Classes Apart.

In 1977, sociologist Paul Willis’ Learning To Labour, a now famous piece of research about “how working class kids get working class jobs” was released. Something of a follow-up to Willis’ study, The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling, was published in 1994, authored by Máirtín Mac an Ghaill. Both studies, broadly speaking, identified groups of working class “lads” or “macho lads” who developed a strong anti-school culture, a desire for manual waged labour, racist and sexist attitudes, and forms of social interaction that led to them failing in terms of educational attainment.

Willis’ lads called conventional hard-working pupils “ear ‘oles” (on the grounds that they actually listened to teachers) while Mac an Ghaill’s macho lads labelled succeeding students, “dickhead achievers.” The lads favoured larking around, which they called “having a laff,” while the macho lads saw school as a means of “learning to be tough,” which involved rejecting the traditional 3 R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) in favour of the 3 F’s (fighting, fucking and football).

In the 1980s I took part in an impromptu “inspection” of a “chicken processing plant” in Yorkshire, England. A group of animal advocates effectively stormed the place to “have a look around.” We found the chicken plant workers putting glue in chickens’ eyes and supergluing chickens to wooden posts and using them as cricket bats. Sociologically, along with impoverished immigrant workers, the men committing these rights violations were the lads and the macho lads.

Many animal advocates will have seen the numerous videos showing slaughterhouse employees, circus workers, and “farm hands” using other animals as baseballs, or stomping on small animals, or attacking large animals with sticks, prods, and iron bars. Some videos expose workers sexually abusing animals, or pushing or dragging “downed” animals to their deaths. Most likely, along with impoverished immigrant workers, these rights violations will also have been committed by lads and macho lads. 

In my last blog entry, I mentioned the slide show presented by Farm Sanctuary’s Bruce Friedrich to AR2011. He sought to convince his audience that the sparkling new use facilities he highlighted (new chicken prisons and barns for calves) represented a major step forward in terms of animal welfare. As I also said last time, these new facilities did look “better” than the dirty old battery cages and veal crates he showed.

Are these brand new animal use facilities going to see the provision of brand new staffing arrangements? No, probably not – the animals will certainly still be left in the speciesist hands of lads and macho lads.

Will the new facilities be adequately monitored? Possibly, but probably not. If they are monitored at all, they will be monitored by other speciesists. It is unlikely that animal advocates, Bruce Friedrich included, will be nipping around having a gander themselves and, even if they did, workers will know they’re on their way and more care will be taken – for the duration of the inspection.

I have worked in several “working class” job locations, including steel works and car manufacturers, as well as being a cinema projectionist for many years. In the first two in particular, there were plenty of lads and macho lads. The only time one saw females outside of the work’s canteen, or as cleaners in office areas, was in the porn magazine pages sellotaped about the place. There were plenty of expressions of racism too, as many “rastas” worked at the car plant, while several Germans and Russians worked at the steel plant.

What has this to do with animal welfare regulation and reforms?

In the steel works and the car plant, the first thing that happened when managers or anyone else imposed new rules and regulations, was the finding of ways of getting around them.  New rules were not adhered to as much as circumvented. There is a lot of sociology about what is supposed to happen in work locations as opposed to what actually goes on. Cinemas are supposed to be regularly inspected by the local fire chief. When I was a projectionist, these inspections were few and far between and we always knew the fire chief was about because phone calls were made as he made his rounds. If he did happen to turn up with no warning, he was taken for a nice cup of tea while we cleared away all the things that were not supposed to be there. Fire chief inspections were a form of monitoring but they meant little in practice.

I wonder whether the middle class animal welfare advocates and their middle class political allies actually believe that the reforms they bring about mean something significant in practical terms? I’d love to be a fly-on-the-wall if ever Bruce Friedrich tried to convince the lads and the macho lads that the new “humane” facilities mean that, henceforth, the animals will be treated nicely. After each had stopped “ROTFLMAO,” I expect they’d just get on with their routine rights violations.

When Animal Welfare Reforms Are Ideal.

Some people, such as David Sztybel and representatives of the National Animal Interest Alliance, argue that there are several versions on animal welfarism. In this blog, I tend to talk about two types, which I have called traditional (or conventional or orthodox) animal welfare and neo- (or new) animal welfare.

I tend to think of the former (traditional) as animal welfarists who want to regulate the use of other animals in the main and do not want to end it. Organisationally, I mean groups such as the RSPCA and the HSUS. However, these groups will claim that they do want to abolish some forms of other animal use. For example, this RSPCA animation talks about (well, booms really, since Brian Blessed did the voice-over) the banning of fur farming in Britain, the banning of hunting with dogs, the banning of cosmetic testing, the banning of veal crates, the banning of conventional battery cages, the banning of the use of drift nets in “EU waters,” the banning of sow stalls, and the banning the import of “wild birds.” Historically, the RSPCA was involved in campaigns that led to the abolition of lower class “sports” such as bear baiting, bull baiting, and cock fighting. On this theme, the HSUS would likely point to their campaign to totally end horse slaughter.

Of course, such bans have their limitations, and none aimed to end other animal use as a general matter. For example, post-“ban,” hunting still goes on in England, Scotland and Wales; calves are still “farmed” in “group housing,” and conventional battery cages are to be replaced by “enriched” battery cages. Even many bans, in other words, are part of the general idea to regulate the use of other animals. According to the lead organisations in the campaign, the British hunting ban was never meant to stop the killing of foxes, just as the other bans were never meant to prevent “animal farming” or vivisection.

Neo-welfare organisations, in my view, are groups such as PeTA and Animal Aid. Both of these groups suggest that they are animal rights organisations, although they do not show much evidence of adhering to the philosophy of animal rights, by which I mean the reasoned theories on human-nonhuman relations laid out by rights-based thinkers. Animal Aid are much better than PeTA on this, as the latter deliberately distort the meaning of animal rights. Animal Aid’s online bookstore, for example, is far superior to PeTA’s. It does, for example, feature texts by Gary Francione, Andrew Linzey, and Joan Dunayer. The absence of Tom Regan is a real shame but I think Animal Aid have sold The Case for Animal Rights, Defending Animal Rights, and Empty Cages in the past. PeTA will not go near these rights-based writers with a barge pole, preferring to sell the work of Peter Singer only and, moreover, lying about it being an animal rights philosophy text.

A few weeks ago, an AR2011 video was released featuring Alex Hershaft of Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM) and Bruce Friedrich, late of PeTA, now earning a crust from Farm Sanctuary. Hershaft made the case for abolition while Friedrich presented the classic new welfarist view, as conceptualised by Gary Francione, arguing that animal welfare reforms both reduce animal suffering and can act as stepping stones to animal liberation.

Acting much like a salesperson for the user industries, Bruce Friedrich showed the audience slides of conventional confinement systems and newer “humane” conditions. I was struck by how clean and shiny the newer exploitation facilities were compared to the dirty, broken down, old ones, reminding me that the HSUS also specialise in publishing such images on their web site: clean, bright, and new = humane, versus dirty, dingy, and old = cruel. It seems that the user industries along with Farm Sanctuary and the HSUS have vested interests in presenting this stark contrast. However, it is rather misleading to say the least.

Essentially, this formulation of the new is similar to the presentation of a crude Weberian ideal type, a concept – an abstracting tool - used in sociology. At its most basic, this involves the construction of a perfect or ideal example, one which is never to be found in the “real world,” and placing what is found in the world next to it. The aim is to gain some understanding of the “gap” between the two. In foundational sociology classes, I would give the example of the construction of an ideal football (soccer) team. It is fairly easy to think of what the perfect football team would look like, what the manager would be like, how good the players would be in their different positions, how big the ideal squad would be, even how good the backroom staff and player’s facilities would need to be. No real team would match up to the constructed one in which everything is “just right” in every detail.

I think animal welfarists consistently make this sort of error when they compare the horrible old to the “much better” new. The pictures of new use facilities don’t look “too bad” if and when the places are empty or “just stocked,” as they seem to be in the favoured photographs. However, give it a few months, a couple of years certainly, and then see the conditions, as perhaps revealed by an open rescue, in circumstances when the user industries and animal welfare organisations cannot stage manage everything. Then, the pictures will reveal the terrible realities: the filth, they’ll give some idea of the stench,[1] the amount of “deads,” and the number of those soon to die.

It seems to me that animal advocates who are more often than not pessimistic about abolition are very often far too optimistic about welfare improvements. They rarely seem to give much thought to the actual day-to-day running of these “improved” units.

Not only will the conditions rapidly deteriorate from those shown in the publicity shots, there is the brutal truth that new facilities will still be operated by speciesists who give little thought to the interests of other animals apart from considerations connected to the economics of exploiting them. Add to that the fact that measures supposed to regulate use are themselves poorly regulated. For example, there have been a number of exposes of the RSPCA’s “Freedom Foods” scheme which exists to endure strict welfare standards. I doubt if it will take long before someone provides footage of the realities behind PeTA’s agreement with KFC to gas chickens, and the HSUS’ deal with the US egg business to phase in “enriched” battery cages (once both their lengthy phase-in periods are over), something even Compassion In World Farming are worried about. Bruce Friedrich made great play of the part of the HSUS-egg industry agreement that is designed to end forced moulting within a year. Who will monitor if that is the case? Who will be there to monitor what goes on in those massive sheds, often located well off the beaten track? These sorts of agreements often pay lip service to notions of “high quality stockmanship,” but is any of that worth the paper it is written on with no-one to monitor the system?

There have been some defence of animal welfare reforms on Animal Rights Zone (ARZone) lately. I get the impression that much of this defence is defence of the ideal – the on-the-face-of-it idea. I think animal welfare reform supporters need to look rather deeper at the actual operation of exploitative use systems – and look beyond the sales pamphlets, photographs and glossy presentations.

[1] I have been in plenty of intensive farming units and the smell and the heat – and often the noise - is almost unbearable.