monument to Dynasty and Death: The Story of Rome’s Colosseum and the Emperors Who Built It (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 3; Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 42; Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure, 47; Livy, History of Rome, vol. 11, trans. J. C. Yardley, Loeb Classical Library 313 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 39.22, page 269. »

39 Petronius, Satyricon, trans. Gareth Schmeling, Loeb Classical Library 15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 45.4–6, pages 149–51. »

40 For “carnarium” as slaughterhouse, see, e.g., Michael J. Carter, “Bloodbath: Artemidorus, Αποτομοσ Combat, and Ps.-Quintilian’s ‘The Gladiator,’” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 193 (2015): 41; and William Arrowsmith, “Luxury and Death in the Satyricon,” Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and Classics 5, no. 3 (1966): 314. Referring to the Colosseum in particular as a “slaughterhouse” has become a kind of set piece in recent historical scholarship and popular writing. On the Colosseum as “slaughterhouse,” see Jérôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, 2nd ed., trans. E. O. Lorimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 244; and Bernard Frischer and Steven Zucker, “Ruin as Abattoir, the Colosseum,” Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History, July 19, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/ruin-abattoir-the-colosseum/. »

41 Augustus, The Acts of Augustus as Recorded on the Monumentum Ancyranum (Res Gestae Divi Augusti), trans. Frederick W. Shipley, Loeb Classical Library 152 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 13.22, page 383. »

42 Cassius Dio, Roman History, vols. 8, 9, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 176, 177 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925, 1927), 66.25.1 (Titus), 68.15.1 (Trajan), 73.15.2–6 (Commodus emulating Hercules), and 73.18.1 (Commodus killing bears), pages 8:311, 389, 9:85, 107; Aelius Apartianus, “Hadrian,” in Historia Augusta, vol. 1, trans. David Magie, Loeb Classical Library 139 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), page 59; Herodian, History of the Empire, trans. C. R. Whittaker, Loeb Classical Library 454 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1.15.4–6, 1.16.11, pages 101, 103, 121. Ridley Scott, dir., Gladiator (Scott Free Productions / DreamWorks, 2000). »

43 Patrizio Pensabene and Enrico Gallocchio, “The Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” Expedition 53, no. 2 (2011): 29–37; Gino Vinicio Gentili, La Villa Romana di Piazza Armerina Palazzo Erculio, 3 vols. (Osimo, Italy: Fundazione Don Carlo, 1999); R. J. A. Wilson, Piazza Armerina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Andrea Carandini, Richerche sullo stile e la cronologia dei mosaici della Villa di Piazza Armerina ([Rome]: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1964). »

44 Petronius, Satyricon, 119.14.5–20, pages 335, 337. »

45 On The Great Hunt mosaic, see Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 31–32; Gentili, Villa Romana, 3:76–108; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 14, 24–25, 32, 39–41, 45–48, 52–53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 74, 82, 84, 87–89, 93, 97, 101. On Roman vivaria, see Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure, 174–76. »

46 Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 32. For discussion of the child hunting imagery, see Gentili, Villa Romana, 148–55; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 50–55. »

47 On North African artists and materials, see Dunbabin, Mosaics of North Africa, 197–98; and Wilson, Piazza Armerina, 32. For discussion of the villa owner, see Pensabene and Gallocchio, “Villa del Casale of Piazza Armerina,” 35. »

48 Strabo, Geography, vol. 1, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library 49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 503. »

49 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 315 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 291. On the Blemmyae, see Jessie A. Maritz, “From Roman Africa to Roman America,” Classical World 106, no. 3 (2013): 465, 471. »

50 Themistius, Oration 10.139d, trans. Laurence J. Daly, “A Mandarin of Late Antiquity: The Political Life and Thought of Themistius” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1970), 241–42. »

51 Plutarch, “Precepts of Statecraft,” in Moralia, vol. 10, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 321 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 802D, page 181. »

52 Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” in Moralia, vol. 12, trans. Harold Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library 406 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 991D, page 525. »

53 Plutarch, “On the Eating of Flesh,” part 1, in Moralia, vol. 12, 993A–B, page 541. »

54 Plutarch, 993F, 12:545. »

55 Bomgardner, Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 369; Luxorius quoted at 370–71. »

56 Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 5. »

57 Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds, 9–10. »

58 Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation (New York: OR Books, 2012). For more on Coe, see Stephen F. Eisenman, The Ghosts of Our Meat: Sue Coe (Carlisle, Pa.: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 2013). On cafos and industrial meat production, see Bill Winders and Elizabeth Ransom, eds., Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019); Jody Emel and Harvey Neo, eds., Political Ecologies of Meat (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Daniel Imhoff, The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Berkeley: Watershed Media/University of California Press, 2010). »

59 For a discussion of Coe’s Feed Lot as an example of “muckraking,” see Allison Carruth, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 132–32. »

60 Mishka Henner, “Op-Ed: How the Meat Industry Marks the Land—in Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-marks-on-the-land-html-20151222-htmlstory.html; also available at the artist’s website, https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots. »

61 Ian Purdy and Anita Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness! ‘Come Closer, as Close as You Can . . . and Try to Help!’: Tolstoy, Bearing Witness, and the Save Movement,” in Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 45–70, esp. 48–49; David Millward, “Woman Who Watered Thirsty Pigs Faces Threat of 10 Years in Jail,” Telegraph (U.K.), November 29, 2016; Ashifa Kassam, “Judge Dismisses Case of Woman Who Gave Water to Pigs Headed to Slaughter,” Guardian, May 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/04/canada-anita-krajnc-pigs-water-case-dismissed. »

62 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 53. »

63 Anita Krajnc, “Green Learning: The Role of Scientists and the Environmental Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2001), 8. On the intelligence and sentience of pigs and dogs, see Barbara J. King, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of the Animals We Eat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 143–65. »

64 Matthew Zampa, “How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?,” Sentient Media, https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/; Bas Sanders, “Global Pig Slaughter Statistics and Charts,” Faunalytics, October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-pig-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. »

65 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 45; Karl Marx, Capital (1867; reprint New York: Penguin, 1990), 165. »

66 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3. »

67 Krajnc, “Green Learning,” i. »

68 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 46–47. »

69 Purdy and Krajnc, 47. See also “Art to Save Pigs,” Toronto Pig Save, http://www.torontopigsave.org/art-to-help-save-pigs/; “22 Heartbreaking Photos from Pigs’ Journey to Slaughter,” https://www.peta.org/features/heartbreaking-pig-transport-photos/; and Peter Young, Liberate: Stories and Lessons on Animal Liberation above the Law (N.p.: Warcry Communications, 2019). »

70 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 59, 64. For “900 Save Groups Worldwide,” see Toronto Pig Save, https://torontopigsave.org/about-us/. »

71 Purdy and Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness!,” 65. »

72 “What Is the Save Movement?,” https://veganactivism.org/pages/the-save-movement. »

73 “Climate Save Movement,” https://thesavemovement.org/climate-save-movement/. »

74 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Total U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in 2017,” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions; “Global Emissions by Economic Sector,” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data#Sector. »

75 Emissions Due to Agriculture: Global, Regional and Country Trends, 2000–2018, FAOSTAT Analytic Brief 18 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2020), [3], https://www.fao.org/3/cb3808en/cb3808en.pdf. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” World Watch, November–December 2009, 11. M. Melissa Rojas-Downing, A. Pouyan Nejadhashemi, Timothy Harrigan, and Sean A. Woznicki, “Climate Change and Livestock: Impacts, Adaptation, and Mitigation,” Climate Risk Management 16 (2017): 146. Helen Harwatt, “Including Animal to Plant Protein Shifts in Climate Change Mitigation Policy,” Climate Policy 19, no. 5 (2019): 533. »

76 Animal Save Movement, “The coronavirus Explained: Where Did This Deadly Virus Come From?,” 2020, https://thesavemovement.org/coronavirus-pandemic/. Kristian G. Andersen et al., “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Medicine, March 17, 2020; Maria Chiorando, “US Vegan Meat Sales Skyrocket 280% amid Coronavirus Crisis,” Plant-Based News, March 25, 2020; Martine Paris and Deena Shanker, “Once-Hot Fake Meat Sees Sales Slide on Price and Being Too ‘Woke,’” Bloomberg, September 26, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-26/vegan-meat-sales-fall-with-high-prices-wokeness-turning-off-shoppers. »

77 Faunalytics, “Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts,” October 10, 2018, https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-and-charts/. On environmental justice and other negative externalities of industrial meat, see Annie Speicher and Matt Wechsler, dirs., Right to Harm (Hourglass Films, 2019), DVD, 75 min.; Winders and Ransom, Global Meat; Emel and Neo, Political Ecologies of Meat; and Imhoff, CAFO Reader. »

78 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15, 70. »

79 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 85, 87. »

80 Barthes, 96. »

81 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. For the “anterior future” in other portraits of condemned nonhumans, see Aline Smithson, "Yun-Fei Tou: Memento Mori," Lenscratch, November 24, 2014, http://lenscratch.com/2014/11/yun-fei-tou-memento-mori/. »

82 Julia Feliz Brueck, Veganism of Color: Decentering Whiteness in Human and Nonhuman Liberation (N.p.: Sanctuary, 2019); Aph Ko and Syl Ko, Aprho-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism by Two Sisters (New York: Lantern, 2017). »

83 “What Is the Save Movement?” https://thesavemovement.org/animal-save-movement/; “List of Save Groups,” http://thesavemovement.org/list-of-save-groups/. »

84 Makah Tribe, “The Makah Whaling Tradition,” https://makah.com/makah-tribal-info/whaling/; International Whaling Commission, “Description of the USA Aboriginal Subsistence Hunt: Makah Tribe,” https://iwc.int/makah-tribe; Frank Hopper, “Makah One Step Closer to Hunting Whales: Animal Rights Extremists Continue to Oppose It,” Indian Country Today, May 7, 2019. On Japan’s whaling industry, see Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 174–76. »

85 Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), cover, 8. See also Melissa Legge and Rasha Taha, “‘Fake Vegans’: Indigenous Solidarity and Animal Liberation Activism,” Journal of Indigenous Social Development 6, no. 1 (2017): 63–81. Darryl Fears, “One Million Species Face Extinction, U.N. Report Says,” Washington Post, May 6, 2019. »

86 Anita Krajnc to Alan C. Braddock, email message, December 8, 2019. »

87 Jo-Anne MacArthur and Keith Wilson, eds., Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene (New York: Lantern, 2020). »

88 MacArthur and Wilson, 27, 210. »

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