The Danger of Devouring Oneself

A quintessential symbol of the grassroots activist movement, the clipboard-wielding canvasser inspires both interest and impatient headshakes. Of course, canvassing, rallying, and protesting have yielded good results for activist organizations in both fundraising and motivational efforts. Despite this success, all such traditional grassroots mechanisms are limited by the number of activist volunteers available to spread the message. This problem led me to search for a means that can both reach a vast audience and forge deep emotional bonds with viewers.

Over the summer, as I interned at an environmental media nonprofit organization, I encountered just such an activist mechanism: online video. While both videos and canvassers are vulnerable to the impatient headshake, only only videos have the potential to reach thousands, even millions, of viewers, while eliciting levels of emotion that no canvasser can attain. Canvassers can tell you about animal cruelty and the dangers of climate change, but only videos can show them so vividly, drawing parallels to easily recognizable events and art forms.

Chew on This, a short, provocative video made by the polemical People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), makes a remarkable attempt to convince the viewer to “go vegetarian.” Opening as a horror film with its menacing title graphics and ominous background music, Chew on This is laced with statements such as “when animals feel pain, they scream too.” PETA does not use these statements to ground its arguments on a human pity toward an “other” species. Chew on This is intentionally designed to make humans identify with, rather than simply sympathize with, the animals. Nonetheless, we can only see the powerful historical associations constructed by this human-animal equalization after looking at the footage itself.

As I saw pigs hung up by their hind legs in excruciating pain, cows branded, and a chicken’s beak broken off, I recalled human torture featured in war photography and film. Indeed, the video’s sheer brutality conjures up images of one of the most well-documented human atrocities in history: the Holocaust. Though not explicitly mentioned in Chew on This, the Holocaust association and its implications can be examined through other instances drawing similar parallels.

A good starting point would be PETA’s own attempt to intentionally liken animal cruelty to the human suffering of the Holocaust. In 2003, PETA unveiled a controversial campaign against factory farming. Titled Holocaust on Your Plate, this exhibit consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels that displayed factory farm and slaughterhouse images alongside photos taken from Nazi death camps.

The exhibit immediately stirred a whirlwind of criticism. In a press release, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) responded by accusing the project of “trivializing the murder of six million Jews.” After asserting that the abuse of animals should never be likened to the Holocaust, ADL affirmed that “the uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis and others ready to commit genocide even today.”

ADL’s belief in the “uniqueness of human life” points to a complication that the word “dignity” brings to the animal rights debate and Chew on This. According to Professor Samuel Moyn, an intellectual history and human rights specialist at Columbia, a philosophical problem that arises from the notion of human “dignity” is its dependence on “reinforcing the hierarchy between humans and animals.” Having taught a course on “Animals from Aristotle to Agamben,” Moyn points to Immanuel Kant’s defense of human dignity on the “grounds that humans are not like other animals” as particularly compelling. Contrary to PETA’s strategy, ADL’s response demonstrates that the equivalence of animal and human dignity can alienate those who view human dignity as inherently distinct from animals.

The question of the distance between human and animal dignity is also central in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. In this short novel, the South African Nobel Laureate calls upon the lectures of the fictional Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, at an American college. Taking up the theme of animal rights, Costello frequently compares the slaughter of animals to that of Jews during the Holocaust. Like Holocaust on Your Plate, Costello’s speeches provoke fervent responses. The fictional poet Abraham Stern answers Costello’s reasoning that since “the Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews…” by arguing that although “man is made in the likeness of God…God does not have the likeness of man.” In line with ADL, such a misunderstanding of the “nature of likenesses,” Stern would suggest, produces insult.

Another character, Professor Thomas O’Hearne, highlights the fundamental problem of identification with animals in Chew on This. Using Thomas Aquinas as a foundation, O’Hearne argues that “friendship between human beings and animals is impossible” due to the observation that humans have “too little in common with them.” In spite of the similarities PETA tries to draw between humans and animals, the differences are too great for a true community with animals to be established.

In his response to Coetzee’s novel, the foremost philosophical advocate of animal rights, Peter Singer, stages a dialogue between a fictional philosopher and his daughter. Singer’s philosopher shies away from the “radical egalitarianism” that Costello espouses in her lectures. Instead, he argues that man’s ability to contemplate life well into the future grants him considerably more to lose and consequently adds more value to human life.

As the objections from ADL and the philosophical tradition show, instead of forging consensus on the equality of humans and animals, PETA’s strategy of equalization inadvertently magnifies the distinctions between the two. With these distinctions taken into consideration, the appeal of Chew on This is limited by two primary factors: First, the video conveys a controversial message—namely, that PETA’s radical egalitarianism equates human life to that of an animal.

Second, Chew on This utilizes the controversial mechanisms of the Holocaust analogy and the stimulation of fear to convey its message. As I suggested earlier, the fear strategy echoes the horror film genre in that its brutality encourages one to submit to the film’s message. According to David Carter, a film critic for Chew on This and its sister film Meet Your Meat, the brutal visual elements are designed to “transgress the aural message, inducing a state of fear or revulsion in the viewer.”

The human-animal parallel becomes even clearer when we look at one particular theme of Chew on This. During a scene depicting the decapitation of a cow, one of the narrators proclaims, “No matter how you slice it, it’s still flesh.” Following the trait of human identification with animals, this statement essentially equates meat consumption with cannibalism. Given the insistent comparison to the cannibal subgenre of horror film, Carter likens the PETA video to the movie Cannibal Holocaust, which combined the fear and revulsion linked to horror cinema with the social criticism usually associated with other, more ‘intellectual’ art forms.

Even within the context of social criticism, the horror film association leads us to question the effectiveness of scare tactics. As a horror film, Chew on This successfully engenders revulsion. But as Carter argues, PETA’s use of gruesome imagery is “not an attempt to convince viewers that vegetarianism is a better way of life,” but “an attempt to scare them into being a vegetarian.” This distinction is critical if we consider the reactions used to defuse fear, especially in horror cinema. Besides outright rejection of the film, one way to neutralize fear is to approach it with humor.

Searching “Chew on This” on YouTube yields several video responses that attest to the popularity of humorous belittlement. In one such video, a masked man mocks everything from the video’s eerie horror music to its grotesque footage. Attacking both the message and the mechanisms employed in the film, the masked critic has gained over 89,000 views—nearly twice as many as those of Chew on This on the same video-sharing website. Chew on This has ceased to be a horror film—it has become a parody of itself.

For most of my analysis, I have examined the limitations of relying on provocative mechanisms to communicate controversial messages. While I maintain that such strategy risks audience alienation, it is also dangerously simplistic to assert that these controversial strategies should always be avoided in favor of more moderate ones. Controversial strategies, especially if they are aimed at inciting significant reform, should not necessarily be toned down for the sake of mass appeal. Molding an argument to appeal to the status quo may only weaken it.

In response to the question of online video effectiveness, Daniel Hinerfield, the deputy communications director at the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), distinguishes between those videos intended to reach NRDC’s “dark green” activist base and those produced for the larger “light green” audience characterized by “the Whole Foods Shopper.” Logically, the success of one type of video should not be evaluated by the responses outside the video’s target audience. One NRDC video featuring Robert Redford asked its “dark green” viewers to oppose oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and to pass on the message to their friends. Within ten days of the video’s release, the video was viewed more than 92,382 times, forwarded to 85,000 people, and enlisted 11,000 new NRDC activists. We can see that a video’s severe message does not have to be compromised in every instance.

I hope you have kept the image of the eager canvasser in mind as you have been reading this article. Assume you stop and listen to the canvasser: While he or she may not be able to draw the powerful historical associations and parallels that other art forms can, they can eloquently give you the facts and arguments on behalf of his or her cause. For this reason, I cannot completely write off Chew on This a failure. The video’s controversial mechanisms push us away as well as engage us. The idea that human suffering is equal to animal suffering may incite us to action, but it also forces us to review the legitimacy of this controversial claim. Regardless of our objections to the video, our engagement with it and the consequential controversy only popularizes its message. Not every viewer will buy the controversial message, but controversy still sells. Perhaps that was PETA’s intention from the beginning.