Bunnies & Factories
When I was just about ten, still in grade school and still not quite conscious of my own personhood, my family got meat bunnies. My mom had told my dad it would be the final straw, and she was, classically, correct. By then, we already had a cat, Emily Dickenson, that I’d begged for for years, a beautiful, gentle lab named Millie, a small run of chickens, a pen of white turkeys, and, significantly, two little pet bunnies. Not meat bunnies.
Despite their practical difference, the meat bunnies, with wide, moving eyes and twitching noses, had the same soft fur as my pet bunnies who often rested against my cheek, the same cyclical rise and fall of their torso as my Emily when she spread her body across the couch, and the same acute attention to my actions and motions as my parents. Petting them, I remembered, too, the way that baby chicks felt when they filled my palms each spring, fluff poking between my cusped fingers and brushing against the grass. Holding the chicks, I had earnestly worried about the prospect of hawks swooping down from the wide blue sky to grab one from my hand, like the seagulls had done that one summer to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. With the bunnies, I worried more about the prospect of someone seeing us playing in the corner of the lawn, of an older brother telling me no, this is not a good idea, snatching away the bunny with more authority than the hawk, but a similar level of finitude. This, too, should’ve been my prime concern with the chick, the chick that eventually became a chicken, that eventually was marinated with garlic and tossed in the cast iron pan, filling the kitchen with hot, flavorful smoke.
Things began to collapse on each other. After one encounter with the meat bunnies, I ran upstairs to find Emily, flatted onto my stomach on the hardwood floor of my bedroom, and held her paws. “I won’t let them do this to you,” I promised her, concerned about what was going on and worried she might worry, too. The two of us lay pressed against the floor together. Her yellow eyes stared back into my teary blue ones, and I realized the severity of the matter. The distinctions my family drew between “us” – members of our big, multispecies family, that thus deserved nice food, healthcare, and tender love – and “them” – pre-dinner, who spent most of their time in handmade boxes, varyingly sized, of metal and wire, and were not named – seemed arbitrary, jagged, like my little brother’s crayon lines on the living room wall. Were the lines even supposed to be there?
So this was, as my mother predicted but nonetheless to her chagrin, the moment I committed to vegetarianism. It had been an itch that had long existed, but, after the bunnies, there seemed to be no arguing with me. It persisted, became a practice that grew, questions of ethical consumption and animal sovereignty slowly snarled throughout my life, tugging in little ways at the borders of my ethics. And it began with the tight proximity to the other, a proximity that both blurred the lines of othering and made their brutality legible. From there, closeness and relationality, I built an ethical paradigm for myself, laid it out across scales, and then wondered what was right, wrong, better, worse, certain, uncertain. How do these questions begin, and how do those places of origin shape an ethos aimed to function across scales? Do the efforts succeed? The answers may not be apparent, but ways to think them have broadened, and the probings continue, fomented now not by the textures of life against my hands or sprawling depths of shared eye contact, but by books, case studies, conversations.
The bunnies and chickens and turkeys were all quite close to me. We shared a home, we watched the same sun rise and set at shifting times, we both noticed the feeling of absence when my dad was traveling for work, we felt the rain on the same days, we recognized and acknowledged each other's presence in the lawn, we touched. Therein was the proximity from which these concerns grew. From the little grassy corner of my backyard where I held baby animals, I became aware of their positioning, their morality, their entrapment. Scholar Thom van Dooren wrote The Wake of Crows after close interaction and study with crows and the communities they take up membership within. He, like me, grapples with ethics due, in part, to the closeness of the other, from a realization of shared perception and experience. “As I watched [the crows], they watched back,” he writes, noting on the way they come to this interaction, world, moment, with one another, inadvertently holding each other accountable (van Dooren 1). This sense permeates; closeness breeds care and responsibility. Even as van Dooren’s work rubs up against and, at times, crashes into complexities and competing modes of flourishing, the closeness and shared membership of a world facilitates a continued attention and pondering to the crows.
I looked into the eyes of a bunny and internalized the reality of her personhood; van Dooren studies crows and realizes theirs, too. Resultantly, we were motivated to wonder and rethink. Justifying his academic work, he speaks of his proximity to another being, claiming that “flitting in and out of my minds eye … has been the image of a single bird: an aga… out in the jungle, quietly, diligently, caching almonds away for a deeply uncertain future” (van Dooren 213). This, he claims, is who he writes this chapter in solidarity with, the life that this academic text features. His work itself does this for the reader; it demonstrates the brilliance and character of the crows throughout. Embedded in the prose is a description of their awareness and adaptability, distinct vignettes tell of their detailed behaviors in response to their own place in the world, and drawings make visible the form that these particular lives, that of crows, lives within.
By drawing the reader so close to the crows themselves, van Dooren attempts to birth in us what is alive within him; a sense of knowing, of sharedness, of familiarity. Developing a knowledge of the individual motivates a broader concern. You begin to care for one little crow or two meat bunnies, situated somewhere in a multiscalar, pleated world, and, with a little thought, become aware of what is occurring across the pleats and scales. And then, perhaps, you move outward. You bring your care to the grocery store or to the publishing house, you throw your attention towards the far-flung chickens, pigs, crows, that suffer like the ones you know.
Their suffering is institutionalized across scales and within systems of production, subsidized and supported by the leaders and members of societies. These were built out before my time, and have broadened and taken new shapes as I’ve grown older. Responses change, too; now, some suggest that one can grow the meat in a lab or make it out of soy and gluten, nursing the textures and flavors out of unsentient forms. Shifting practice of extraction, governance, and response change with the tides and thus change animal lives.
In Beringia, the whales faced a similar reality; their ecological niche changed with the world around them, and soon their bodies were taken apart and used to power cities far away. Bathsheba Demuth writes of the conditions that facilitated the extractive whaling practices in the 1800s, and how the whaling efforts fit within the broader project of the United States. “Being a whaling nation made the United States an imperial one, in the Pacific – an empire that saw civilization as having commercial potential, and commerce as having the potential to civilize,” Demuth writes, capturing the close relationship between identity, power, and wealth (Demuth 29). The large, quiet lives to the east of Alaska were part of a broader American project; each one ended, apparently, for the sake of a nation or a company. Their byproducts were dished out, generated revenue, and lightened the streets of New Bedford. Bodies that once remained in the tundra were forced into and moved through networks.
The whales of Beringia, beholden to empires, sound an awful lot like the chickens in my backyard or the chickens that are raised in American factory farms today and sold in the fast food industry. Growing up, McDonalds was not far from me, in the part of town that was entirely paved over and not appropriate to explore on foot. McDonalds was also by my grandparents' home, and when we drove from Wakefield to Binghamton, we’d pass many McDonalds, enough that we could go pee at different ones each time, bumbling from the minivan and through the glass and metal doors. Inside, my brothers would each get chicken finger kids meals, six times four made twenty four little bodily fragments.
There was then the question of the money, the USAA card that slipped into the machine to buy the four kids meals, one small fries, and two hot coffees for the parents who drove. Through a computer and digital wire moved the apparent value of twenty four nuggets, at least a hundred fries, a handful of coffee grounds, hot water, several oil-based sauces, the cardboard, the plastic, the styrofoam, and who knows what else. That communicated to someone somewhere that there was some reason to continue to separate meat from bone. After discussing the persisting demand for the whales and continued disregard of extinction risks from those far away, Demuth writes that, “the men who killed bowheads for profit returned to Beringa in 1858” (Demuth, 47). Similarly, we provided continued demand for McDonalds, making up a little piece of the conglomerates’ slaughter of chickens. I wondered, vaguely, if the fries as opposed to the chicken, did much. But the fries were the only thing I could eat in the rest stop, and I wanted to eat at the rest stop.
When you regiment your ethics, you limit them. Lines are drawn, once again; no dairy, no meat, no eggs, but you’ll kill the roaches crawling beside your kitchen sink, order the backless white top made god knows where off Amazon, and then the necessary nipple covers, and then reorder when someone spills wine down the front, fly to Sweden to work on climate economics, and tip aged leftovers into the garbage disposal beside where the roach died. The label of “vegan,” an attempt to respond to the crisis of cruelty around me, encourages the purchase of hearts of palm at the grocery store and motivates the refusal to witness the local chickens’ processing. Yet, as the Feral Atlas depicts, the plastic bags from the shops and the long-distance flights are a part of a sprawling, multiscalar pattern of harm, one that breaks down the environment and ecologies. Meanwhile, the quiet, quick slaughter of an animal in my driveway feeds a brother, a neighbor, a gentle yellow lab named Millie.
The Feral Atlas captures the complexity of responding to these systems of harm; a rigid framework might fail to respond when the Anthropocene is a flowing body of influences, a wild virus of harm. The strawberry field parallels the factory farm in its impact on the environment, as
“machines have become discipline-producing overseers: lines of corn and rows of strawberries turn landscapes into grids. Greenhouse operations offer the same modes of monoculture and alienation. A milk production operation shows that animals, too, can be managed through the principles of GRID. (“GRID” Feral)
Buying more from the produce aisle than the meat fridge in the local Stop & Shop doesn’t respond to this reality. It focuses on a response to the ethical concerns born from the killing of bunnies, where this care originated. It does not engage with how the production processes of the vegan options extracts and subjugates. It fails to respond to certain issues. My ethics, facilitated by my closeness to meat production, aimed to reduce animal subjugation and death, but did not disengage from the parallel forms of destruction, particularly those of monocropping and fashion overconsumption.
To my dad, tender care in the backyard to produce food alongside my mom and their five children was a way to buy less from this system of harm and exploitation. Eight years in the Marines, and he felt like he’d had enough; he barely buys clothes or travels, unless he has to. Our petite homestead was a way to ground himself in the place we lived, see the beauty the land had to offer. Every summer, my mother wades into the water, drags the clamming rake through the sand, churns up small necks, and grins. My brothers, growing up alongside the same chickens, turkeys, ducks, cats, and dogs as I did, cherish using their own hands and knives to move something along the food chain. They speak highly of the meat on the table; they know it and respect it. For a long time, I turned away from this.
Recently, I tipped my head back and tilted an oyster forward, let it slip down onto my tongue and, after a second try (the first, I spit it back out onto the shell), down my throat. Just that once, because my dad and brother grew it on their farm, and it made them smile. I stopped buying clothing first hand in January, but my mother insisted she was allowed to give me new things sometimes, so I told her of course. I keep that free jar of honey from my aunt in the pantry for when someone’s over during cold season, but never drip it into my own tea.
I still see my original commitments as vital to how I’d like to be. I also understand their limits and selections, that they privilege one perspective and one form of advocacy over another, and that they stem from closeness rather than unbiased scholarship. Still, I believe that our ethics often come from being in community, from knowing and thus caring. As we care for the world and respond to the crises around us, we bring what we’ve experienced to the global stage. If we do so with empathy, with humility, and with continued revision – knowing that we must do well, but that others may do well differently, and we can learn from them – we can do better, though never perfectly.
“Stories within stories bring together the diversity necessary to inhabit responsibly the rich pattern of interwoven inheritance out of which we must together craft our shared worlds” (van Dooren 93).
Bibliography
Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019.
van Dooren, Thom. The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds. Columbia
University Press, 2019.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al., editors. Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene.
Stanford University Press, 2020, https://feralatlas.org/.