Cattle revenge

"A cow escaped from a slaughterhouse in this city Wednesday, killing a bystander, damaging vehicles and leading police on chase before being destroyed." You lookin' at me? 

Yvonne the cow as difference

How can we think difference in itself? It is a question posed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. Examples of D's thinking are hard to come by since the question bears upon the unrepresentable. Animality offers a mode of engaging difference in itself. Cows are domesticated beasts but for Yvonne the cow, domestication is merely a camouflage. She has not only taken herself out to pasture, she kept running and is in full on wilderness. Some in Germany are hunting to kill her. The State says she posses a threat since her corporality, her animality that was used for commercial gain in milking, has turned into a possible weapon should she step onto a road and get hit by a car. Others, animal welfare folk, want to bring her into the fold and give her a safe home. But Yvonne is having none of this dialectics. She has receded into the wildnerness and humans can't find her. Recall Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide." But really, must we seek it? Can it not be into and of itself. Allowing Yvonne to be is a recognition of a difference in itself, one that cannot be domesticated but roams of its own accord.

Bovril for Strength

Bull in a china shop...

When fables, proverbs, and idioms come to life, it is a sign of an animal revolution in the making... they warned us these days would come:

"The animal escaped from an auction market next to GB Antiques Centre in Lancaster, Lancashire, on Monday and barged its way into the shop, which was packed with 200 people.

Police had to shoot the animal in order to save customers and stock - china and all. It was herded to an area of the centre and blocked in using two antique organs before a police marksman opened fire. A woman was treated in hospital for a bruised shoulder after the incident. 'Hundreds of items will have been destroyed, at a cost running into thousands of pounds,' Mr Blackburn said."

Really, the owner could have invited the bull for tea. Where is his hospitality? Is it reserved for humans alone, and only for select humans...not very hospitable then is it? The absurd idea of inviting the bull for tea once it is in the china shop is a figure for saying: what does the animal want and why don't we think of its desire, which is to say, why can we not be hospitable. Here think of Derrida on hospitality:

it [hospitality] already broaches an important question, that of the anthropological dimension of hospitality or the right to hospitality: what can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality toward the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable; does one owe hospitality, and is that the right word when it is a question of welcoming – or being made welcome by – the other or the stranger as god, animal or plant?”

Founding Father bites like an animal

George Washington's false teeth were made from animal teeth:
"He had several sets of false teeth over the years, but they were not made of wood. For at least one set, Washington's dentist, Dr. John Greenwood, used a cow's tooth, one of Washington's teeth, hippopotamus ivory, metal and springs." Talk about becoming animal?! The res-publica has now created a line of flight for animality.

Cows send tweet messages on Twitter

Local Woodstock, Canada dairy now has its cows twittering out their dairy diary. You can follow the day in the life of the beasts!

Cattle on strike!

A popular children's story carries the seeds of revolt: Click, Clack, MOO by Doreen Cronin (author) and Betsy Lewin (illustrator). You can follow the video version of the story in the link above.

The cattle get a hold of an old typewriter in the barn. They begin to type demands to the farmer: give us electric blankets for cold nights. The farmer refuses and the cows bar him from the barn and refuse to give up their milk.

Besides the tale of humane treatment to animals, besides better treatment creating higher milk yields, there is a more complex story of language, animals, and revolt using technology.

Beasts terroised Julius Caesar. Now the are back... in Devon

This was the front page headline for The Times April 22, 2009 as I arrived in Liverpool to give a talk on animal incidents at the Animal Revolution symposium at Hope Liverpool.

The article is actually a good political history of cattle. It notes taht the last auroch died in the royal Jaktorow forest in Poland. Heinze Heck conducted Nazi experiments to genetically back-breed modern cattle to the aurock wildness: "The heard has Herman Goering, the head of Hitler's Luftwaffe, to thank for its existence. Goering hoped to recreate a primeval Aryan wilderness in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe" (15).

The Heck cattle were imported into Devon by Derek Gow, a conservationist who also led the fight to re-introduce the beaver into the UK (after several hundered year without the dam animal). He brought them over from a anture reserve near Amsterdam where 600 Heck cattle roam. The animals are particularly fast and a bit agressive. Gow "intends to breed tehm, selecting the more placid animals that are less likely to react to curious pekinese as though it were a maurauding carnivore." Backbreeding to an "original" but breeding out the agression of nature... a curious shifts in standards here for the benefit of humankind.

Correlary to Are You Being Served--they are killing us

Kathy Ferston has an good essay called "Shattering the Meat Myth: Humans are Natural Vegetarians." She assembles a series of authorities on the matter including:

Dr. William C. Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, "Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

Roberts ain't saying anything most nutritionists don't already know. He is just saying it with more studies and institutional backing. Ferston's other authorities include some noteworthy anthropologists. What interests me for this blog entry is that "they end up killing us."

Given the very high percent of Americans and Europeans who are overweight, the problems of incorporation of cattle can even lead to issues of morphological change of humans in the 21st century. That is to say, we manage cattle and we eat them, manage and manger. Because we eat them we shape and manage them a particular way. Incorporation as eating is managed by corporations as businesses. Corporate chains from fast food icons such as McDonalds to steak houses such as Longhorn (which serves more polled than horned cattle) make demands on breeders and farmers. So, we change the beast according to these demands. Yet, they change us as we digest globally homogenized and overly processed animal products.

We will not be rent asunder

Calling themselves "Flavoristas" the capitalist machine tries to co-opt the bestial revolution and its herds http://www.freethemeat.org/

We will not be daunted. Animals of the umwelts, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Mad Cow And Alzheimer's Have Surprising Link

Prions is the link. Have these animals infected us or we them. Biological warfare.