The Domestication of Animals... And of Man.

Perhaps you wonder sometimes if I'm getting carried away with our criticism of m odern day life. Is all the talk about the evil system and our sick society is ju st youthful rebelliousness and exaggeration? It certainly is hard to tell from h ere inside the human race, with all our dissembling and projecting and pretense, whether what we're doing really makes sense or not... so who knows, maybe thing s aren't so fucked up, right? If you want some perspective on whether the brave new world is really as bad for us as the "radicals" say, just have a look at how it affects the others who must live in it - the animals. If you're middle class, the animals you know best (besides the ones in animated movies and visual commercial propaganda) are probably household pets, zoo animal s and circus animals; sports mascots and show horses. Just like the bourgeoisie (the people who own property), these animals seem to have it easy sitting around all day, eating and sleeping, playing with their masters - but this is not the life these animals have been prepared for over the last million years of evoluti on. Dogs have four legs so they can run through fields and canyons and chase dow n prey, not play frisbee for an hour a week. Parrots have wings so they can fly over jungles and across wild landscapes, not just sit, wings cut away, in little cages, with nothing to do to maintain their spirits but sing to themselves and learn meaningless fragments of less musical languages. Cats have claws so they c an fight and hunt and sharpen them anywhere they choose, they have testicles and ovaries so they can mark territory and go into heat and make love and raise kit tens; cut all these off and keep them locked inside, and they get grouchy, pathe tic, fat for lack of anything to do but eat standard-issue canned food they can' t even hunt. Domestic animals are exprected to be the court jesters and courtesa ns of the modern household, to provide entertainment and surrogate community, an d their lives and even bodies are adjusted accordingly. Their role is not to *be animals*, in all the wondrous complexity that entails, but simply to be toys. A quick look back at middle class humans reveals how similar our situation is. W e too live in isolation from our fellows in small, climate-controlled boxes, lit tle fishtanks complete with simulated foliage, called apartments. We too are fed on standardized, mass-produced food that appears as if out of nowhere, vastly d ifferent from the food our ancestors ate. We too have no outlet for our wild, sp ontaneous urges, sterilized and declawed by the necessities of living in cramped cities and suburbs under cramping legal and social and cultural conventions. We too cannot wander far from our kennels, leashed as we are by 9am-5pm jobs, apar tment leases, fences and property lines and national borders. And just like our pets, we learn to behave, to be housebroken and spirit-broken. We learn to adapt ourselves to this nightmare - becoming fat, grouchy, songless. Far less fortunate than us castrated prisoners, animals and humans alike, are th e animals that form the non-human proletariat (the people who work): the chicken s trapped living in their own shit in egg-factories with their beaks removed so they won't peck out each others' eyes, the rabbits that have their eyes systemat ically burned out to test the safety of shampoo, the veal calves that spend thei r entire miserable existences in tiny wooden boxes. The roles these animals pay, correspond to those of factory workers, temporary dishwashers and secretaries, minimum waged movie theater popcorn servers - and however individual bosses migh t see things, you can bet the market views them all with the same calculating di sinterest as the animals prepared to be food. The same profit-hungry heartlessne ss that makes it possible for the meat industry to regard the yearly holocaust o f millions of animals as fine, just keeps them doing their best to fight off dem ands for better working conditions and higher wages. And just as cows and chicke ns have been carefully bred, even genetically engineered, to such an extent that they are so far removed from their previously natural lives, the modern worker no longer has any concept of what life outside the working world of plastic and concrete might be, or how to apply his energies except under a whip. Where would

he go, anyway, were he to escape? Are there habitable lands as yet unclaimed, t o which he could flee? And wouldn't he destroy these lands, too, bringing to the m the values of domination with chisch hed has been poisoned by his bosses? In t he end, unless advised by a total regection of industrial capitalism, his flight would be just another advance in the tide of concrete that is sweeping across t he globe. Finally, there are the wild animals which still survive in environments polluted with oil slicks, discarded plastic soda bottles, and air pollution, to say noth ing of highways and hunters. As urbanization and suburbanization march pitilessl y forward, destroying the resources of their natural habitats, they learn to liv e off human waste instead, or perish. Pigeons build nests out of cigarette butts instead of twigs, rats learn to live in sewers and adapt accordingly, cockroach es proliferate as the vultures of the new era. These urban wild animals occupy t he same tier of society as the homeless do, scrounging through the refuse for th e bare essentials of life, although they certainly fare better than their human counterparts. The suburban ones - the wily raccoons, possums, squirrels who surv ive in the forgotten corners of conquered lands, living off what's left of the n atural, not to mention the extras and excesses of the bourgeoisie - can be compa red to squatters, organic farmers, punks, the metropolitan hunter-gatherers of t he underground resistance. The remaining species of truly wild animals, like dol phins, caribou, and penguins, are analogous to the very, very few existing indig enous peoples of the world who have not yet lost all their culture or been place d in zoos. For all of them, the future looks bleak, as the iron wind of standard ization blows across this planet. All this is not to say that we've deviated from some great plan set out for us b y "Mother Nature," or that the measure of happiness and health should be our con formity to the "natural." Whenever human beings try to decribe what "Nature" is, they invariably project onto it the laws their own society abides by, or ascrib e to it everything they think their civilization lacks; and besides, nature itse lf is something that changes constantly: at this point, the natural habitat of a poodle really is a leash and a kennel. If we have destroyed the natural world w ith our "civilization," then in the final analysis this must too have been a par t of our "natural" destiny (for what is there that does not proceed ultimately f rom nature? Is humanity somehow blessed or cursed with powers that are... *super natural?*). The question is not how to get back into submission to the Natural, but rather how to reintegrate ourselves into the world around us in a way that * works*. Can we make a world in which humans and animals can live in harmony with each other, with no divisions between them, no distinction between the natural and the civilized, between the familiar and the foreign? Can we escape from the forests of steel into the lush, green ones that linger, atavistic, in our fantas ies?