can factories be a farm?
Factory farming, a concept first emerged in 1960s, now almost completely overtook the previous family farm model. In factories, animals constantly face forced hormonal injections and broken limbs until they get slaughtered without living one percent of their natural lifespan. When I was a child, my dad used to take me to a Bosintang
place often. I vaguely remember them tasting heavily of Perilla leaves and Sichuan pepper. Nowadays, whenever I force him to have a vegetarian meal, he says it doesn’t feel like a proper meal with no meat on a table.
can animals be an art?
“You kill things to look at them,” said Damien Hirst, whom have been using animal body as an art material in their work since the 90s. In the essay [The animal that therefore I am], Jacques Derrida proposes to us to take on the vantage point of the animals, dead or alive. And while this imperfect suggestion provides a reversed perspective of the subject - object relation between animals and humans, it fails to acknowledge the utilitarian frame still being provided to non-human beings. And whether you wish to participate or not, we exist in a profit driven society where your wish to be just requires constant remembrance and inconveniences. Layers of plights are manufactured precisely to leave you feeling inept but to not be convinced of this false defeat, perhaps we can start by echoing the famous scrivener, I would prefer not to.
“Dead animals do tell tales. There are decoding secrets for interpreting the mute testimony of these animal specimens. Only in death do most animals pause long enough for our analytical minds to torture some truths out of them.”
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