Humans and Farm Animals in Documentary Film Narratives: A Romantic Perspective on the Problem of Capitalist Meat Production

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of Romantic notions in understanding contemporary human–animal relations. I examined how three documentaries dealing with the problem of farm-animal exploitation construct the relationship between farmers and meat producers on the one hand and farm animals on the other. Using the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, I examined audiovisual and linguistic levels of documentaries. I argue that documentary narratives have a dual function in exploring these relationships. First, they produce anthropocentric narratives that focus on the farmer’s perspective and their experience of the relationship with farm animals. The anthropocentric narrative legitimizes the notions of traditional forms of sustainable agriculture in which animals graze freely, and a relationship of trust exists between farm animals and farmers. In this narrative, farm animals are portrayed as anthropomorphized and thus equal to humans. Ideologically, it follows the premodern idea of pastoralism. The second narrative is biocentric in that it focuses primarily on animals. This narrative consists of a critique of the exploitation of farm animals in large, industrialized fattening farms and slaughterhouses. I argue that the origins of both narratives lie in Romantic notions about the relationship between humans and animals. Ultimately, both narratives propagate a Romantic return to preindustrial pastoralism, advocating a harmonious coexistence of land, animals, and people, and rejecting industrial, mechanical, and technological forms of farm animal husbandry. I conclude by asking how Romantic ideas contest late capitalist forms of commodification of animals and what the limits of these ideas are in eliminating the exploitation of farm animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphism
• capitalism
• documentary
• farm animal
• human–animal interaction
• Romanticism

Meat, a documentary film by Frederick Wiseman, is a famous example of cinémavérité that is often discussed in documentary studies (Burt, 2002; Carson et al., 2013; Stam et al., 1992). Dating to 1976, the documentary is known for its critical examination of the process of mass meat production. In this 2-hour depiction of the American meat industry, the scenes show how sheep and cattle become consumer goods. It shows the processing and transportation of meat products in highly automated packing plants and illustrates the problems of production, transportation, logistics, and labor management (Wiseman, 1976). This graphic documentary sparked heated debates about the American meat industry and consumer eating habits (Scherer & Baker, 1999). Although it was neither a major commercial success nor primarily intended as an activist project (Burt, 2002; Eames, 1977), its importance, in addition to its cinematic virtuosity, lies in its exposure of the meat industry.

Since the beginning of 2000s, Meat was followed by the release of an activist segment of documentaries that brought food, and meat in particular, out of the realm of unthinking consumption and back into the realm of politics and social controversy to address issues of consumer ethics and awaken consumer activism (Carson et al., 2013, p. 153; Lindenfeld, 2010).¹ Functioning as a critical counterpoint to the hegemony of speciesist rhetoric circulating in the public sphere, the power of these documentaries seems to be in exerting pressure on meat industries (Freeman & Tulloch, 2013). Moreover, these documentaries aim to frame meat production under the appeals for farm-animal rights and as such they serve not only as observations (like, for example, documentaries on wildlife or the previously mentioned documentary, Meat) but also as social interventions (Duvall, 2017, p. 29). In their aim to problematize the mass production of meat, these documentaries reveal the conditions in which farm animals live and die before becoming meat for human consumption.

Activist documentaries have mostly² stuck to the agenda pushed by social movements advocating for animal rights. Making some claim to truth and credibility, documentaries play an important role in producing and reproducing images of society and in forming, confirming, or challenging worldviews and perceptions among their viewers. They shape our relations to animal life, particularly in the contemporary terrain of hyper-mediatized animal visibility (Lawrence & McMahon, 2015, p. 9). This explains the importance of analyzing documentaries as documents – that is, as meaningful cultural productions – for the social sciences. Treating documentaries as documents that narrate their times can contribute to understanding past and present developments and social expressions (Pollak, 2008, p. 77).

It seems that it was the proliferation of Western documentaries on farm animals with an activist agenda that triggered scholarly critical inquiry toward this genre (Freeman & Tulloch, 2013). Documentaries became an important focus of critical animal and media studies that have been characterized by the shift of attention from an anthropocentric standpoint toward nonhuman animals in examining the ideological and power structures behind the meanings generated around nonhuman animals in film, on television, and in videos (e.g., Almiron & Cole, 2015; Merskin, 2015). As such, critical animal and media studies draw on disciplines such as environmental studies, ethnic studies, women and gender studies, ecofeminism, and media and cultural studies (Merskin, 2015). Informed by these disciplines, (critical) animal and media studies have focused on exploring human and nonhuman animal relationships in mediatized environments (e.g., Almiron et al., 2015; Burt, 2002; Lawrence & McMahon, 2015; Mills, 2017; Parkinson, 2019). The field of critical animal and media studies is activistic in its essence, while scholars from the field openly advocate for animal rights and subscribe to an anti-speciesist agenda (Almiron & Cole, 2015; Nibert, 2013). The focus of the field on animals and animal-advocacy documentaries cannot be denied (e.g., Freeman, 2012; Novero, 2015; Shukin & O’Brien, 2015). However, not many works focus on the semiotic and discursive analysis of visual and linguistic representations of farm animals. Although some literature focuses on farm animals in documentary films (Freeman & Tulloch, 2013; Smaill, 2016), this topic is still underrepresented considering the proliferation of Western documentary movies on farm animals in the past two decades. Moreover, these works do not engage with a broader exploration of Western ideas influencing the representation of human and farm-animal relations in media. This study aimed to address these gaps in scholarship.

The purpose of the present research was to examine how documentaries about meat, farmers, and farm animals construct nonhuman animals in relation to human animals. The documentaries that I analyzed roughly represent two different narratives concerning human–animal relations: anthropocentric and biocentric. The anthropocentric narrative focuses on how farmers experience the relationship with the farm animal. It believes that meat can still be produced sustainably and without cruelty if production follows the forms of pastoralism that are concretized in small farms that operate on regenerative models where animals graze freely and are slaughtered in a “humane” manner. In this view, animal agriculture is still an important part of the Western diet, society, and culture. The biocentric view focuses primarily on farm animals. This view primarily brings forward the criticism of the exploitation of farm animals in large, industrialized feeding facilities and slaughterhouses.

I will show that the origins of both biocentric and anthropocentric views of human–animal relations lie in Romanticism. Therefore, I will explore the Romantic return to preindustrial pastoralism, which promotes a harmonious coexistence of land, animals, and people and rejects modern capitalist, industrial, mechanical, and technological ways of treating animals (McKusick, 2000, p. 105). By analyzing documentaries, I will show Romantic ideas relate to contemporary capitalist forms of commodification, objectification, and instrumentalization of farm animals and also what the potential limits of Romantic ideas are when it comes to problematizing the capitalist forms of animal exploitation.

This paper therefore examines Romantic views and perceptions of farm animals for two reasons. First, because Romantic attitudes toward animals seem to appear in critical contemporary documentaries that reflect and rework broader social ideas about how animal agriculture and the meat industry should change. Second, because Romantic notions about farm animals represent an important critique of how modernity and capitalism view the role of animals in the contemporary meat system. While the modern food industry viewed farm animals predominantly as commodities, industry in late modernity became more informed about the problem of animal welfare. Policies and practices were initiated to regulate farm-animal welfare (e.g., Belasco, 2006; Fiddes, 2004). Although the commodification of animals is continuing in post-modern times, many alternatives to contemporary mass-meat production are being explored.³ Romantic ideas that seek alternatives primarily in pre-modern, rural, peasant, and artisanal ways of raising and killing animals represent are important when considering how animal welfare should be approached in the future. Therefore, it is important to understand the Romantic ideas and how they are reflected in contemporary visions of farm animals and the meat industry. This paper will therefore evaluate the political potential of Romantic ideas about animals for addressing contemporary challenges. I will try to show that Romantic ideas seem to be stagnant because their idealized and nostalgic images of pre-modern societies offer sensitized anthropomorphic and victimizing narratives about farm animals with questionable potential for socio-political change.

I will first provide a methodological overview of the study, followed by an explanation of how Romanticism understood animals. Then I will present the results of the analysis of the selected documentaries. In the conclusion, I will try to assess what Romanticism could contribute to the study of the relationship between humans and farm animals and to animal welfare in the context of late capitalism.

Methods: Analyzing Documentaries as Multimodal Texts

Defining documentaries is an elusive process, primarily because their genre and style change rapidly due to the many modes and forms used (Duvall, 2017; Ellis & McLane, 2005; Nichols, 1991; Saunders, 2010). A documentary is a collage of production approaches drawn from fictional films, news TV, reality TV, and investigative journalism. A documentary story usually relates to the source of the story, whether through direct testimony or by directly capturing the world for the purpose of authentic recording (Saunders, 2010). The effort to represent reality truthfully is probably the most characteristic feature of documentaries compared with feature films. Although documentaries give the impression that their content reflects reality, they should not be considered as simple records of reality but as complex and sophisticated works that can inform, provoke, and entertain audiences (Spence & Navarro, 2011, p. 2). Documentaries should therefore be interpreted as representational paradigms (Hamilton, 1997).

Representation is the most important part of the process of meaning production and meaning exchange between the members of the same culture. In the case of documentary film, representation is part of negotiating meaning between the filmmaker, the audience, and reality. Whether we watch documentaries that deal with social issues or those that reflect and narrate social or natural reality in general, we always see representations of that reality, no matter how realistic they are meant to appear. Meaning is constructed in the context of culture and works with language and representation to signify the world around us. However, meaning does not depend on the materiality of the world but on its symbolic function, which is constructed in culture (Hall, 1997). For these reasons, the analysis of documentaries should rely on discursive and semiotic approaches as both see phenomena as constructed through audio–visual or written language. The process of representation in documentaries involves the use of film language, signs, and images used in documentary forms to represent things, agents, and phenomena. In analyzing documentary films, I will thus look for discursive and semiotic constructions of realities. My analysis will focus on visual and linguistic constructions of phenomena rather than on the description of images and evaluation of presented facts (Nichols, 1991).

The camera angle used, the position of subjects and objects in the frame, lighting, color, editing, music, and sound are all instances of “film language” that have the potential for social and symbolic meaning, and the same is true for spoken and written language. We need to understand how this complex sign system works to grasp what semiotics calls the connotative meaning of texts; that is, their implicit sociocultural and “personal” (ideological, emotional, etc.) associations (Barthes, 1977; Chandler, 2007, p. 138). The work of all these activities is called signification –the making of meaning – and the methodology for capturing this meaning is called multimodal analysis (Machin & Myer, 2012). Once we understand the basic premises of multimodal analysis, we can apply it to the particular “signifying practices” of film; that is, the various media and technologies through which cinematic meanings are produced (Turner, 1999, p. 55). However, the methodological toolkit offered by multimodal analysis only allows us to show what semiotic and linguistic resources have been used in documentaries and what meaning potential these have. By applying these tools, we are unable to determine how readers receive these texts or make any objective conclusions about meanings and the film makers’ and the represented agent’s intentions (Machin & Myer, 2012).

In the following analysis, I focused on the multimodal dimensions of documentaries about meat. This means that I used a set of methodological tools to decode the lexical and grammatical choices in the language, as well as the choices for visual and aural features (Machin & Myer, 2012, p. 7). Focusing on the linguistic level, I analyzed the verbatim transcripts of the documentaries, as well as audiovisual materials. I selected three documentaries that focus on the relationships between humans and farm animals: Eating Animals (Quinn, 2017), Dominion (Delforce, 2018), and At the Fork (Papola, 2016).⁴ See Table 1 for details about the documentaries.

Table 1. Details on the selected documentaries.

Title	Director	Writer	Length	Year	Storyline
Eating Animals	Christopher Dillon Quinn	Christopher Dillon Quinn Jonathan Safran Foer	94 min	2017	Eating Animals is a documentary adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name. The film focuses on the changes in animal agriculture that have occurred in the past 40 years since America moved away from traditional farming communities to massive industrial farming complexes that produce “cheap” meat, eggs, and dairy. Addressing the question of where our meat comes from, the film provides insight into American industrial animal agriculture of today and shines light on the problems of farming and animal treatment in the industry (https://www.eatinganimalsmovie.com)
Dominion	Chris Delforce	Chris Delforce	120 min	2018	Dominion is the sequel to 2014s documentary Lucent. Dominion uses drones and hidden and handheld cameras to expose the dark underbelly of modern Australian animal agriculture, questioning the morality and validity of humankind dominating over farm animals. While mainly focusing on animals used for food, it also explores other ways in which animals are exploited and abused by humans, including clothing, entertainment, and research. The film is divided into several parts, each covering an abused animal species and narrated by famous pop culture personalities and the director (Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Sadie Sink, Sia, Katherine von Drachenberg, Chris Delforce) (https://dominionmovement.com)
At the Fork	John Papola	Cristina Colissiamo	89 min	2016	Filmmaker and omnivore John Papola joined by his vegetarian wife Lisa offers a look at how farm animals are raised for our consumption. With unprecedented access to large-scale conventional farms, Papola asks the tough questions about meat production. The documentary focuses on American farmers – real people who, along with the filmmaker, are grappling with the moral dimensions of farming animals for food – but also shows the reality of feedlot operations involved in the mass production of cows (http://attheforkfilm.com)
		John Papola
		Lisa Versaci Papola

For this study, no ethical approval was required.

Animals in Romanticism

We cannot talk about Romanticism without clarifying the role that the Enlightenment played in its creation. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century and laid the foundation for modernity. Along with notions like tolerance, reason, common sense, and liberalism, Enlightenment thinkers espoused the idea of technological and scientific progress. Technological optimism was based on the central belief that through the understanding (through observation, experimentation, and rationality) and application of the laws of nature, the material condition of all humanity could be improved as part of progress and evolution (Pepper, 1996, p. 124), leading to the first waves of industrialization and urbanization. The prevalent understanding of animals during the spread of industrialization saw them as servants to human needs to promote human welfare and progress. This is evident in Kant’s (2017) moral philosophy, in which animals have only instrumental value owing to their lack of capacity to reason. The Enlightenment emphasized the power of humans to alter and improve the natural environment and gain control over nature to advance the progress of civilization. Dominion over animals was seen as an indicator of cultural progress and power. The natural environment changed because of the actions of humans, not the other way around. Human superiority resulted primarily from the clearly historical process of gradual domination of nature and animals as part of it. The sanction of human mastery of nature was based on rational scientific reasoning that replaced religious anthropocentric cosmology, creating a strong sanction for the use of nature (Wolloch, 2012).

However, some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Rousseau (2002), Voltaire (2006, pp. 21–23), and Hume (2003), viewed animals as sentient beings. They challenged the Cartesian notion of animals as “automata” and began to view them as creatures capable of feeling pain, experiencing suffering, and remembering; they believed that these qualities brought animals closer to humans. Continuing Rousseau’s legacy, discussions focused on animal rights. The Romantics posited that animals were capable of feeling and expressing emotions such as fear and courage, which led to discussions about the oppression of animals.

During the Romantic period, these ideas spread. Artists continued to express their interest in animals and nature. Although Romanticism was primarily an artistic and intellectual movement that emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century, its authors and thinkers pursued a strong political agenda. It developed in response to social changes, particularly industrialization, urbanization, modern science, and the technological innovations that accompanied the emergence and spread of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century (Oerlemans, 2002, p. 3). The Romantics were critical of how rural life and the natural landscape were changing in the wake of industrialization and urbanization and lamented the loss of rural traditions and the changes in wild nature. They idealized the land and nature and the animals as part of it (Williams, 1975, p. 138). They saw these changes as a loss of the pristine landscape, a loss of nature, and a loss of the rural community, which included animals (Williams, 1975, p. 139). Romanticism was therefore steeped in what Buell (2013) calls pastoral ideology: the idea that humanity should return to a less urbanized, more natural state of existence with an active green consciousness.

Results

Anthropomorphization of Farm Animals

Romantic thinkers believed that humans and animals were biologically similar (Heymans, 2012) and shared a common sense of kinship (McKusick, 2000, p. 83). They emphasized the similarity between species and the brotherhood between humans and animals. By attributing animals with the characteristics that they considered human (e.g., feelings, appearance, consciousness, thought, and behavior), the Romantics believed that animals were not very different from humans (Oerlemans, 1994, p. 3). During the Romantic period, anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to animals, was integral to the relationship between humans and animals (Berger, 2009, p. 21). Anthropomorphic tropes are a way of attributing emotions and other mental activities to animals that are normally considered typically human. The translation of animal inner life into human language (Pughe, 2020) has often been used to make the inner world of animals accessible to humans. In the Romantic period, one of the most representative instances of anthropomorphism is found in Robert Burn’s poem “To a Mouse” (1785), in which the poet, after frightening a field mouse while farming, apologizes to it because human domination has broken the social bond between humans and animals (Pughe, 2020). Before this rupture, animals were the first circle of what surrounded humans (Berger, 2009, p. 12), and Romantic artists saw the rupture of this connection as problematic.

According to Parkinson (2019, p. 3), “/ … / mediation is an act that brings ‘the animal’ into a human world. Mediation in this sense is inevitably anthropomorphic / … /”. Moreover, “/ … / anthropomorphism shapes ideas about nonhuman animals more than any other aspect of their popular representation” (Parkinson, 2019, p. 1). Therefore, in the following sections, I will analyze examples from the selected documentaries to show how the Romantic anthropomorphization of animals is echoed in them.

In the first example analyzed, a farmer who appears in Eating Animals describes the relationship between humans and farmed turkeys as follows:

You have to start thinking like the turkey and realize what they’re gonna do next … and also sort of learn their language. I mean, turkeys are always talking. They have a tremendous language of their own and many, many different vocalizations that mean different things. / … / People think turkeys as being stupid and, you know, drowned in the rain and all this stuff, which isn’t true. That all got based where people went out and bought baby turkeys and brought them home and didn’t properly house them. And it rained and they all drowned. But my response to that is take a human baby and put it out in the rainstorm and see how long it survives. It will put its head up and drown. Um, you know, that had more to do with just really bad care.

The example shows that the farmer believes that it is important to understand the language and the behavior of his breeding turkeys. The high modality⁵ expressed in the phrase “you have to start thinking like a turkey” shows the importance that the farmer places on the ability of humans to interpret and understand animal thinking and communication. During the course of anthropomorphizing, the farmer attributes turkeys with the ability to talk, which is often denied as an animal ability. Furthermore, the farmer believes that turkeys can master the complex medium of language. The complexity of turkey language is suggested by the farmer’s statement that turkeys have “many, many different vocalizations that mean different things,” suggesting that he believes the complexity of turkey language is similar to that of a human language. Since the ability to communicate via complex language matrices is commonly attributed to humans and not animals, the recognition of turkeys’ language abilities can be interpreted as anthropomorphism. The human ability to think and speak (“Turkeys are always talking”), the farmer emphasizing the importance of understanding their language, as he is fascinated by it (“they have a tremendous language”), as well as the implicit positioning of turkey language on the same level as human language reinforce the anthropomorphized image of turkeys. Moreover, the farmer also anthropomorphizes the turkeys when he denies their stupidity. By denying the commonly held assumption that “turkeys are stupid,” he implicitly presupposes⁶ that they are intelligent, addressing the Cartesian division between animals as non-thinking machines and thinking humans that was heavily criticized in Romanticism.

Similarly, in the next example from Eating Animals, a pig farmer attributes what society believes are human qualities to his pigs:

They wanna know what’s going on. And I, I think that’s really part of how a pig makes its living, you know? They’re interested in a lot of things. They’re intelligent. They like being together. They’re a group animal. If they’re by themself, they’re uncomfortable.

The goal of attributing sociability, curiosity, and intelligence to animals is another form of anthropomorphizing animals by describing characteristics that are primarily attributed to humans. The anthropomorphization of animals in documentaries also applies to cows. In the next example from Dominion, the narrator directly compares mother cows to human mothers.

Like humans, cows are strongly maternal beings who form close bonds with their young / … / Over the days following separation, the mothers bellow day and night, searching for their calves. They’re known to grieve for days or even weeks.

The description of cows as empathic, emotional, and capable of feeling grief when separated from their calves makes human and cow mothers seem similar. It also facilitates the documentary audience’s empathic engagement with farm animals. As humans feel more empathy for the animals that they feel are more similar to them – an effect known in psychology as the similarity principle (Joy, 2009, p. 125) – depicting animals as humans-like facilitates the emotional investment that human viewers may have in relation to animals (Parkinson, 2019).

However, anthropomorphism becomes even more apparent in the next example from Dominion, in which the narrator equates animals with humans by symbolically referring to animals with pronouns commonly used for humans.

Beings in our own right, not units of production. Not stock. He, she, and they, not “it.” The truth is, there is no humane way to kill someone who wants to live. It is not a question of treatment, or better ways of doing the wrong thing. Bigger cages, smaller stocking densities, or less painful gas. We tell ourselves that they have lived good lives, and in the end, they don’t know what’s coming and don’t feel a thing. But they do. In their final hours, minutes and seconds, there is always fear, there is always pain. / … / And never are they shown mercy or kindness, instead mocked, laughed at, kicked, beaten, tossed like ragdolls.

The narrator claims that “he,” “she,” and “they” are the pronouns we should use when referring to animals to avoid their objectification, which is implied by using the pronoun “it.” It refers to objects, while “they,” “them,” and “he” refer to subjects (e.g., Merskin, 2022). As the documentary states animals feel pain and fear and can understand the death and pain of their conspecifics, it suggests they should not be treated as commodities and objectified but should be seen and treated as sentient beings. However, the relationship between humans and animals in Romanticism is ambivalent. Critical portraits of humans in Romanticism often depicted them as stiff, placid, and relatively indifferent to animals (Oerlemans, 2002, p. 74). On the one hand, humans are portrayed as acknowledging the emotions and intelligence of animals, as shown earlier. In these cases, humans are portrayed as sensitive, emotional, and empathic about animal suffering and are closely connected to animals and nature (Mortensen, 2000, p. 303). On the other hand, Romanticism aimed to problematize violence against animals, and, in some Romantic works, the goal of showing animals as victims of human cruelty was a way to critically engage with this theme. Similarly, the documentary Dominion portrays animals as victims to problematize the inhumane treatment of animals in feeding facilities and slaughterhouses. In this case, the animals are shown neither mercy nor kindness, while the humans, particularly the slaughterhouse workers featured in the documentary, are portrayed as cruel.

The Romantic ambivalence regarding the human relationship with animals is perhaps most typically portrayed in one of the final scenes of At the Fork. The scene takes place at a local farmers market in the USA, where farmers sell the pigs that they have raised for slaughter. Two teenage pig farmers are shown petting, holding, hugging, combing, walking, and feeding their pigs during the event. Their relationships with the pigs and their interactions with them closely resemble human behavior toward pets. With tears in her eyes, one of the young farmers explained her strong emotional bond with her pigs and her sadness over selling them for slaughter. She sits on the floor holding and petting the animal. The young farmer’s body language and her proximity to the animal connote her emotional attachment to the animal (Machin & Myer, 2012, p. 74), while the animal seems comfortable and at peace. She explains to the filmmaker how she feels about her pigs:

They are just like dogs … This one is Kopper and this is Hopper / … / I go in their pen, they nibble on my shoes, I rub their bellies, it’s really fun actually spending time with them, but it kind of hurts when you see them for the last hour of their life. Because you’ve been so connected with them, just scratching their belly that means something to them. Every pig is different. Like, I had one pig one year, if I would touch his ear or just scratch his ear, he would just calm down. Every pig has a different way of calming down. And he is really special.

Romanticism often acknowledged the individuality of animals – especially in children’s literature, where the personalization of animals was most evident (Perkins, 2003, p. 3). Using the example above, we can see how the pig farmer personalizes the pig. She gives personal names to the pigs and describes their individual characters. In this scene, the pig, an animal intended for human consumption, is elevated to the status of a pet. Unlike pets, farm animals are raised en masse, de-individualized, and not given personal names. Consequently, human emotional attachment to farm animals is less pronounced or nonexistent compared with pets (Joy, 2009, p. 119). “Recognizing the individuality of others interrupts the process of deindividuation and makes it more difficult to maintain the psychological and emotional distance necessary to harm them” (Joy, 2009, p. 120). This is evidenced by the aforementioned similarity principle, which explains that people feel emotionally closer to individualized subjects than subjects who appear en masse (Joy, 2009, p. 125). Naming the pigs in the scene and treating them as pets makes the audience feel that each pig is unique, and when presented as such, the pig is no longer an object or commodity but appears as a subject. In this way, the pig moves up the symbolic ladder and is classified, at least temporarily, as a pet rather than a farm animal. This process significantly alters the viewer’s relationship to the pigs in question, making the animal more sympathetic and moving it from the mental category of edible to inedible (Joy, 2009, p. 15).

Since the Romantics held the idea that animals are not so different from humans and that they (like humans) can feel emotions and pain and sometimes even behave like humans, Romanticism found it morally unacceptable to harm animals and cause them suffering. Romantic descriptions of peasants’ guilt, remorse, betrayal, and compassion toward their animals were prevalent in writings and poetry (Perkins, 2003, pp. 2–3). This morally ambivalent relationship with animals also appears in documentaries. In the next example, a farmer who appears in At the Fork describes how the circle of trust between him and the animal breaks once he sends the animal to slaughter.

When you’re out with our animals, you can get pretty close to ‘em and a lot of ‘em would actually come up to you because they trust us and there’s a relationship that we have built over time with our animals, but if we were ever to hoot and holler an get ‘em going, than we just broke that relationship or that trust.

This quotation expresses the contradictory attitude toward animals that accompanies the romanticization of the human–animal relationship in which the animal is given the dual status of pet and slaughter animal. As a farmer explains in At the Fork,

[c]ows are definitely emotional creatures they respond to our physical body / … / You know, killing, let’s just like put it out there, all right. You know, that’s what we are doing. We are killing them to eat them. And how ironic when you just built this bond of them over the course of their lives. I have often in darker moments wondered if I am, you know, racking up, like a really serious karmic debt?

Romantic anthropomorphization has its limits, however, when the socioeconomic context of agriculture as a business comes into play. The context in which farmers seek profit ultimately determines the type of relationship farmers have with animals, a relationship of power. The romanticized portrayal of the lives of ranchers barely touches on the issue of animal suffering. It obscures the unequal power relationship between humans and animals through pastoral ideology and the narrative of “happy meat” (e.g., Aaltola, 2014) in which no animal ever suffers. However, in documentaries dealing with mass meat production, “happy meat” narratives are entirely avoided. The central topic of such documentaries is to problematize the objectification and oppression of farm animals in the process of meat production.

De-Anthropomorphization of Farm Animals

The oppression of animals was problematized by early Romantic poets who depicted animals as slaves and victims of their human masters (Kenyon Jones, 2009, p. 140). The depiction of animals as victims was a feature of Romanticism and reinforced the Romantic idealization of animals as sublime creatures. This portrayal of animals contradicted the logic and practices of enlightened, rational, civilized society, which instrumentalized animals for food. In particular, the hunting and killing of animals in butcher shops were recurring motifs in Romantic poems and paintings⁷ (Oerlemans, 2002; Perkins, 2003). Romantic misanthropic depictions of humans showed humans as abusers, repressors, tormentors, and destroyers of animal creatures with whom the Romantics sympathized (Perkins, 2003, p. 4). Present in Romantic poetry was also moral criticism of animal suffering inflicted on humans for sometimes even sadistic pleasure (Mortensen, 2000, p. 303). Romantic depictions of the cruelty of animal deaths were morally condemned by Romantics to emphasize that animals can suffer various forms of intense misery, including both physical pain and psychological coercion, which places a moral obligation on humans to try to avoid the infliction of such suffering (Mortensen, 2000, p. 304).

While in some of the cases examined above farm animals are brought closer to humans through anthropomorphization that constructs animals as subjects, in other cases animals are predominantly portrayed as objects that appear as victims of the meat production system. The narratives I present below therefore speak of animal suffering, oppression, and exploitation, particularly emphasized in the documentary Dominion (Delforce, 2018).

In Dominion, the visual layer consists entirely of very explicit images of animal suffering in fattening farms and slaughterhouses. The audience of Dominion is exposed to long, agonizing images of sick, dying, mutilated animal bodies. The authenticity of the images of animal suffering is reinforced by the rhetoric of surveillance (Levin, 2002), with the inclusion of video surveillance equipment and footage from hidden cameras that show the cruel conditions in which animals are kept. This creates what Freeman and Tulloch (2013) call reverse panopticon establishing a surveillant gaze (Levin, 2002), with the effect of establishing surveillance over the meat industry by exposing its modes of production. However, the inclusion of this footage reinforces the sense of reality and documentary nature of the footage and enhances the credibility of the data and information conveyed to the audience. The voiceover by six advocates for animal rights who are also famous actors and singers adds further authority and credibility to the content as the audience often relies on famous people’s opinion and knowledge when interpreting reality. In turn, famous people often engage in lead-by-example practices, in this case advocating for animal rights. Their narration is poetic, calm, slow, and full of silent moments where the viewer has time to reflect on the graphic elements. In addition to the spoken narrative, which mainly describes the processing of animals in farms and slaughterhouses, viewers are treated to diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. The former consist mainly of animal sounds, screams and heavy breathing, the latter of instrumental music⁸ that suggests menace and horror in violent scenes and sadness in images of suffering animals. The footage gives the viewer a deep insight into the reality of fattening farms and slaughterhouses and is intended to provide a critical social commentary on the nature of meat production. The goal of Dominion is to elicit an empathic response from the viewers, ideally leading to compassion and their transformation into vegans. As with Romanticism, Dominion’s focus is to critique the utilitarian value of animals to create awareness of animals as sentient and suffering creatures (Dolan, 2016).

The depiction of animal suffering in Dominion requires further unpacking of the cinematic language of documentary to show how animal bodies are objectified and victimized. Dominion often shows animals in close-ups that allow the audience to read emotions from the animals’ faces. Zooming in on animal faces is used to indicate the animal’s strong emotions and crisis (Turner, 1999, p. 56). Documentary film uses two different ways of representing animals: through “offer” and “demand” images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). These two modes have different communicative functions. In Dominion, animals appear predominantly as “offer” images. In such cases, the viewer gazes at the animal object without making eye contact and at the moment it is dying, in pain, or already dead. In these cases, the animals do not look directly at the camera. The camera often films a dying animal and captures only the dying animal’s breaths and laments. The viewer is offered the image of the suffering animal as information about the animal’s condition. The repetition and length of such shots give the viewer time for contemplation and emotionalization. The goal of showing images of suffering animals as objects of the viewer symbolizes the social distance between the meat industry and Western consumers on the one hand and the animals on the other. This is further emphasized by sporadic distant shots of fattening farms, when livestock are filmed from above and the camera moves away from the scene, suggesting the sense of social distance between livestock and humans (Machin & Myer, 2012). Also, documentary film very sporadically reminds us that animals are still subjects by capturing their faces in a “demand” image. In these cases, the animals look the viewers directly in the eye, which is a visual form of direct address. In these cases, the animal’s gaze is directed at the audience, prompting them to take action by establishing an imagined relationship with the audience. The viewer is asked to enter into a relationship of compassion and emotional involvement with the filmed animal. These images also call for action on the part of the viewer based on the symbolic social bond that is created between the animals depicted and the documentary audience. The two modes of representation symbolize the ambivalent attitude of humans toward animals. On the one hand, the emotionally distanced “offer” image symbolizes the instrumentalization and objectification of farm animals by humans: their suffering bodies are exhibited as objects of the gaze. On the other hand, the emotionally engaging “demand” image subjectivizes the animals. Finally, the scenes from fattening farms and slaughterhouses allow the viewer to humanize the suffering of animals: “/ … / by being represented as looking at the viewer, [the animals] are represented as human, anthropomorphized to some degree” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 118).

Conclusion: Romantic Narratives as Capitalist Critique?

The question of our relationship with animals was central to Romanticism. The way Romanticism viewed animals as sentient beings contrasted with the industrial, technicist, and mechanistic views of animals held by Descartes and the Enlightenment. The instrumental view of animals, which involved the domination and exploitation of animals and nature, the technologization and mechanization of production, is the cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production (Plumwood, 2005). The mass killing of animals is consistent with capitalist agriculture, which goes hand in hand with industrialization and the move away from pastoral animal husbandry. As Berger (2009, p. 23) points out, “In the first stages of industrial revolution, animals were used as machines. Later, in the so-called postindustrial societies, they are treated as raw material.” Food animals are processed like industrial products. In developed capitalist food systems, farm animals become a commodity for individual consumption, leading to alienation between consumers and the meat they buy, and between farmers and animals. When following the “will of capital,” animals are stripped of their individuality and subjectivity to serve as profitable units of production (Canavan, 2017, p. 38).

The Romantic critique of the oppression of animals is therefore also a critique of how capitalism instrumentalizes animals. This Romantic critique is still relevant today and is often reflected in the documentary film genre and pro-animal rights discourses, which often work synergistically. The resurgence of Romanticism in contemporary documentaries about meat is therefore no accident. Romanticism still has something to say when it comes to critiquing the way capitalism treats animals. Romantic ideas still play an important role because “the crisis of civilization associated with the genesis and development of industrial capitalism is far from having been resolved” (Milner, 1973, as cited in Sayre & Löwy, 1984, p. 54). It is important to emphasize, therefore, that addressing the consequences of capitalist industrial transformation is not just a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Romantic anti-capitalism and anti-industrialism are essential components of modern culture and form a worldview, the importance of which is increasing (Sayre & Löwy, 1984, pp. 42–43; Sayre & Löwy, 2020).

The Romantic response to the contemporary meat system, which was the subject of the documentaries analyzed here, has evolved from continuous changes in society. Industrial revolutions (from the 1st to the 4th) as well as capitalist ideas of growth, acceleration, expansion, and maximization have been triggers for Romantic narratives for more than two centuries. Romantic notions that have emerged since the dawn of industrial production resurfaced during the consolidation of the neoliberal order in the 1980s and 1990s and have been particularly present in documentaries about farm animals in the recent decades. The realization that the limitless multiplication of food, especially meat, was doing serious damage to animal welfare revived the Romantic ideas. As I have shown in this article and as addressed in other works, these ideas express a disdain for capitalism and modern industrial society by addressing its social and environmental impacts and advocating pre-capitalist values (Sayre & Löwy, 1984, p. 46). In the documentaries analyzed, these values are most evident in the attempt to arouse audience sympathy for farm animals by, on the one hand, pointing out the similarities between farm animals and humans and, on the other, presenting them as suffering victims of capitalist meat production.

But what are the implications of these Romantic ideas conveyed through a genre such as documentary film? The debate in communication and media studies about how media messages affect audience behavior is old and complex; the question of whether and how the audiences of the documentaries studied were influenced by their content is beyond the scope of this article. Even if media have no direct impact on audience behavior, they create, recreate, and construct meaning for the phenomena they portray and influence the way we see and interpret those phenomena. Media privilege particular senses, perspectives, knowledge, and ideologies that rely on certain institutionalized practices, strategies of engagement, and systems of meaning (Parkinson, 2019, p. 3). The Romantic notions about farm animals that are adopted by documentaries are therefore not entirely unproblematic.

Romantic representations idealize the relationship between animals and humans by portraying farm and grazing animals as happy and in synergy with their keepers. Although the representations of farm animals in the analyzed documentaries cannot quite be compared to the anthropomorphized image of the happy cow grazing on endless grass fields prevalent in marketing communications for animal food products (Andersson, 2019), the problematization of such representations can nevertheless be seen as moving in the same direction. In the documentaries analyzed, the portrayal of anthropomorphized animals is embedded in nostalgic relationships and affective bonds between humans and farm animals. Such representations can facilitate cross-species identification. As Parkinson (2019, p. 8) points out, such affective appeals can act as a mobilizing force, opening possibilities for empathic connections.

Consistent with the so-called pastoral ideology, these narratives include depictions of grazing animals living happy and harmonious lives, while their keepers are portrayed as empathic and respectful toward them. As I have shown at the linguistic level, this is often reflected in athropomorphizations. However, Purcell (2011) points out that this idealized relationship does not necessarily eliminate violence in the human–animal relationship. The animal is still ultimately killed for its commercial value. The problem with anthropomorphizing farm animals in documentaries is the anthropocentric narratives of “happy meat” and “animal welfare wash,” which make it difficult for individual animal consumers to address the concrete costs of their choices (Aaltola, 2014, p. 27). In addition, anthropomorphizing the animals that we consume does not translate into a lower consumption of those animals (Johnson et al., 2021). Some critics of anthropomorphism point out that anthropomorphic representations of cows actually prevent viewers from perceiving cows as oppressed, while subliminally highlighting their differences from humans (Canavan, 2017, p. 43; Parkinson, 2019).

Documentaries that focus solely on shocking, explicit images of animal suffering may also fail to elicit the expected behavior change in meat consumers. These documentaries expose the viewers to images of violence and animal suffering that aim to make the viewers feel uncomfortable about their dietary choices. The images imply guilt and demand responsibility (Aaltola, 2014). However, the images of animal suffering are always countered by meat consumers’ notion that the animals we consume are less capable of suffering, which shows that little moral interest is given to them (Mathur et al., 2020). However, some research shows that such documentaries have been an “eye opener” (e.g., Vezovnik, 2022), and some contend that they strive to propel the necessary preconditions for emancipatory social transformation challenging injustices and demystifying poser relations by envisioning alternative orders (Freeman & Tulloch, 2013). But before jumping to conclusions about how documentaries like Dominion influence behavior and change social orders, we need to carefully determine the people who feel motivated to consume less or no meat after watching such documentaries.

Research shows that exposure to images of suffering animals collides with many other personal, economic, social, and cultural factors that play a role in the decision to go meatless (e.g., Vezovnik, 2022). Furthermore, when evaluating the reception of shocking images of violence against animals, researchers speak of “compassion fatigue,” a defense mechanism in which the ability to care about animal suffering diminishes because the abundance of such images numbs viewers (Aaltola, 2014, p. 28). This is even truer when we engage with media content because in today’s media the abundant depictions of violence are widely tolerated. Therefore, images of animal suffering must be anchored by providing viewers with instructions for action. “If compassion is not translated into action, it withers,” says Sontag (2004, p. 79). If action is not taken, images of violence become a flash in the pan of morbid voyeurism.

Romantic narratives of human–animal relations are thus both an effective tool of capitalist forms of meat production and consumption and a dubious way to sensitize audiences to animal welfare. On the positive side, anthropomorphic representations open the possibility for viewers to emotionally engage with farm animals by at least considering the possibility of them having a dual status as companion animal and farm animal. Furthermore, through horrific images of animal oppression and suffering, the often-hidden spaces of animal exploitation in capitalist meat production are made visible. In this sense, a Romantic perspective is important because, as Wallerstein (1998) puts it, it envisions utopistics,⁹ in which humanity could develop and implement alternatives to the current capitalist food system that endlessly accumulates capital through the exploitation of animals.

Two questions remain. The first is whether and how documentaries about animal welfare can play an active role in realizing and manifesting ideas that seek to change the dominant paradigm and how, in the heterogeneous media milieu in which they compete with images of “happy cows” (Andersson, 2019) in food advertising and the carnist ethos manifested in reality shows such as The Butcher (2019, History Channel), this becomes possible. The second question is whether and how the Romantic frame can be transformed into a political project that goes beyond the nostalgic and sentimental frame of the representation of farm animals and enables a material (not just symbolic) transformation of the power relationship between humans and animals.

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for helping me improve this manuscript. I also thank Domen for all the support given. This paper was partially written during my sabbatical at the University of Colorado, Boulder that was supported by the Fulbright program, for which I am also thankful.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Fulbright program.

Notes

1 For a more precise analysis of the development of Western food-focused fiction and documentary films, see Carson et al. (2013).

2 To my knowledge, there are some exceptions to animal-rights activism. These are pro-meat activist documentaries, such as Beyond Impossible (2022) and, to a certain degree, Sacred Cow (2020), that advocate against veganism.

3 One such solution, for example, relies on ecomodernist ideas in which high-tech meat products are developed. This involves plant-based meat analogues, insects, and meats cultivated in laboratories. In addition, vegetarianism has been on the rise since the 1980s, which again speaks about a shift in how society and consumers see the problems of farm animals in the meat industry (Fiddes, 2004).

4 Documentaries were selected using the Google search engine, with the keywords documentary AND meat. I limited my search to the 2012–2022 period, as I was interested in recent depictions of animals and meat in documentaries. A list of nine documentaries dealing with meat was created. The transcripts of the documentaries were coded into MAXQDA2020 along with the visual and audio features. The next step was to select three documentaries from this list that focused most on human–animal relations, namely Eating Animals (Quinn, 2017), Dominion (Delforce, 2018), and At the Fork (Papola, 2016). Examples from these three documentaries are included and examined in this study. The specific examples I have shown are representative of many similar examples of the anthropomorphization and de-anthropomorphization of animals in the documentaries. Detailed information about the selected documentaries appears in Table 1.

5 Modality includes any unit of language that expresses the speaker’s/writer’s personal opinion of or commitment to what they say. Low modality shows less certainty and obligation, while high modality shows a high degree of the latter. Verbs such as have to, must, and ought demonstrate high modality (Machin & Myer, 2012, p. 186).

6 Presuppositions are forms of implicit intertextuality defined as propositions that are taken by the producer of the text (in our case the farmer) as already established or given. Presuppositions therefore engage with something taken for granted (Fairclough, 1992, p. 283).

7 See, for example, the painting Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe and a Hound by George Stubbs (1800) or The Death of the Stag by Benjamin West (1786).

8 The purpose of music in film helps the audience realize the meaning of scenes. It gives them dramatic and emotional value, and it supports the film narrative (Prendergast, 1992, 2013).

9 For those unfamiliar with the concept, speaking of utopistics in relation to utopias, Wallerstein defines utopistics as “the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment regarding the substantive rationality of possible alternative historical systems” (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 65).