I will come back to these experiments in time. First I am using my ability in this class to free write over the Animal Humanities overview. Many different thoughts and images crossed my mind while reading this section of text. Suffering, cruelty and putting oneself outside of the choices made were major themes that jumped out at me. Every living creature can be made to suffer, and according to Singer “if a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.” (169) There have even been studies toward the ef
fect of torture on a tree. Yes, I said a tree. In the experiment, a large warehouse was set up with groups of sapling trees. Each day after watering, a caretaker would take out a chain saw and cut through one of the trees (killing it). After two weeks, the trees started to lose leaves and begin to wilt, while the trees in the control group were growing strong. They were expressing the only way a tree can in the given situation. I won’t try to guess the emotion, if trees can feel emotions; they did however begin to die. This I believe is torture, and shows that even a plant has a spirit that can be tortured. “The boundary between human and animal is arbitrary and moreover, irrelevant, since we share with animals a capacity for suffering that only ‘the hand of tyranny’ could ignore.” (169)
When the author started to go more in depth in the subject of anthropomorphic, and that “humans can both be, and be compared to, animals”, a children’s television show can to my mind. (171) Anamorphs was a television series, that I myself did not watch, but I do remember seeing commercials for the program. A group of teenagers were able to change at will into an animal. How about that… humans can be both a human and an animal?
To my surprise I jumped ahead of the thought process of the author when reading the section over people feeling pleasure toward the misfortunes of animals. “Her explanation is that people felt the need perpetually to reassert human dominance over, and separation from, the animal kingdom by baiting horses, bears, monkeys and bulls… to watch a baiting, to enact anthropocentrism, is to reveal, not the stability of species status, but the animal that lurks beneath the surface. In proving their humanity humans achieve the opposite.” (172) While reading this section I started to think about the Disney documentary where the camera crew chased and FORCED lemmings over a cliff, to “document” the age ole’ tale that lemmings will follow one another and jump off a cliff. This of course was a false tale, so the camera crew forced these animals to suffer outside the bounds of nature and throw themselves off. To my surprise 9 pages later this case was brought up. This also brought up images and stories from old western movies. Before the revaluation of treating animals with care in Hollywood, horses were severely injured or killed during scenes in old westerns for the “realist effect” of the scene.
Screen Shot of the Lemmings.I have noticed that this blog is starting to get rather long, so on to my next thought string….
I had
recently purchased a movie that I believe fits into the realm of the sadism experiments along with cruelty to animals. In fact, I think this movie would be a great addition to the overall material presented in this class. The first time I watched UNTRACABLE, I was sickened and scared knowing that the story and the plot were realistic and not farfetched at all. The basic plot of the movie is as follows. A killer sets up a website called KILL With Me.com The more people that log onto the site; the faster the animal/person is killed. The first victim was a kitten, stuck to mouse paper out of the reach of food and water. The more viewers that logged onto the site, the higher the setting on a heat lamp above the kitten rose. This killer went on to find horrible ways to kill his victims without being the one to “take the life”. The website grew and millions were tuning in, thus killing the people faster. The news stations broadcasted NOT to log onto the site, which in turn lead to masses of people logging in thinking individually that their ONE login will not make a difference to whether the animal/person lives or dies. Though some of these people felt empathy or “the aesthetic sympathetic feeling of that act of erecting and spreading”, they were the ones inflicting the harm, and were the killer. (194)What would you do? When the pressure is applied through an experiment to a
ct a certain way and inflict pain, or taking the initiative yourself to login to a website that allows you to become a killer; can you look at yourself from a third party view to see what you are doing? Even people are assured by a scientist, teacher, and a commander in the army that “they would not be held responsible…most continued”. (202) In the case of the Milgram experiment, Dr. Thomas Blass “found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61-66 percent, regardless of time or place.” (202) Curiosity drives us to look at the most gruesome sights, and it was “Curiosity that killed the cat”. Photo Credits:
http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/the-sapling-lloyd-burchell.jpg
http://img256.imageshack.us/i/animorphs.jpg/
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xMZlr5Gf9yY/0.jpg (leemings)
http://media.photobucket.com/image/untraceable/terrible54/1399467h.jpg?o=50
http://media.photobucket.com/image/untraceable/cinema_lover/Untraceable-kill-with-me.jpg
