Abstract
How widely separated is a lavishly presented roast hog served in a fancy restaurant from a sanitized, shrink-wrapped piece of chicken breast bought in a supermarket? They might appear to be aesthetic and cultural opposites, but at the same time they are both commercial presentations of a dead animal as a product. What are, if any, the common denominators between these two (and of course many other) instances of human-other animal relationship? Are the ethical aspects of this relationship a topic of interest for zoosemiotics?
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- 1.
Much should be said about the symbolic value of sacrifice in the main religions, and how much this value is implanted in our minds during everyday interactions. There is no point in glossing over the situation: still nowadays, meat stands for feast and affluence, and the fact that we eat turkey for Christmas and lamb for Easter, the fact that we practice ritual slaughtering, and so on, still remain a clear metaphor of the offer to the gods, a characteristic of both pagan and monotheistic cultures.
- 2.
To be fair, that sentence was attributed not only to Duke Ellington, but to a lot of other musicians and composers, including Richard Strauss, Louis Armstrong and others.
- 3.
As in the sad case of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
- 4.
A typical case are ALF’s raids in fur breeding farms, where hundreds of specimens (like minks, foxes, etc.) that were born and have spent their whole lives in cages, are liberated. As they are not used to a life in the wild, most of them starve to death very soon or die for other reasons. Now, these raids certainly represent enormous losses (not only economically speaking) for a fur farm, and – because of this – we can definitely regard them as actions performed towards an opposite direction than the anthropocentric one. At the same time, however, it is difficult to conceive them as actions “in favour” of the liberated animals, at least when taking the idea of “life” as a point of reference, not to mention that – ecologically speaking – the sudden liberation of a huge amount of specimens that are basically alien to a given ecosystem, may impact on this latter in quite a traumatic way. Of course, one can always object that few hours of freedom are always better than a whole life in a small cage, but perhaps – for the purposes of this very argument – this is not the point.
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Martinelli, D. (2010). Does Zoosemiotics Have an Ethical Agenda?. In: A Critical Companion to Zoosemiotics:. Biosemiotics, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9249-6_5
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