The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
Bonus: Animals in Media
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Bonus: Animals in Media
Together with Arukah Animal International, The Animal Turn co-hosted a panel discussion focused on "Animals in Media". Using a video about animalized hierarchies in contagion films as a prompt, Claire Parkinson, Susan McHugh, and Tobias Linné engaged in an open-ended about media, representation, power, and activism.
Date Recorded: 22 May 2024
Claire Parkinson is Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies and Co-director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University. Her publications include the books Popular Media and Animals (2011), Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012), Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (2019) and Animal Activism On and Off Screen (2024). Connect with Claire on Twitter (@molloy_claire).
Susan McHugh, Professor of English at the University of New England, USA, researches and teaches literary, visual, and scientific narratives of cross-species relations. She is the author of three monographs, most recently Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (2019), and coeditor of six edited collections, including Animal Satire (2023). McHugh serves as co-editor of two book series, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and Plants and Animals: Interdisciplinary Approaches, as well as Editor-in-Chief of Society & Animals.
Tobias Linné is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Media. His research explores veganism and how animals are made accessible for human consumption. In 2012, Tobias launched the course Critical Animals Studies. Animals in Society, Culture and the Media and he was later the coordinator for the project “Exploring ‘the Animal Turn’: Changing perspectives on human-animal relations in science, society and culture.” In 2016, Tobias co-founded the Critical Animal Studies Network.
Featured:
- Animals in Media, video of the panel discussion on Arukah Animal’s You Tube channel.
- Animalized Hierarchies in Popular Contagion Films, on The Animal Turn’s You Tube channel.
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Arukah Animal International
Arukah Animal International seeks to end animal exploitation through advocacy, awareness, & the arts
iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
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Introduction
Claire ParkinsonThis is another iRaw podcast , and so media is absolutely critical , I would say , and I think that we have enough studies to demonstrate this . Now it's really important that we understand these relationships between media and how we think about and act towards and treat animals . Think about , and act towards and treat animals because media has been and I'm talking very generally now but media has been absolutely key to shaping the way in which the , the public , the various different publics , the audiences , understand animals and understand our relationship to animals .
Claudia HirtenfelderWelcome to the Animal Turn . Today's bonus episode is something a bit different . It's the audio form of a panel discussion I organized together with Robin Dorman from Aruha Animal International , an organization that aims to bring an end to animal exploitation and suffering through advocacy , awareness and the arts . On the 22nd of May 2024 , we brought together scholars in media , communication and literary studies to have an open-ended discussion about animals in media . We used a short film I made together with the Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research Collective as a prompt to kick off the conversation , but together we discussed matters as wide-ranging as what constitutes media , the material impacts of animals included in popular media , as well as how media might be harnessed to improve animals' lives . I'm not going to give you the guest bios here , because those are included in the short intro that was given at the event itself , but if you're interested in watching instead of listening to this panel discussion , you can find the full video produced by Rene R Frederick , a digital artist for Octopus Media Productions , on Arucha Animal International's YouTube channel . If you would like to watch the short film that appears at the start of the discussion about animalized hierarchies , it's available on the Animal Turns YouTube channel .
Claudia HirtenfelderI hope you've subscribed Before I let you go . If you do visit our website , the Animal Tones website , you'll find that we now have a merch store which features incredible art made by Rebecca Shen and , of course , our incredible logo made by Jeremy John , and most of the proceeds go towards the podcast and some of the profits from selected items go towards some sanctuaries and rescues . It's really it takes a great deal of time and effort to produce this content for you , and I've been trying to think of ways in which I can repay the work of others , such as Christian and Rebecca , who help me behind the scenes and figure out ways to get the podcast a bit off the ground . So I hope that you appreciate the merch and we would very , very much value your support . And if you're looking to support sanctuaries such as Vine Sanctuary , you can do so via our merch store as well . There's some incredible portraits that Rebecca's made of some of Vine Sanctuary's residents , and all of the profits from those sales , for example , will go to Vine Sanctuary .
Claudia HirtenfelderSo make sure you head over to our website . This is one way in which you can support the podcast as well as other animal organizations , and if you don't have money to spend or you're not keen on buying things online . You can also support the show by leaving reviews and rating . It really does go a long way in terms of helping others to find the show Okay . But it's enough of that . This is a long discussion today . It's a really fascinating and interesting panel discussion and it created a whole bunch of new ideas for me , and I hope you feel the same way . Enjoy .
Robin DormanI'm Robin Dorman , president of Arifaa Animal International , and welcome to Animals and Media , a co-production with the Animal Turn . When I think about animals and media , how other animals are represented in popular culture , I remember in 2017 seeing the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's new film , the wildly imaginative satirical thriller Okja as something of a miracle , with its stars 13-year-old Mija and Okja , the painstakingly designed , computer-generated pig protagonist in the words of Bong Joon-ho , branded as a super pig by Mirando , a monstrously predatory multinational agrochemical corporation . Okja , property of Mirando , along with 25 other piglets born in a lab , were sent to farms around the world to hold a contest to see which pig turns out the largest to be bred and slaughtered for consumption , and Okja wins the prize . The race is on to reclaim the super pig , who has been living an almost fairytale countryside existence , wandering the dreamy South Korean mountaintops with her devoted companion Mee-Chun , with whom she shares an unbreakable bond . But diabolical plans are afoot , as the maniacal corporate giant will bring back the super pigs to Manhattan's headquarters to be disclosed to the world and sold as beef , jerky , bacon and hot dogs as edible as apple pie . And then the dizzying and hot dogs as edible as apple pie . And then the dizzying , preternaturally exhilarating race is on to free Okja , which includes a group called the Animal Liberation Front with its own eccentricities to help meet you .
Robin DormanWe are in the grip of a wild . Elsewhere , there is much to laugh aloud about . Until it suddenly pierces your heart at the slaughterhouse which haunts me to this day . Until it suddenly pierces your heart at the slaughterhouse which haunts me to this day , when the battle to liberate Okja makes the news . The villainous CEO , lucy Morando , says the synthesis of old Morando and new Morando was impeccable . I took nature and science and I synthesized , and everyone loved it .
Robin DormanYou remember what the New York Times said about our super pigs ? Lucy Morando is pulling off the impossible . She's making us fall in love with a creature we already are looking forward to eating . I mean , these are journalists who never write about pigs . They never write about pigs . They wrote about our pigs Ten years in planning , on the cusp of a product launch that will feed millions . And what happens ? We get tangled up in this terrorism thing and somehow we end up being the ones who look bad . Okja . The film no doubt belongs to Okja the pig , who , to me , is one of the great characters of any film , and now I hand it over to Claudia Hertenfelder of the Animal Turn . Enjoy .
Animalized Hierarchies in Popular Contagion Films
Claudia HirtenfelderHi everyone , Welcome to this discussion today .
Claudia HirtenfelderThank you so much for joining us live for what I suspect will be an awesome panel discussion about animals and media . Thank you so much , robin , for that great introduction there . Now we don't have too much time . Today . We've got two hours , which I know sounds like oodles and oodles of time , but when you put three scholars together with a topic that's as interesting as animals and media , that time flies . So let me give you a little bit of a sense of how things are going to go today . But before I do that , who am I , you might ask ? Well , my name is Claudia Hertenfelder .
Claudia HirtenfelderI'm the host of the podcast the Animal Turn , and today I will be moderating this discussion about animals and the media . What will happen is we're going to have a brief intro now , then we're going to play a very short video and then we're going to enter into a discussion with our panelists . Let me introduce the panelists to you now , so , in alphabetical order , first up we have Claire Parkinson , who's a professor of cultural communication and screen studies and also the co-director of the Center for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University . Her publications include the books Popular Media and Animals , also Beyond Human , from Animality to Transhumanism , animals Anthropomorphism and Mediated , mediated encounters , as well as animal activism on and off screen . So , needless to say , claire Parkinson has definitely got a deserving seat in this panel discussion where we're talking about animals and media .
Claudia HirtenfelderNext up we have Susan McHugh , who is a professor of English at the University of New England in the United States . She researches and teaches literary , visual and scientific narratives of cross-species relations . So I really love that we're cutting across different media here as well . We're thinking about film and books and literature . She is the author of three monographs , most recently Love in a Time of Slaughters Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction , and co-editor of six edited collections , including Animal Satire . Mchugh serves , or Susan serves , as co-editor of two book series . The first is Pallagrave Studies in Animals and Literature . The second is Plants and Animals Interdisciplinary Approaches . She is also the editor-in-chief of Society and Animals . So thank you , susan , so much for all of the work you do . I know being an editor on journals takes a lot of time , so thank you so much for doing that , and I know that you've read oodles and oodles about literature and media .
Claudia HirtenfelderFinally , we have Tobias Linner , which please correct me if I'm saying it incorrectly in a moment . Tobias , who's the assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Media . His research explores veganism and how animals are made accessible for human consumption . In 2012 , tobias launched the course Critical Animal Studies Animals in Society , culture and the Media , and it's a fantastic course . You should definitely go check it out online . He was later the coordinator for the project Exploring the Animal Turn Changing Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations in Science , society and Culture , and , if I'm not mistaken , susan Claire and Tobias all worked together and knew each other through this project , so that's really quite great , and you can access this PDF online or bits of this information online . So if you're interested in animals and media , go and check out that resource . In 2016 , tobias also co-founded the Critical Animal Studies Network , so our three panelists have done amazing work across media , across communication , and they've really thought deeply about how animals are represented as well as the material ways , I think , in which animals are included in the kind of media we consume .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd these are some of the topics that we will be talking about today , but first we're going to launch things with a bit of a video Now . This video I made as part of a project two years ago with Carolyn Prowse for a group called the Biosecurities Urban Governance Research Collective and we were interested in thinking about how contagion films were showing a variety of things , whether it was cities or animals or people , and one of the key themes that came up for us were animalized hierarchies . Here's the film Enjoy Sweet Tooth . A series on Netflix is a fantastic show to explore how animal hierarchies are used in popular media films .
Claudia HirtenfelderInfected figures are abundant in apocalyptic films that explore contagion and tensions between science and nature . Diseases jump from animals who are eaten , such as in Contagion , or are tested on , such as in Resident Evil or 28 Days Later . Not only are animals represented as vectors of disease , but as humans become infected , they often become less human and more animal-like . Humans lose their capacity to speak , they cannibalize and sometimes they even run on all fours . These films have an implicit animal hierarchy the closer to human a character is , the more worth and value their lives have .
Claudia HirtenfelderWe see this in .
Claudia HirtenfelderSweet Tooth 2
Tension between animals and contagion
Claudia Hirtenfelder.
Claudia HirtenfelderSet a decade after the Great Crumble . Many humans have died because of the H5G9 virus . Other humans are giving birth to hybrids . These human-animal forms and the show depicts humans as problematic , but they remain the baseline against which hybrids are compared . This is clear when we realize that the main hybrids in the show , gus and Wendy , are more human-like in characteristics than any of the other hybrids in the show . Everyone is surprised . They can speak . Leave me alone Shit .
Claudia HirtenfelderSpeak , stay back , you talk .
Claudia HirtenfelderThe importance of this becomes apparent when Addy , the resident tortured doctor , finds himself unable to do an invasive scientific experiment on Gus .
Claudia HirtenfelderWhat I'm about to do goes against everything that I believe in , but I'm doing it for her .
Claudia HirtenfelderGus is just too human-like , too high up the hierarchy for the doctor to experiment on without completely undermining his ethics , so he opts instead to test on a chameleon-human hybrid that is more animal-like . But understanding the animal hierarchy does not end there . Animals are hidden in the narrative of Sweet Tooth 2 . We see chickens tested on in labs , tigers tied in containers , teenagers wearing fur and humans eating meat . These animals are at the bottom of the animal hierarchy and are often only used as plot fillers and little else in these kinds of shows . The only animal who is given any sort of considered attention in the show is Trixie , dr Addy's horse . Dr Addy's horse , trixie , is used for transportation and she is implicated in the death of a neighbor and eventually she is let free as an allegory for questioning who humans are .
Claudia HirtenfelderWhile Sweet Tooth's reliance on hybrids upsets the divide between humans and animals , the show unsuccessfully captures the significance of animals in its narrative . In general , animals are given less attention , screen time or agency than humans and the other figures in contagion-related films , whether it be chimpanzees or chickens that are tested on , dogs who are caged or deer who are hunted , animals often only serve as background noise or plot points in these films . One exception is Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs , which represents how dogs are caught up with zoonotic transmissions and urban politics . Unlike most films , in Isle of Dogs we realize that if animals are kept as pets or tested on , they tend to have different relationships to the spread of disease . We also see how animals are impacted differently by diseases too . They can die , be relocated and be saved .
Claudia HirtenfelderI don't think I can stomach any more of this garbage .
Claudia HirtenfelderExactly what I'm hearing Words out of my mouth .
Claudia HirtenfelderMany zombie , alien , superhero or contagion-based films have these animalized hierarchies . Some humans are the norm , infected others are the problem , and animals are often invisible . It is important to remember that while humans often remain the norm , which humans are considered to be in quotes , the ideal type in these films is often shaped by racialized and gendered hierarchies too . Have you ever thought about animal hierarchies before ? Why are they so common in popular media and how do these figures help us to explore human anxieties and ethical questions about animals ? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below .
Claudia HirtenfelderGood boy .
Claudia HirtenfelderI absolutely love Isle of Dogs . It's got to be one of my favorite films . It's just , it's fantastic . And I couldn't help myself but include them here when thinking about Contagion , because I really did feel as though that film treated Contagion with a little bit more nuance . Now I know in our discussion today we're not going to be focused on Contagion exclusively . We're going to be thinking quite broadly . This will be an open-ended discussion , but maybe we can start there with this tension between animals and contagion and the ways in which they're represented in media . Susan , why don't we start with you ? Have you given this any sort of thought ?
Susan McHughThank you , claudia , and thank you all for providing this wonderful space for this discussion today . It's funny because when Claudia first asked , do you want to be a part of this ? We're starting to by talking about Contagion , I thought I don't know anything about that , I don't write about that . And then I gave it a really good think and realized that my very first academic article that I published was on the very first film of the Planet of the Apes franchise , which spoiler alert , sorry if you don't already know this the premise of all of the films is that all of the world's dogs and cats have died due to a highly contagious virus . Why dogs and cats , who knows ? Anyway , that's the premise for why suddenly people take an interest in living much more closely and really domesticate their relationships with non-human primate species .
Susan McHughAnd as I thought about it , I realized that all of these things that make contagion narratives the ones that are interesting to me , like Isle of Dogs , are these questions that sometimes are simmering at the background sometimes explode into the foreground . I think they do in that . One is how this does and doesn't work as a metaphor for interracial relationships . The interspecies tensions map on quickly to that , and the Planet of the Apes , one I thought was particularly interesting because , as Claudia says in the video about Sweet Tooth , another one of these tensions is animals in the foreground versus animals in the background , or human-animal species , questions that are important versus ones that are considered not important . And that was what drew me initially into wanting to write about Planet of the Apes and how it is and isn't a racial hierarchy . Because about racial hierarchies as much as species .
Susan McHughBecause I couldn't help but notice the horses that are used in that film aren't named . They're part of the backdrop , of course . Just transportation maybe gives it a little Western movie flavor . They're all dyed to be a uniform Black presentation . Often they are on the guerrilla character's side , it seems . But there's a weird kind of history there of Blackface representation that I just couldn't it being the 90s at the time that I was writing about this let go of . Because in the 90s we were still looking at unredacted cartoon media that had heinous blackface stereotypes just out there and Turner Media had just decided to when they bought the rights to I believe it was Looney Tunes to redact that material and again , I think it was not considered problematic as the human representations of blackface minstrelsy were by the 90s , but still through the 90s , because this was Bugs Bunny doing a blackface routine . Somehow it was funny or at least not considered so disgusting . We had to put it in a vault and forget about it forever . So yeah , lots of thoughts there .
Claudia HirtenfelderSorry , susan , you were saying that the horses were painted black here . So the gorillas in the film had painted the horses black and this was reminiscent of blackface .
Susan McHughIt was whoever was staging it . So this was all done behind the scenes , behind camera , in the way the animals are quite often altered in their presentation . Live animals are altered for their film presentation but there isn't any sort of diegetic explanation for why the horses have to be black . You know they could just be presenting , but if you look very closely you can see that there's some who have a white stripe or a white sock or some aspect of their coat isn't uniformly black as it is intended to be represented on the screen . So that involved some considerable work behind the scenery . And why ? Why would they go to that trouble ? I began to wonder about and realize that this does fit into a longer cinematic history . That is , and again isn't about species .
Claudia HirtenfelderThat is and again , isn't about species Fascinating . We were kind of thinking a little bit about just kind of starting with contagion . So I mean , susan has already introduced , I think , a topic that we'll dive into quite a bit here with the tension between race and species . I think that is paramount
Boundary Crossing and Ableism
Claudia Hirtenfelderin these contagion films . They come up kind of all the time . But when you think about contagion , what comes up for you when you think about animals ? Contagion films they come up kind of all the time . But when you think about contagion , what comes up for you when you think about animals , contagion and media .
Tobias LinnéYeah , well , first of all I want to say like that's very interesting to hear , susan . I've never done this close look at Planet of the Apes , so it's really interesting . I mean I've seen it but I've never thought of it . The horses , no , but for me , uh like , um , I was thinking about you know , like with covid and and , uh , all that happening , of course it has become a very , you know something that has spilled over like into reality in in some way , if you look at the like from popular culture to the news media , because I mean , of course we still , I guess we still don't know the , the source of covid . But if you remember the first weeks after covid , it was a lot about bats and bat soup and uh , some you know , uh , and , and the consumption of animals .
Tobias LinnéI mean , I who knows what was really behind it . But I just thought that was such a real-world example of this contagion theme that we've seen a lot in popular media , and I think the news media also used that frame as they were reporting this , which of course then I guess , made people even more interested in this . And I mean , today we see a lot of discussion around . You know how the next pandemic , you know , and where it will come from and which animals will be involved . So I also think that this fear , this cultural fear , has really translated into reality in a fascinating way over the last years . Sorry if that's a bit off the topic .
Claudia HirtenfelderNo , there's no need to apologize . This is again an open-ended discussion and I think you're right . Contagion the film Contagion had come out I think shortly before , just before COVID hit , and then a lot of people went back and watched Contagion just after and it was remarkable how visceral the film almost seemed , where you saw that opening scene of them like touching all the doorknobs and all of a sudden we were paranoid about the things we touched and where we moved . So it was kind of like the fantastic moving into your living room and it didn't seem so you know so far .
Claudia HirtenfelderBut what I think is really interesting here with thinking about animals is animals have pretty much always been represented in these films . They've always been in the background or in cages or you know , I think it's 27 days later there's this . You know , the opening scene is just kind of monkeys and dogs that are rabid in a cage and there's very little to the storyline . But so often I think animals are used as this kind of starting point when did the disease come from ? An animal ? It's like a quick and short and sharp narrative and there's obviously precedent for this . A lot of zoonotic diseases , a lot of diseases are zoonotic , um , but there's this kind of fear that really seems to spark , and I wonder if these films don't speak to a kind of anxiety that's that's hidden about the human animal divide . Claire , do you have anything to add there ?
Claire Parkinsonyeah , I mean , I , I think that's absolutely true , because one of the things that we see all the time in these kinds of films is the anxiety
What is Media? Popular Media?
Claire Parkinsonover border crossings or boundary crossings . So it's this moment where something moves , so zoonotic diseases , for example , moving from animal to to human , this , this becomes something to be . You know , this is something fearful , but um as well , I think , where susan was pointing out before , you know , there there's a whole range of different boundaries . It's not just that kind of human , animal boundary , but there's all these other categorizations that we have that come into play when we have these contagion films . And one of the things that I was thinking about , which perhaps is not , maybe not as obvious , is , you know , I do .
Claire ParkinsonI absolutely think that these films are exploring those boundaries . You know , alongside , what it is to be properly human and you know this , this idea of where we cross over and where something becomes animalized , this idea of where we cross over and where something becomes animalized . But there's also these ideas around , for example , not just race , but also , I think , gender , and also I would say that ableism plays a large part in this as well , because one of the things , if you think about a lot of these contagion type films . I'm speaking very generally now , but a lot of the time what happens is that we actually see this kind of , uh , this progression from somebody being , let's say , properly human as , in , you know , properly human equals healthy then something happens , they catch something , they become , you know , disabled to some extent . Then they become disabled and animalized . So I think there's something really interesting to explore there as well about ideas around ableism .
Claire ParkinsonUm , that is another one of these boundary crossings that can , um , you know , sort of work on the anxieties , um of of people , and it's um , it's certainly something you see . For example , example , you could think about zombie films . I mean the sort of George R Romero style of zombie films , for example , are the ones where you , you know , and obviously you do see that similar kind of zombie character appearing in contemporary film and television as well . So , so you know , you have this kind of zombie character that you know drags , their feet , can't move properly , their bodies have become different , um , and they are , in effect , they're disabled in some respects by becoming zombie and at the same time , also they're animalized . So there's something I think really interesting about exploring as well that boundary , which speaks a lot to the way in which ableism is presented um and represented uh within our culture as well yeah , I find that really fascinating .
Claudia HirtenfelderLike who the infected figures are , you know whether , whether you're thinking about a vampire or uh , um , what's a wolf-human hybrid ? I want to say not a wolverine , a werewolf , thank you , I was like the word just completely went . You know , there are these definite kind of infected figures that have come up , I think for ages and ages and ages right Pre-predating film , these kind of infected figures , and they seem to have , I the , the kind of blurring of boundaries seems to be in two directional . In some senses they seem to become , quote-unquote , less than human or there is playing with not being this kind of perfect , able-bodied like white man or whatever it is , but on the other hand , they seem to become more than human . They tend to like , get a lot more in the way of strength or speed . So there's an interesting tension happening there as well .
Claudia HirtenfelderI wanted to take a bit of a step back , maybe , from Contagion now and just think about what is media , and maybe this is really basic , but we're kind of jumping around and talking about media and popular media and news , and I think it can all kind of get smashed together into one thing , but it's not . There's many different ways of thinking about media . Who could perhaps give us a bit of a breakdown here of what we're talking about , when we're thinking about media and popular media ? Tobias , my eyes are on you , buddy .
Tobias LinnéI'm looking at the professor of media in the group , but sure I'll start . And the professor of media , but it's in the group , but sure I'll start and then Claire can fill in .
Claudia HirtenfelderNo , but I mean You've got the course . So I'm imagining this comes up in the day one of the course , so come on .
Tobias LinnéSure . So yeah , I mean I would have so in the course . I start by talking about non-media centric and media centric approaches . So you know , like , because of course media can be understood very broadly , and in my department we understand media very , very broadly , so basically anything that communicates anything to anyone . But I mean that's not a workable definition in this .
Tobias LinnéI mean , I think you , you we talked when we were preparing for this , we talked about popular media and I think that's equally a very , very broad concept that we were discussing . For example , does commercial advertisements ? Is that popular media ? And I would say , of course it is , from my perspective , because it's circulated in a popular economy , a media economy , because it's circulated in a popular economy , a media economy . And so popular media is a very broad concept . For me it can include social media . Well , news , to some extent I would say , like some would say that news is a different kind of , but I mean there has been sort of a popularization of the news , what's sometimes referred to , as you know , infotainment or whatever . So I mean you can use broader definitions , but I don't know what you say , claire .
Claire ParkinsonWell , I can only really just add a little bit to that , because I think that was a really good way of defining it . I mean , we think about popular media as something which is widely accessible . So film , television , it does cover , I would say , social media . It also covers news media as well , I would certainly say that's the case , and advertisements , so it's anything really that's widely accessible to what we might call a general public .
Claire ParkinsonUm , and it's interesting because actually what , what you're asking is , there's , there's , there's decades and decades of work on trying to define what media and popular media is . And I suppose , very , very simply , you know , people used to talk about mass media and people still do talk about mass media sometimes , but , um , in the 1950s there were a couple of theorists who came along , people like roland bartz and raymond williams , and they started talking about popular culture in a different way and actually using that term popular and sort of rescuing media alongside this kind of broader definition of popular culture , and they sort of rescued it from this idea of it being , you know something that was that was mass for the masses , this kind of undifferentiated group that were out there , that were you know this idea that people were just sort of going along and receiving the messages from the media and sort of acting on recovering media and talking about it in a really serious way and understanding that , yes , it is about it being , if you like , general and about it being out there for the masses . But what does it do ? And when I say the masses , I mean I'm uncomfortable with that term , I find that really difficult , and we know that we don't have an undifferentiated mass of people out there . In fact , what we have is we have lots of different audiences , we have lots of different individuals . They make up different audiences and those audiences , those individuals , all come to media with their own , if you like , kind of knowledge and cultural , you know understandings .
Claire ParkinsonSo this is what's so exciting about media is that , um , people take different meanings from it , for example , you know so , although it is there and there is maybe one intention where something is being made , there's an intention to communicate in one way , in fact , what happens is is that we have all these different audiences made up of all these different individuals , all different knowledge , different cultural ideas , identities , values and so on , and as a result of that , we make different meanings , which is great for us who are involved in thinking about and looking at media , because it means that it's really exciting to actually try and unpick what those meanings are and try and understand them . So , yes , so I think we've moved from those ideas of mass media , undifferentiated group , to a much more nuanced understanding of what popular media is . And popular is not a pejorative term . We use popular in a very positive way . It reaches a lot of people . That's basically what we're saying such a great explanation , karen .
Tobias LinnéLike the whole idea of there being a popular media is , of course , um , I mean the ,
Animals and Media – Why should anyone care?
Tobias Linnéthe idea , the theoretical idea was , of course , that there is some um , something like art , or you know whatever avant-garde , or you know fine , uh , fine , called fine art , uh , whatever , you know whatever avant-garde or you know fine art .
Tobias LinnéYou know the antithesis of the popular , you know the culture or media for the masses that Claire is , but I mean that's not a distinction that is , you know , upheld today , like with digital media , of course , all of these blend into one . So I mean I would say that , with the omnipresence of media today , like almost almost all media is popular media to some extent , like claire was saying , I mean it's hard to uh , it's not a workable concept in that way , but I mean um , but there are interesting dimensions to it , which Claire mentioned , and I mean the focus on how different audiences interpret different media is , of course , one of the real developments during the past decades in this field , and I think it was Raymond Williams said , claire , that there are no masses , only ways of seeing people as masses , or something like that . And I mean that perspective , you know seeing how different people . But I mean , we do know that popular media shape a lot of people's opinions on everything from politics to their personal relationships , to their views on animals yeah , pretty much anything .
Susan McHughOh , I just wanted to add that , as an interloper in literary studies , the same theoretical revolution that was led by the likes of Barth and especially Raymond Williams , in rethinking the artificial hierarchy between high and low culture , has had a wonderful effect in opening out who counts as a producer of literature and this question of high and low of culture at all has had a wonderful .
Susan McHughIt's set up some great new work , I think , and great new approaches to thinking about Indigenous media production and thinking about how we can change that narrative of whose stories matter .
Susan McHughFor me personally , my own method has been to look at stories in every media form and to think about how the same story is remediated across media forms , and also in thinking about animal stories in particular , how animals can have stories because they're seen as producers or at least somehow direct contributors to their own media representations . And that's a 20th century phenomenon , and that , for me , was really thinking through popular media . I don't think I would have been able to make the argument that animals matter in literary studies without the new media forms , as they always say , that have emerged and keep evolving in the 20th and 21st centuries and the fact that they have become democratized to a certain extent , that people , more and more kinds of people , more and more peoples around the world are having access to media production . That for me has really been a tremendous asset in raising questions not just about the problems of human hierarchies , but of various species hierarchies as well .
Claudia HirtenfelderWell , that takes us nicely , I think , to asking then why is this important when we're talking about animals and media ? Why is it so ? We've got many audiences . They go from perhaps very niche audiences to large audiences that are sharing memes where everybody knows what is in reference . So there are various scales here of maybe reference to understanding media . But then what is the significance here of focusing on animals and media ? Why is this an important question ? Why would having this panel discussion be important ? Why should anyone care about the relationship between animals and media ? Leah , why don't you start us off ?
Claire ParkinsonI was going to say . I think that Tobias really sort of started pointing out where it becomes critical , and this is because , think about , where do we get the majority of our information from ? Well , you know , we get a lot of our information from media , whichever source that is , whether that's news media or whether that's , you know , through social media . A lot of the shaping of our worldviews , for example , can happen through our consumption of different types of media , and so media is absolutely critical , I would say , and I think that , um , we have enough studies to demonstrate this .
Claire ParkinsonNow it's really important that we understand these relationships between , uh , media and how we think about and act towards and treat animals , because media has been and I'm talking very generally now but media has been absolutely key to shaping the way in which the , the public , the various different publics , the audiences , understand animals and understand our relationship to animals .
Claire ParkinsonAnd I mean , we can sort of take that back to those contagion films , for example , and you know the ways in which some animals are represented in those films . You know as , for example , you know monstrous , or you know animals that are threatening human life , human well-being , and this , you know , it may may not say this this does genuinely shape the way that people think , and we've got really good examples of this . It does shape the way that people think about animals in lots and lots of different ways . I mean , I'm I I'm sure that we can all start talking about different examples , but just to speak very generally at the moment , um , it's just really important that we acknowledge and we understand the role that media is playing in shaping the public understanding about our relationships with animals and other species themselves .
Claudia HirtenfelderWhy don't you give us one of those examples , so that we can ground that Susan ?
Susan McHughI can jump in . Yeah , looking back to Tobias's really important point at the beginning , that COVID is making us super aware of how these processes happen in the US anyway , among certain circles , there is this persistent and entirely ungrounded Wuhan laboratory theory of the origin of the disease . Again , there's no evidence for this , but it really is one of these narratives that became quite viral and is persistent . And it strikes me as really interesting to reflect on the examples that you started us out with , claudia , because I can't think of a single film example Well , I can think of very few film examples where experimental animals are treated as sympathetic creatures . Instead , quite often they're treated as vicious , as infected of the problem and in having no other nuances in this representation of laboratory animals seems to me as really quite dangerous .
Susan McHughAnd you can sort of see it earlier in examples like the novel and animated film the Plague Dogs , where , even though the author and the filmmakers are very sympathetic to trying to break that down , um , even though the author and the filmmakers are very sympathetic to trying to break that down , nonetheless it doesn't seem to have cracked that narrative pattern across media forms .
Susan McHughUm , and I'm thinking , trying to think of a few examples on the fly here and it seems like um the brown dog , um the real life
Material Impact
Susan McHugh, uh , brown dog , life , brown dog , animal rights controversy of a dog who escaped , flayed from actually a medical educational theater . It raised huge controversy in the Victorian or Edwardian England at the time of this incident and it was exposed by two gals who were posing as medical students but were animal activists there on purpose to document this . It's repeated the scene at the very beginning of the novel the Island of Dr Moreau . This is the reason , the premise , the narrative for this , for why Moreau has to flee England because he's got the media hot on his tail and the public not , so a real life event ended up in kind of the basis of launching this book Fascinating .
Susan McHughYeah , and that becomes one of these experimental animal dramas that's repeated at least three filmic times in the 20th century and in each case the technology changes and interestingly it isn't it's not a contagion narrative . In any case it's a surgical alteration , then it's a hormonal injection and in the most recent Marlon Brando version it was genetic modification , but not viral , interestingly .
Claudia HirtenfelderYeah , I mean , I think genetics have really captured people's imagination as well . People are quite concerned with genetics and , I think , genetic kind of hybrids as well , like how human and animal organs are moving between bodies and stuff . There's a lot of tensions there . Tobias , I can see you sitting on the edge of your seat . I know that you've . I can see you scrambling to say something .
Tobias LinnéNo , it's just so much interesting . I just want to say , susan , I know that story because one of the women who originally did this was Swedish Lithilindov Hageby , and she was a Swedish animal rights activist and aristocrat who lived in London . They published their diaries called the Shambles of Science , where they document the torture , as they saw it , of the little brown dog in the medical examinations . So that's a fascinating story . But I wanted to just bring it back to a little about what claire was saying about why , uh , animals in media is important and the examples of that we see , of that . I mean , I would say , like the way I explain it to my students , uh , would be that you know , media is the the largest producer of stereotypes about anything in our society . Media runs on stereotypes . It needs to because otherwise we wouldn't understand it . But of course and that goes for animals as well and those media stereotypes are very powerful and they're often repeated and we see it in so many examples , I think , in film and and um , and there are , of course , many tragic example . I mean anyone can think of flipper or lassie or any of the popular .
Tobias LinnéI uh , I have a funny example because I work , um a little on my free time with a rat rescue organization and so we take in and rehome pet rats and in the organization we always joke about like not another remy , and remy is of course the , the little rat in uh ratatouille , and , and everyone you know names their rat remy , and when we get them in it's like so , or the suggestion is always what about remy ? And there are so many , so it's messing up . You know our system of like keeping track of the rats because they're all named Remy , uh , so that's like a very concrete example that you can see how that movie , which came out I don't know 10 years ago , 12 years ago , something like that , how that has you know , uh , I don't know what impact it actually had , but I mean , but people are naming their rats for me for a reason , I guess , because they appreciate the film . Um , yeah .
Claudia HirtenfelderSo I guess the significance here is happening on on two levels . On the one , I mean probably way more than two levels , but on the one level you've got , uh , it's seeping into the ways people think about different animals . Some animals are problems , as Susan said , some animals are likely to be infected . Some animals are dangerous . You need to stay away from them . You know , there are , I think , numerous examples of animals that have come up in literature and books where you have to stay away .
Claudia HirtenfelderRats , crows , wolves have been vilified in numerous across across genres , across um media . But , of course , tobias , you also touched on something that's really important here that I think we should spend a bit of time on is the material impact for actual animals . So there's the representation of animals , which is really significant and important in terms of how we think about our world as being a multi-species world . But there are actual animals who are also in these films and there are animals who happen to be bought and sold as a result of these films . Um , you know the , the obvious example here is a clownfish with finding nemo , the , the , the number of people , exotic pet trade that went up with clownfish and it was devastating for these fish populations as a result direct result of a film . So I know that many of you have worked on this already . So who would like to jump in ? Go ahead , claire .
Claire ParkinsonYeah , yeah . So I could certainly give you many examples of this , and that's a lot of what my work is about is actually looking at the ways in which media is shaping public understanding and public opinion and what the impact of that is on the material lives of animals . And so I give you an example , something that I've been working on for a long time and very much so recently , because sadly it's become a major issue , certainly in the UK , but I think elsewhere as well and that's the representations of dogs classed as dangerous dogs . So pit bulls are probably the type of dog that are most well known in this context , and one of the things that we see is that , um , the way in which the news media represents pit bulls and the people who live with pit bulls , um , the the way in which they're represented , is that both the pit bull and the human companion share similarities , so the stereotype of the pit bull , and in the UK at the moment also , we have the XL bully dog , which has just been the subject of a loss of intense media coverage coverage .
Claire ParkinsonUm , and so what happened , certainly in the uk and elsewhere , was that there was a lot of media coverage , sensational media , sensationalized media coverage of dog attacks , um with certain types , particularly the pit bull . Um . That was sort of in the 1980s and 1990s . I mean previous to that you had um . It was always . It was always attacked attacks by rottweilers , dobermans , german shepherds and so on , but particularly pit bulls and more recently xl bullies . And these are the attacks that are um are reported and there's a particular stereotype that emerges from those , those those new stories about not only the dogs but also the humans that live with those dogs as well . So , for example , in the UK particularly , this is very much tied up with ideas around class and gender . It's a slightly different situation in the US , where it's tied up with ideas around race and gender , where it's tied up with ideas around race and gender .
Claire ParkinsonBut particularly if I'm just talking from the UK perspective , one of the things that happened was this sensationalised media reporting ended up with the UK government responding by introducing breed-specific legislation , and what that did was it prohibited certain breeds of dog and certain types of dog within the UK , but particularly the pit bull initially , and more recently within the last sort of few months it's also been the XL bully , and we have so many studies that show that breed specific legislation does not work . It is not effective , it does not do what it sets out to do . It does not . If , if the if the main , if the main idea behind it is to protect the public , it does not do that .
Claire ParkinsonIn fact , since these breed specific legislation was introduced in the uk , dog attacks requiring um hospital treatment have increased massively . I I mean , the numbers are huge . You know we're talking about , you know sort of 25,000 or so , but the media focuses in on a few attacks . Now , in the case of Axel Bullies , it's been a focus on sadly fatal attacks on humans by dogs , and these attacks have been linked to the XL bully . Now , of course , the XL bully is not a breed of dog . An XL bully is a type of dog . Um , the uh , the news reports , um might say that it's an XL bully , but there's no evidence that necessarily they are XL bullies , for example .
Claire ParkinsonBut what we get out of this is we get a huge public concern that then begins to focus what we call a moral panic , begins to focus on one particular type of in this case , type of dog and there , and the people that live with them as well , they're human companions . And
Literacy and Animals in Context
Claire Parkinsonwhat we end up with is breed-specific legislation , which is horrendous . It is cruel . Dogs end up being taken away from their homes just because of what they look like , not because of their behaviours , but they're just taken away from their homes . They're often euthanised just because they look a particular way . So what we have there is a direct link from the way in which media represents particular types of dogs and their owners and the outcomes for those dogs , and what it doesn't do is actually deal with the problems , and of course , the problems are things like unregulated breeding , inappropriate homes , poor upbringing of puppies and young dogs and , crucially , which is work that I've done , is people's lack of understanding of dogs' body language , because quite often dogs are trying to tell us listen , I'm uncomfortable , but we don't recognize that body language for a number of different reasons . We don't . We don't recognise that body language . For a number of different reasons . We don't recognise it . So we got there and I just reiterate that there are so many studies there that demonstrate that breed-specific legislation doesn't work that this is not the way that you deal with this particular issue of dog attack , which is a very real problem . It's a real problem , but we're not dealing with it in the right way , and the reason is is because of the misplaced media focus on one particular type of dog , um other than you know . Uh , things like you know the , the dangerous dogs question , I think you know .
Claire ParkinsonJust to sort of add another couple of ideas here into the mix . You know we can look at , there was a trend which was um for slow lorises and that was sparked by a viral video of a slow loris which , um , if people don't know , is a , a beautiful um , so it'd be difficult for me to describe but but , but basically they basically they're small and they have huge eyes and they're what we would class as very cute . So people look at these slow lorises and they think , oh , aren't they adorable ? And there was some viral videos which showed the slow lorises raising their arms in the air and being tickled , and this whole idea of oh , isn't it cute ? Look , they love being tickled , look how much they're enjoying it , they're tickled . And this whole idea of oh , isn't it cute ? Look , they love being tickled , look how much they're enjoying it . They're holding their arms in the air and being fed rice balls and holding umbrellas and things like this . And what people didn't realize was that actually those slow lorises were suffering because the um , the act of raising their , their arms in the air , is actually them trying to recruit a kind of poison into their glands , which are in their elbows , and so they're trying to kind of like , recruit this poison so that they can bite and they only bite if they're absolutely pushed to it but they're actually suffering . So they're not raising their arms because they're having a great time and enjoying being tickled . They're raising their arms because they're really suffering and they're terrified and they're actually getting to the point where they need to bite .
Claire ParkinsonAs a result , we had this huge spike in slow lorises being bought , um as I'm going to use the word pets here , so as pets or companion animals um , and they were being taken from the wild in huge numbers , impacting absolutely we know this from from academic studies . They've been done um , absolutely impacting the , the slow loris in in the wild . And these slow lorises were taken from the wild , usually illegally . They would then be subjected to horrendous conditions . Their teeth would be removed , quite often so without any kind of anesthetic . They would have their teeth ripped out and they would be sold into what is basically an illegal pet trade . So , yeah , and this was directly linked to a couple of viral videos . So I think that you know , when we're looking at things like the impact of media on the material reality of animal lives , I I mean you know . I've given you two examples there these are ones that have very poor outcomes for those particular animals .
Claudia HirtenfelderYou know they are both suffering and in the case of , you know , pit bulls , exile bullies they're being euthanized , you know those are fantastic examples and I think you also kind of showed across two different media , how there are material , how our image and our idea of animals does translate into very , and our lack of understanding of animals , the animals who are in our lives and who we want to include in our lives , our lack of understanding of their communication , the ways in which they speak , susan .
Susan McHughYeah , I just wanted to make three points here about how , just following up from Claire's wonderful observations that history and absence of history and not putting these into a broader context can really lead to some horrific distortions . A hundred years ago , pete the pup was the canine star of the Arnie gang or little rascals films , in other words , presented as the most child friendly cinematic dog that you could imagine . And to think a hundred years later , a complete flip . Many breeds that the narrative that gets attached to breeds can start in these Hollywood cook-a-vat and then boil over into some entirely unintended horrific consequences . 101 Dalmatian trend for Dalmatians that started in the 50s , 60s and is continuing right on into the 21st century with Game of Thrones fad for Inuit sled dogs . These are highly reactive working dogs . They have no business being parked in
Harnessing the Media for the benefit of animals
Susan McHughsuburban houses and asked to do nothing . That is the recipe for disaster , and it's again something that could easily be avoided if we put these creatures into context , understand where they're coming from , understand what their needs are . But I don't think we can look to media to do that for us . I think this is something that we need to train each other and ourselves to look at media more critically .
Susan McHughI just coincidentally finished reading the biography Me Chita that came out about 15 years ago . It's a spoof biography but it's really well done because the premise is that the world's oldest chimpanzee , the actual oldest chimpanzee to have survived in captivity , died at age 76 . And just to put it into a more personal context , he was born two years before my parents were born and he died the same year my dad did , in their 70s , and the imaginative experiment is to imagine what this chimpanzee witnessed . Very unusually , this particular chimpanzee also was kept in work beyond his teenage years , which doesn't often happen because they become too volatile , as many , many horrible pet experiments have resulted in illustrating .
Susan McHughBut one of the really important takeaway messages from the film is that film is implicated in creating these wrong narratives . For instance , the juvenile chimpanzee's grimace , which is often represented in stories as a smile in the movie is a grimace . It's a fear reaction , it's a fear display and to the untutored eye just looks like a childlike happy-go-lucky expression . The same thing is true of the dolphin's smile . Many people have written about the whole flipper effect too .
Susan McHughThe creatures who are being kept in horrific conditions are nonetheless seen by the I don't want to say general public . But those of us who haven't learned it yet , let's say ,
Media Ethics and Animals
Susan McHughto read these reactions . I think Claire's point about being able to read dogs' expressions it implies literacy , it implies learning how to read them . This isn't natural or organic . It's something that we have to be trained and train ourselves and each other to do , and that that seems to me to be a missing link in many media literacy initiatives , something that we can probably carry forward from this discussion about how we can do this better , and do this better for human health and human safety reasons as much as for benefit of other creatures too .
Claire ParkinsonYeah , I just wanted to add into that as well . I think , um , and and thank susan for bringing up the chimps um , I also read the , uh , that that particular book , which was absolutely fantastic and I read it . I was , um , I was actually writing , I was researching and writing , um , about bonzo , the chimpanzee that appeared in bedtime for bonzo along alongside ronald waken . Um and um , it was really fascinating for me to kind of get you know that , that that book was coming out just at a sort of time where , uh , where I was , I was writing about about bonzo .
Claire ParkinsonUm , I think that , as much as we're looking as well at the material effects and these negative material effects and , believe me , there's many of them , and I think that you know we've pointed towards quite a few of them I think it's also worth talking about the flip side to this . I'm pretty sure we'll all have something to say about something like Blackfish , for example , which also demonstrates the power of media representations in against shaping public understanding . So , um , there's , um , there's , there's , there's a chapter actually , which is , which is brilliant , in uh , in a book that I just edited called animal activism on and off screen . Um , and it's a chapter by , uh , two scholars , deborah meskin , and uh and carrie freeman , and they actually write about the blackfish effect .
Claire ParkinsonUm , and the blackfish effect is basically when blackfish , a documentary about uh , an orca called tilikum um who was at sea world , and um , the the impact of that particular documentary was absolutely vast . It had severe reputational and economic effects on SeaWorld and it forced SeaWorld to have a complete change in terms of their practices . What they did , I mean their share price went down . I mean it was , it was , it was huge . The impact was absolutely immense and um , and deborah and carrie actually um that they they write about you know kind of what the lessons can , what lessons can be learned from that for animal advocacy organizations in terms of understanding how we should harness the media as well and the ways in which we can think about um it working for the benefit of animals . Now , sadly , I think that we could probably come up with more examples where it works against the benefits of animals , but I also think it's worthwhile pointing out that there are these other examples .
Claudia HirtenfelderWhat this does show , though , overall , is that media absolutely impacts the way that we think about animals and our relationships with them 100% and I think , to harken back to something you said earlier about multiple audiences and this kind of democratization of media production , I think it's also important to realize that we are producers of media and I would be remiss if I didn't mention , you know , some of the work of folks like Jess Hooper , who have done work on animals and tourism , and you know recently brought out a documentary about civets , because civets and kopi luwak the coffee that's made from them pooping . This rose to fame after being mentioned briefly by Oprah Winfrey and these animals have suffered greatly because of it . But the reason I bring this up now tourism . I think it's really important that we produce media . When we go to a museum or we go to an exhibition or we decide to pose with a tiger and we put it up on our social media platforms , we are putting out a message as well that says hey , look , this is an animal who can be caged and who I should take photos with , and it's a normative . I think it's a normative thing . It's not neutral to put up this type of media and I think in your flip side there , claire , of saying you know , we also have a responsibility that when we engage as tourists or as consumers , to decide the kind of media we put out there and to actually think critically about the images we put up and the texts we write and how those representations foster and I think this runs in academia as well how we represent animals as agents or as objects or subjects . We really it does carry a great deal of weight in terms of how we think , but also the material lives of animals , and thank you so much for that concept .
Claudia HirtenfelderThe black fish effect , I think that's . I've heard of the Jamie Oliver no , not Jamie Oliver . The late night talk show in the US , john Oliver , there we go . The John Oliver effect I've heard of , but the blackfish effects , I think , is the next , not Jamie Oliver , a mixed chef and a late night host . It's not quite working out there . All of you have kind of raised things here that make me think a little bit about media ethics and what kind of guidelines exist . So can animals just willy nilly be like , I'm guessing , in books ? You can just kind of say you know , freedom of speech is this you can just say whatever you want whenever you want . With film , can animals just be included in news reporting ? Are there any guidelines that help journalists or media producers to produce content in a way that thinks critically about animals .
Claire ParkinsonYeah , I mean one of the problems .
Claire ParkinsonI mean , obviously you have whatever laws or regulation are in place in terms of the way in which animals are used , depending on you know which country you're in and where the filming's happening and so on , but , more broadly , in terms of guidance for how representations are created , in fact , that's completely lacking , and so really , you have a situation where you have animals can be represented in any way you know , as long as obviously it's not sort of going against the laws or regulations of how the animals are actually physically being kept or used within a particular country or state .
Claire ParkinsonAnd because of the lack of guidelines , in fact , one of the things that Carrie Freeman and Deborah Merskin did and I'm sure Tobias and Susan probably know about this this , and so Kerry and Deborah actually came up with a set of guidelines which they called I think it's , the style guide , giving voice to the voiceless . I think that's how they term it , and what they've done is they've produced a set of guidelines which are for journalists , advertising , pr , entertainment , media , and it's to help content makers and creatives to make more responsible representations of other species . So there are guidelines out there , but of course , they're not enforced . But there's the guidelines that Deborah and Carrie have produced on their website , which I think is animalsandmediaorg . I think , yeah , I think I've got that . Is that correct ?
Tobias LinnéYes , yeah , I think it is yeah yeah , we use those guidelines too in my teaching , actually because I teach journalism as well . So it's yeah .
Claire ParkinsonSorry to interrupt you , I was just going to say they were needed because those those kinds of guidelines for responsible representations aren't actually there and so people can do what they want . You know , content makers , creators , they can do what they want . And of course , you know animals , in that sense , are the ideal subject because they don't get to complain , they don't get to sue , there's no defamation of character out there , you know , there's nobody saying , oh , you shouldn't do that with animals , that's dreadful , you know so . So it's really important . It's a shame that these guidelines aren't part of you know , kind of regulation , um , but they they do need to be there , certainly you can say that , though , but uh , the same sort of initiatives have been in place in the nature film industry .
Susan McHughEco nature film has tried to emerge and push back against the blue chip nature film or the big bucks David Attenborough style of film , and they just don't work . So I do also wonder about whether that's the solution . I mean , it feels good to say that , and it definitely is something that is necessary to talk about in a classroom environment . Personally , more compelling in my teaching and in my thinking are these films that are either so overt and recent like the Cove , in their racist and xenophobic problems that you cannot help but walk away and feel icky and need to talk about this , or a film like Eco-Terrorist , which may not be circulating as widely , but it's a film about the sort of rise and fall of the Sea Shepherd and how the making of Paul Watson as a superstar unto himself really became part of the problem and not part of the solution , and some of the decisions that he made for the group along the way .
Susan McHughYou can't help but walk away from this film version thinking , wow , that's profoundly unethical to put a bunch of people on a vessel that could sink at any minute , and with the idea that you are going to sink it somewhere , but you're going to stick it on the Canadian government in that case to pay for it . People could have been killed and yes , they are , in very good natured ways , trying to prevent animals from being killed . There's a lovely sort of sub-narrative of them all becoming vegan , because the vegans take over the ship's galley along the way . There's lots of little lessons to be learned about how difficult and ongoing and site-specific true activism or truly effective activism has to be , and it has to be self-reflexive as well . It has to be self-critical . We can't be sanctimonious and believe that what we are doing is right all the time , or else we find ourselves in Paul Watson's shoes pretty quickly , I think . Sorry , paul .
Claudia HirtenfelderThere's no short and sharp and quick answers to any of these . I guess and I know , susan , you've spoken a fair bit about , like cultural representations and I think , coming back to thinking about these material entanglements , but also , you know , hierarchies of power , both materially but also in terms of representation . Coming back to you know what Claire was talking about ableism , gender , race , but culture , here I think these different figures or these different problems are represented culturally quite differently . Maybe you just want to I know I'm switching gears here a little bit back to thinking through these hierarchies and entanglements , but maybe you could walk us a bit through that as well , in thinking about how this impacts activism and animals .
Susan McHughSo I can only speak from my own very limited perspective of teaching undergraduates and really trying to rethink how to teach in the 21st century and feeling very strongly about open access educational materials , and so I've moved my teaching towards materials that are freely accessible online or through libraries . And , along the way , I also have a lot of marine science students , so fishing in my nature films class has been a pretty important subject because it's just something that is on their minds and they can relate to immediately and in trying to think about how to for the 21st century , particularly thinking about how African animals are overrepresented in visual media and African people are not very well represented in the history of nature films . I was looking for examples and found this beautiful film at least I think it's beautiful and maybe others will have problems with it called Bahari Yetu . Again , short format is another thing that I'm looking for all the time , teaching students of the 21st century , but that one really struck out to me as really importantly beautiful because it's just premised as a conversation or really long interview with a fisherman who uses traditional methods off gosh where is it ?
Susan McHughOff the coast of Ethiopia , I think , and it's just very beautiful . He's an older fellow who's just talking in his own language so there's subtitles throughout and reflecting on how fishing has changed as a premise across time and why he's aging out or leaving the profession and doesn't see a future for it . And it's not a story of coming to terms with the ethics of human-fish relations . It's a story of plastic pollution , a story of large-scale fishing and a story of species endangerment and extinction . But it's told in an immediate , first-person eyewitness account that my students came back to me saying this is incredibly compelling . You could throw a lot of numbers at us , you could tell us what the science says , and none of that is as important or as interesting or as compelling to them to rethink their own investments , let's say , and their own future plans for supporting this industry .
Susan McHughAs hearing from someone who like the subject of this film , about why it's wrong on so many levels , and I think that to me is a way in which we can and the filmmaker himself is a Black African person too and this seems to me like moving forward as we collect these local stories , as we shift the focus from what can be the universal narrative and instead think about in a site-specific way what's doable , what's possible , what can we even learn just by stopping and listening .
Claudia HirtenfelderYeah , this speaks quite interestingly to , I think , global geopolitics . Right , it's like the mass of Hollywood now it's not just you know , we're not just talking about .
Video Games and Imaginative Work
Claudia HirtenfelderI grew up in South Africa . None of us are Americans here , but all of us are very well in tune with , I think , american slash , also British media , but definitely much more American media .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd I think I wonder , when it comes to thinking about animals , that we often tend to focus on the consumption of Americans and how Americans consume and interact with animals , as well as the representations of animals in um and and by America meaning here the U S um , how they're represented in primarily large based U S kind of films , without maybe thinking about , you know , what's what's happening in in Bollywood and in Nollywood and what's happening in smaller , what's happening in South Korea , right , really , south Korea's film industry and its serial industry is one of the largest in the world .
Claudia HirtenfelderThey really do a fantastic job of putting through series , but it's in a language that's not in English , so it's subject to perhaps a different kind of critical eye to be , as you also teach a lot of animals and media . Do you have any reflections when you were thinking and listening to susan speak there about animals and media that you'd like to add no , I well yes end of story , everybody well , no , but I'm thinking it brings a lot of thoughts to my mind about , you know , animal , as you were asking .
Tobias LinnéYou know animal activism and media . So , and what we were starting to talk talking about , you know about guidelines , and will they be used ? And how can I mean we have to , I mean is , of course , very double-edged sword . Uh , I mean it's , I I would say , like media when it comes to animals and treatment of animals , media is a really , really big part of the problems on all levels , but it's also really our only means of changing anything , because that's , you know , how the world works today . We live in this , uh , you know , uh , where media is omnipresent everywhere and I mean , so we'll , we'll have to try to use it .
Tobias LinnéI mean , there are wonderful examples , like , like claire was saying , like the blackfish effect , like , for me , the blackfish effect is like how many papers I've had that have been written about Blackfish as a , you know , a positive example , that it really entered the mainstream . You know , like , because suddenly I heard people at my workplace who had never talked about anything , you know , veganism or anything , and they had seen conspiracy because , uh , you know it was out in the mainstream . And here I want to bring out , like another aspect that I think claire brought up prior to this conversation that you know that was also a lot about that Cowspiracy was being streamed on Netflix . That had a huge impact , you know , because if it had been available through one you know a smaller I don't know like , if it hadn't been available on , you know , the world's largest streaming service that you know people already pay for , I don't think it could have had that impact . I'm not sure about Blackfish , but I'm sure it's available on lots of streaming services .
Tobias LinnéThere are so many dimensions that we have to understand , mean what I teach my students that I , I , I think media is a big part of the problem like that we as , as activists and animals activists face , and I mean we've talked about all the stereotypes and all that . You know all the problems that it creates , uh , but I mean it's also I think we need to work through through the , and when I say we need to work through the media , I mean we need to work through popular culture . Unfortunately , we need to be on TikTok . You know all of these uh things I know , or whatever is . I mean I'm not on TikTok and I don't want to be either , but I , I think we as a collective need to be there , because and I mean in video games , I mean we often forget video games is a huge part of young people's popular cultural consumption , you know , for hours and hours a day , and there's so many animal representation in video games .
Tobias LinnéOf course , that is is . I mean , I tend to forget about that because I don't play a lot of video computer games myself , but I mean young people do , um , so so it's hard , but I think we need to work through that , however hard it is . Uh , I mean , if we want to make a real change . I love that you bring up video games .
Claudia HirtenfelderI I think that's so cool because I think I mean , yes , I think many animals and perhaps also people you know , you think of Grand Theft Order people have like finally pushed back on that , saying you know the kind of overt violence directed at a woman in that is problematic and should be addressed , you know . And so I think there's been some increasing dialogue about the impacts of video games and how they could be more nuanced . But you know , whether that's reached , thinking about animals , I'm not sure . But I think video games raise interesting ideas with regards to this idea of like hybrids as well , especially as we're starting to think about like VR sets and I don't know , like the idea that you could become animal and I don't play video games , so maybe I'm completely off here , but that could be a creative way of actually trying to obtain a worldview . And this makes me think about the film Stray .
Claudia HirtenfelderI don't know if you guys watched Stray Elizabeth Lowe's Stray following stray dogs in Turkey . The whole film was shot at a dog's eye level , following the dog around the city . No human dialogue in the film . It was all in the background . You could hear people talking in the background , but she followed the dog through the city and it was a beautiful , tragic , amazing full feature length film of a stray dog . That wasn't trying to sensationalize the dog was just doing and it was really transformative . So when I think here about like VR and video games , I think if it was done in a sensitive , nuanced way that actually thought about animals' different sensory experiences , their different challenges , it could be quite transformative . But , like you say , it's a double-edged sword because if it's not , it could just reinforce some of these stereotypes . Tobias , if you weren't finished , feel free to go ahead and then Susan will follow you .
Tobias LinnéFeel free to go ahead and then Susan will follow you . No , but I think that's really interesting . You bring up this . You know the potential of this immersive reality experiences and I think that is where a lot of popular culture is heading , as it offers us a lot of potential . For sure , it has great potential that we can't realize if we work with it . Unfortunately , we need to step into these cultural spheres . I think , like the video games , which I think really shaped a lot of people's understanding of animals and isn't very much discussed . I don't think it is .
Susan McHughSusan , I wanted to jump in just to say that your point about narratives from non-human perspectives and that immersive , um , imaginative experimentation of viewing the world and experiencing the world from non-human perspectives is hugely underrepresented and there's a grand opportunity there , I think . Um , a fantastic recent example again to put in another literature film uh plug . Here is Ted Chiang's short story , the Great
Impact of Consumers
Susan McHughSilence , and there's a wonderful short film version of it made by the artists . I'm forgetting their names right now , but it's freely available online .
Susan McHughAgain , one of these things that's not hiding behind a paywall , and what was really beautiful in listening to the artists once being interviewed and talking about their choices in it is that , although the short story is told from the perspective of a Puerto Rican parrot , centered on using text box like teletype presentation of the parrot's narration to keep it in the parrot's voice .
Susan McHughSo you know , the problem of how do you translate parrot to English is the language of the film is just completely changed , because what would the language of a Puerto Rican parrot be ? Would it be indigenous ? Would it be indigenous ? Would it be European , would it be parrot ? And it's really very sweet that they take that audio element out and leave it in our heads as viewers and I think that's something that is part of the power of that particular example . But again , tasking more creative people with more projects like this and trying to get us all together to get out of our anthropocentrist default and really trying to look at what the effects of what we're doing on larger species , but even individual members of another species , I think beautiful that we can be engaged in . We don't know where it's going to go , necessarily , but I'm troubled with this boom in the gaming industry of this being a sidebar , maybe gimmicky afterthought , and not really being central to the project .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd I think there's something in what you were saying there is . It's also in the process . I think so often we focus on the product , right , the film , the thing , but there is something to be said for that process of thinking . If I were and a lot can go wrong , right , you can have critiques of antriloquism , you can have all sorts of critiques , but I think the fact that these critiques could happen shouldn't stop us from attempting to think through what that experience might be , because then we've stopped before we've even started . And I think that process of producers and makers and creatives thinking really sensitively and really like going . There's a lot of research on almost any animal you can think of and thinking about their physiology , thinking about their cultures , thinking about what would be significant to the parrot , what kind of social relationships does that parrot have ? If a parrot was in an allowed environment or a city or in a forest , how might they respond differently ? You might not have a clear-cut answer , I think to that , but I think the very act of thinking through and asking those questions is moving closer towards having some approximation of better representing animals and I think that this speaks across literature , books , histories , stories , news items . Yeah , I really appreciate what you're saying there , and I think there's a big power in that we're approaching , if you can believe it . You were worried , tobias . Would we be able to talk for that amount of time ? Well , we're almost an hour and a half in , I tell you . So I just want to remind the audience . Thank you for listening to us and if you've got any questions , feel free to pop them in the chat .
Claudia HirtenfelderWe're going to start taking on some questions from the audience . Before I do that , though , I just wanted to see Claire , tobias and Susan , do you have anything to add here before I start taking on those questions ? No , all right . So I've got the first question here , a question from Jennifer of Arruja . What impact can we as consumers have on helping shape how media incorporates other animals , and I think we've touched on this a little bit . So what impact can we as consumers ? So , maybe , how can we think of , as consumers , what we can and cannot do better or less of ? And I think this is a thorny question ? This is a really actually tricky question . You know , when it comes to veganism , I think , oh well , just don't eat the food . But if you're going with a group , does it mean not watching movies . What does it mean ?
Tobias LinnéYeah , movies . What does it mean ? Yeah , I think . I mean , I'm sorry , my thoughts are like is this a question at all that we can act on as consumers ? Like you were saying , that's very hard , but then I was . Then I thought , you know , of course there are small things which usually , when it comes to these consumer things , I mean for you know , if we see inappropriate content on Instagram concerning animals , we can report it . I don't know about Instagram's guidelines , but if they don't have guidelines , maybe we can , you know , try to , you know , influence them . I mean that's a concrete thing , but I mean , like you say , I mean checking . You know how a certain popular culture product has been produced , whether
Ambassador Species
Tobias Linnéanimals have been involved . I mean that's going to be hard . I think it's a hard task .
Claire ParkinsonIt's tricky for sure , lynn which probably was never possible before . In the same way is there's much more of a two-way communication with media producers nowadays , and we know that audiences can absolutely have an influence on media productions , on certain filmmaking , on the way in which characters are developed and so on . So I do think there are opportunities there and it does mean obviously taking to social media and perhaps having coordinated campaigns where people are challenging particular uh media representations , uh . So I do think that we should be using social media in that way . I think that that's that's , that's a , that's a positive . You know we need to find positives to social media .
Claire ParkinsonI think sometimes and that's a positive , you know , we need to find positives in social media sometimes , and that's definitely one of them is that it allows a more direct and public communication with creatives , with media producers , in a way that we didn't have previously . You could write , you could individually write a letter of complaint , but nobody else would see that unless it was a coordinated campaign . This is much more , you know , it's uh , it's much more public . There's , there's ways of doing it which can certainly impact and , as I say , we've we , we have seen it , we've seen that happen with uh , not necessarily when it's come down to , you know , representations of animals , but we've certainly seen it in terms of what people have wanted , what fans have demanded from certain , you know , from certain popular series and so on . So you know there are opportunities there , I think .
Claudia HirtenfelderYeah , and I would just add , like nuance , I think it's really , I think , easy to get angry online and to just go to town and just say a whole bunch of nasty stuff , and I think anger is well-placed when it comes to a lot of this . But I would also just caution that you know to be civil like it's to be angry and civil . Is that possible ? I don't know . But I'm often wary of how quickly vilification can happen online without necessarily thinking things through . But maybe I'm being too generous here . I'm not too sure , susan .
Susan McHughI just want to put a plug in again for Jess Hooper's forthcoming film on the civet cat coffee trade , which is also a wonderful model of how asking questions and being critical and talking to people on the ground has led just to this wonderful coordinated effort of questioning the tourism industry that's built around it and following , I guess , the Okja model , to bring this pressure to bear on large corporations . The role of trip advisor in that particular narrative becomes super interesting because , yes , you and I could write our own very angry things as individual reviewers on TripAdvisor , but when you bring a group coordinated effort , the pressure of that on a company that needs to be public , facingly a good citizen , you can start to leverage some real change for the better just to just to clarify , because one of the things that I was saying there was it needs to be about coordinated campaigns .
Claire ParkinsonI think that's what we , what we know , certainly from the , from the blackfish example , for you know , I think that's a that's another one that , yeah , we can look at where this is about coordinated campaigns and often it's emerging from grassroots organisations as well . Those are the organisations , those are the groups who are coordinating the communication .
Claudia HirtenfelderWhat do you think the significance is of ambassador and ambassador species here , because I sometimes worry that some animals kind of get lost in narratives or our tendency to focus on specific issues or single issues . Is that a useful ? I mean , of course it's useful , but is it the best strategy ? Or do you think ? You know , when we think extinction , we think polar bears . Now polar bears have become the poster child . For when we think extinction , we think polar bears . Now polar bears have become the poster child for extinction . I think this has done something to bring the plight to polar bears , but I'm not sure anything is actually being done . I think there's been a kind of essentialization of polar bears of being just these ultimate victims , without any sort of like you're saying here coordinated effort . So maybe it needs to be an individual polar bear . Maybe people respond better to specific individuals . It just popped in my head now , but I wanted to know if any of you have thought about ambassador species , slash ambassador like individuals and their potency in this .
Susan McHughI think green pieces are really spectacularly bad example of , or an example of how this can spectacularly go bad , with the case of the harp seal pup becoming the face of the anti-fur campaigns of Greenpeace and that in the film Angry Anook is so carefully and surgically dissected as extremely racist and xenophobic , ultimately in its effects , that it disproportionately harmed one smallish community and for the benefit a questionable benefit really of putting a dent in a global fur trade that has simply moved and it's not changed in its scale or its or , if anything , has grown more intense in its cruelties .
Susan McHughThat's the situation where I think we can learn a lot about the problem of especially trying to bank on the cute factor , on the big eyes , on the remoteness of the people who are actually affected compared to the
Media for Children
Susan McHughtarget audience of donors to the organization and the yeah , the the harm is is taking decades and may never be undone , in that particular situation to Inuit communities . That , I think , is something that , yes , it's wonderful that Inuit filmmakers are bringing this to our attention now as a problem , but moving forward is going to be a lot more difficult than if that simple strategy had been questioned in the first place um , anyone want to add to this before I go to the next question from the audience ?
Claire ParkinsonI think that , um , it's it's difficult because you actually to to get people to engage , you , you do need to have individuals that have a really clear identity . So individual animals , individual species , certainly , but individual animals that have a really clear identity , um , and you can sort of you can better engage . I think there's , there's plenty of examples of this . It's happening , um , where you it's very difficult to ask people to say you go out there and say , hey , care about all the animals , because you know that's that feels odd and overwhelming . And then people say , but why would I do that ? You know , because they immediately think , well , I don't like those animals , I don't like spiders , I don't like inside . You know it's it's very difficult to ask people to care about , about everything . And so , you know , by targeting and I'm not saying that in any way , this is ideal , because it's it's certainly not but by targeting different individual species , you have a better chance , I think , of engaging people . And then , if you have an individual that you know , often if an individual is named as well , that works really really well in terms of getting people to you know , to to sympathize or empathize with that particular species situation . Um , it doesn't always go well , I would agree with that , but at the same time , I think that it's it . It's .
Claire ParkinsonIt's incredibly difficult to um to talk about , you know , a number of different species all at once , since they care about all of these because , you know , people need something to sort of latch onto , they need to be able to identify in some way with that species or with that individual . And then we get the emergence of charismatic megafauna , which you know often are . You know the tigers and the , you know the polar bears and so on , the lions , and then we have all of these animals that are going extinct , you know , because they're not cute enough or they're not . You know they're not , they don't have a good campaign behind them , they don't have good PR , basically . So it's a big problem , but I think that what we've seen is that individual animals and individual species , you can actually engage and you can begin to change people's views , people's minds , but not ideal , far from ideal , in fact .
Claudia HirtenfelderI think it's quite interesting because there is something sticky about an individual being named . You know , I think about Cecil the lion . I think I can just say Cecil the lion . Amongst the right group of people and I mean even beyond animal studies crowds , most people know Cecil the lion created some controversy . You think of Marius the giraffe , who was killed in a zoo and then dissected publicly . Again , people were outraged and there's something sticky . There are not many animals who I can just kind of call to mind
Capitalism and Consumption
Claudia Hirtenfelderno-transcript . Going back to what Tobias said at the beginning about Remy the rat , right , you think , oh , these animals , nemo the fish , they really are memorable . So it's , yeah , it's definitely thorny and tricky . Okay , I have another question here from annette jorgensen . We have mostly heard about media aimed at adults . Are there potentials for influencing how people relate to animals through children's tv movies etc . Uh , so , uh , tobias , why don't you take us off there ? We're thinking about children .
Tobias LinnéYes , yes , I think I mean we were talking about children . Now you mentioned the rat . I mean Disney movies , I mean in general . So yes , I would say , of course there is a huge potential .
Tobias LinnéProblem is that , as we were talking about , you know , we cannot decide how people will be influenced . I mean , claire was mentioning a lot of problems like how to bring up these issues in popular culture , but the real big problem is , of course , that we don't know . We don't know how . Even if we tell people in a film or whatever , we don't know how they're going to react to that . I mean , it's not propaganda , popular culture . But that also carries a potential which I think is we're going to go back to popular culture , the potential of popular culture . Because if we accept that the movie Ratatouille was a good thing for rats and I think it was , you know , like rats have a pretty bad reputation since the Black Death . So I mean I think it was a good movie in some way . I mean Disney didn't have it . Wasn't Disney's intention to make a movie to save rats ? I don't think I mean it was Disney's intention to make money of this story . I'm sure they didn't do it to save , to raise the status of rats in society , but that's what happened because of the movie . So I mean it really shows , you know , I mean the problems of working or , you know , within popular culture .
Tobias LinnéI mean if we are talking about you know how to influence children . I think children are influenced hugely by popular culture and especially , I mean if you look at any children's media , I would say you find more animals there than any other kind of popular media . Obviously , animals are hugely important to children . It's very hard because although we have these great representations of animals like , I don't know , babe the Pig , you know , which was a huge movie in the early 2000s I'm still sure that most of those kids still had a pork steak the same day or whatever , ate something with pork or sausage , that they saw that movie because they weren't allowed to make that connection , for example , with the food . So I mean it's very hard to decide how we're going to influence people . I mean we can do our best and I think Claire was saying you know we need narratives , we need these , you know individual stories we need , but we can never be sure about you know how those are going to land with different audiences .
Susan McHughA nerdy detail . The film inspired Babe's vegetarian cookbook . Precisely because parents came forward realizing that they had to deliver on the ethical message of the film , because it was just so popular and it really did touch children's hearts .
Tobias LinnéYeah and I think that is great . But then again , I mean , we were talking about Finding Nemo before and think about it it's literally a film about a fish that wants to escape
Talking and Speaking Animals
Tobias Linnéthe fishbowl and go back to the sea and that led to people buying these clownfish . I mean , it just shows the complexity , I think , of communicating , and especially in communicating in popular culture communicating in popular culture .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd again , I think this comes to thinking about a much bigger idea of consumption and a bigger structure of capitalism and what it means . I work currently with kindergarten kids and it's remarkable how quickly they see something that's cute and it turns to I want . And this speaks to a much bigger kind of challenge of when you see something . And this speaks to a much bigger kind of challenge of when you see something , it's there to consume and it's available . Everything is readily available . If you want it , it's available .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd , of course , this is not only with regards to animals . This is with regards to environment , land usage . That said , I think young kids and I'm speaking here like five-year-olds are really acutely aware of environmental disaster and pollution . Five-year-olds are really acutely aware of environmental disaster and pollution . And I'm not too sure that this is translated into and I'm not a researcher on children and animals in any way but I'm not too sure that this , like you're saying , is translated into eating habits , because the extent to which children have a say in the home is still quite constrained when it comes to what they can eat . Say in the home is still quite constrained when it comes to what they can eat . And yeah , and you know it's tragic that every time Easter rolls around , sales of rabbits go up .
Claudia HirtenfelderThis again speaks to a habit of consumption . That's not questioned , that if you want something , you can have it . If it's convenient to have it , you can have it . Oh , you want bees , we'll fly them across the world to you because you can have it . And sorry , I'm going on a bit of a tirade here , but I've got a bit of a . The kind of unbridled access to everything all the time I think is something we need to work on and , as Susan was saying earlier , also hold corporations accountable . There is something you can have , a caveat or something at the beginning of your Disneyney film saying do not we do not condone the purchasing of exotic fish , like you know .
Susan McHughAnyway , sorry because , because I've written about it extensively in my book animal stories , I do want to put a plug in for babe because , um , one of the things that I think makes it quite different to many of these other narratives is that it thematizes the making of your own story . So it asks you to join in being critical of the narrative of Babe as being what's for dinner and then shows how Babe has to go to this elaborate staged event and change the narrative . So the idea that questioning where these stories come from , recognizing that the stories can be different depending on what your perspective is , this is not often enough , maybe in these films , but where they're there , that's where I think they really do have an awful lot of power and really do stand to leverage change . It has to be reinforced . Yes , and is it often the case that you see filmmakers taking these kinds of risks in their own narratives ?
Susan McHughNo , but it is curious to me that my students reported this last term , for instance , that their introduction to anthropogenic extinction was through films like Rio and the Lorax Granted extinction as a concept they already knew through dinosaurs , but the idea that human responsibility gets attached to the demise of particular species like , um , the , the . Uh , I've forgotten what rio is a toucan . No , yes , I think it's a parrot . I can't remember that . That part , that message didn't come across to me . Strongly sorry , but these other ones are making an impact and that's good .
Claudia HirtenfelderThat is good . We have another question coming in here and I think this speaks a little bit , susan , to what you were saying earlier , but also what's been coming up here If you can expand your thoughts on animals talking in films and what languages you find appropriate for them and I think this tension between talking and speaking , it also came up in the film at the beginning . You know how the more animalized something in quotation marks becomes , the less it speaks , which I find quite interesting . So , susan , why don't you give us your thoughts on that ?
Susan McHughSo the talking animal was something that I moved away from initially in my research because I was trying to begin with , to figure out how it is the animals come to have their own stories and while I find something like Michida utterly delightful because it's so for lack of better terms woke in its politics .
Susan McHughThe animal speaking directly was exactly the problem from a literary perspective of trying to get out of thinking about literary animals as humans in animal suits .
Susan McHughSo it's actually the descriptions and incorporations of characters who don't speak who initially , in animal ethology , the science of studying animals in their own ordinary habitats , those people in the early days look to literary representations like , speaking of problematic texts , jack London's the Call of the Wild , because there is realistic depictions of human-dog relationships where humans , just by watching how dogs interact with them and interacting with them , sympathetically understand where the dogs are coming from and then can work with the dogs versus eating on them and other horrific examples in it that show that , no , you're not paying attention to a dog is burying its teeth at you , is about to bite you , sort of thing , and I think that there is some potential for that .
Susan McHughBut it takes a lot , a big ask on the part of the filmmakers to either themselves become versed in this attentiveness and attunement to non-human species , which is a lot of time and a lot of commitment , or being empathetically and sympathetically engaged with people who are , and following their guidance , which those folks too are , coming from places that aren't entirely without their own fraught ethical situations . But yeah , I don't think it's going to be done with a simple no animals were harmed in the making of kind of labeling or packaging . This is going to be something that's an ongoing negotiation . If it's done well .
Claudia HirtenfelderYeah , and I think it's interesting that you brought up literary and film kind of tensions there , because I think you know , when you have it on film and you're hearing it , some of those tensions that you raised earlier about which accent who's speaking like , how are they . You know there's a lot of again thinking about those entanglements and hierarchies , like whose voices get represented . You know which accents sound smart or silly or what pace is used . And this is a common thing where I mean , claire , in the UK you'll know that specific accents from the UK are used to show someone is posh versus other accents are used to show that they're perhaps from a different class . This kind of use of voice portrays a hierarchy as well . So even when you have animals that are speaking and it's done problematically , sometimes , even the very use of the accents and who is speaking and how they're speaking is showing other related hierarchies . And this makes me think of the pit bulls again , claire , like if you were to make a pit bull speak in a film , I think everyone listening has probably got a voice in their mind , probably because of the stereotypes that we've been fed about pit bulls and their related companions . So it's a really fascinating question for that . But then , on the other hand , what you were saying , I think it's much easier in some ways to write down the speech because you don't have those questions and maybe you're given a little bit more leeway . But then , yeah , it's so complicated . Oh my goodness , it's so complicated .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnyone want to add to that ? I really find this tension between talking and speaking and whose voices are heard quite interesting . Anyone else , given that ? Some thoughts in the media that they've consumed and thought about ? I really find this tension between talking and speaking and whose voices are heard quite interesting . Anyone anyone else , given that ? Some thoughts in the media that they've consumed and thought about ? No , tobias , do your rats talk to you ? Do they actually talk to you ? I know you look after these rats . Do they ? Do they speak ?
Tobias Linnéto you . I talk to them , but no , but it's funny . I mean I , my daughter and me , I mean mean we have take care of the rats together and I think , like , what I noticed about her is that I mean speaking of children and animals . I mean she speaks to them in a different way than I do and I , I think she , she feels that they speak to her in a different way as well . Uh , so yeah , and I think that's great .
Tobias LinnéI mean , I think that you know we're , with all the problems that there is to , you know , with anthropomorphizing , you know , animals and speaking for animals , or whatever , that's really the only way that we can understand them too , right , uh , to imagine them speaking . And then we will have to try to do that as fair as possible from what we know , from what we know of them , and I think what , what susan was saying about you know how ethology was founded in these literary representations . It really speaks to that , right , because the only way that we can understand other animals is , of course , by projecting ourselves onto them in some way . I mean , that's how we understand other humans .
Claudia HirtenfelderAnd I think also what's come up in this conversation is that speaking is not just a matter of voice , and I know , eva Mayer , you know , eva Mayer , wouldn't you know ? When animals speak in text or on film , it's speaking and communicating happens through the body . All of these examples that you've said today of the bearing of the teeth , the slow larynx lifting , this is communication . This is communication , this is saying something , both across genres . It's a willingness to hear and listen and actually pay time and attention to what's trying to be said .
Claire ParkinsonAnd we're always fascinated with these stories about animals that can communicate with humans , but in very much human terms .
Wrap up
Claire ParkinsonSo , you know , when we have chimps , for example , who can communicate by using variations of sign language , for example , or dogs I mean , I'm sure people have seen or they may have seen recently there's been a lot of videos of dogs who are using these small buttons that they press and each of them has a sort of a word attached to them and they're they're communicating with the people , with the humans that they live with , and we're absolutely fascinated with this , um , and we spend so much time . And , of course , chimpanzees , you know we've , you know we've . We've always been intrigued by this idea that you know , we can bring chimpanzees up as sort of humans and teach them to speak and teach them to communicate with us on our own terms , and this just shows the anthropocentric bias that's built into us . We're fascinated by that , and yet we completely ignore the fact that animals are trying to communicate with us all the time . They're trying to say don't hurt me , don't kill me . You know , please don't do this to me . I'm not enjoying that . I would like something else . I would like to live . I would like to not be treated in that way . And yet we blithely go ahead and completely ignore all of that language , all of that communication , because we are so boundaries .
Claire ParkinsonAgain , this idea of you know what separates humans from animals Obviously , language has always been one of these kind of key defining features and this idea that no animals have got language and they can't use language in the way that humans can .
Claire ParkinsonAnd yet the sophisticated communication systems of other species , we completely , you know , we completely ignore it . And actually , when you think about the fact that you know , dogs live with us and we expect them to understand certain words and commands and their names , and yet , you know , we spend very little time actually bothering to pick up on what they're trying to say to us , and they're probably the species that certainly you know , um in the global north , where we're probably more attuned with than than any other , um , and yet we still don't understand them , we still refuse to spend that time to actually speak to them or communicate with them or understand them in their language and on their terms . But that's about the anthropocentric bias , that's about the very human-centered nature and on our inability to move beyond that , which I think is a great shame because you know we're we're missing out , yeah , yeah , we're missing out on having a great relationship the week is out , for example , with our companions Got to shout out to Alexandra Horowitz's work here .
Claudia HirtenfelderIf anyone knows and wants to think a bit more about dogs and how dogs communicate , and someone who spent painstaking amounts of hours watching how a tail wags , which direction a tail wags , thinking deeply about smell , you know , when you think about that , that a dog's world , their primary sense is smell , not sight . Like what does it mean to see through ? Smell Like that's , like mind-bending , twisty stuff . And , as you say , so many animals communicate and elephants use , you know , ultrasonic sounds that can communicate rumbles across massive distances . This is incredible and I think , like you said , claire , thinking about boundaries , there's boundaries in terms of language , that we draw , these boundary markers , like Susan brought up earlier . Thinking about culture , this type of language and communication , the use of tools , the things animals are telling us , is indicative of culture . And I think when we show , I think , anemic versions of animals in films and on literature , we're also denying their culture . We're denying their will , their will , the experiences and histories , as you've pointed out .
Claudia HirtenfelderNow we are nearing the end . We have four minutes left . Now we are nearing the end . We have four minutes left , so I'll give each of you a chance to kind of say your final bit From my side . It's been a fantastic , fantastic conversation . I very much enjoyed talking to all of you . We'll go , tobias , susan Claire , and then I'll sign us off for your final words , go ahead , tobias .
Tobias LinnéMy final words ? No , it's been a great conversation and , as you were saying , I wasn't sure if we were going to fill the two hours , but we sure did . So it was really nice to listen to you all and to talk to you . So I think those are my final words . I really think there has been said so much and I think it has got me started to think even more about animals in popular culture and how much there is , and I mean I got a lot of movies and series that I want to watch after this and books to read and , yes , it's been very inspiring .
Claudia HirtenfelderThank you so much for that , tobias . And yeah , and everyone , go check out the Critical Animal Studies Network . Did I say it correctly ? Critical Animal Studies Network that Tobias is the leader of and he's a wonderful human being , so go and check that out , susan .
Susan McHughI feel so honored to be here . Thank you so much for inviting me , and I've learned so much and I realize how much more I have to learn , which is always a good sign from a conversation . And , yeah , I'm leaving with so many more things to watch , to think about , bring into my teaching , I hope , and just can't say enough about how great an experience this has been . So , thank you all .
Claudia HirtenfelderThank you so much , susan . I know you were quite nervous and coming you were like what can I say ? Like it's film . But no , I think you helped us historicize things . You brought , you tied these things together in a really beautiful way .
Claire ParkinsonAnd I'm just so delighted that you joined us , uh , joined us here today and , uh , claire well , I'm just really going to echo what susan and tobias have probably already said . Uh , thank you so much . I've really enjoyed it and it's wonderful to be in the company of such amazing scholars , who I hold in such high esteem . So , thank you , tobias , susan , thank you Claudia as well Amazing chairing all the way through this . I really , really enjoyed it . So , thank you everybody .
Claudia HirtenfelderThanks . I know the people listening are like oh , do I have to sit here and listen to everyone saying thank you , thank you ? Well , yes , you do , ok , because gratitude is important , and we'd like to say thank you to you as well listeners and viewers for joining us . If you came in for the live stream , we really appreciate your time . This video will be made available if you want to watch it at a later stage . I'm not exactly sure when the video will be made available , but it will be made available . I also just want to make sure that you know so . This was organized by Aruja Animal International . Make sure that you go and check out their website as well . That's A-R-U-K-A-H-A-N-I-M-A-L . You'll find it org . And if you're interested in learning more about the animal turn , just go and check out the Animal Turn podcast , where I interview scholars about important concepts in animal studies . It's been a delight organizing this and talking to you . I've learned . I've realized I need to do a season on animals and media now .
Claudia HirtenfelderSo at least I've got . It's been fantastic and I hope we do it again soon . All right , everyone , have a lovely , lovely evening . We do it again soon . All right , everyone , have a lovely , lovely evening .
Credits
Claudia HirtenfelderThank you to Robin and Arucha Animal International for co-organizing this event . Thank you also to Rene R Frederick from Octopus Media Productions for your production work . Thank you to the panelists , Claire , Susan and Tobias , for your contributions and thoughts . I so enjoyed talking to you today . The audio is cleaned by Rene R Frederick and additionally edited by myself for the show . Just some cleaning up here and there and removing bits and pieces when we spoke over one another nothing too drastic . And of course , the logo was made by Jeremy John and the bed music by Gordon Clark . This is the Animal Tone , with me , Claudia Herzenfelder .
Tobias LinnéFor more great iRule podcasts , visit iRulePodcom . That's .
Claire ParkinsonI-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com .
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