Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers

Richard Bulliet – Old man. Farming Background.

Sex and Blood

• what does it mean when our childhood is part of seeing and exposure to sex and blood?
• Differences: Domestic vs. Post-Domestic
• Our experiences on… farms, with animals, Media: 16 and pregnant,
• What is the reason for these differences? Animal relationships? Or is it caused by other things?
• Humane Slaughter – Does it matter how?
  • matters more – the conditions in which they were raised
• Efficiency? of slaughter “Production in the modern area” that’s the parallel. After WWII
  • Using animal slaughter techniques on humans! Woah!
  • The opposite – and “correct” reaction as opposite to the animals rights group message.
• How long was the domestic era? What about sex and blood / violence in the pre-domestic era?
• Beastiality- a common thing at Bulliet’s time?
  • is this superior to fantasy?
  • You still can get your milk delivered. or otherwise conveniently.
  • The “Domestic Era” is actually 10,000 years – and beastiality was more common then than it is now. The experience with Sex and Blood and violence is fundamentally different than ours now.
  • Switzerland.

Motivations for vegetarianism:
post-domestic guilt (about the conditions of modern agriculture / food animals)
environmentalism – nature is important
social conscience – first world guilt

Real Experience …. to …. Fantasy

• Roman blood sports and now Football Stadium… Things were more “realistic” … Is getting the experience very very good for people?

Evolutionary speaking, we are omnivores.

Are we part of nature or separate / above it? Us. Woman. Man. Human.
Our role in earth stewardship?
Are we limited by its carrying capacity? Does technology make it infinitely exploitable?
Our evolution – adapted to “think” and so we use it to create/alter animals and nature. So maybe that’s just what nature intended. right? right.
All organisms have altered their environment. We are similar in our impacts. So how are humans and animals different?

• Because we have a higher level of intelligence and that ability to reason.. “the theory of mind”
  • Makes us MORE responsible for what we do? Animals (we think) don’t have the ability to reason the consequences of their action.
• Check this out:
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Bonobo-Atheist-Humanism-ebook/dp/B007Q6XKEY
• or this:
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Empathy-Natures-ebook/dp/B002PYFW8Y/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1360093576&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=FranzDe+Waal

It’s Human Nature.
That’s what we say to justify ALL of our actions.
we differ by only… such a tiny percent of DNA.

Hunting – the way we hunt if different. Domesticating – a way to overcome hunting.
How does science define life? (see fig 1.1)

• A fundamental tension about the category of “animal” to tell us about us.
• Animals don’t do that. or You’re acting like an ANIMAL.
• EVIL: makes us unique….
• Oh, but we’re the different ones.

Biology defines life as having these requirements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life):

1. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
2. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells — the basic units of life.
3. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
4. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
5. Adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism’s heredity, diet, and external factors.
6. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

Philosophy of Life

• Our place in the universe…Cf:

The Human situation
Main article: Human situation
The human situation appears to be a struggle between what is (existence) and what ought (essence) to be.

• Normative situations – Alternatives, Choice, Freedom, Values, Standards, Ideals, Obligation, Responsibility
• Existential predicament – Finitude, Alienation, Anxiety, Guilt, Ambivalence, Thrownness

Four eras: of the human-animal relationship

1. Seperation
2. Pre-Domestic
3. Domestic
4. Post-Domestic

Powerful and True forces but they are not all encompassing ones. ???
————————————
Man-eating tiger. Predation. Motivation. “Theory of Mind” Read this Book.
Spiders, Snakes, Being Eaten Alive: Hard-wired. from our evolution. unconscious reactions.

This distance between these eras becoming shorter?
Why?
Future of animal-human relations. What do we predict?

Unique – Group vs. Individual vs. Species
Now are we better?
Personalities and Animals. Are animals individuals? group consensus is that they are.
Check out Tinbergen….

• perception and stimuli from environment determines your being.
• Survival Strategy.

Corporations

Contradictions in this day and age
Vegetarians that wear leather and keep dogs and cats as pets

ANCIENT ALIENS: George Washington

First of all, what a read.

This book, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers is so interesting, and just after a week of reading it I am already finding myself either quoting it or introducing it’s logic in my conversation.  There are so many different things to talk about, so I’m going to go right into it. I consider myself to be a post-domestic type of person. I definitely feel the guilt for the mass onslaught of animals born and raised on factory farms to live for one purpose: get nice and fat, then sold for a high price and killed for human gain. The thing is, however, I can’t stop myself from eating the meat, milk, eggs, and other products they provide us with. It’s too damn good.

To put the idea of domestic vs. post-domestic societies in a different perspective, consider this: I have an Indian roommate, who is of Hindu decent. Another roommate of mine is of Irish decent. One day we got on the topic of vegetarian diets and my Irish roommate said simply, “that’s stupid.” My Indian roommate (who eats all types of meat), was slightly offended by it, being that many Hindus do not eat meat. Could this, itself, be an almost spot on representation of domestic vs. post domestic living styles?

The world is slowly shifting to a more “post-domestic” way of life. I love the movie examples Bulliet used when talking about it, such as the 1970′s remake of the 1930′s original King Kong showed the girl showing affection towards the beast that abducted her (before she hated the kidnapper). Humans are slowly but surely shifting their mindsets of domestic societies to post domestic societies, mainly by showing their ever growing for animals, and as Bulliet pointed out, mammals especially. Its’s just a proven fact that a person might get more teary eyed over a lost dog, versus a lost gold fish (although my sister cried her eyes out when her Beta fish died?)

I like how Bulliet separated all known life into the stages dealing with the domestication of animals. You got your pre-domestic age: before the domestication of animals, generating the hunter/gatherer tribes Diamond told us about. Then we have Domestication: when we started harboring animals, breeding and feeding, and so on. Finally, the unreached, yet not unobtainable stage of post-domestication. But this all had to come about after humans realized they were smarter and more adept than animals, and had to separate themselves.

Bulliet denotes 3 main points as to how humans seperated themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. One point was that human sexual awareness played a key role. We could control who we wanted to breed with, and that like. Another point was the meat intake humans have. In particular, our hunting and use of tools that allowed us to obtain meat. Finally, speech was the 3rd point. Humans have the ability to connect with one another in ways animals cannot. We mimic other animals, sing songs, and form different shapes with our mouths to produce sounds animals couldn’t imagine producing.

I’m ending this blog on a quote in this book I found quite interesting about vegetarianism and veganism, and it had me pondering:
“The human digestive system and physiology cannot be fooled by squeezing a diet from a moral. We are omnivores: our intestines and teeth attest to this fact.”

More importantly, our taste buds attest as well.

Richard Bulliet begins his book with sex and violence, giving an inverse relationship between fantasy and experience. That is, the current child-sheltering from violence and sex that takes place in our society is a product of post-domestication. He says living around animals while young provided children with introductions into killing, slaughter, and sexual intercourse, ultimately conditioning people against novelty interest in the subjects. I’d like to mainly talk about a few of his points found later in the chapter, but I feel I can make a few comments about his initial premise and explanations.

Let’s start with violence – are children really sheltered from violence in this country? Violence is glorified in every medium of entertainment, and specifically targeted for adolescent and teenage males. Even beyond the teenage years, violence is touted as legitimizing force in entertainment. The darker and more gruesome the subject material – the more ‘serious’ a work of art. Now, this may be exactly what Bulliet describes as our glorification and fantasy with violence – but I take issue with his claim that children are ‘sheltered’ to it.

And while sex certainly seems to be a more taboo subject (I’ve read it is otherwise in European nations), youth certainly haven’t stopped having sexual experiences. While the ‘adult’ culture may have a general consensus against youth sex, the reality is otherwise. I may have just started a roundabout semantic argument with myself that ultimately affirms Bulliet’s assertions, but I felt I needed to give an opinion on this.

Bulliet goes on to cover the history and origins of vegetarianism, and humanity’s self-separation from animal kinship. I would like to hear more about Bulliet’s personal opinion with vegetarianism/veganism, etc., as I’m a tad confused as to why he wrote this section of the chapter. There’s no direct affirmation or condemnation of it, rather an articulation of the claims made by prominent members of those ideologies. The main assertion seems to be that animals – because they are able to suffer – have rights, and we should therefore refrain from eating them. Or that we are animals as well, and are therefore practicing a form of mild cannibalism. But this seems to contradict the intentions of evolution. It seems pretty clear that humans evolved to eat meat, that being a carnivore is a natural part of being human.  How do we, as a society, begin to reconcile this? Is meat-eating only acceptable when necessary, or when we are live in a more domestic partnership with our animals? Interestingly, we might find a parallel between the evolution of human violence with animal violence. The more advanced societies are, the more they distance themselves from a natural evolutionary state, the less their survival is hinged upon slaughter and killing. History often ascribes less blame and immorality to those who have killed and committed atrocities in previous, less forgiving ages than it does to those who live in times and/or places of wealth. While the same currently cannot be said for animals, we have a useful template to follow for an evolution of morality on animal treatment (if we desire). As the killing humans was necessary in more survival-oriented times, so was the killing of animals. Now that many societies live comfortably, and violence is condemned and generally outlawed, so may be violence against animals, as we no longer require such ‘atrocity’ to survive.

I’m certainly not endorsing this. It’s just a thought. We may also consider a few logical extensions of the ‘vegetarian premise’ that Bulliet presents. Let’s look at it this way:

We are evolved to eat me. If we choose to abstain from this, in pursuit of morality, we are separating ourselves from other animals, particularly if our choice is (I’d say hypocritically) from a pre-domestic view of ‘animal kinship.’ Animals eat meat; If we do not, we are implying that we are ‘above’ that. But if we have created a distance between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, haven’t we achieved a similar mindset to those who eat meat in the domestic and post-domestic era? Bulliet discusses the enlightenment, and its assertion that humanity lords over animals, and he has this point to the current post-domestic culture of eating whatever we please. So we essentially have two entirely different conclusions on animal violence stemming from the same premise of humanity at least being different than other animals. Whether we are ‘above’ or ‘rulers of’ those animals may be up for debate.

The point is meat-eating is not necessarily a terrible violation of an animal’s natural rights. We have different conclusions stemming from the same assertions, and that should be considered when condemning the other side of this debate. We’re caught somewhere between domestication, evolution, and philosophy, and I suspect we’ll never have a genuine or clear discussion of these subjects. In this case I have to agree with a piece of the thesis and conclusion from last week’s video – many of these problems that are rooted in evolution aren’t really solvable, and they may not even be problems, they just are.

I’d like to finish with what I think is a humorous (and semi-vulgar) quote about chickens from Mark Rippetoe, a strength and conditioning coach who firmly supports meat-eating as an expression of evolution.

“Okay, have you ever been around chickens? They are stupid, uncooperative, inconvenient, ill-tempered creatures. They get what they deserve. Fuck chickens.”

I am going to take a different approach to this than I think many will because, while I enjoyed the reading as a whole, I would like to focus on an argument that I found extremely unconvincing. The argument in question that really got to me is on page 21. He describes the thought process of filmmakers as they decide what species of animals to cast in screenplays. Here are a few things I picked out. Bulliet writes:

“Today’s audiences are uncomfortable with portrayals of wild mammals – note the stress on mammals – as dangerous to humans.”

“Reluctant to present the hunting of mammals as acceptable or cast wild carnivores as villains, filmmakers have cast less closely related vertebrates – birds, snakes, alligators, dinosaurs, sharks – as frightening animal adversaries, hoping as they do so that audiences will be willing to accept screenplays that located a malign intelligence in the often peanut-sized brains of these menaces”.

Bulliet makes a critical assumption here. In fact, his argument in this section depends on it. He assumes that audiences are uncomfortable with the idea of hunting mammals being acceptable. Ignoring people for whom this is obviously not the case and enjoy it as a hobby, I would argue that with the prevalence of violence on television and in video games, people are about as desensitized as they can get. In addition, the genre of film he references here is the genre of Anaconda and Jaws: in other words, the genre wherein numerous people are killed in nasty, gruesome ways by some unseen predator. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bambi’s dad; if he’s goring teenagers at Make Out Point, few people outside of PETA will draw issue with his killing. But therein lies the issue; which is more threatening, Bambi’s dad or Jaws? Which one is a horror writer more likely to write about?

Bulliet presents his argument as though audiences have some sort of moral qualm regarding mammals in horror movies, he even implies that audiences would reject a screenplay featuring a mammal villain. People, to use Bulliet’s example, would indeed be less likely to watch a horror flick about a killer tiger, but I posit that it’s not because they perceive mammalian camaraderie or intelligence within the tiger, it’s because tigers simply aren’t frightening unless you’re being mauled by one in real life! The reason people would reject such a screenplay isn’t about morals, it’s a very black and white issue; visually, mammals are not horror film material.

Filmmakers don’t just want an animal that kills in a scary and unfamiliar way–mammals have an eating process very identifiable to us, as opposed to snakes swallowing their food whole or ants carrying you off to feed to the queen– they want something that would still be scary when written in comic sans. In addition to the fact that people get mauled by mammalian carnivores all the time (So we get desensitized), there are no deep-seated human phobias against mammals like there are with snakes and spiders. Simply put, bears, tigers, elephants, etc, do not give us the heebie jeebies. It’s not about intelligence or cross-species sympathy. It’s all about what’s visually scary and impactful to the viewer, ie what will gross the most at the box office.

Bulliet also ignores what is, to me, the crux of this issue – censorship! That’s right. Film censorship was extremely common until, in 1952, the Supreme Court ruled that films fall under the first amendment right to free speech. Before then, detective shows would depict the detective standing over the body (blood was never shown), the camera angled so that the viewer did not need to see anything unsettling. I imagine that the likes of Jaws eating the little boy and his yellow raft would have fallen under that label. With the censors down, producers were suddenly given new license to push past the government established boundaries of yesteryear. This is why we see Them! in 1954 and later Alien in 1979. It is not, as Bulliet suggests, the natural evolution of filmmakers trying to distance sensitive and uncomfortable audiences from “evil” mammals. It is simply filmmakers finally being allowed to push the boundaries that, I would wager, they had wanted to for a while.

Ironically, Bulliet himself reinforces this for me by referencing birds. This, I can only assume, is a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (1963). Birds aren’t visually frightening like snakes, but Hitchcock is a master and could –make- them scary. If someone could write a convincing screenplay about a killer Shiba Inu or Fennec fox (I exaggerate here, but I hope my point has been made), I think people would watch it regardless of how intelligent a species is. Bulliet misappropriates a lack of diversity within a specific genre to a deliberate, thoughtful exchange between a progressive audience and amenable filmmakers.

That was a long rant, but I can basically sum it up in a couple sentences for all you TL;DRs out there:

It isn’t that audiences are uncomfortable with mammals in the villain role and filmmakers respond by casting non-mammals. It’s that mammals are not perceived as threatening and therefore a film producer whose goal is to scare will not cast them, as they make for an unconvincing monster in all but a few, rare, unique circumstances. It all comes down to what makes money.

I hope it came through as clearly as I intended. I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but something about this is like watching an episode of “Ancient Aliens” wherein Dr. Georgio “Crazy Hair” Tsoukalos tries to convince me that the likes of Da Vinci and George Washington were actually extraterrestrials. Tell me I’ve lost the complexity of Bulliet’s argument. I’d like to hear that because it would make tomorrow’s discussion more interesting for me. If my argument did not make sense to you, please let me know in the comments section and I will try and rephrase my ideas. But in the mean time, I leave you with this:

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/34356419.jpg

Never before have I considered the vast history of human-animal relationships and what the implications of those relationships will mean in the future. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers presents the four stages of human-animal relationship history: separation (when humans began to consider themselves as fundamentally separate from animals), pre-domestication (rich in symbolic expression of animals), domestication (exploiting and taming animals for human use), and post-domestication (our current industrialized consumption and separation from domestic animals).

A key debate in modern post-domestic thought is the question of what separates humans from animals and over what moral consequences? Although we know there is an inherent separation, the categories by which humans have defined themselves as different from animals have fluctuated over years and cultures. In fact, “human societies have repeatedly conceived and re-conceived of their differences from animals in ways intended to explain or reinforce their current social or spiritual standings.”

Prior to the post-domestic era humans understood our separation from animals in terms of sexual shame and the divine creation of animals as servants to human kind. These qualities disappear from discussion today because we make our conceptions based in evolutionary terms. That is, capacities like speech, reason and skill at hunting are important only insofar that they can be conceived of in evolutionary terms. What’s more, ideas about prehistoric humans have given rise to ideological arguments used to further the interests of their proponents. Case and point: “survival of the fittest”. As time continues and each new hypothesis undergoes civilization discussion, it contributes to and influences our contemporary understandings on the nature of humanity.

Therefore, if the influence of a particular idea or hypothesis is based on our current socially constructed paradigm can we ever truly understand how and in what psychological state human-animal relationships evolved? Since understanding this relationship will help us best appreciate where we stand today and help us predict, to some degree, where we will be in the future, how far must we escape from contemporary enlightenment thought to be successful in our understanding? By “success” I mean to reconcile our post-domestic guilt and fear of the revolting process in transforming animals into standardized livestock products and cultural services. It may be clear that the advent of post-domesticity has called into question many centuries of thinking on human-animal relationships generated under conditions of domesticity, as with all social development of ideas throughout human history. However if we look to the other hand, are we not supposed to learn and adopt new ideas as new knowledge becomes available? How far should we separate these cultural paradigm limitations from the history of human-animals relationships? Thinking about evolution, fundamentally and interestingly, may be the primary influence of the experiences of post-domestic society anxiety about animal exploitation morality.

This small business sells local food from their farm with domestic animals -

Exploring the two most common topics of separation, meat eating and speech, are examples of our current freedom to speculate and the point-of-view promoting purposes that are often served by such speculation. It was an interesting realization that humans may have learned to butcher first, then hunt and finally cook. That’s right, it’s unlikely humans stumbled upon a forest fire and were enticed by the cooked meat, since human teeth and digestive tract are best adapted for eating fruits and vegetables. It was then made apparent that the incorporation of meat into the human diet was not like that of other meat eating animals. Humans killed members of the same species, large carnivores  and were involved in mass-slaughter. The consumption of meat, since not as difficult to identify safely like vegetation, may have allowed for the eventual human expansion of the homo erectus habitation. Looking at speech as another logical difference between human and animals there are two considerations of speech development: song and secondary representations of animal vocalizations (i.e. “moo-moo”). It was striking to read, “for mom and dad the dog, ‘goes bow-wow’; for baby the dog is ‘bow-wow.’” This understanding of human brain development in grasping human consciousness evolution I found to be new and thought-provoking.

The reading also debunked a socially accepted idea that pre-domesticity transitioned into domesticity based on human ideas about animals for food. Conventional descriptions of the neo-lithic revolution (like last week’s Germs, Guns and Steel video) are centered on food production. However, food does not determine artist preference, as exemplified in historical human art evidence, human conceptions of animals involved many dynamics not relating to food. Nor is there any evidence reasonably supporting the idea that the domestication of plants and animals accorded together. These new rational conclusions, I think, interestingly eliminate much of our current world-view bias of this small human-animal relationship aspect. However, these understandings do not provide enough evidence of knowing what exactly motivated the transition into animal domestication.

Other fascinating points:

• Deepest inherited human fear: being eaten alive
• Post-Domestic push to maximize the cost to the consumer
• Modern value for humanized wild animals is greater than farm animals
• Emerging avenue of post-domestic development: recrudescence to pre-domestic thought
• If sexual fantasy takes priority over real-world carnality, and masturbation takes priority over the actual act as a response activity which is then “better” for human society? Is that answer simply determined by cultural paradigms or are there other factors that could better evaluate?

It’s only week two of class. I wonder if I will ever be able to look at meat the same way again.