Follow the Judas sheep: materializing post-qualitative methodology in zooethnographic space

Abstract

What becomes of education when performed in a slaughterhouse? Drawing on Raunig’s Marxian–Deleuzian treatise on the machine, the article configures the veterinary education curriculum and the animal production system as two symbiotic apparatuses connected by innumerable flows, routes, movements, rhythms, and passages. Using critical posthumanist analyses to work through empirical material from zooethnographic fieldwork in veterinary education, the article maps how human and animal subjectivities are formed along with crisscrossing biochoreographies of pedagogical and animal production rituals in intimate interplay. The article argues that as education becomes materially enclosed in the process of animal slaughter, teaching becomes distributed among human and nonhuman actants, students (and the education researcher) become a collective human component, or prosthesis, of the slaughter apparatus, and pedagogy itself becomes a prosthesis of slaughter. As student affect is recruited in the “educationalization” of violence, students’ expressions of abjection in the slaughterhouse may be configured as an integral and necessary part of, rather than a disturbing side-effect of, slaughter education. At an epistemological level, this indicates that critical posthumanist inquiry accommodates a particular potential to bring forth “the edges” in qualitative education research.

Keywords:

• posthumanism
• veterinary education
• slaughterhouse
• animals
• zooethnograpy

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the faculty and students of the veterinary program who kindly invited me to join lectures and study visits as an education researcher. Without their generosity, this study would not have been possible. I am also indebted to the animals I encountered during my fieldwork.

Notes

1. Howard (2009, p. 1) has suggested that “the question of the animal” may more accurately be reformulated as “the flock of questions that circle around the term ‘animal’.”

2. The zooethnographic approach in this article is located within the research area of critical animal studies. As fields of critical inquiry and politically engaged scholarship, critical animal studies and feminist materialism exhibit divergences as well as overlaps. Whilst interlocking material and symbolic structural oppression on the basis of gender and species affiliation was analyzed 20 years ago (Adams, 1990/2002), there is no given commitment to nonhuman animal liberation among contemporary feminist materialist scholars. This article is an attempt to re-fuel such commitment. See also Adams (2009) for a “postmodern” analysis of the shifting modalities and cultural referents of animal exploitation.

3. As my empirical investigation engages with only one week of the 5½-year veterinary education curriculum, my “zooethnographic” analyses make no claims to be representative of the full veterinary program.

4. All veterinary students in Sweden – a vast majority of whom are females in their 20s – follow the same curriculum, the same educational “track,” regardless of whether they see their future careers in the sectors of food hygiene, horse racing, laboratory animal research, or pet clinics. The primary purpose with the study visits is to give an insight into the working conditions for farmers and veterinarians alike, and to create opportunities for early encounters and contacts between veterinary students and their prospective (human) “clients.” The teachers emphasized to the students that they are there as invited guests, hosted by the farmers; not as practicing veterinarians with the task of identifying problems in the farming environment and suggesting improvement measures, a task which the students are still unauthorized to perform (field notes).

5. Although my empirical material consists of ethnographic fieldnotes, I emphasize that this is not an ethnographic study in its proper sense due to the sharp delimitation of fieldwork time. It is, however, a study where I as a participant observer was given the opportunity to join a student group on a special occasion and share their study visit experiences; experiences that I have documented in the form of fieldnotes. With these fieldnotes I do not intend to give a complete “interpretation” of my material through the lens of posthumanist theory, but rather to use my empirical material to work with and through theory development in critical posthumanist education.

6. On the first farm visit I realize that the students’ boots are all identical – they have collectively purchased a professional model of sturdy, high-quality boots from the same specialized store on the same occasion. My own boots, purchased from an ordinary, inexpensive city-center shoe shop, deviate conspicuously from the others.

7. This description overlooks the oppressive character of dairy production whose economy relies on the exploitation of the female animal’s reproductive system. For critical analyses of the gendered oppression of the dairy industry, see, for instance, Adams (1990/2002) and Calvo (2008).

8. This blog statement needs some modification. Slaughter by electricity is intended to cause an epileptic seizure in sheep (and other animals with a sturdy forehead structure needing considerable force to be stunned). An over-heating of the brain occurs, causing a typical convulsion pattern. If slaughter by electricity fails, a different technique, such as a boltgun, must be used (field notes). Thus, there is a risk that the animal is not rendered instantly unconscious by stunning.

9. Williams (2004) has made an extensive analysis of this phenomenon and its recruitment of animal sentience to assist in the process of production. (Ironically, animal sentience has frequently been emphasized by animal rights organizations to motivate an elevated moral status of animals beyond their present ontologization as “food.”) Noting that physical coercion may cause stress and bruises that risk lowering the retail value of the carcass, Williams remarks that “animal docility is an extremely valuable commodity” (p. 49) in meat production, giving the industry a strong economic incentive to elicit compliance from animals. She gives several historical as well as contemporary examples of species-specific biotechnical disciplinary strategies used for the purpose to achieve the smooth “flow” of animals necessary to production efficiency. These strategies include blinding particularly obstreperous animal individuals by stitching shut their eyelids to make their behavior more easily manageable; adjusting space and the interior slaughterhouse design (an innovation named “stairway to heaven”) to block out distracting sights and sounds while exploiting animals’ species-specific behavioral characteristics (such as their tendency to circle) to make them effectively walk themselves into the plant; and the use of decoy animals.

10. For a critique of the animal welfare notion, “happy” meat and “humane” slaughter techniques, see, for instance, Cole (2011) and Williams (2004).

11. The Judas sheep is one of several incarnations of decoy animals working by principles of deceit. As wildlife control strategies, feral animal eradication programs have used Judas goats (Campbell & Donlan, 2005), Judas pigs (Ramsey, Parkes, & Morrison, 2008) and Judas donkeys (Bough, 2006), equipped with radiotelemetry devices, to associate with groups of animals of their own species who can then be tracked down and shot.

12. My use of the notion “prosthesis” here refers to a technologization of the body that exposes the porosity between the organic and the inorganic, between subject and apparatus (cf. Smith & Morra, 2006). It inverts other understandings of prosthesis as adjunct technologies to a nodal human body.

13. I thank Patti Lather for contributing to my thinking around the implications of slaughterhouse zooethnography for post-qualitative methodology. These implications also draw on Jackson and Mazzei (2012).