Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature

Ethics and the Environment, 5(2):285–322 ISSN: 1085-6633

Val Plumwood

Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Analysis

Is this what it’s like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land. —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I have suffered With those that I saw suffer! —Miranda, The Tempest

THE NEED FOR BETTER INTEGRATION I discuss in this article ways a critical feminist-socialist ecology might begin to re-envisage the projects of animal ethics and defense in a form both more integrated and more effective as a liberatory theory and political movement than the present offerings of animalist theories. Mainstream (mainly male and abstract) animal ethics theory has many substantial achievements to its credit. It has effectively contested the dominant human-centered assumption that ethics, mind, and communicative capacity are confined to the human sphere, and begun to drive mainstream philosophy towards a revision of Cartesian human/nature dualism.1 Some ecofeminist and eco-socialist theorists especially have developed a powerful critique of human/animal dualisms and their role in rendering food practices as well as scien-

Direct all correspondence to: Val Plumwood, Research Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; E-mail: [email protected]

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tific practices sites for both human and gender domination. (Adams 1990, 1994; Benton 1993; Birke 1994, 1995; Noske 1989). Ecofeminists have theorized in substantial terms the basis for kinship and solidarity with animals and some of the linkages between the forms of oppression common to women and animals, contributing to our understanding of the animals wing of human supremacism and anthropocentrism (Adams and Donovan 1995; Gaard 1993; Luke 1995). However, closer up, there are significant failures as well as pleasing successes. The leading strategy stressed is vegetarianism, and the leading forms of vegetarian theory, including the feminist ones, have been far less successful in dealing with their own biases of ethnicity, gender, and class, and at evolving theory that successfully integrates nonhuman justice concerns with those of human justice movements. The established animal theories have evolved a longstanding conflict with ecological theory that is the subject of a slowly simmering debate across the journals. Although there have been some important philosophical attempts at reconciliation, overall, fundamental conflicts and differences between animalism and ecology seem to be entrenched and growing within the current set of theoretical frameworks. The responsibility for this situation (which may not be entirely negative, provided the present impasse is temporary) lies on both sides.2 Much abstract ecological theory and practice continues to affirm bonds to forms of scientific and hunting ethics that treat animals (but not, or not yet, humans) in abstract, mass general terms as replaceable members of species and populations, to ignore, discount, or oppose individual life and justice perspectives for nonhumans, and to identify humanity closely with a glorified predatory ecological role which is only too readily given the lineaments of mastery and managerialism. Not to be outdone in distancing from “the other side,” recent animal rights and vegan/vegetarian theory has come to stress individual life perspectives to the exclusion of all other ways to view animal (and human) lives. Neo-Cartesian animalist theorists aver fervently and often that animals, and only animals, count ethically, signaling the repetition of the Cartesian gesture of moral dualism and the ethical exclusion of “non-conscious” life forms that marks the approach of minimal departure from the rationalist foundations of liberal-humanism (see Plumwood 1999). Other radical animals theorists have been at work devising vanguardist, universalist, and alienated forms that are increasingly incompatible with human liberation and environmental positions. Some crusading versions of rights-based vegetarianism are aggressively ethnocentric, dismissing alternative and indigenous food practices and wisdom and demanding universal adherence to a western urban model of vegan practice in which human predation figures basically as a new version of original sin, going on to supplement this by a culturally familiar methodology of dispensing excuses and exemptions for those too frail to reach their exacting moral norms of carnivorous self-denial. Some simply embrace the negative ethical implications for predatory animals of demonizing human predation, seriously proposing measures for the elimination or predation, while others stop short at merely deploring its existence.3 Others still have attempted to evade these implications by endorsing an extreme form of culture/nature

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dualism proclaiming that we humans live in culture and not in nature that reinstates human/animal dualism through the back door and is incompatible with virtually any form of environmental consciousness that recognizes our embeddedness in an ecological order (see Adams 1994, 118; Moriarty and Woods 1997). As alternatives to these mainstream positions that offer us a choice between glorifying or demonizing predation, there are several offerings to choose from among feminist positions. Feminist and ecofeminist animal ethics and vegetarian positions should be best placed to effect a useful integration with other liberation movements, since, unlike many mainstream forms of animal rights theory, they acknowledge broad liberatory social ideals of opposition to all forms of oppression. Ecofeminists have critiqued the philosophical basis of both ecological theory and mainstream animal rights theory, the first mainly on account of its holistic reductionism, and the second on account of its discounting of oppression perspectives and the contextual insensitivity of its leading theories framed in terms of abstract and universalist concepts like rights and utility. Leading theorist Carol Adams has provided a powerful critique of our relations with animals as oppressive, and as political rather than natural, challenging feminists to oppose them (Adams 1993, 1995). However, opposing all forms of oppression is a tall order, much more easily proclaimed than achieved: despite their impressive achievements as both critics and innovative oppression theorists, leading ecofeminist accounts of animals have not themselves always escaped the dualistic, contextual, and integration problems they have criticized in others. Despite the hopeful prefix “eco-” and the feminist commitment in theory to embodiment and context, the main forms of “eco”-feminist animal theory remain inadequately contextualized and poorly integrated with ecological consciousness, and the universalizing, ontological form of veganism which has come to the fore in Carol Adams’s theory seems to have as much potential as the mainstream version for development in directions that express alienation from ecological embodiment and ecological communities. The leading thesis of what I shall call “ontological vegetarianism” is that nothing morally considerable should ever be ontologized as edible or as available for use (Adams 1993, 200). For those who subscribe to this position and for whom animals are morally considerable, animals can never ethically be ontologized as food. The alienation from ecological embodiment this position gives rise to derives not from the extension of moral considerability to animals, but from the extreme opposition between edibility and ethical considerability it presupposes, and its incompatibility with any ecological view which situates embodied beings within the dynamics of the food chain. Cultural feminism remains influential in many present forms of ecofeminist animal theory, and has played a prominent role in the development of an ontological vegan theory based around a universalist, uncritical value reversal of western women’s alleged “gathering” roles in contrast to demonic “male” hunting. This kind of theory creates major conflicts with contemporary feminist consciousness, as well as with feminist anthropology and women’s experience in indigenous cultures (see Stange 1997). Australian Aboriginal women’s gathering, for example, has always involved

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killing a large variety of small to medium animals: this is not a matter of historical speculation, but of present-day observation and lived experience, and of disappearing and falsifying the lives of some kinds of women in the construction of a falsely universalized concept of “woman.”4 Cultural ecofeminism reproduces the alienation and ethnocentrism of the mainstream animalist theories by its dualizing, genderizing, and demonizing of predator identities. Cultural hegemony appears in the sweeping assumption that “women” do not hunt and that female-led “gathering” societies were vegetarian or plant-based (Adams 1994, 105, 107; Collard 1989; Kheel 1993, 1995), assuming a gendered dualism of foraging activities in which the mixed forms encountered in many indigenous societies are denied and disappeared. The cultural feminist proclivity to privilege explanations focused on men and masculinity means that the forms of economic rationality behind contemporary animal debasement and factors other than masculinity are largely neglected in its theoretical framework.5 This methodology, plus the assumption of a gendered hunting/gathering dualism, is one reason why hunting has been accorded such a disproportionate amount of attention in cultural ecofeminist literature, at the expense of factory farming which in the United States accounts for the overwhelming majority of animal deaths and an even higher proportion of extreme animal suffering. Yet any priority focus on factory farming is explicitly rejected by Adams (Adams 1993, 203). Ecofeminism has so far developed little debate and internal diversity on this issue. This means that at the present time, there are basically two highly polarized feminist perspectives on animals elaborated in the literature. In opposition to ecofeminism, Mary Zeiss Stange (1997) in Woman the Hunter draws on her own experience as a hunter in the Northwestern U.S. to critique the essentialism of what she calls the “radical ecofeminist” approach to gender and hunting. Stange aims to reclaim Woman the Hunter as a disruptive figure who makes a feminist claim to powers of aggression and predation oppressively reserved in patriarchal society for men. She argues convincingly that much cultural ecofeminist discussion of hunting has involved gender dualism, ethnocentrism, mythical anthropology, and poor contextualization. However, as I argue, Stange completely dismisses the animals movement, presents a predation-centered account of human identity which is just as problematic as the cultural feminist account, and replaces the over-idealization of women by an over-idealization of hunting. Basically, the main feminist theories develop the gender themes mainstream theory neglects, (along the lines of a false choice between cultural and liberal feminism) but otherwise largely reproduce its false choices between on the one hand glorifying predation as the major feature of human identity in a way that neglects its ambiguity and potential use to justify practices of mastery, and on the other hand demonizing predation in an account which finds an easy way prepared for it along well-trodden western paths of alienation from ecological embodiment. I shall argue that many of the criticisms each feminist position makes of the other are justified, and suggest that they can be resolved within a further account which avoids either glorifying or demonizing predation in general terms, but focuses on its social construction. In Femi-

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nism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood 1993) I posited critical ecological feminism as capable of breaking the false choice between the feminism of uncritical reversal and the feminism of uncritical equality. That is also the path a critical ecological and socialist feminism needs to plot here, as it strives to construct alternatives to the choice between Gaia as the goddess of cultural feminist uncritical reversal of western gender ideals versus Artemis as the goddess of uncritical equality as white privileged female recreational hunting. It seems clear that there is room to negotiate positions that offer more choices and diversity here, positions that are both more in keeping with the realities of ecological embodiment and also with the desire of many contemporary feminists to avoid value reversals and their universalized concepts of woman while retaining a critical feminist edge on contemporary society. In this article I try to develop a critical ecological feminist position on food ethics and animals which rejects human-centered assumptions of mastery over animals and which takes animal lives seriously in both individual and ethical terms, but which also avoids overly genderizing and/or demonizing predator identities in the human or nonhuman case and provides for a contextual rather than an ontological vegetarianism. In the contextual view, it is not human predation itself we need to oppose, as in the ontological view, but what certain social frameworks have made of predation. The outcome of rethinking predation and replacing predation-demonizing theories by less alienated and more ecologically compatible accounts is that we can still justify well-contextualized forms of vegetarianism. Although the resulting theory is of necessity more flexible, less dogmatic and universalist, it still provides plenty of good reasons for being a vegetarian in most modern urban contexts, and the major concerns of the animal defense movement can still be amply vindicated. The contextualized position I outline, like the under-contextualized one I criticize, would also have the consequence of requiring us to avoid complicity in contemporary food practices that abuse animals, especially factory farming. It would enable a stronger critical focus on the “rationalized” farming practices that are responsible for the great bulk and intensity of domestic animal misery in the modern west, while avoiding the culturally hegemonic attitudes towards indigenous cultures the poorly contextualized treatment of predation and hunting associated with ontological vegetarianism forces on many animal theorists—including a number of ecofeminists. A better-integrated and contextualized theory can thus provide a better basis for alliances around the issue of rationalized agriculture, allowing us to imagine a future interspecies politics emerging around opposition to the flesh factories. These may emerge in the future as extensions of contemporary factory farms, dedicated to growing food and body replacement parts for an “immortal” human elite set apart from both ordinary humans and from animals, drawing on ontologizing both as animals are now ontologized, as fully replaceable and completely instrumentalizable “bodies.”6 We should begin our opposition to traveling this route right now, in a politics of solidarity with the animals already subject to such treatment. Crucial to such a strategy is a political focus for the animal defense movement which can give a high priority to

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the flesh factory as the leading systematic and rationally-constructed form of abuse among multiple forms of contemporary animal abuse.7 As Joy Williams notes: Agriculture has become agribusiness after all. So the creatures that have been under our “stewardship” the longest, that have been codified by habit for our use, that have always suffered a special place in our regard—the farm animals—have never been as cruelly kept or confined or slaughtered in such numbers in all of human history. . . . . The factory farm today is a crowded stinking bedlam, filled with suffering animals that are quite literally insane, sprayed with pesticides and fattened on a diet of growth stimulants, antibiotics, and drugs. Two hundred and fifty thousand laying hens are confined within a single building. (The high mortality rate caused by overcrowding is economically acceptable; nothing is more worthless than an individual chicken). (Williams 1997, 60–66)

The factory farm/flesh factory is a very important area for political alliances that is missing out on activist attention in part because of poor connections between the animals movement and other eco-social justice movements. Recent European legislation banning the production and sale of battery cage eggs shows some of the priorities and possibilities here for harnessing widespread opposition to current forms of economic rationality and their abuse of animal lives in coalitions against factory farming, which represents the worst and largest scale systematic practice of abuse of animals and nature. A movement that can focus on such areas of broad agreement has the potential here for a really amazing and world-shaking coalition, which could include: 1. The possibility of coalitions with workers (on wages, conditions and the widespread use of prison and indentured labor in growing and especially slaughtering facilities); 2. The potential for alliances with consumers on health issues—for example, the use of antibiotics and the prevalence of disease in intensive practices, highlighted by recent findings on very widespread salmonella and the potentially fatal organism Camphylobacter in poultry products, and of course BSE in British intensive agriculture and possibly more widely; 3. Alliances with the local environment movement (on the massive water pollution and other unacceptable ecological and neighborhood consequences from intensive farms, for example); 4. Alliances with small farmers and local growers on rationalist agriculture’s destruction of the small producer and contribution to the vulnerability of local communities; and 5. Alliances with activists on the issues of neoliberalism (economic rationalism) and global trade who look to establishing a beachhead for injecting some compassion, ethics, and community empowerment into our economic lives— for both humans and nonhumans. These alliances would undoubtedly represent a challenge for the animal movement, which would need to deal with its vanguardist tendencies to aim for nothing less than “the peaceable kingdom” (a highly problematic concept whose mild exterior conceals many hidden hegemonic agendas) and to put more energy into opposing the

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most extreme examples of distortion and instrumentalization of animal lives—the intensive farming practices that treat animals as no more than living meat or egg production units. Nevertheless, I believe that a better focused and integrated theory would ultimately strengthen the animals movement and allow it to explore the potential for powerful alliance politics and interspecies ethical commitments that are needed for effective political action. Recovering a liberatory direction would mean replacing the over-individualized and culturally hegemonic vanguard focus on veganism as a politics of personal virtue and self-denial, with its unhealthy elements of selfrighteousness and holier-than-thouism, by a more carefully contextualize vegetarianism, a more diverse and politically-sensitive set of strategies for collective action, and by a stronger focus on the responsibility of systems of economic rationality for the atrocities daily committed against animals, especially in the factory-farming framework. An over-emphasis on personal conversion and vegetarian action has meant that other forms of popular political action are under developed and under theorized. But to the extent that personal vegetarian commitment is potentially an important component of effective popular action against the flesh factories, animal defense stands in need of a less polarizing and more politically radicalizing theory of ethical eating with potentially wide appeal that can form part of the practice of progressive and aware people in a wide variety of global contexts, not just saints and seminarians in limited enclaves of privilege in urban North America.

ECOFEMINISM: DUALISTIC SOURCES OF ALIENATION IN ONTOLOGICAL VEGETARIANISM People, especially people concerned about others enough to be concerned about animals, do not usually set out to make theory that is alienated and racist. Theories in this area often wind up with these unintended characteristics for two kinds of reasons. The first is a standpoint reason: problematic theory making usually emerges from privileged western perspectives and uncritically extends those perspectives and experiences universally in hegemonic ways. Western culture has long encouraged such imperialist extensions, and theorists from privileged backgrounds at the center, even radical ones, often are not well enough informed to notice the conflict or do not care enough about indigenous and other justice issues to rethink their theories when conflict becomes evident. I will discuss examples of such ethnocentrism below. The second reason has more to do with philosophy: most of us are still to some degree entrapped by dualistic conceptual structures and assumptions that are part of the legacy of the western worldview. In currently polarized thinking about predation, for example, we continue to be seduced in subtle ways by old dualistic narratives of human identity as a form of individuality above the lower sphere of nature and animal life and to reject “animalistic” ecological embodiment as corrupting and alien to true human identity—narratives some animalists now aim not to deconstruct but to extend, ironi-

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cally in the name of equality, to animals themselves. Alienated ontological vegetarian forms draw on our traditional western alienation from embodiment and paradoxically serve to alienate us from animals themselves, by presenting predatory animals as morally deficient. Predatory animals, like women hunters, are set aside as ecological “exceptions,” predatory human identities either demonized as male-coded or treated as moral exceptions. To the extent that ontological vegetarianism involves a deep rejection of embodiment and of animal life itself, to the extent that it involves a moral dualism which endorses reductionist assumptions about food, denies evolutionary and ethical continuity, and establishes a lower order below moral consideration we need in order to eat, it is deeply incompatible with any ecological or species-egalitarian outlook. Historically, ontological vegetarianism has often kept company with alienated worldviews which reject earthly life and construe embodiment as a corrupt and tragic condition, for example in Manicheism, Gnosticism, Pythagoreanism, and Catharism.8 An explicit alienation from embodiment (and its finale of bodily disintegration) is expressed in the ontological vegetarian practice of treating human predation as so universally alien and fallen, its results should only ever be referred to in terms calculated to horrify, revolt, and disgust, terms that deliberately and uncritically invoke alienated traditions of fear and aversion in relation to the flesh, the dead human body, and the dread of ghoulish “corpse consumption.” Carol Adams tells us that even if we should somehow find ourselves obliged, for emergency reasons, to eat animal flesh, we should acknowledge its close relationship to cannibalism by finding it equally repugnant (Adams 1994, 103). The foundational and basically egalitarian role of predation in ecosystems, as a way of exchanging or sharing around our common substance, its normalcy in most of those systems (especially once we deconstruct the dualistic polarity between “animals” and “plants” ontological vegetarianism presupposes), and its role in taking up the generosity and excess of nature, all disappear from view as it is made to seem an evil, freakish, and unnecessary perversion introducing corruption and moral decay into an otherwise innocent and peaceful world. Alienated ascetic forms of vegan strategy also fit snugly into the spaces of neoChristian and neo-Puritan salvational projects and narratives of original sin, bodily temptation, individual struggle and fall, personal virtue and righteousness, and revulsion at the flesh, narratives that have been liberally applied in the Christian past to sexuality. There is a strong parallel to the interpretation of veganism as sexual abstinence in Adams’s claim that “there is no neutral observer to our culture’s commitment to animal flesh: One either eats animals or one does not” (Adams 1995, 222).9 The alienated metaphor of sexual abstinence fosters highly polarized accounts of vegetarianism as moral purity which obscure and impede useful intermediate positions of reduced, adventitious, or occasional flesh-eating.10 This can actually hinder the spread of vegetarian orientations and skills in the community and favor prioritizing issues of personal moral purity over questions of helping animals or improving human health.11 An integrated animalist theory would need to develop greater sensitivity to the difference between alienated and nonalienated forms of vegetarianism and to the considerable potential for subsuming ontological vegetarianism within these kinds of alienated narratives.

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One of the reasons why this alienated path has been taken is that as part of human/nature dualism, western human-supremacist worldviews have positioned humans and nonhumans within different and apparently exclusive narratives. The narrative of ecological embedment and exchange that gives meaning to predation has largely excluded human lives, which are positioned in the west within very different narratives of individual or historic justice. The tragedy, suffering, and vulnerability to predation that are part of the alternative “holistic” narrative of ecological embodiment and exchange have been treated as appropriate for nonhumans, as a sacrificeable and replaceable order not subject to individual life narratives, but as totally inappropriate for humans. The necessity of such events is one of the main things that has been seen to distinguish the human condition, allegedly in “culture”—from the nonhuman condition, supposedly “in nature.” For human lives, which are to be grasped in the completely different terms of individual ethical narratives of tragedy, desert, and justice, the ills of ecological embodiment become part of “the problem of evil” (Cheney 1997), inexplicable and execrable alterations of the proper human condition we do not deserve and which are to be evaded or combated by any means possible (including the means of sacrificing other animals). This is part of a larger dualistic treatment in which the sanctity attributed to individual human life, for example, in Christianity, contrasts radically with the completely instrumentalizable and replaceable status attributed to nonhuman life. More recently ecological narratives have also been used selectively to privilege humans over animals (see Rolston 1988). Hence it seems to many animal theorists that any acceptance or affirmation of predation as part of the goodness of ecological embodiment, which in evolutionary terms must necessarily include predation, belongs to the very same human/animal dualism that has traditionally used religious and ecological narratives selectively as a basis for human privilege and animal inferiority. But this is not necessarily the case. There are several importantly different strategies for dealing with the privileges the dualistic western worldview has conferred on humans, and with the selective use of narratives of ecological embedment to sustain that privilege. One path basically attempts to break down human/animal dualism and achieve greater egalitarianism between humans and animals by extending the concept of the sanctity of human life and its privileged status as normatively above ecological embodiment and predation, to include a larger group consisting of both humans and (higher) animals.12 This is essentially the path taken by ontological vegetarianism, and it leads surely, I will argue, to alienation and a dualistic ethics of closure which is at odds with the continuity of species life forms. An alternative path, at present less traveled, would attempt to deconstruct the dualism by placing the whole dualistic human/nature construction and its privileged “sacred” human status itself on a more critical and less illusory plane, seeing humans as themselves subject to the conditions and narratives of ecological life, as well as aiming to extend aspects of the ethical and individual narrative to nonhumans. Instead of aiming to extend just one of these narratives, the “above nature” story of individual human sanctity, to animals as ontological veganism does, we could aim to integrate both humans and nonhumans more equally and in liberatory ways

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within both ecological and individual narratives. This would lead I think to radically different, less human-centered, and more ecological accounts of the relations of both humans and animals to food, predation, and individuality. But first we need a more detailed analysis of what needs to be deconstructed. It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the west there is a strong effort to deny that we humans ourselves are positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices—the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent anything digging us up, keeps the western human body (at least sufficiently affluent ones) from becoming food for other species. Sanctity is interpreted as guarding ourselves jealously and keeping ourselves apart, refusing even to conceptualize ourselves as edible, and resisting giving something back, even to the worms and the land that nurtured us. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking, and sci-fi monsters trying to eat humans (Alien and Aliens). Horror and outrage usually greet the stories of other species eating live or dead humans, various levels of hysteria our nibbling by the leeches, sandflies, and mosquitoes. This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food (see Plumwood 1996).13 This interpretation of human participation in the food chain fits human death into liberal concepts of self-ownership of the body (Cohen 1995), making the aim self-preservation and rendering death a site for apartness, domination, and individual salvation rather than sharing. As eaters of others who can never ourselves be eaten in turn by them or even conceive ourselves in edible terms, we take, but do not give, justifying this one way arrangement by the traditional western view of human rights to use earth others as validated by an order of rational meritocracy in which humans emerge as the big winners. Humans are not even to be conceptualized as edible, not only by other humans but by other species. It is a curious and paradoxical feature of ontological vegetarianism that it basically shares this taboo on envisaging the human in edible terms, and that its strategy for greater equality is the extensionist one of attempting to extend it to a wider class of beings. The paradox is that it was precisely to give effect or expression to such a radical separation between humans and other animals that this taboo on conceiving humans as edible was developed in the first place. As a result of this hyper-separation, food as interpreted in such a human supremacist order of rational meritocracy could never be a sacramental means to share our embodiment, but must become instead a hyper-separated and degraded category with which we are unable to experience any form of identification. This conviction is one source of our domination and reduction of those whom we would make our food. But it is also a further source of the alienated ontological form of vegetarianism that sees

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de-dualizing as attempting to extend outwards to some nonhumans this “sanctity” aspect of what is imagined to be the human condition. Since human life is sacred, or at least morally considerable, then if we ourselves can never be food, can never even be thought of as edible, then neither can those animals with whom we now identify and to whom we now wish to accord an extended human status as also conceptually outside the food chain.14 The extensionist strategy which gives rise to the alienated project of ontological veganism thus has its source in incomplete and badly thought out strategies for deconstructing human-animal dualism. One of the chief assumptions the extensionist strategy supports is the Exclusion Assumption, that because food is inevitably a site of domination, degradation, and exclusion, ethical food practice consists in ensuring that nothing that is morally considerable can ever become our food or be ontologized as edible. As we will see, this key Exclusion Assumption, which at first glance may seem plausible, forces a variety of unacceptable conclusions and alienated projects. One of its worst consequences is that the refusal to allow anything morally considerable to be ontologized as edible or useful results in a deep rejection of ecological embodiment for those beings, since all embodied beings are food for some other beings.

CAROL ADAMS: ONTOLOGIZING THE OTHER AS EDIBLE The failure to see this human conceptual status above edibility and its dualistic concomitant of reducing other animals to “meat” as the result of specific cultural constructs and assumptions of human mastery lead the ontological vegetarian to see the status of being food for others as inevitably and universally a degraded one. Carol Adams, in various books and articles (Adams 1990; 1993; 1994), provides a very useful and thorough account (if one somewhat exclusively focused on gender) of the resulting concept of meat as a reductionist form and of associated food concepts and practices as sites of domination. But although Adams’s account focuses almost entirely on the contemporary west, it is presented as culturally universal, an account of inevitable and timeless ethical features of human predation, rather than as a culturally specific account of present commodity practices of animal food in certain rationalist-reductionist cultures which often model rational control and enslavement in genderized terms. Adams presents the reductions and degradations of animals she describes so convincingly as the outcome of ontologizing them as edible (Adams 1993, 103). But saying that ontologizing earth others as edible is responsible for their degraded treatment as “meat” is much like saying that ontologizing human others as sexual beings is responsible for rape or sexual abuse. An ontologization of the other in sexual terms may be a necessary condition for rape, but it can hardly be identified as the salient condition, rather than as a precondition of a very general kind that includes a range of very different specific possibilities of which rape is only one set. Such an analysis occludes a range of more respectful options, which, fortunately, a few of us have managed to discover and to practice.15

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The conceptual means by which more respectful and less alienated forms of predation are occluded in Adams’s work are worth examining in detail. Adams fails to distinguish between the concept of “meat”—a culturally specific construction which as she shows involves high levels of commodification, homogenization, reduction, denial of kinship, and hyper-separation—and other possible constructions of animals as edible food that do not have these features. The term “meat” is used equivocally, and is ambiguous between being animal food (edible), conceived in this culturally specific way as meat, and also as a cultural generic term for any kind of animal food.16 Since the term “meat” in Adams’s work functions ambiguously between the culturally specific (determinate) concept of meat and the culturally generic (determinable) category of animal food, the latter can be treated as if it were invariably a reductionist-commodity practice, and so the attitudes associated with reduction and commodification are made to appear as invariable concomitants of any form of predation. The ambiguity allows the ontological vegetarian to generalize the animal food construction of a specific abusive culture to the constructions of any possible culture. Thus the ruthless, reductionistic, and hyper-separated treatments of animals as replaceable and tradeable items of property characteristic of the commodity form and of capitalist economic rationality come to appear an inevitable aspects of animal food and human predation or consumption— which, of course, they are not. Now this is not the only possible way to formulate a less human-centered account of food that might be useful to animal defense theorists. Instead of insisting that no being that is morally considerable can ever be conceived as food (a move that, as I show below, inevitably leads to alienation, moral dualism and Neo-Cartesianism) because food is inevitably a site of domination, we could acknowledge instead a distinction between being food and being meat. Meat is a culturally specific reductionist and commodity category, a specific cultural determinate of the determinable category food. One way for animal defense to reformulate the fundamental equality the vegan position strives for might then be: no being should be treated reductionistically as meat, but we are all edible (food), and humans are food as much as other animals, contrary to deeply entrenched beliefs and concepts of human identity in the west. This ethical principle is clearly useful to those opposing factory farming: it provides a clear basis for opposing reductionist practices that treat factory animals as living “meat,” and for recognizing the kinship between us and our food. It ethically undermines the basis of reductive practices because the belief that only those beneath ethical consideration can be food is one reason why the factory farm is able to treat those whom we position as food as beyond and outside ethics. Only when we can truly acknowledge our own position as food for others will we be able to acknowledge those who are our food as our kin, and be unable to carry out the alienated kinds of food practices Adams so rightly denounces. So here is an alternative path to breaking down human/animal dualism and its dualization of food practices: instead of extending our illusory positioning of ourselves outside the food chain to other animals, we can reposition ourselves back in the food chain, acknowledge our own edibility, and start our project of recognizing kinship from there.17

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A parallel fantasy of extending to animals the master position outside the food chain appears in Adams’s treatment of use and instrumentalism which extends vegetarianism, prohibiting animal use as food, to veganism, prohibiting any kind of use. Human/nature dualism constructs a polarized set of alternatives in which the idea that humans are excluded from any form of use is complemented at the opposite extreme by idea that nonhumans are totally instrumentalizable, forming a contrast based on radical exclusion. Ontological vegetarianism again strives to extend the dualized human status to the nonhuman area in the name of equality, re-envisaging nonhumans also as beyond any form of use. Thus Adams argues against any use of the animal other (for food or anything else) as involving instrumentalizing them (Adams 1993, 200). Instrumentalism is widely recognized (although often unclearly conceptualized) as a feature of oppressive conceptual frameworks, but instrumentalism is misdefined by Adams as involving any making use of the other, rather than the treatment of the other as no more than something of use, a means to an end (Adams 1994, 103). This concept of intrumentalism as the same as use is not a viable way to define instrumentalism even in the human case—since there are many cases where we can make use of one another for a variety of purposes without incurring any damaging charge of instrumentalism.18 The circus performers who stand on one another’s shoulders, for example, are not involved in any oppressively instrumental practices. Rather instrumentalism has to be understood as involving a reductionist conception in which the other is defined as no more than a means to some set of ends. But if instrumentalism is not the same as simply making use of something, and even less of thinking of making use of it (ontologizing it as edible), predation is not necessarily an instrumental practice, especially if it finds effective ways to recognize that the other is more than “meat.” Adams’s vegan framework in effect presents us with a false choice between no use at all and totally instrumentalizing forms of use. As Shepherd has remarked (Shepherd 1996), this equation of use with abuse corresponds socially to universalizing the “hands off” perspective of an urban population remote from its food production sources that has forgotten the possibility and dynamics of loving and even respectful use and interaction. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose records hearing the estuary beneath Obiri Rock described by a Gagadju woman whose country it was. To her as a person of European culture, its beauty was that of the distant “landscape,” while her companion evoked its beauty in loving detail as a larder teeming with nourishing life-forms whose own flourishing was deeply interwoven with her own and with the self-constituting narratives of country (Rose 1996). Clearly the choice between use and respect is a false one for such a life. By counting all cases of use as instrumentalism, Adams’s framework also eliminates the difference between much less and more extreme forms of instrumentalism, since the most considerate and respectful forms of farming which allow animals to lead the kinds of lives they have always led and that are respectful of their species life, amount to the same thing as the worst forms of factory farming in which an animal’s entire life is deformed and instrumentalized.19 This has important implications for activism, strategy, and long and short term objectives, since it means that ontological veganism has

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poor discrimination about and provides little guidance for activists on how to prioritize animal issues.20

SACRED EATING, ETHNOCENTRISM, AND THE EXCLUSIONARY IMPERATIVE The appeal of ontological veganism largely depends on the false contrast it draws between veganism and the traditions of animal reduction and human/nature dualism, that is, between alienation and domination, or between no use at all and ruthless use based on domination and denial. Cultural feminism’s ethnocentric ontological veganism succeeds in this false contrast because its conceptual framework obscures the distinction between meat and animal food, where meat is a determinate cultural construction in terms of domination, and animal food is a cultural determinable. Meat is the result of an instrumentalist-reductionist framework, but the concept of animal food allows us the means to resist the reductions and denials of meat by honoring the edible life form as much more than food, and certainly much more than meat. If we must all, including humans, be ontologized ecologically as edible, as participating in the food chain as a condition of our embodiment, that does not mean we must all be ontologized as meat. Food, unlike the reductive category of meat that does not recognize that we are all always more than food, is not a hyper-separated category and does not have to be a disrespectful category. Once we make this distinction it is possible to reconcile the critical position that no being, human or nonhuman, should be ontologized reductively as meat, with the framework of ecology and cultural diversity by maintaining that all embodied beings are edible (for something), that is, through an ecological ontology. A careful contextualization of food practices can then enable us to combine opposition to the “rationalized” farming practices that reduce animals to living meat and which are responsible for the great bulk and intensity of domestic animal misery in the modern west (Adams 1993), while avoiding the culturally hegemonic attitudes towards indigenous cultures the poorly contextualized treatment of food and predation associated with ontological vegetarianism forces on many animal theorists—including a number of ecofeminists. As a result of its conceptual maneuvers, the framework of ontological veganism colludes with the dualism of the western tradition to systematically obscure an important set of alternatives based on ecological ontology, respectful use and reciprocity, and the concepts and distinctions appropriate to them. But once we have grasped these distinctions we can begin to recover the outlines of some possible alternative systems for thinking about edibility, human and nonhuman—for example in terms of the kinds of “gift-exchange” frameworks of ecological ontology for understanding human and nonhuman life developed in a number of non-dominant cultures and religions (see Cook 1977; Hyde 1979; Plumwood 1997). The spaces of ecological ontology and respectful use that are eliminated in Adams’s treatment prohibiting any ontologizing of others as edible are precisely the ones that could be occupied by alternative models which see the food chain in terms of reci-

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procity rather than domination or alienation, for example as a sacrament of sharing and exchange of life in which all ultimately participate as food for others, and the “moreness” of all beings is recognized (Snyder 1990).21 This kind of ecological ontology may correspond philosophically to the sorts of worldviews many indigenous cultures have followed, but grasping the general features of this model as an ethical system or set of systems does not depend on reproducing exactly the details of their philosophical frameworks or lifestyles, and it can be given an independent philosophical defense once we have a grasp of the main distinctions. Adams’s conceptual framework rules out this kind of reciprocity alternative, assumes a culturally universal interpretation of food practices, and implies a culturally universal set of conclusions ethically requiring ontological veganism. Adams displays some uneasiness with these consequences, claiming that she wishes to avoid conflict between her position and the aspirations of indigenous people. However, she does not tell us how this conflict is to be avoided; the outcome of any ontological veganism based on universalizing the western domination framework of meat must inevitably be some unacceptable form of ethnocentrism. And as we will see below, Adams adopts further assumptions that put her on an even more direct collision course with those who depend on hunting for survival. When presented with examples which indicate the possibility of a “sacred eating” alternative framed in terms of reciprocity, Adams compounds the conflict with indigenous aspirations to have their perspectives and differences recognized by refusing to acknowledge that there may be ways of constructing animals as food which are not subject to the kinds of objections she raises to the reductionistic form of meat. Thus when presented with an example of reciprocity in what she calls “the relational hunt,” Adams strives to assimilate this case to the case of the reductionist construction of meat, with the result that not only is it impossible to acknowledge any significant cultural difference, but that the reductionist and instrumental forms are made to appear inevitable and culturally universal, the only possible way in which an animal could be food and therefore the only possible alternative to the desired condition of no-use or veganism. The “relational hunt,” a hunting context which is usually only vaguely and ambiguously specified but one form of which may be taken to involve some elements of respect or sacrality and to be strongly based on need, ultimately comes down, according to ontological vegans Carol Adams and Marti Kheel, to nothing more than the usual nasty business of corpse consumption; talk of respect is no more than a bit of romantic waffle, a fancy piece of sleight of hand used to cover over the revolting, demonic facts of murder as usual (Adams 1990; Kheel 1995). Of course, Adams and Kheel are right that the concept of “the relational hunt” is sometimes misapplied or invoked in bad faith by those who cannot meet the quite stringent conditions such a reciprocity framework imposes, (see my argument on Stange below), but they are wrong in their implicit assumption that it is invariably so misused. The “relational hunt” is dismissed by Kheel and Adams on the grounds that “it makes no difference to the animal” whether it is killed by a relational hunter who sees food as a sacrament that respects the animal as more than meat, or by a conven-

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tional one who sees the animal as meat and does not question the identification of food practices with domination. But this is to practice an extraordinary and extreme reduction of the context and of what makes a difference, a reduction to the sensations and beliefs of the one individual hunted animal immediately prior to its death. In the human case, this is like saying that it makes no difference to you whether you are eaten by a hungry grizzly bear or killed in a Nazi concentration camp, and that where in both cases the result is your death the moral status of the latter must be the same as that of the former. Even in terms of the immediate, narrowly interpreted context of your own consciousness, this is plainly wrong; how and why you die can be very important.22 But this reduction of the context to your consciousness itself is unwarranted, and in a larger context the discrepancy between the properly “respectful hunt” and the reductionist construction of food animals can make a great difference, not least to animals themselves, who will potentially be faced with very different conditions of life in the reductionistic case than in the respectful case. In one case an animal’s entire life can be instrumentalized and distorted in the most painful ways in the service of an unremitting, unreflective, and ungrateful human desire for meat, and the “more” than food that it is can be completely denied. In the other case the animal can be made use of responsibly and seriously to fulfill an important need in a way that recognizes the “more” that it is and respects both its individuality and its normal species life, in a reciprocal chain of mutual use which must ultimately include both hunter and hunted. One framework is arrogant, reductive, and human-centered, assuming a hierarchy of value in which human lives are worth more than those of other species, while the other is compatible with a basically egalitarian framework of honesty, nonranking, gratitude, and reciprocal benefit—a benefit which does not accrue of course in liberalindividual terms (as Adams 1994, 103, insists it must) but through taking our turn in, benefiting from and and sharing in the systems of flow and exchange that nurture all life (Cheney 1997). Ultimately the difference between these frameworks ontological vegans dismiss is a very major one.

THE EXCLUSION ASSUMPTION AND THE ANIMAL/PLANT BOUNDARY In thus dismissing “the relational hunt” complex (which apparently includes the reciprocity, sacred eating, or gift/exchange frameworks), Adams and Kheel not only court ethnocentrism but dismiss the whole concept of sacred eating that may help to show us the way out of the fly bottle, the dualistic versus alienated alternatives of unconstrained use versus the alienated “outside the ecosystem” alternative of avoidance of all use in which we are culturally trapped. Ontological veganism creates a further nest of problems about the boundaries of moral exclusion that are insoluble within its own parameters without some form of neo-Cartesian ethical exclusion. The crunch comes eventually for this kind of ecologically disembodied

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theory because the conceptual exemption from the food chain that results from the attempt to extend the “above the food chain” human status to all morally considerable beings cannot be indefinitely made. There has to be a class of living beings to whom these moral scruples do not apply if we are going to have something to eat at the end of the day, that is, the theory has to assume that there is some class of living beings who as food are excluded from moral consideration. If they are not so excluded, then we need to acknowledge some form of “sacred eating” anyway, to take account of that section of the class of ethically considerable beings who are our food. But since the sacred eating alternative has been dismissed as simple hypocrisy, the ontological vegan theory entails moral dualism, a neo-Cartesian insensitivity to non-animal forms of life as beyond moral consideration, and an abrupt moral and biological break between “animals” and “plants” which is out of step with what we know about the continuity of planetary life. The idea that creatures other than animals might need consideration is just as destabilizing of the ontological vegan project as the idea that animals might be similarly subject to consideration was originally to the human supremacist project. The admission of living beings not counted as animals to the sensitive and ethically considerable category has to be treated as a threat because in combination with the Exclusion Assumption it would render the whole ethical eating project unviable. Any position which has thus equated availability as food with moral exclusion is thereby committed to an exclusionary imperative, since it is forced to insist on a substantial outclass of living beings that are morally excluded to locate any viable form of eating which allows an ethical basis for human survival. This is another source of conflict with ecological consciousness, because in the present context of ecological destruction, it would be wise for us to adopt philosophical strategies and methodologies that maximize our sensitivity to other members of our ecological communities and openness to them as ethically considerable beings, rather than ones that minimize ethical recognition or that adopt a dualistic stance of ethical closure that insists on sharp moral boundaries and denies the continuity of planetary life. What is particularly disturbing about the moral dualism ontological veganism entails is that in the context of today’s growing neo-Cartesian consensus in philosophy that takes only animals to be morally considerable, many ontological vegan theorists reproduce exactly the same conceptual maneuvers to exclude plants and lower animals from moral consideration that their opponents earlier used to exclude animals. Carol Adams simply ridicules the idea that plant lives could have individual value or that plants could have forms of awareness, for example, in exactly the same way the idea that animals might have minds was ridiculed earlier by those who urged that animals were beneath consideration.23 These features are indicative of the way the ontological vegan position relies on repositioning the boundary of closure and retaining moral dualism rather than eliminating dualistic boundaries, as is possible with the “sacred eating” option they reject. Although ontological vegans present themselves as extending our sympathies for our companion life forms on this planet, their rejection of sacred eating carries as its hidden underside another unstated project, that of nar-

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rowing and blunting our sympathies and sensibilities for the excluded class of living beings who are needed for our food. The drawing of exaggerated and dualistic boundaries between animals and other creatures such as plants cannot do justice to ecological complexity or the continuity of life, and the outcome is an over-polarized, over-homogenized, and over-individualized account of what counts as predation (identified with aggression by ontological vegans), an account in which the krill-eating whale is a vicious male-coded mass killer, but the tree-girdling rabbit that can be utterly destructive of whole forests and their occupants is a peaceful, female-coded cutie. Direct aggression against an individual animal is unacceptable, even in cases where individuality is not well expressed in the animal’s species life, while indirect aggression against entire ecosystems gets to count as peaceful. Ontological veganism rests here on a mythical and gender dualizing ecology which complements its mythical gender-dualizing anthropology, and on a simplistic account of aggression which completely neglects the balance of ecological communities and the variations in the way individuality is expressed and given value in different kinds of species-life (Finson 1988). Once we resist the dualizing of the animal-plant boundary we have to see predation in much more continuous terms, and its identification with violence and aggression is more contextually variable, depending as it does on the assumption of inviolate individual boundaries which may not be appropriate for certain kinds of species life (see Luke 1995).24 The strategy of extending outwards the alienated human status as above edibility inevitably results in dualistic boundaries and neo-Cartesianism maneuvers that widen the boundary of exclusion beyond the category of the human but continue to rely on maintaining a class of radically excluded beings (see Plumwood 1999). It is paradoxical that vegetarianism, so often taken up for the best of intentions and for genuinely good reasons, including that of compassion for animals and the desire to do right by nature, under the influence of ontological veganism so often winds up endorsing by default alienated reductionist constructions of food and denying and minimizing our sensitivity to the class of beings we are permitted to think of as morally considerable in the interests of maintaining something outside that class that can be potential food. The recent popularity in philosophy of closed vegetarian and animal rights theories based on a neo-Cartesian moral dualism aimed at stopping moral consideration at higher animals and denying ethical continuity is in part due to the Exclusion Assumption drawn from the alienated account of food, that since to be food is basically to be degraded, nothing that is morally considerable can ever legitimately be made food. Given this Exclusion Assumption, arguments for vegetarianism can apparently be based on a simple demonstration that certain animals should be treated as rights-holders, and the vegetarian conclusion follows. The Exclusion Assumption rules out the possibility of sacred eating, which is unattractive to this kind of vegetarian because it undermines the apparent simplicity of the argument strategy; once the equation of food with moral exclusion is abandoned, arguments for vegetarianism become more complex and less universal, requiring much closer attention to context and ethical complexity.

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CONCEPTUALIZATION, ETHNOCENTRISM, AND UNCRITICAL REVERSAL IN ECOFEMINIST ONTOLOGICAL VEGANISM To the extent that ontological veganism involves a moral dualism that implicitly endorses reductionist assumption about food, denies human/animal evolutionary and ethical continuity, and establishes a lower order below consideration we need to have as food, it is alienated from embodied life and is deeply incompatible with an ecological worldview. These unacceptable consequences are direct outcomes of ontological veganism, and any position that wants to avoid them will have to embrace some form of sacred eating, the alternative framework summarily dismissed as mere hypocrisy by ontological vegans. Principles of sacred eating hold that in a good human life we must gain our food in such a way as to acknowledge our kinship with those whom we make our food, which does not forget the more than food that every one of us is, and which position us reciprocally as food for others. This kind of account does not need to erect a moral dualism or rigid hierarchy to decide which beings are beneath moral consideration and are thus available to be ontologized as edible, and does not need to treat nonanimal life as lesser. The conceptual distinctions between food and meat associated with it suggest the basis for a less ethnocentric, more contextualized, and more ecologically compatible account of animal defense. Although contextual vegetarianisms that are more sensitive to cultural difference are clearly possible, ontological veganism stands firmly on universalizing a North American perspective. If vegetarian theorists have available the alternative possibility of a well contextualized ethical theory, why do they choose to develop and support a culturally insensitive and universalist one? It is hard to see what animal defense theorists have to lose by paying more attention to context. It is true that a better contextualized position may require a more complex argument, but on the other hand, if that argument is less hypocritical about opposing human oppression, more helpful to activists, more convincing to a wider variety of people and less disruptive of connections to ecological and human liberation movements, some greater complexity would appear to be a price well worth paying. The answer is itself a complex one: it includes the pull of North American cultural hegemony, the legacy of western cultural imperialism, poor knowledge of other cultural contexts, and at the theoretical level the mistaken belief that the only alternative to its North American-based universalism is an indiscriminate cultural relativism.25 Perhaps its social causes also include its emergence from largely white western feminist contexts,26 its isolation from other struggles, and the high degree of self-righteousness, the belief that one’s own cause overrides all others, that appears to be fostered in the crusading cultural climate associated with ontological veganism. Although ecofeminist theory has tended to stress contextual ethics (Warren 1990), existing cultural ecofeminist ontological vegan theories have not lived up to these commitments any more than they have to ecofeminist ideals of opposing all

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forms of oppression. Acknowledging the need for contextualization in an abstract and formal way does not dispose of the question of contextualization for cultural ecofeminism, when so many of its characteristic claims are poorly contextualized or improperly asserted as universal. As the ontological vegan imperative is applied insensitively and universally, even to those peoples for whom hunting is an ecological necessity, it privileges certain cultures’ lands and food orientations over others in its focus in a way which is clearly hegemonic. Ontological veganism strongly resists contextualization in several crucial areas. For example Carol Adams’s comments on “warehousing” carry the explicit suggestion that all forms of animal food ultimately carry the same ethical status (Adams 1993, 202). “Those who argue that warehousing is immoral but alternative [ways of] obtaining animal flesh are acceptable deny the historical reality that has brought us to this time and place.”27 But far from denying the realities that have brought us to factory farming, opponents of factory farming who do not universally condemn predation may have the specific kinds of rationality that have fostered warehousing precisely as their focus. The import of this passage though is that no contextual discrimination between forms of animal food is possible: all other ways of obtaining animal flesh have the same ethical status as factory farming, and the only historical trajectory that would have avoided factory farming is that of eschewing all predation. Among the inadequately contextualized claims of ontological veganism are claims about the ecological consequences of animal food (Adams 1993, 214). The cultural hegemony and universalism openly espoused by leading vegan theorists tries to assimilate all planetary meat-eating practices to those of North American grain-feeding and its alternatives, and is insensitive to the culturally variable ecological consequences involved in the use of other animals as food. Animal defense theorists stress the ecological and health benefits of eating lower down the food chain (Adams 1993, 214; Waller 1997). These principles may be a useful general guide, but they are subject to many local contextual variations that are not recognized by ontological vegans. In some contexts, for instance that of the West Australian wheat belt, the ecological costs of land degradation associated with grain production are so high that eating freeliving, low-impact grazing animals like kangaroos must at least sometimes carry much lower animal and ecological costs than eating vegetarian grains, so a vegan diet derived from this context can create conflicts with obligations to eat in the least harmful and ecologically costly way.28 Veganism does not necessarily minimize ecological costs and can be in conflict in some contexts with ecological eating. Yet vegan universalists employ a set of simplistic arguments which are designed to show that the vegan way must always and everywhere coincide with the way that is least costly ecologically. Both David Waller and Carol Adams quote decisive and universally-applicable statistics drawn from the North American context comparing the ecological costs of meat- and grain-eating, a comparison which is supposed to dispose of the problem of conflict between animal

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rights and ecological ethics. These universalist comparisons assume that grain production for human use is always virtually free of ecological costs or costs to animal life (whereas it is in many arid land contexts highly damaging to the land and to biodiversity), and ignore the fact that for much of the world the statistics they cite are largely irrelevant because animals used for food are open-range and not grain-fed. As we will see, the conflicts between the ontological vegan imperative and liberatory and ecological worldviews go even deeper than this. The need for any contextualization in terms of ecological, social and cultural context is explicitly rejected by Adams in her claims that all humans are equally positioned with respect to the need for animal food. Thus she claims that “humans have the choice whether to eat animals or not” (Adams 1993, 206). This claim, which is crucial to the ethical case, is made about humans in a completely generalized and unmodified form, although it is clear that not all humans do have this choice. For instance, those undernourished humans who cannot access an adequate diet of any kind, either a vegan diet or one containing animal food, plainly do not have the same freedom to choose to reject animal food that may come their way29 that privileged humans in the west now have, or at least, their freedom to reject it may be exercised at a very different sort of cost.30 The assumption of universal choice here is clearly a universalization of middle-class privilege. Similarly, Adams appears to believe that eating animal food is as inessential in all cultural and ethnic contexts as she takes it to be in her own. Explicitly rejecting any exceptions to her strictures against animal use for nondominant cultures, Adams states “We [feminists] do not embrace nondominant cultural traditions that, for instance, oppress women” (Adams 1993, 211). This claim appears to assume that the only alternative to its North American-based universalism is an indiscriminate cultural relativism. It also carries the implication that animal use is always as contingent and beneficially alterable a feature of a culture as feminists believe the oppression of women to be. It ignores the constraints of particular ecological contexts—thereby universalizing the ecologically damaging life form of the urban marketplace, consumer choice context of relative detachment from the constraints of those ecological contexts. But the successful human occupation of many places and ecological situations in the world has required the use of at least some of their animals for food and other purposes: The most obvious examples here are places like the high Arctic regions, where for much of the year few vegetable resources are available, but other indigenous “gathering-hunting” cultures are similarly placed—for example Australian Aboriginal cultures, whose survival in harsh environments relies on the finely detailed knowledge and skillful exploitation of a very wide variety of seasonally available foods of all kinds, essential among which may be many highly-valued animal foods gathered by women and children. Adams’s theory displays in several distinct ways here an offensive and clear cultural universalism in its assumptions about women and gathering. The problematic moves here are often lumped together by feminists under the term “essentialism,”

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but are better approached through a more careful breakdown of assumptions.31 First, Adams relies on the same doubtful cultural feminist anthropology of historically peaceful pure “gathering” cultures as Collard,32 in which men hunt large animals in what is envisaged as a precursor of warfare and women exclusively and peacefully gather or nurture plants in a precursor of agriculture. This imaginary schema frames both contemporary indigenous and historically food activities in terms of a western gender dualism that is read back in a universal way into other times and places, and involves the approach to women’s identity and history I have called the feminism of uncritical reversal—one which makes a guiding virtue out of and reverses the negative value previously attributed to the peacefulness and passivity associated with women’s subordination. Second, and somewhat more offensively, Adams denies the undeniable evidence from contemporary indigenous women’s foraging practices that they often include far more than collecting plants, thereby universalizing her own cultural situation, using it to obscure or overlay their different cultural experience, and making the racist implication that these indigenous foragers are “not really women.”33 Third, in assuming that alternatives to animal food are always or “generally” available, Adams universalizes a context of consumer choice and availability of alternatives to animal food which ignores the construction of the life ways of well-adapted indigenous cultures around the ecological constraints of their country, which do not therefore represent inessential features of ethnic cultures in the way she assumes.34 This gives rise to another paradox: the superficially sensitive and ecological vegan can implicitly assume an insensitive and ecologically destructive economic context. From the perspective of the “biosphere person” who draws on the whole planet for nutritional needs defined in the context of consumer choices in the global market, it is relatively easy to be a vegan, and animal food is an unnecessary evil. But the lifestyle of the biosphere person is, in the main, destructive and ecologically unaccountable. From the perspective of the much more ecologically accountable “ecosystem person” who must provide for nutritional needs from within a small, localized group of ecosystems, however, it is very difficult or impossible to be vegan: in the highly constrained choice context of the ecosystem person some animal-based foods are indispensable to survival. Vegan approaches to food that rely implicitly upon the global marketplace are thus in conflict with ecological approaches that stress the importance of ecological accountability, and of the local. None of this is to say that nondominant cultural traditions of animal use are always above ethical or other criticism, or that new traditions cannot or do not sometimes need to be worked out. Nondominant cultures as well as dominant ones have obligations to maintain global ecological health and species diversity, for example, and to adapt tradition to take account of new contexts in which animal lives may be much more beleagured than in the past (Mathews 1994).35 The prospects for useful dialogue and negotiation between environmentalists, animal activists, and indigenous peoples on these issues are not, however, improved by the uncritical deployment by ontological vegans of blatantly ill-informed and offensively culturally hegemonic frameworks.

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CULTURE VERSUS NATURE: EXCEPTIONALIZING PREDATION In demonizing predation, ontological vegans have again brought a cultural feminist mindset to bear and have overlooked a cross-cutting problem: they neglect “the intricate texture of things in the world . . . the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air” (Dillard 1976, 200). They forget that animals are not only human prey but also themselves predators of us and of other animals, just as cultural feminists forget the “intricate texture” of oppression, that women are not only victims of oppression but also oppressors of others. So any attempt to condemn predation in completely general, ontological terms will inevitably rub off onto predatory animals (including both carnivorous and omnivorous animals), and any attempt to separate predation completely from human identity will also serve to reinforce once again the western tradition’s hyper-separation of our nature from that of animals. This is another paradox, since it is one of the aims of the vegan theory to affirm our kinship and solidarity with animals, but here its demonization of predation has the opposite effect. Ontological vegans have several responses to this problem, but none of them, I argue, successfully avoid this paradox. The first cultural feminist response to this paradox is to present predation as an unfortunate exception and animals, like women, as always victims: fewer than 20% of animals, Adams tells us, are predators (Adams 1993, 200), while according to Marti Kheel even pigs and chickens are vegetarians (Kheel 1993, 257). This last claim must rouse some incredulity among those who have had close contact with either of these species in a free-living state, since both are easily observed to be avid hunters of smaller animals in the wild (as well, of course, as relishing various nonanimal foods). Kheel’s claim serves to indicate clearly not only how limited is some ontological vegan theorists’ experience of the animals they theorize about, but also how the concept of vegetarianism is manipulated to suit the occasion in a way that shows little respect for animals as agents and choosers. Omnivorous animals like pigs and chickens may be “vegetarians” if they are confined and allowed nothing else but vegetable food to eat, but on this “low redefinition” practically everything would be vegetarian. That is, the extension of the category “vegetarian” is maximized, by counting as vegetarian any animal that can somehow survive a vegetarian diet, whether or not this is the animal’s chosen diet. In this way it is suggested that predation is unnatural and fundamentally eliminable. This same definition would make all humans already vegetarians too, but of course this conclusion is somewhat problematic for ontological veganism and its strategy of spreading moral purity. So when it comes to human beings, a totally different definition is applied with a view to minimizing the category of humans who count as vegetarians, to those who would eat animal food only in life-threatening emergencies and with appropriate degree of disgust (Adams 1995). This “high redefinition” for the human case serves to simplify and homogenize the issue and eliminate the question of context, as well as to minimize the category of the morally pure and sug-

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gest that human predation is unnatural. (Neo-Cartesianism of course will also serve to minimize the category of creatures who count as predators, by only counting as predation the eating of some “higher” animals). Once dualistic boundaries assuming that nonanimal lives are of no value are abandoned, and the term is used inclusively to include omnivores as well as carnivores, predation emerges as the staple of ecological life; but even if we can somehow limit the term to “animals,” predation is much more common and continuously distributed that these claims of Kheel suggest, and in some ecosystems such as coral reefs is extremely widespread. Tallies of predatory species in any case do not give a good indication of the ecological importance of predation in an ecosystem or its potential eliminability. The second move ontological vegans make to minimize the significance of predation and block the problematic transfer of their anti-predation stance from humans to animals is to argue that human predation is situated in culture while animal predation is situated in nature (Adams 1993, 206; Moriarty and Woods 1997). Human participation in predation therefore cannot be justified as participation in integral natural process, as Holmes Rolston (1988) and Ned Hettinger (1984; 1994) have justified it. Since Paul Moriarty’s and Mark Woods’s arguments are implicit in Adams, who also claims that human predation is situated in culture rather than nature, their implications are worth considering in some detail. Moriarty and Woods (1997, 399) argue against Rolston (1988) and Hettinger (1984; 1994) that “meat eating and hunting are cultural activities, not natural activities.” They claim that (398) “our distinctively human evolutionary achievement—culture—has strongly separated us from non-human nature. We have found freedom from ecosystems . . . [and] are no longer a part of ecosystems” (401). Because meat-eating is influenced by culture it can be considered to “involve no participation in the logic and biology of natural ecosystems” (401). Human hunting and meat-eating therefore has an entirely different status from the predatory activity of nonhuman animals. There are several problems and paradoxes here. One paradox is that animal activists who have stressed our continuity with and similarity with animals to ground our obligation to extend ethics to them now stress their complete dissimilarity and membership of a separate order, as inhabitants of nature not culture, in order to avoid the flow-on effects of demonizing some of the respects in which humans appear to resemble them. Embracing the claim that humans “don’t live in culture” to block the disquieting and problem-creating parallel between human hunting and animal predation introduces a cure which is worse than the disease and which is basically incompatible with any form of ecological consciousness. The claim that humans are not a part of natural ecosystems is on a collision course with most fundamental point of ecological understanding because it denies the fundamental ecological insight that culture is embedded in ecological systems and dependent on nature. It also denies an important insight some animal students and activists have rightly stressed, that nonhuman animals also have culture. In fact Woods and Moriarty’s solution rests on a thoroughly dualistic and hyper-separated understanding on the terms “nature” and “culture.” Nature must be “pure” nature, “strictly biological,” and culture is conceived as “pure” cul-

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ture, no longer in or of nature: an activity is no longer natural if it shows any cultural influence, and culture is completely disembedded from nature, “held aloft on a cloud in the air.” Of course Moriarty and Woods as well as Adams are right to object to Rolston’s simple naturalisation of human hunting and meat-eating. On the kind of account I have given, both the Rolston-Hettinger claim that meat-eating is in nature rather than culture and the Moriarty-Woods counterclaim that it is in culture and therefore not in nature are wrong and are the product of indefensible hyper-separated ways of conceptualising both these categories that is characteristic of human/nature dualism. It is only if we employ these hyper-separated senses that the distinction between nature and culture can be used to block the flow-on problem that demonizing human predation also demonizes animal predation. On the sort of account I have given above, any form of human eating (and many forms of nonhuman eating) is situated in both nature and culture—in nature as a biologically necessary determinable and in a specific culture as a determinate form subject to individual and social choice and practice. Food, like most other human (and many nonhuman activities) is a thoroughly mixed activity, not one somehow throwing together bits of two separate realms, but one expressing through the logic of the determinate-determinable relationship one aspect of the “intricate texture” of the embedment of culture in nature. Both conceptual schemes are inadequate to deal with the problem, both sides of this debate deny the way our lives weave together and criss-cross narratives of culture and nature—and this, as I argue in the last section, is very much the heart of the problem and the heart of the argument between ecology and animal defense.

IDEALIZING VERSUS DEMONIZING PREDATION: IDEAL HUNTING IN STANGE AND ROLSTON The pattern we have discerned repeatedly in this debate, inadequate contextualization, hegemonic universalization, and the presentation of a series of false choices associated with western dualisms, appears again in the treatment of the difficult and highly context-dependent question of hunting. With generous allowance for context required, discerning ethical guidelines for hunting is a difficult matter. The ethical framework of reciprocity and “sacred eating” provides some guidance and discrimination, since satisfying the respect and reciprocity conditions is no mere formality and requires respect practices somewhat thicker than the rather thin accounts offered by most contemporary western hunters. What is clear is that the options existing accounts of hunting present to us are excessively polarized, consisting either of the undercontextualised condemnation provided by ontological veganism or, as I shall now show by an examination of the work of Mary Zeiss Stange in defending women’s hunting, of an almost equally uncritical and undercontextualized idealization of hunting and predation. If ontological veganism presents predation as an eliminable, tragic, and corrupt flaw in an innocent world, predation and hunting are pre-

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sented in Stange (as to some degree in Rolston) as the premier feature of human identity and unparalleled source of true knowledge about the world of nature. It seems that once again we need some more sensible and sensitive alternatives to these extreme positions. In Woman the Hunter, Mary Zeiss Stange (1997) presents a feminist defense of women’s hunting. In a gripping account which nicely integrates experiential narrative and theoretical discussion, Stange describes, theorizes, and justifies her own involvement in hunting, which grew, she says, out of wanting to be involved in producing her own food. There are several aspects to Stange’s position that it is important to separate. First is her critique of what she calls the “radical ecofeminist” approach to gender and hunting. The second is her presentation of Woman the Hunter as a disruptive figure making a feminist claim to powers of aggression mistakenly and oppressively reserved in patriarchal society only for men. The third aspect is her presentation and defense of hunting, which she celebrates as the premier form of ecological knowledge and of human identity, to which all others are inferior. She is, I think, largely on firm ground in her anthropological and feminist critique of “radical ecofeminist” animals theory, or what I have called, more specifically, cultural feminist ontological veganism, but on shakier ground in the last two parts of her account. The third part, her defense and experiential account of hunting falls, I will argue, into an over-idealization that resembles the traditional over-idealization in narratives of warfare, and only doubtfully satisfies the conditions of the reciprocity account she appeals to. Her account of Woman the Hunter as a liberatory figure raises many of the same problems that liberal feminism does for feminism, the problems arising from what I have referred to as the Feminism of Uncritical Equality. Stange’s critique tends to identify both animal defense and ecofeminist positions with “radical ecofeminism,” mainly exemplified in the work of the leading theorists I have criticized.36 Since more critical ecofeminist and animal defense positions remain underdeveloped at the present time, there is some excuse for this—which may be taken as an indication of the way the lack of more critical developments weakens the animal defense position. However, that the possibility of more critical animal defense and vegetarian positions has eluded Stange is also one of a number of indications that her overall position, although certainly appreciative of nature and ecology, rather uncritically supports human supremacism. Stange completely dismisses the animals movement as a whole as hostile to embodiment and dismisses solidarity with animals along with it, apparently believing that the entire basis for animal defense lies in the radical ecofeminist arguments she has criticized (see 204, fn). Although at one point Stange justifies hunting by claiming that it is less damaging as an option than factory farming, there is no development of objections to the latter and no suggestion in the book that Stange envisages or uses hunting as an alternative to rather than as supplementing the products of factory farming. Although she claims to respect the animals she hunts, there is no real criticism of the contemporary disrespectful treatment and reduction of animals in the factory farm context, in nonhunting contexts, or in abusive hunting contexts. Stange offers a rather thin account of respect that lacks more that a

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few occasional suggestions that animals are taken seriously as subjects of a life, and does not indicate that the stringent counter-hegemonic conditions of the reciprocity framework are fulfilled. Stange is right in suggesting that Woman the Hunter is a profoundly unsettling figure, as unsettling for macho hunters as for many animal people. But she should also be unsettling for feminists. As she invokes Artemis (Diana) the Huntress to bless her enterprise of reviving Woman the Hunter, the project of reclaiming women’s access to weapons and to aggression, Stange quotes from the myth which relates how Artemis asks her doting father Zeus for what her brother Apollo has, “eternal virginity; as many names as my brother Apollo; a bow and arrows like his” (138). According to Stange, the Artemisian identity is that of the independent other or one-in-herself, in contrast to the hegemonic and subordinated other-than-the-male identity patriarchal societies try to mold women to fit. But that is not what the myth indicates; the story tells us that Artemis asks for just what her brother has—she asks for equality on his terms, not on her own terms. And there is no criticism of those terms, no sign here of feminism as “a critical discourse that tends to ask uncomfortable questions about everything” (Birke 1995, 33), or at least not about hunting. The result is a Feminism of Uncritical Equality, one that explicitly aims at extending to women power in the form of the male-coded side of the dualism of male and female-coded characteristics. Artemis, as eternal virgin, is set apart from the general female condition, and underneath her wish to participate in the aggressive use of weapons is the desire to be unlike other women, who remain tied to childbirth, the function of which she is also goddess, but which she herself escapes. Hers in an exceptionalized participation in a male-coded form of power that is not itself brought into question. Like the Feminism of Uncritical Reversal, this version of Woman the Hunter does not really escape the gender dualities that position men as active-aggressive and women as passive-peaceful, and which demands admittance for elite women into a sphere marked out for elite males. Rather than invoking a more complete unsettling of the dualistic boundaries, which would involve working out new terms for both sexes, we get equality as participation for a few women on male terms. Breaking these gender-coded dualisms, creating new terms, involves opening the space for change and for questioning the value and prudence of the activities that have been marked out for men by the exclusion of female-coded characteristics like sympathy. But this kind of “unsettling” as critical questioning is not what we get from Stange. Instead we get a rather shallow analysis of feminism as breaking stereotypes and crossing boundaries, without much thought for where this kind of feminism may have crossed over to. And we get a reaffirmation of the value of the old male-coded forms of power through the enthusiastic participation of “the new woman” who provides idealized accounts of the liberated activities in which she participates. Although Stange characterizes hunting as “blood knowledge,” hunting and predation in Stange’s hands emerge as noble and remarkably clean activities. Her narratives capture nicely some of the combined tension and frustration of the stalk, in a way reminiscent of the Hemingway war narrative, but as with heroic accounts of warfare,

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we hear nothing of the blood or the details of the animals’ deaths—they just “go down” neatly and are next heard of as carcases being tagged. We hear nothing of the effect on the animals’ affective relationships as they are removed, apparently with the precision of a surgical strike, from their conveniently fugitive and uncomplaining fellows. They are replaceable, we are led to assume. We hear of noble and considerate hunters, but nothing either of the kind of drunken hunters who shot up the camp occupied by myself and several other women on a float trip in Montana recently, firing murderously and randomly at the river banks in the middle of the night. Nor do we get a sense of how the world has changed for most animals, whose lives and spaces are increasingly few and encroached upon, as species like chimpanzees are driven towards extinction in the wild by hunting. Stange depicts responsible and ‘ecological’ recreational hunting37 in some of its frustrations and triumphs in a close-to-ideal context, but for a realistic representation we surely deserve to hear something of these other aspects too, not just “the scenic parts.” For Stange, as for Rolston (1988), hunting is not just another human activity and form of human identity—it is the form that discloses to us our essential identity, that reveals to us once and for all who we really are as humans. We are predators, above and beyond all else, and thus hunting comes to have a value above and beyond all else as a source of human self-knowledge. According to Stange (1997, 121), there is a mode of special listening which arises from hunter consciousness that makes this mode of attentiveness superior far to other forms of knowledge. All the friendlier wilderness activities—walking, watching, studying—all the stored gathering skills and observations—all forms of knowledge other than hunting get consigned to inferior “ship in the bottle” status. Only the hunter really knows the place (159), and only the knowledge of the hunter is real knowledge of nature or of the self (162). These are strong, indeed arrogant claims, stronger than those made by Rolston. For Rolston, too, predation should be celebrated and indulged in by humans, especially where it involves killing sentient animals in painful ways, because it brings us uniquely into contact with our evolutionary identity as predators and with ancestral formative processes in nature. We might ask whether such an unequivocal celebration of predator identities continues to be appropriate in times when nonhumans are in most places being driven from the world and increasingly exist only in the interstices of humanized spaces. But we should also ask whether predation has really had this singular role in shaping us, as these positions assume, and whether it really contributes such a singular wisdom? Have we not, also and equally, for nearly all our evolutionary history, known this relationship from the other side, been positioned as prey? Have we not, as Homo habilis, erectus, and sapiens, been in many habitats nibbled as well as nibbler, prey at least as much as predator, prey of the sabretooth, the crocodile, the grizzly, and the kangaroo, to name a few? In fact it is only very recently for most of us that these predators have been eliminated from our species life and we have come to think of ourselves within our enclaves of “culture” as positioned unequivocally at the top— a mode of thought which coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with our new identity

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as author of environmental problems. But are we not still as humans prey outside our largely illusory enclaves of culture, and still chomped in various more subtle and unacknowledged ways even inside them, as “the frayed and nibbled survivors of a fallen world” (Dillard 1976, 242)? Yet neither Rolston nor Stange propose that we commemorate and honor our position as prey in an equal way to our predator position. These hunting advocates of putting us back in touch with evolutionary wisdom and ancestral processes do not suggest that we should encourage some of our number to be carried off regularly to remind us of who we really are, or that we should set up some grizzly or crocodile festivals in which we make ourselves available for carnivore consumption so we can honor our sacrificial ancestral processes. Their justification of privileging hunting in terms of “contact with ancestral processes” does not seem to fit consistently with practice. Hunting allegedly has us participating in nature “in the same way as other animals” (Stange 1997). But it is rare for hunters eager for ancestral blood-knowledge to put themselves in the way of fair chase without sophisticated weapons by predators of humans in the name of evolutionary processes, or to affirm their participation in the food chain from the other side of the predation relationship. Yet this knowledge from the other side of the predation relationship has perhaps more to offer us that is relevant to our present situation, a knowledge that speaks equally of the cycle of exchange of lives, but one undoubtedly with a more humbling message about who we are as humans in the world—the knowledge that we too are food, that we are not outside but inside the food chain, subject to the same ecological narratives of energy exchange and replaceability that we reserve for the animals we hunt. If until recently the knowledge of the predation cycle was one obtained from both sides, neither the identity of predator nor that of the prey was pure. Each side could invoke and balance the other, tragedy could make itself known as the other side of triumph. The prey identity in combination with the predator gave us the knowledge of predation as both a dilemma and a paradox, the knowledge of our own vulnerability and animality, a deeply ambivalent condition of embodiment. That double-sided knowledge may have had an ecological power and balance that the single-sided one does not. This may help to suggest the real reason why unbalanced predator identities and knowledges are now given such stress and accorded such a privileged position over others and over our identities and knowledges as prey: the pure, unmixed predator identity of the western recreational hunter, unlike the prey identity, is now experienced in the west in a ‘pure’ form unbalanced by its other side, and this “pure” unbalanced form of the predator identity lacking doubleness not only does not disrupt but confirms western illusions of human supremacy and mastery. We do indeed have good reason to be highly critical of predation-centered accounts and positionings of human identity, not because predation itself is invariably fallen and demonic in the way ontological vegetarianism insists, but because what they usually offer us is a very incomplete and one-sided narrative of the human condition, one which lends itself readily to supporting human mastery identities and other abuses. For from that onlypredator angle we can easily come to think the food chain reflects our own species’

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greater worth, that it confirms our great cultural illusion that it’s our role in life as humans to always have the upper hand. Although there are clearly some contexts, especially indigenous contexts, where human hunting can be justified within an egalitarian reciprocity framework, and is in ecological balance, contemporary Northwestern American predation-centered accounts of human identity tend to give us a narrative which is as over-universalized and as culturally hegemonic as the alienated forms of vegetarianism it criticizes, since over much of the world the situation of prey animal abundance it presupposes no longer applies. In these contexts the predation-centered identity is the enemy and not the friend of ecological balance, its “blood knowledge” a knowledge of extinction, but one that brings no wisdom. The continuing decline of hunted songbirds over much of Europe, and the ongoing refusal amongst hunters to discontinue traditional practices, gives the lie to claims that hunting invariably brings ecological awareness. For those many contexts where what needs to be stressed is how much animals now require our care and protection, it can be disastrously inappropriate to glorify predation in general terms and to privilege it over other aspects of human identity. While purporting to celebrate human inclusion in nature, Rolston’s and Stange’s unequivocal celebration of predation depends on a subtle repositioning of the human outside the food chain relationship and on reconstruing it as a form of domination to which they themselves will never be subject. That is why they can identify predation so simply with a triumphal human identity, but this identity cannot bring ecological wisdom. For the ‘balanced’ predator identity that can bring ecological wisdom, as also for the prey identity, the food chain cycle is very much more an equivocal relationship of doubleness that can never be available for simple celebration unmixed with a sense of tragedy and gratitude. In the absence of a sense of this doubleness in the knowledge of predation, the doubleness Dillard’s Eskimo shaman takes to be the central problem for human life, (1976, 210) the ethical significance of the reciprocity framework as a way of reconciling doubleness is lost and its ethical requirements of reciprocal positioning cannot be met by the modern recreational hunter who invokes reciprocity as a philosophical justification for hunting (see Plumwood 1997). The sense of the suffering and ending of nonhuman lives as a tragedy for them that is learnt from this double positioning is something that is largely missing at the experiential level from accounts of hunting as “sport” or as triumph, (and is entirely missing from Rolston’s), along with a telling of the story in a different way from their side.38 It is easy to speak of suffering and death and to say that that is the way the world is, easy, that is, if you are certain you will always be on the right side of the predator-prey relationship. True, the recreational hunter comes to know in vivid experience that the world runs by a terrible Heraclitean logic, can see the self as the instrument of that logic, but what such a hunter cannot come to know unless they are positioned equally as prey that that what is terrible in that logic of living the other’s death applies to him (or her) as well as to the prey. There is a moral here then about entitlements to take being balanced by obligations to give, in this case by ensuring the continued thriving in the ecostem of potential predators of humans.

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NARRATIVES OF NATURE, NARRATIVES OF CULTURE, AND TRAGEDY IN ANIMAL LIVES The power of Stange’s narrative turns on the paradox of the sensitive hunter, as an evolutionary identity that has something to tell us about one part of our human history. There is an older and a newer form of this central paradox. The older form is, I think, probably widespread in indigenous cultures. The general form of it is that to be effective, especially in pre-modern contexts where the hunter cannot rely on the great technological power available to the modern western hunter, the hunter must rely on his/her communicative skills, knowledge, and to a great degree understanding of and rapport with the animals that are being hunted. Given the poor predictive power of mechanistic conceptions of animals, it is very likely that the hunter will often be effective just to the extent that they adopt the intentional stance, are able to conceive the hunted animal as another mindful, communicative, and intentional being, not a machine or mere piece of walking meat, and do not hide from or deny the animals continuity or kinship with the human hunter. The successful hunter must combine this rapport with the imperative of hunting food that is needed for the survival of self and loved ones. This is one basis for the paradox, according to the indigenous wisdom of the Eskimo—the central one that must be faced in human life: that all our food is souls. In many indigenous cultures, this paradox is openly acknowledged and is mediated in ritual and in ethical terms in a more or less egalitarian reciprocity framework in which eating is participation in the sacred mystery of the food chain and exchange of bodies in the energy flow of life, and justification for using others is obtained through the mutual availability of each species within it. The paradox of the sensitive hunter helps to explain why typically mechanistic and reductionistic views of animals are able to come to the fore only once hunting is replaced by agriculture, especially industrialized agriculture. It also helps to explain another paradox of cultural comparison, that the indigenous culture which gave us this wisdom, a culture which by our standards is materially very poor, could afford to be so much more honest and generous in its understanding of the other who is our food than we are in the hyper-affluent west, with our reduction of the other that is our food to the category of soullessness as “meat” or even less, and our perception that to be in the category of food is to be beyond ethical consideration, as far from kinship and acknowledgement as possible. We deny the “soul,” the communicative and kinship potential of the other which is our food, in the degraded conditions of the life we inflict on our food-to-be behind a wall of consumer distance and calculated ignorance. We are able to do this because of our conviction that we ourselves are beyond and above this process of exchange we have conceived in such degraded terms, safe inside the walls of “culture” from the savage and hostile ways we think are those of “nature.” By subsuming food within the category of nature we have been able to avoid treating it as an area where ethics is relevant and to justify applying to it the ruthlessness we take to be appropriate to nature—hence no challenge of ethical eating can arise.

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The dominant way of thinking about these problems in the western tradition has been in terms of human/nature dualism as elaborated in the narrative of the sanctity of human life, a narrative of personal justice and salvation, carried over from Christianity into humanism, in which we humans are irreplaceable and unique individuals, who gain our right to sacrifice other species from our rational superiority. When our individual or national life narratives in “culture” are flawed or do not run the course we aspire to, we have tragedy and the problem of evil. Nonhumans, on the other hand, have been seen as part of a very different story, in which they figure as replaceable members of much more holistic groupings (species), as characters in Heraclitean ecological narratives of energy flows and exchanges in “nature.” So we have inherited the great western cultural illusion that they live in nature and we live in culture. The radical difference between the individual justice and the food/ecological framework is real, as you discover when as a person whose sense of identity has been defined in the individual justice framework you are suddenly catapulted into that other older, shocking, subversive and denied Heraclitean framework in which you are food (see Plumwood 1996). Now these are apparently two separate and incompatible stories and kinds of justice—so different that we who see the world from the apparent safety and sanity of the sanctity side think the Heraclitean narrative is not a narrative of justice at all—just ruthless “red in tooth and claw” brute reality—a reality for brutes, but still not for us. The radically different character of these narratives has not been seen as a problem because they have been taken to apply in two separate realms, nature and culture, to a totally different cast of characters. Now this separation of characters is part of what the animal defense movement in our time has challenged, and rightly challenged. They have repositioned nonhuman animals as also part of the individual justice framework, as beings whose lives and projects and connections to others can be as compelling for them as our own, and whose ending is as much for them a tragedy. They have retold the world story from this more egalitarian perspective, no longer seeing the world as just their world, extending previously “human” privileges of individuality and care outwards to animals. At the same time, the ecological crisis has forced some of us to see that our apparent human immunity from the Heraclitean narrative is an illusion—that we, too, are positioned equally and along with the whole cast of nonhumans in the drama of the ecological world of populations, species, and the flows of the food chain. We can no longer retain the comfortable human-centered illusion of separate casts of characters in separate dramas. Both kinds of egalitarian narratives must now be seen as applying to both groups; we live in both culture and in nature. This confronts us rather directly with the problem that liberal individual narratives (of culture) and ecological narratives (of nature) are often of a radically different cast. Neither cultural resources nor individual experience has yet caught up with the challenge of integration our world now presents, so that our participation in one of these narratives can seem real at one time and the other at another, but usually not both together. Because we have so far to go to develop an ecologically insightful and integrated culture, the ecological narrative of nature still seems often abstract and unreal, while nature and culture in the

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form of these two narratives still often seem, experientially, like utterly separate worlds, which collide in unfathomable ways now and again. One problem is that though each project has a kind of egalitarianism between the human and nonhuman in mind, the ecology movement has been drastically modifying the humanist narrative just as the animal defense movement is trying to expand its extension. We need to do both these things, but in an integrated way we have not yet imagined. Another problem is that each of the two revisionary groups who have thus disrupted these traditional narratives of nature and culture has a partial perspective, seeing the way their own challenge needs to expand and has expanded the story, but not seeing the other. So many animal defense activists seem to believe that the food chain narrative is an invention of hamburger companies, while the ecological side often retains the anthropocentric humanistic and scientific resistance to seeing animals as individuals with life stories of attachment, struggle, and tragedy not unlike our own, and the refusal to apply ethical thinking to the nonhuman sphere. Clearly both sides need to make some changes here. This part of the impasse is potentially resoluble, by acknowledging both narratives and seeing from within each, which the movements as a whole have yet to do. But what is of concern for the future of the conflict between animal defense and ecological movements is that there seem to be some differences between the narratives that are ultimately irreducible, and hence a potential for never-ending conflict There really are two radically different kinds of narratives here, with different standards of individuality, justice, and generosity at work. The narratives envisage the individual’s relationship to life, for example, in completely different ways. In one of these narratives, you “own” your own body and have the right to exclusive use and control of it for your own exclusive benefit, while in the other one’s, life is more like a book borrowed from the library and subject to immediate recall by other borrowers—when you haven’t even finished reading it! If we abandon liberal individualism and its “ownership” model we will get some conflict reduction, but any society that values individual life forms highly will experience conflict with the radical flows of the food chain narrative. It seems here that animal activists have to be more willing than the ontological vegetarian to acknowledge and live with some degree of doubleness, tragedy, and limitation, accepting certain conflicts as inherent in ecological embodiment, and abandon the project of the peaceable kingdom which aims to reduce the two narratives to one as a project of cultural colonization no more desirable or achievable than that of rational colonization. The way towards resolving the impasse involves a level of cultural integration between these narratives we in the west have not yet achieved, in which we can see both kinds of narratives as valid and operative in our lives and come to see the world and ourselves from both sides at once, as it were. In the challenge of integration, it is helpful to see how the ecological narrative might be articulated as an ethical framework, to be satisfied that we not only cannot, but should not, try to reorganize the world to eliminate predation. No number of repetitions of “that is the way ecology works” will convince the kind of ontological vegetarian who sees predator ecology as a framework

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of monstrous injustice, and who thinks injustice should be challenged even as the ultimate power of the universe, that he or she is in the wrong narrative. The framework of reciprocity points to a way to bring the two narratives closer together by envisaging an ecological order which is itself potentially an ethical order with its own values and standards of sharing, generosity, and radical equality between species, and with its own stringent obligations to recognize the other as equally positioned, as potentially food and always more than food. The anthropocentric denials of western culture have set the stage for this conflict of perceptions, but less anthropocentric alternatives such as the framework of reciprocity are still alien to the thinking of western culture and in conflict with the modes of life and rationality it has developed. The challenge and conflicts of ethical eating show that the old narratives have already been disrupted: the task now is to develop alternative frameworks and models like the reciprocity model which can address these conflicts as a practical ethic for contemporary life and a source of critical, ethical, and ecological remaking of our food relationships.

NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

Although so far mainly toward a minimalist neo-Cartesianism in which humanoid status is extended at best minimally to a few higher animals on the basis of their similarity to humans (Plumwood 1999). Although the social effect of long-term confusion and conflict in the ecology/animal rights area is likely to be debilitating for both movements, it is enlightening and useful for theory development to observe the implications of a particular set of assumptions unfold. For examples of those who would eliminate predation see Stange (1997, 209) and Sapontzis (1987); deplorers include Peter Singer (1980). For critique of cultural feminism, see hooks (1980, 1984) and Lorde (1981). For some other kinds of analyses see Benton (1993) and Plumwood (1997). Much of the technology to develop such a “super-race” is already in place. See the Mother Jones special issue “Inside the Biotech Revolution” (May/June 1998). The experimental treatment of animals in science is a more direct practice of rational mastery, although the numbers involved are much smaller. For a discussion of its links with Nazism, see Arluke and Boria (1995). This brings to mind the aphorism that one cannot be half a virgin (see also Adams 1994, 106). Adventitious use (scavenging) might include cases where you find road-kill in still-edible condition, where someone is about to throw away a ham sandwich in perfectly good condition, or the waiter brings the wrong dish. Adams’s ethic would allow adventitious use only under the rather unlikely and self-defeating conditions of nutritional desperation and sufficient disgust. An ethics supportive of adventitious use could be justified by the benefits of promoting flexibility, countering alienation and self-righteousness, adding possibly useful nutrients to the diet, and minimizing wastage and general ecological stress—all without any further impact on animals. Occasional use includes the case where the normal diet excludes animal products, but fish (nonfarmed) is eaten every third Friday to be on the safe side or for specific health reasons. Further intermediate categories such as the occasional eating of noncommodity animals that are known to be the product of ethical farming or hunting which respects species life can also be distinguished. Vanguardist competitions over moral purity are the inevitable outcome of such accounts, the really pure insisting that it is unacceptable to like foods that even visually resemble flesh. See

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

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debates in the Vegetarian Times (1997). On the hindrance such polarization represents to reducing animal consumption, see Midgley (1983). This is an extension, perhaps in part inspired by pet-keeping practices. But as I argue in Plumwood (1997), normal practices here are themselves full of contradictions and denials, as freeliving animals are sacrificed to provide food for carnivorous pets. This may be another (less alienated) way to interpret the point of the “corpse and two veg” badge. Paradoxically, the denial that we are food and the related denial that our bodies are biologically perishable is one source of further suffering for animals as we sacrifice them in experiments designed to support our normative status as above bodily decay. There is a certain resemblance here between this argument and certain cultural feminist arguments designed similarly to demonstrate that, regardless of cultural context, heterosexual intercourse is degrading for women because the concave is inevitably passive and the convex active. The resemblance no doubt indicates certain common themes in cultural feminism. This move of using the commodity term “meat” as a cultural universal is sanctioned by terminological practice in the west, which to that extent expresses cultural imperialism. Does this mean allowing cannibalism? No, I do not think so. To allow that we are food for other beings is not to imply that we are necessarily food for one another. Many animals do not eat their own kind for what appear to be ethical bonding and species life reasons, and important health reasons for not doing so are increasingly in evidence. It does mean though that the taboo on cannibalism cannot be based, as it largely is now, on human/animal dualism. On Kant’s basically confused treatment of this problem see my discussion in Plumwood (1993, chapter 6). See Noske (1989) and Plumwood (1997). On respect for species life see Benton (1993), Mathews (1997), Luke (1995), and Finson (1988). Indeed any such prioritization is explicitly rejected in Adams (1993, 203). Adams in her discussion of the “relational hunt” asks in relation to reciprocity “What does the animal who dies receive in this exchange?” (Adams 1994, 104). The answer is that it has already received it in life itself, existence as part of the cycle of embodiment exchange. The idea of the food chain as a cycle of sharing and exchange of life in which all ultimately participate as food for others is what we should understand by reciprocity here. As political activists have long recognized, it can make a big difference whether you die in struggle or in submission, for yourself or in solidarity with others, in changing the world or uselessly. See comments in Adams (1994, 106). Adams states that plants are “renewable resources” for example, thus denying to them individuality. Similarly, David Degrazia’s case for excluding plants from any possibility of awareness is circular and ad hoc. It reproduces exactly and without any real argument the stimulus-response framework previously used to exclude animals. As mere stimulus-response machines, plants are beings who cannot rationally engage our moral sympathies (Degrazia 1996, 50, 93, 99, 130, 111). Degrazia basically employs a human extensionist framework in which equal consideration for animals amounts to “giving equal weight to their relevantly similar interests” (76). It is true that certain boundaries are important for ethical treatment and that being eaten or used can be a much greater harm to some kinds of individuals and species than others, something we need to take into account for ethical eating. But the salient distinctions here do not coincide in any simple way with the boundary between animals and plants as ontological veganism assumes but turn on such features as individuality, species-life, attrition and wastage rates, sensitivity to and care for others of the same species, and so on. In this situation some animals are much more like some plants, for example flies, sea turtles, some fish, corals, insects, and other species with naturally high attrition rates and no offspring care. And of plants, especially long-

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

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lived plants, we have still much to learn about how individuality is expressed. The emphasis upon individuality could also be argued to be a form of assimilationism or valuing sameness. As Carol Gilligan (1992, 24) notes, “The question of what responses constitute care and what responses lead to hurt draws attention to the fact that one’s own terms may differ from those of others. Justice in this context becomes understood as respect for people in their own terms.” The point has an important application to species life. For a cogent argument that these alternatives of absolutism and relativism present a false choice, see Mathews (1994). Some prominent feminists of color support vegan positions, but what is in question here is not racial but cultural difference. The passage actually reads, “alternatives to (sic) obtaining animal flesh are acceptable.” But this wording clearly does not draw the intended contrast the passage requires. The passage may have omitted the word “warehoused,” thus “alternatives to obtaining [warehoused] animal flesh,” which comes to the same as the reconstruction above. Adams prefers the term “warehousing” to the term “factory farming” no doubt because the latter hints at the possibility of ethical farming she wants to exclude. The assumption that all eating of animals has the same moral status also appears in her claim (Adams 1993, 196) that “the eating of animals is the most pervasive form of oppression in the western world,” which does not recognize any nonoppressive ways in which animals may be eaten. Of course one might be right to take this also as an indication that something is badly astray ecologically in these contexts, but it is unclear how far this argument can be generalized. Obviously it is unlikely that the poor would be able to afford to buy animal food on a regular basis, but it may present itself adventitiously or occasionally as an opportunity for the poor. Cultural feminist vegan arguments that meat is “for the privileged” and that this blunt generalization therefore means that the problem of adventitious use by the poor does not need to be considered in making universalized ethical claims about the needs of “humans” and the inessential character of animal food is typically undernuanced and undercontextualized. In fact many omnivorous animals have this choice too and do not usually choose the vegan way. I agree with Cuomo (1998) that vague charges of “essentialism” are usually an obfuscating and inadequate way to address what are often really problems of cultural hegemony. See Adams (1994, 107), where it is claimed that “to equate the process of gathering with the process of killing is simply lying about violence and a distortion of women’s past.” There are fewer factual constraints on our reconstruction of the past than on the present. But to ignore the fact that the process of women’s gathering often includes killing animals is simply to lie about the reality of many indigenous women’s present. The equation of women with a dualized concept of gathering and men with an equally dualized concept of hunting is clear in Adams (1994, 103–107). Equally clear is the cultural feminist lineage of this kind of argument, now largely discredited in feminism. For a classic discussion of the problems in this kind of white feminist cultural universalism see bell hooks (1980, 1984) and Lorde (1981). A different “not really women” move is often applied to female western hunters, who are regarded as mere dupes of men or as “male identified.” Of course Adams could mean that such cultures should abandon these traditional land and ecological relationships and either take up western store food or move to the soya bean belt, but these ideas are likely too open in their colonizing sentiments for most animal people. A good example of adapting tradition to take account creatively of such a changed context is the defense of buffalo in Montana from massacres by the state allegedly aimed at brucellosis control by the largely indigenous group, Buffalo Nations. Stange does note (73) that ecofeminism is diverse and that cultural feminism presents a problem for social ecofeminists and other feminists. It is unclear how the hunting practice Stange describes of taking the best animals can corre-

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spond to any natural form of predation by animal predators, who are said to improve the stock by taking the old and infirm from among the their prey. This seems to blow some of the ecological cover for modern “sport” hunting. 38. This is nicely taken up in Vance (1995).

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