Famous Animals

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, human culture has become more powerful — and thus, more dangerous to nonhuman animals — than ever before. The scope of modern society is global and instantaneous. Ideas, beliefs, trends, and perversions are ubiquitously diffuse. The expansive reach of civilization’s technological capabilities leads to global warming, habitat destruction, oil tanker spills, and radioactive and other toxic emissions. And such obvious (physical, chemical, spatial) threats to animals’ well-being are accompanied by an array of less immediately apparent incursions into their lives. Ecologically, a sophisticated international infrastructure facilitates the rampant, gluttonous consumption of natural resources. Animals frequently figure as a resource — which is, of course, a cultural frame, and, from animals’ point of view, as well as ecologists’, a regrettable one. The consequence of constructing the animal-as-resource may literally involve eating, skinning, harvesting, or otherwise physically devouring the animal’s body; but the construct may also denote a kind of visual cultural consumption — watching, framing, representing, characterizing, and reproducing the subject in a certain way — that may comparably devour animals.