Consumption of the Mechanical Pig

From Robo Culture Wiki

Page 4 of the "Why Vegan??: Boycott Cruelty" pamphlet states tells me that "[i]n the September 1976 issue of the industry journal Hog Farm Management, John Byrnes advised: “Forget the Pig is an animal. Treat him (sic) just like a machine in a factory.” Of course, being in a Roboculture class, this makes me wonder whether humans (and other animals) become machines through the consumption of pigs? Or rather, do we become cyborgs?

To John Byrnes a farm animal is equivalent of a machine due to its factory farming, which is the farming of animals for profit. On the same page, the pamphlet proceeds to describe the lives that the pigs lead:

Today’s pig farmers have done just that. As Morley Safer related on 60 Minutes: “This [motion picture Babe] is the way Americans want to think about pigs. Real-life ‘Babes see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushes into hyge pits.

The pig, through its blending of the organic and the machine, is a cyborg. The pamphlet’s reference to Chris Noonan’s Babe (1995), a film in which a pig befriends other farm animals and wins over the hearts of audiences, succeeds at giving the animal subjectivity. However, if Babe was moved to a factory farm he would not “go a long way,” as the tagline of the film states, instrad he would be treated like machine solely existing for the consumption of humans or other animals (poor Babe!).

Donna Haraway, in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentienth Century,” states:

A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born to garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment” (Haraway 180).

Babe, according to Haraway, was never innocent, due to his dulism as both a talking animal friend and as consumable meat. Where do we, as humans, exist then if we consume such dual creatures which can be both the almost domesticated Babe and a machine?

Considering John Byrnes, it can be read that through the consumpion of the dual mecahanical pig we as well become machines due to the blending (through consumption) of the organic (us) and the machine (the pig). Moreover, this is also possble through the pig that was perhaps allowed to be organic (like Babe) and then to a factory farm therefore becoming a blend of the organic/mechanic. If we note Donna Haraway, we, as humans, are already are cyborgs, therefore to Haraway perhaps as cyborgs as consume cyborgs due to the pig's mechanical status.

[edit] References

Babe. Dir. Chris Noonan, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

"Why Vegan??: Boycott Cruelty." Vegan Outreach, 2007.