HUMANE CONDITIONS
ANIMAL KILLING AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL
LIBERALISM IN POST-WAR CULTURE
Robert McKay, University of Sheffield
I wish gratefully to acknowledge the support of the Animals and
Society Institute Fellowship when working on material included in this
paper and the comments on earlier versions from fellowship
participants in 2010, including Tom Tyler and Susan McHugh, and from
Brett Mizelle.
THE ONE WHO WAS CAUGHT
‘Steer Flees City; Swims To Jersey’, New York
Times, 11 June 1954
THE ONES WHO WERE SHOT
Fred Myers, one of the co-founders of
The Humane Society of the United
States.
THE ONE WHO CAME BACK
Mr. Agee is tall,
faintly rustic in
appearance, with
slightly walled
eyes. He is gentle
when not
aroused, and
always kind to
animals.
James Agee, ‘James Agee by
Himself’ [1942], Esquire,
60.6 (1963), 149, 289-290
(p. 149).
James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, first published in Harper’s Bazaar,
July 1952, reprinted in Encounter, 55 (April 1958)
“‘All who are put on the range are put onto trains. All who are put
onto trains meet the Man With The Hammer. All who stay home are
kept there to breed others to go onto the range, and so betray
themselves and their kind and their children forever.
“'We are brought into this life only to be victims; and there is no
other way for us unless we save ourselves.'
“Do you understand?”
Still they were puzzled, she saw; and no wonder, poor things. But now
the ancient lines rang in her memory, terrible and brave. They made
her somehow proud. She began actually to want to say them.
“'Never be taken,'” she said. “'Never be driven. Let those who can,
kill Man. Let those who cannot, avoid him.'”
She looked around at them.
“What else?” her son asked, and in his voice there was a rising valor.
She looked straight into his eyes. “'Kill the yearlings,'” she said very
gently. “'Kill the calves.'”
She saw the valor leave his eyes.
James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short
Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965),
pp. 432–33 (Agee’s italics).
James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, first published in Harper’s Bazaar, July
1952, reprinted in Encounter, 55 (April 1958)
For as he walked along in this sudden and complete
loneliness, he tells us, this wonderful knowledge of
being one with his race meant less and less to him,
and in its place came something still more
wonderful: he knew what it was to be himself
alone, a creature separate and different from any
other, who had never been before, and would
never be again. He could feel this in his whole
weight as he walked, and in each foot as he put it
down and gave his weight to it and moved above
it, and in every muscle as he moved, and it was a
pride which lifted him up and made him feel large,
and a pleasure that pierced him through (p. 42627).
James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short
Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965),
pp. 426–27.
Reading through the creaturely prism consigns
culture to contexts that are not exclusively
human, contexts beyond the anthropocentric
perspective. It recognises in culture more than
the clichéd expression of the “human condition”
but an expression of something inhuman as well:
the permutations of necessity and materiality
that condition and shape human life. A work’s
formal qualities as well as its conceptual and
historical contexts are fundamentally stamped by
this altered perspective.
Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in
Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011), pp. 5-6.
The elementary beginning of true
reason, that is, of reason which involves
not merely the forebrain but the entire
being, resides I should think, in the
ability to recognise oneself, and others,
primarily as human beings, and to
recognise the ultimate absoluteness of
responsibility of each human being. […]
I am none too sure of my vocabulary,
but would suppose this can be called
the humanistic attitude. [Among those
who preserve a living devotion to it] few Shoeshine. Dir. Vittorio De Sica. 1946.
Lopert Pictures
seem to have come by it naturally, as a
physical and sensuous fact, as well as a
philosophical one; and few still give any
evidence of enjoying or applying it with
any of the enormous primordial energy
which, one would suppose, the living
fact would inevitably liberate in a living
James Agee, Review of Shoeshine,
being.
Dir. Vittorio De Sica, in Agee on
Film, vol. 1 (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1969), p. 278.
A little bridge ran crosswise above the fences.
[The Man with the Hammer] stood on this bridge
with His feet as wide apart as He could set them.
He wore spattered trousers but from the belt up
He was naked and wet as rain. Both arms were
raised high above His head and in both hands He
held an enormous Hammer. With a grunt which
was hardly like the voice of a human being, and
with all His strength, he brought this Hammer
down into the forehead.
James Agee, ‘A Mother’s Tale’, in 50 Great American Short
Stories, ed. by Milton Crane (New York: Random House, 1965),
p. 427.
• He was upside down and very slowly swinging and
turning, for he was hanging by the tendons of his
heels from great frightful hooks, and he has told
us that the feeling was as if his hide were being
torn from him inch by inch, in one piece. And then
as he became more clearly aware he found that
this was exactly what was happening. Knives
would sliver and slice along both flanks, between
the hide and the living flesh; then there was a
moment of the most precious relief; then red
hands seized his hide and there was a jerking of
the hide and a tearing of the tissue which was
almost as terrible to hear as to feel, turning his
whole body and the poor head at the bottom of
it; and then the knives again (p. 428).
Hubert H. Humphrey in 1958
I have asserted that a great cruelty exists. It is
hard to find words that can evoke reality
behind that simple statement. Here in the
senate we have got used to big numbers and
when I say that more than 100 million animals
are subjected to unnecessary cruelty every
year, I am afraid that I may sound merely
statistical. But we are morally compelled, here
in this hour, to try to imagine — to try to feel
in our own nerves — the totality of the
suffering of 100 million tortured animals. The
issue before us today is pain, agony and
cruelty — and what a moral man must do
about it in view of his own conscience.
Congressional Record, July 29th 1958,
Volume 104, pt. 12 (Washinton, DC: US
Govt. Printing Office, 1958), p.15381.
in the Nazi camps, we find those who had been
citizens, members of the community, now stripped
of every legal protection and right by means of the
declaration of a ‘state of exception,’ whereas in the
factory farm, we find those who never were
members of the community nevertheless afforded
at least some minimal protection (as in humane
slaughter laws, for example), even if those laws are
in fact minimally enforced.
‘Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context’, Law, Culture and
the Humanities, 6 (2010), 8–23 (p. 20).
the division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and
animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a
mobile border within living man, and without this intimate
caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not
would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose
man to other living things, and at the same time to
organise the complex—and not always edifying—economy
of relations between men and animals, only because
something like an animal life has been separated within
man, only because his distance and proximity to the
animal have been measured and recognized first of all in
the closest and most intimate place.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, pp. 15–16.
beyond the so-called human, beyond it but by no
means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘the
Animal’ or ‘Animal Life,’ there is already a
heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more
precisely (since to say ‘the living’ is already to say
too much or not enough) a multiplicity of
organizations of relations between the living and
the dead, relations of organization or lack of
organization that are more and more difficult to
dissociate by means of figures of the organic and
the inorganic, of life and/or death.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. by
David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28.2 (2002), 369–418 (p. 399).
Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.
I think human
beings might do
exceedingly well
to learn from
animals and hope
to come half-way
up to them,
rather than exert
themselves in
distinguishing
themselves from
them.
Map of escaped steer’s route through New York.
Total distance 6.1 miles.
James Agee, Letters of
James Agee to Father
Flye (New York: George
Braziller, 1962), p. 121.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.