Flesh, Death and Tofu : Hunters, Vegetarians and Carnal Knowledge (original) (raw)
Related papers
More than the kill: hunters' relationships with landscape and prey.
Current Issues in Tourism, 2009
Through a discussion of the perceptions of hunters within a New Zealand tourism context, this article explores how different perspectives of the ‘connection’ between hunter and prey are performed by participants and analysed by scholars using distinct ethical approaches. It attempts to contribute to the conversation about hunting ethics within the tourism and recreation fields by discussing the limitations of environmental ethical positions involved in analysing hunters' narratives and performances while engaging with their prey. An analysis of the sublime environment in which the hunting performance takes place proves to be central to the discussion of this sensual engagement with the hunted animal. It is argued that the contradictory feelings that sometimes prevail within hunters when it comes to the relationship between loving and killing must be considered in this kind of research and that some hunting practices are undoubtedly a way to feel close to, and engaged with, the target animals that are offered respect. Hunting expressions as dynamic cultural performances serve to generate fruitful discussions, contributing to an understanding of broader tourist relationships with nonhuman animals and the ethical issues involved in hunting practices.
Predation, Pain, and Evil: Anti-hunting as Theodicy
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2017
The classical problem of natural evil holds that the suffering of sentient beings caused by natural processes is an evil for which a divinity is morally responsible. Theodicies either explain natural evil as a punitive imperfection in nature, which humans ought to avoid and/or purify, or as a constituent part of a greater good whereby the evil is redeemed. The environmental ethics literature has taken the latter route with respect to the secular problem of natural evil, arguing that local disvalues such as predation or pain are transmuted into systemic-level ecological goods. The anti-hunting literature takes the former route, arguing that humans should not participate in the predatory aspects of the natural order. The anti-predation literature, furthermore, argues that nature should be redeemed – so far as is technologically and economically possible – of its unsavoury predatory aspects. While all sides of the debate employ strategies analogous to those found in the philosophy of religion, the immanentizing function of secularism moves the target of ultimate moral evaluation away from the divine and onto the natural. Environmental ethics' teleological approach culminates with nature as a transcendent good, whereas anti-hunting and anti-predation critiques view nature in the here-and-now as riven with evil, requiring humans to distance themselves while decontaminating it.
Warszawskie Studia TeologiczneXXXIII/2/2020, 166-182, 2020
In this short essay I demonstrate that the contemporary discussion on animal rights has some problematic presuppositions concerning the role of philosophy. I argue that what is necessary is not so much to resolve the alleged cultural dispute than to re-learn how to approach it contemplatively. A certain type of hunting can offer a highly dramatic and personally transformative encounter with the animal world through which we can consider our participatory relationship with nature. Thus, after a short methodological introduction, I identify the type of hunting that may allow for such an experience. After the dramatic aspect of hunting is described and analyzed, I explain how the encounter with the quarry illuminates man’s paradoxical place in nature and its subordination to humanity. I finish by phenomenologically describing what the gaze of the hunted animal communicates and how witnessing it restores the contemplative context in which an authentic human response might be given to nature.
Respectful Use: The Ecological Ethics of Eating Nonhuman Persons
Although animal advocacy and environmentalism have had a long association as social and political movements, the relationship has not been without conflict, both in theory and in practice. An opportunity to defuse such conflict is to be found in the ecological feminist analysis of Val Plumwood. The foundation of Plumwood's position is an ecological outlook which, consistent both with indigenous worldviews and with the modern scientific understanding of the natural world, sees nature in terms of a community of interdependent self-willed agents, who are owed ethical consideration along with the communities they form and the ecological processes and places they depend upon. Plumwood strongly opposed other theoretical approaches that led to universal duties to veganism, articulating a series of ways in which normative veganism is in conflict with a non-anthropocentric ecological outlook that 'situates humans ecologically, and nonhumans ethically.' A recent attempt by Esther Alloun to integrate Plumwood's insights into uncritically universalist veganism is therefore fundamentally ill-conceived. In this paper, I reiterate why an ecological outlook precludes any universal duty to veganism, and refute some of the counter-claims that have been made against Plumwood's repudiation of universalist veganism. I then outline how ecological nonanthropocentrism casts the eating of nonhuman persons (including animals) as potentially respectful use within an ecological network of gift exchange, and in fact restrains human interference with the more-than-human world-including with individual nonhuman animals-differently but even more strongly than veganism. In the longer term, we must move towards food production methods that can co-exist with intact, healthy wild ecosystems, upon which all wild organisms depend. To motivate such a shift will take radical cultural change, which begins with each of us correcting our worldview. Key to this process is embracing our ecological situatedness, which is best done experientially, by direct, visceral participation in the wild food web: by hunting, fishing or foraging.
Is Animal Suffering Really All That Matters? The Move from Suffering to Vegetarianism
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2019
The animal liberation movement, among other goals, seeks an end to the use of animals for food. The philosophers who started the movement agree on the goal but differ in their approach: deontologists argue that rearing animals for food infringes animals’ inherent right to life. Utilitarians claim that ending the use of animals for food will result in the maximization of utility. Virtue-oriented theorists argue that using animals for food is callus, self-indulgent, and unjust, in short, it’s an unvirtuous practice. Despite their different approaches, arguments for vegetarianism or veganism have a common step. They move from the notion of suffering to the conclusion of vegetarianism or veganism. In this paper I suggest that the notion of animal suffering is not necessary in order to condemn the practice of animal farming. I propose the possibility of defending vegetarianism or veganism on the basis of arguments that do not rest on the notion of animal suffering, but rather rely on aesthetic principles, the avoidance of violence, and preservation of the environment, and health.
MEAT AND MEANINGS: ADULT-ONSET HUNTERS' CULTURAL DISCOURSES OF THE HUNT
2011
iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Donal Carbaugh, for his guidance, insights, patience, good humor, fine teaching and scholarship, and all the time he has devoted to working with me over the past two years. I would like to thank him for introducing me to the ethnography of communication and to cultural discourse analysis, and for his keen judgment in discerning when to let me stumble around and sort out my own confusions and when to suggest another-and better-way of approaching things. I would also like to thank him for his enthusiastic support of the directions my research has taken. I would like to thank committee member Benjamin Bailey for much of the same.
On Hunting: Lions and Humans as Hunters
The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics
This is an interrogation of some commonly cited intuitions about killing animals, enjoying killing animals, and enjoying eating animals. It concludes that intuitions are the only possible philosophical guide through this territory. Accordingly if intuitions cannot be trusted, moral arguments about the killing of animals and related matters are likely to be fruitless.
Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
Agriculture and Human Values, 2018
In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) which promote an agenda of reconnection, allegedly linking consumers and producers to the socio-ecological origins of food. Rarely, however, does the AFN literature address "origins" of food in terms of animals, as in the case of meat. This article takes a relational approach to the reconnection agenda between humans and animals by discussing how the phenomenon of animal welfare and "happy" meat are enacted by producers and consumers in mundane, embodied, and nuanced ways. Utilizing hybrid conceptualizations of human-animal relations through "natureculture" and "being alongside", we demonstrate that consumers and producers of AFNs perform natureculture entanglements daily, often considering humans and animals as part of one another and the ecological system. Nonetheless, we also point to how participants in AFNs set boundaries to distance themselves from moments of animal life and death, explaining away uncomfortable affective naturecultures through commodification logics. Drawing on qualitative data from consumers and producers of food networks in Austria, we introduce the concept of "human-animal magnetism" to illustrate that the draw for humans to care about other animal lives exists within a spectrum of attraction and disassociation, engendered through specific human-animal interactions. Ultimately, we offer a cautiously hopeful version of alterity in AFNs of meat in which more caring human-animal relations are possible. Keywords Human-animal relations • Alternative food networks • Visceral • Meat • Natureculture It would be a mistake to assume that the 'externality' of nature can be suspended, on the sole grounds of its metaphysical or ontological implausibility: in empirical practice, it takes a lot of work to establish relations between environmental entities and social practices or assemblages. (Asdal and Marres 2014, p. 2057) For me what's important is that animals are multidimensional, living beings. There's this emotional relationship they have with us, where you really understand the animal…farming is fundamentally about being with animals as living creatures, the key is making those human-animal relationships more visible.