Foot in Mouth: Animals, Disease, and the Cannibal Complex
By Tiffin, Helen
The world-wide panic occasioned by outbreaks of BSE was (and is) incommensurate with the number of human fatalities incurred. This apparent over-reaction can in part be accounted for by BSEs simultaneous disruption of cherished “boundaries” between those categories (civilization and savagery; cannibalism and carnivory; human and animal) upon which our human self-definition depends.
Although the title of this paper invokes a disease of sheep as well as cattle, my primary concern is with the outbreak of another illness whose history in animal (and human) populations is more cryptic and more recent: so-called “mad cow” disease, or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). Both the 2001 foot and mouth scourge in Britain and “mad cow” disease were (and are) widely represented in the media as disasters or catastrophes, in the case of foot and mouth for the sheep industry, and BSE for Britain’s beef producers. The detection of a single cow with BSE on a Washington (US) farm in 2004 had major financial repercussions for Canada’s farmers when the United States banned imports of Canadian cattle and meat products allegedly to protect its herds (and humans) from BSE and new variant Creutzfeldt- Jacob disease.1 The animals (especially sheep) caught up in the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain were slaughtered and then burnt in huge pyres, a holocaust similar to that following the mass killing of over a million cattle in Britain in 1987. The sheep were destroyed for three reasons. The primary reason was to stop the spread of the disease. Second, although the animals suffer greatly from the symptoms, the majority recover; but affected animals become unsaleable due to loss of condition, and costs incurred in treatment and in waiting for their recovery outweigh, for the farmers, the alternative of replacing stocks. Third, the sheep were slaughtered because public perception had confused “foot and mouth” with the very different “mad cow” disease.
Because of the hypothesized connection between protein feed (derived from both sheep and cows) and the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle (and its equivalent, “new variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease” [vCJD or nvCJD] in humans), consumers in Britain and elsewhere had become overly wary of the possible dangers of eating meat. Members of the public surveyed “felt” there was “some connection,” however vaguely understood, between both animal illnesses: Human carnivores could no longer be sure their meat was “safe” (Fiddes). Public confidence had also been eroded in 2000 over the re-cycled chicken meat scandal, where chicken legs and breasts past their “use-by” dates had been pressure- hosed, treated with preservatives and painted with glycerin to be re- dated and re-placed in supermarket freezers. While the latter did not involve animal disease, and two out of three of these meat scares were the results of capitalist greed rather than any apparently “natural” animal contagion, the public were frightened and dismayed at the possibility of contracting a fatal disease from the flesh of animals traditionally a part of their diet.
Although this discussion focuses on BSE and its human counterpart, nvCJD, its broader subject is the way in which the so- called “mad cow” outbreak, from the 1980s to the present, posed (and poses) a threat less to our brains (in the disease’s lethal spongification of the cerebellar region), than to our identity as “civilized” humans (rather than “savages” or “animals”) and to our anthropocentric being-in-the-world. Through BSE/nvCJD’s apparent transgressions of two closely guarded “boundaries”- that between humans and other animal species, and that between the “savage” and the “civilized” as articulated through what Peter Hulme has termed the “cannibal complex” (31)-nvCJD generated world-wide panic far in excess of the number of deaths it actually caused in human populations. Fewer than two hundred human deaths have so far been attributed to nvCJD, and though there were predictions of millions to follow (the protein prion that causes the disease is a slow acting one) no such pandemic has materialized nor seems likely to do so.
Since nvCJD has complex connections with other Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs), it is necessary to include a brief preliminary sketch of the relationship between the various forms of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease itself. One of the most widely disseminated non-medical accounts of CJD is Jennifer Cooke’s 1998 Cannibals, Cows and the CJD Catastrophe.2 As Cooke explains, medical researchers Creutzfeldt and Jacob, between 1913 and 1921, isolated a particular form of dementia in some human patients whose pre-mortem symptoms included ataxia (staggering). Post-mortem examination of the brain revealed extensive destruction of the cerebellum. The cases investigated by Creutzfeldt and Jacob were of what is now known as “Sporadic CJD” and they occurred-without apparent cause- mostly in elderly patients. Occasionally (though not necessarily), such sporadic cases came to be linked to another very similar CJD,”Familial CJD.” Symptoms and post-mortem appearance of the brain in both were the same, but in the latter the causal agent of the disease appeared to be, at least in part, heritable. Such an apparent genetic predisposition sometimes seemed to connect Familial CJD with yet another grouping, “Cluster CJD.” The precise catalyst(s) for such cluster occurrences, in, for instance, a particular region of Czechoslovakia and amongst some Sephardic Jewish populations, has/have never been determined. While there may be a genetic proclivity, another agent-suggestions range from metal contamination to pine-needle tea or the eating of sheeps’ eyeballs- is involved in the disease’s manifestation (Cooke 210-19).
But Sporadic, Familial, and Cluster CJDs differ from both nvCJD and BSE in their order of symptom expression.While in the former group dementia generally precedes ataxia, in nvCJD and BSE, ataxia (staggering) is usually one of the first symptoms. All, however, are fatal. Though there has been some speculation-beyond genetics-that both Sporodic and Cluster CJD may be related to the ingestion of animate or inanimate material, there is no longer any doubt that, whether or not a heritable predisposition is also involved, nvCJD and BSE are caused by an infective agent (originally thought to be a slow virus, but now recognized as a protein prion) that is passed from one animal (whether “cow” or “man”) to another through a passage of cellular material by ingestion, injection, or transplant. Jennifer Cooke’s book is concerned primarily with nvCJD accidentally caused in recipients of human pituitary-derived hormone taken as a course of injections to induce fertility, increase growth in small- statured children, and more recently by athletes to improve performance. The infective prion in all forms of CJD (including nvCJD) is concentrated in the brain and spinal cord, though it can be present in other tissues. During the 1970s and 1980s, some batches of hormone, distributed world-wide, had been contaminated with the fatal prion when donor material had been unknowingly obtained from patients who had died of Sporadic or Familial CJD. Cooke’s book gives personal accounts of CJD sufferers who contracted the disease in this way in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Japan, Spain, and the United States.
Although Creutzfeldt and Jacob had isolated CJD as a disease separate from other forms of dementia by the early 1920s, CJD did not attract world-wide attention until a form of it called Kuru began to devastate villages in a remote area of Papua New Guinea. Since the 1970s, that story has been well known: Carleton Gajdusek, an American pediatrician and virologist (with anthropological interests) working in Papua New Guinea heard from Australian researchers that the Fore people in the New Guinea Highlands were experiencing a devastating epidemic. The first symptoms were ataxia- the characteristic staggering of the later identified BSE and nvCJD- followed by dementia, wasting, and death. Kuru had claimed a comparatively large number of lives, especially of women and children, and Gajdusek was the first to do an autopsy on one of the victims, recognizing the peculiar spongiform nature of the cerebellum as characteristic of a TSE. Gajdusek hypothesized that the mode of transmission of the “slow virus” amongst the Fore was connected to their practice of ritual cannibalism, that is to say the ingestion of small parts of the bodies of dead relatives as a funerary rite. The bodies were prepared by the women and often it was the women rather than the men (though not exclusively so) who participated in this homage to the dead (Cooke 11-13; Gajdusek). A puzzling factor, however, was why, if this was a traditional ritual, the disease of Kuru had not become endemic rather than being manifested in epidemic form. Gajdusek explained this by arguing that the Fore had only recently begun this practice, one they had adopted from neighbouring groups. (The 1960s-70s epidemic could also be explained by an initial “spontaneous” occurrence of sporadic CJD, though the order of symptoms manifested by sufferers was not characteristic of the Sporadic/Familial/Cluster group). Carlton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1976 for his establishing of the link between Kuru and cannibalism.
But theconnection between the funerary cannibalistic rituals of a “primitive” people (Gajdusek 27) and the outbreak of Kuru was seriously challenged by anthropologist William Arens in an exchange with Gajdusek in the New York Review of Books as well as more generally in Arens’s celebrated, but also controversial, The Man- Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. In brief, Arens argued that, as had often been the case with cannibalism, Gajdusek and his co-workers had no real evidence that the Fore did practice cannibal rituals. In fact, Arens argued, the photographs of the feasting ovens being prepared (which Gajdusek had used to illustrate his Nobel Prize speech) were instead intended for pork.Writing of these issues in 1998, twenty years after the original exchange, Arens summed up the ways in which what he referred to as “an enduring myth about stone age peoples” was glossed into a disease causation:
The situation can be reconstructed as follows. The authorities first suggest that kuru is not transmitted by cannibalism per se. However, since those afflicted are cannibals, the disease is transmitted during ‘ritual’ practices associated with the suspected activity. This muddle is then further complicated by subsequent controversy over the evidence for the deed, which results in some rather dubious pronouncements by the principals. Yet despite these twists and turns, there is a single, constant, attending message for others to pick up on: if the Fore were not cannibals, they would have neither contracted nor spread the disease (see Seale 1987, 1989; and Cominas et al. 1989). This morality tale encourages the subsequent direct translation of the cannibal metaphor as objective truth in textbooks for the neophyte.
This interpretation does not suggest that kuru was invented by the investigators. The disease exists and takes the lives of its victims, however they are characterized. Nor am I suggesting that those involved in the scientific research and its cultural interpretation invented the cannibal metaphor. The theme of the ‘other’ as cannibal had, and has, an existence beyond the control of those employing it at any particular moment. Indeed the cannibal notion has the ability to manipulate those who harbour it rather than the other way around. This is the nature of cultural myths and the fate of their proponents, whether explorer, missionary, scientist, or anthropologist. In a sense the principals deserve some sympathy for their present predicament: having to account objectively for a cultural notion and discourse they merely re- deployed. Nonetheless, the result was that the Fore became double victims of the kuru malady, as they succumbed to both its internal incidence and external interpretation. (“Rethinking” 54)
It is not impossible that the Fore had originally contracted Kuru through the consumption of pigs, though this has never been established. (To date there have been no reported cases of transmission of any TSEs to humans via pig flesh, but Papua New Guineans depend on pigs for protein, and the association between villagers and pigs was and is a close and traditional one). A TSE similar to BSE could theoretically have crossed “the species barrier” occasioning a symptom order-ataxia preceding dementia- uncharacteristic of either Sporadic, Cluster, or Familial CJDs.
As the epidemic amongst the Fore began to subside in the mid- 1980s, one that affected urban Westerners was about to capture even greater attention. The advent of socalled “mad cow” disease in Britain in 1986 created national and international panic. The history of the scientific and medical debates about its potential to infect humans through flesh ingestion and the official denials of its possibility are too long and convoluted to recount, except to note that by the mid-1990s, when human cases of BSE had begun to appear, it had been firmly established that BSE (as nvCJD) could be transmitted from cattle to humans through consumption of flesh including cooked meat.3 Both the order of symptom occurrence and the post-mortem pattern of cerebellar spongification and protein “nodules” linked this nvCJD more closely with Kuru and BSE than with either Sporadic, Cluster, or Familial varieties where, in the latter, dementia preceded ataxia. It is this first cluster, BSE, Kuru, nvCJD, which is of particular interest here, that is to say, those outbreaks where the mode of transmission has been demonstrated (or can safely be assumed) to be the oral consumption of flesh- whether human or animal-containing the infective prion.
If we compute the numbers of human deaths world-wide from this last cluster, including the relatively large number of Kuru deaths in Papua New Guinea, the figure still remains under one hundred. The impact of the Kuru deaths on Fore communities was a substantial one, since groups in Highland villages tended to be small and scattered, and at least for a time, the gender balance in pockets of the population was disturbed. But in Western societies, the panic occasioned by the possibility of contracting nvCJD from beef products was completely incommensurate with actual numbers of deaths.4 And while nvCJD/BSE might have seemed to have the capacity, as a slow acting prion, to cause more deaths in the future, the fear it generated (and continues to generate) is out of all proportion to human deaths incurred. (If we exempt the earlier Kuru cases, and those CJDs transmitted via transplants or pituitary hormone injections, the figure world-wide, of deaths from ingestion of “cow” meat is less than 50). Predictions as to future deaths ranged from zero to “millions,” but most experts seem now to agree that the figure is likely to remain a very low one, even if a few more cases do emerge. It is this incommensurability between the fears of contracting nvCJD held by the Western public and the real risk potential of the disease that is of interest here. Responses to BSE/ nvCJD thus resemble those to leprosy, another disease where levels of fear of contamination are radically disproportionate to numbers of actual cases or degree of communicability. Neither disease is venereal, so the “high profile” of sexually transmitted diseases cannot account for the obvious symbolic weight leprosy and nvCJD carry in spite of their extremely low rates of transmission. So what was/is it about “mad cow” disease that is so troubling?
To suggest possible reasons for this involves returning to the earlier Kuru outbreak and the controversial issue of cannibalism. As Stephen Slemon has demonstrated, “cannibalism’s use is endless. Whatever the anthropological or sociological facts behind various practices of anthropophagy, cannibalism, as Peter Hulme has carefully argued, is a term within a discourse of othering; a term which marks an impassable boundary between communities, and as such, takes its primary meaning from discourse” (165).
In the Western invasion and conquest of “other” peoples around the globe, cannibalism, whatever its actual occurrence, marked the limit of “civilization.” Those (human) communities “beyond the pale” were always already “cannibals” whether or not there was apparently corroborating evidence. In the twentieth century, no such direct correlation was likely to be made, but the implication, in some medico-scientific accounts of Kuru amongst the Fore, was, as Arens points out, that since they were apparently “practicing cannibals,” the disease was in the nature of a just retribution. Moreover, although the epidemic had attracted wide publicity, the focus of most comments had been on the question of whether the Fore were (or were not) cannibals rather than on the other possible origins of the disease or the Fore’s individual and community sufferings and losses. Thus the arrival of Kuru (nvCJD) amongst (“civilized”) carnivorous Europeans evoked an even more spectacular response. Both outbreaks had apparently involved the consumption of material (particularly brain and spinal tissues) of the dead, but from the Western perspective, the nature of that consumption was vastly different: the Britons had eaten “cows” while the Fore had allegedly eaten each other. Nevertheless, the “cannibal complex” haunted the Western outbreak in one increasingly obvious way as well as in a more cryptic fashion. In the hurried search for a cause of the sudden appearance of nvCJD/BSE victims in Britain, it was revealed that a “cannibalism” (of a rather different kind) was implicated after all.
Scrapie, a TSE of sheep, had been familiar to farmers in Britain well before the twentieth century. It was known to be infectious, but the cause and the path of transmission remained unknown. From the 1940s onwards, however, it was recognized that the pathogen, whatever it might be, was not destroyed by conventional methods. In 1947, an outbreak of a formerly unknown disease, (later designated as Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy [TME]), occurred on a farm in Wisconsin in the United States (Cooke 32). Autopsied mink brains showed a pattern of deterioration similar (if not identical) to sheep scrapie. How sheep scrapie had been contracted by the minks, or whether the outbreak was a freak occurrence remained unknown. (Similar TSEs have since occurred in deer, squirrel, and other wild animal populations). With hindsight, however, it seems most likely that the mink had been fed on sheep-derived protein extract.5
The practice of feeding ruminants such as cows and sheep (i.e. “vegetarian” animals) the remains of their own kind (or a related species) as protein supplement dates back to the early 1900s. Further industrialization of animal farming during the century increased the use of such “supplementary” protein, turning it into primary feed. Rather than waste the meat and tissue of cattle and sheep who had died or been “downed” (as the cattle industry so charmingly expresses it), farmers stripped the carcass of meat for human consumption and then boiled\, sterilized and crushed the rest for feeding back to healthy animals. This was regarded as good practice in avoiding waste, and from a “mad capitalist” point of view it was also cheap. More intensive farming methods, too, as Kieran Mulvaney notes, locked the industry into a vicious cycle: “Farmers readily used the extra protein to further increase output from their animals, which led to the production of greater waste, which was recycled back into animal feed.” Dr. Michael Fox, Vice- President for bio-ethics and farm animal protection in the United States commented that: “What has been happening is that biological processes are being turned on their head. First, we have this enormous amount of waste generated from animal based agriculture. Then, as a way of dealing with that waste, we are feeding it back to animals, trying to turn cows into something they’re not” (qtd. in Mulvaney). Protein waste-based feed (whether already passed through the animals’ alimentary systems or not) had become regular agribusiness practice by 1986 when the Veterinary Record in Britain first reported on a new disease afflicting cattle. Revelations of the huge numbers of cattle affected by BSE and the slaughtering of millions of animals who might (or might not) be contaminated, followed. Their carcasses, like those of the foot and mouth- affected sheep, were burnt in huge pyres, a conflagration recalled by the characters in Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, as a precursor and dire warning of animal and human catastrophes to come in a world of unbridled technophiliac capitalism.
But public outcry in Britain at this wholesale killing rarely focused on animal lives lost, or on the horrific intensive farming conditions it thus publicized. Rather, people were dismayed at learning of a change in herbivore status: they had in fact been consuming carnivores, not, as most had believed, ruminant herbivores. Another kind of taboo was thus being violated; and this violation was compounded by the apparent erosion of another (related) ontological boundary: Scrapie, the “sheep disease” had “jumped” the species barrier to infect cattle when cattle had been fed sheep parts and cattle offal (including brain and spinal cord sections). Cows had been turned, “unnaturally” into carnivores, and a devastating plague was the result. This “unnatural” cow “cannibalism,” like Fore funerary rites, had therefore exacted its “own” punishment.
As Nick Fiddes explains, in Western societies certain categories of animals are conventionally rejected as food: pets, primates, and carnivores. We exclude primates because of their genetic proximity, and pets because of their social proximity to ourselves as humans. (As Frank Simeons suggests, contact with pets like the dog probably led to the rejection of the entire species as food in Western societies because eating our companions “seemed an act of cannibalism” [113].) Pets thus have a semi-human status. “We treat pets,” Fiddes notes, “more like individual subjects than the abstract objects we officially regard [as] edible” (113). (In illustration of the connection between familiarity with a subject and refusal to eat it, he cites the passage from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen, having insisted on introducing Alice to the meat she is about to eat, then rebukes her for attempting to cut the roast: “[It] isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!” [Fiddes 135].) Farmed animals-and especially factory farmed animals-are not considered close (or “introduced” to us) unless they have been kept as pets. But in general,we do not eat carnivores either, and Fiddes’s suggestion is that we do not consume, for example, lions or tigers, because they are also proximate to us, if in a different way. Like “animal” carnivores, humans are top predators of their food chains; in “evident positions of power over other animals.” There is thus something “not quite right” about eating another top predator. “In other words, once again, carnivores are close to us-not this time socially, nor morphologically, but functionally, and so to eat them would be similarly akin to cannibalism.” (141). Yet it is also possible that we avoid eating carnivores because some are potentially (if very rarely) “man eaters” themselves, and this capacity, rather than its actual practice, also smacks-however remotely-of a kind of cannibalism.
In what was often cited by British newspapers as a precursor to the nvCJD outbreak- the salmonella scare of 1988 (Fiddes 190)-the feeding of ground-up chicken carcasses to egg-laying chickens as protein supplement had precipitated a nation-wide health crisis. But distressed as people were by the threat to their own health, they seemed equally upset by the (enforced) animal cannibalism. Unknown to consumers, chickens had been turned into carnivores, in violation of the order of the food chain and the recirculation of the ground- up remains of dead birds was causing the chickens to be unnaturally cannibalistic.
If cannibalism has long provided an uneasy but nevertheless obdurately determining limit marker between Westerners and “savages,” us and them, self and “other,” a limit marker whose shadowy violations haunt the Kuru/BSE/nvCJD story, BSE also transgressed another crucial boundary, one with which the cannibal complex was intrinsically interwoven. Like that between savage and civilized, the species boundary between humans and their “others,” that is to say, animals, is central to our self-concept and our way of being. And just as we usually regard other animals in terms of species (again with the exception of pets, or those singled out in some other way), we regard ourselves as autonomous individuals, socialized and enculturated certainly, but discrete and separate from the other components of the world(s) through which we move. BSE/ nvCJD-whether this was apprehended consciously or at some deeper level-challenged our ontological status as civilized, autonomous, human subjects.
In raising the always problematic issue of flesh consumption (or even consumption/ eating itself) together with the evident permeability of the species boundary, BSE/nvCJD seem(ed) to be forcing us to reconsider our autonomy and cherished claims to special status on two fronts. Carnivory in general reminds us that though we are the meat consumers, we are ourselves potentially meat. It is in part because of this unwanted reminder that we fear the so- called “man eating” animals such as sharks so much. Even those humans who are never likely to see the sea, a shark, let alone swim with one, are apt to agree with the comment of a Western Australian woman: “What brings most terror to your heart? It’s a shark” (Price 16).When a shark is caught, we are thus also obsessed with the contents of its gut, especially when it, so very rarely, contains human remains. Like fears of “mad cow” disease then, human hysteria about shark death, rare as it is (on average, 6-10 per year, world- wide) is radically disproportionate to the threats actually posed. But sharks have “teeth that cut, just by suggestion, especially in dreams” (Richards 76). Sharks, who have the capacity, if rarely the inclination, to eat us can, potentially, expose us as the flesh of which we are composed, and their ability to ingest our meat-like ours theirs-makes them too proximate in terms of self-exposure and self-reflection, obliging us to exaggerate their differences through the very similarity we are reluctant to acknowledge: their apparent “savagery” in “attacking” prey as against our “civilized” dining.
Of worldly existence in general, continuity, rather than division, can be posited as a universal condition, although the epistemologies of Western (and many other) cultures are based on division, categorization, and hierarchization. Yet the separating of civilized “man” from “nature” and the firm belief in human species exceptionalism and individual autonomy have always been problematic because, as Maggie Kilgour argues, “like all acts on incorporation, [eating] assumes an absolute distinction between inside and outside, eater and eaten, which however breaks down as the line ‘you are what you eat’ obscures identity and makes it impossible to say for certain who’s who. Paradoxically the roles are completely unreciprocal yet ultimately indistinguishable” (7). Many human populations depend for sustenance on the constant incorporation of animals from the other “side” of a species “boundary” we regard as axiomatic and inviolate. If this apparently breaks down, over the issue of pets for instance, we invoke another taboo which also depends on such a “fixed” division: Where an animal has become close to us as a pet we cannot consume it because that act-as Fiddes’s survey demonstrates-precipitates the apparently “civilized” into the area of (savage) cannibalism (137). Indeed, the radical abuses and/ or eating of dogs and cats by some non-Westerners can become the very marker of their non-human otherness; of their savagery and animality (Elder,Wolch, and Emel 83).
Our humanist concept of subjectivity, as Cary Wolfe explains (drawing on George Bataille and Jacques Derrida), “is inseparable from the discourse and institution of speciesism,” which relies on the “tacit acceptance” that the “full transcendence of the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic,” which in turn makes possible a “symbolic economy in which we can engage in ‘a non-criminal putting to death,’ as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of other humans as well by marking them as animal” (Wolfe 40). Even so, and in spite of Montaigne’s 1580 recognition that the practices of European invaders were often more “cannibalistic” than those they self-righteously murdered as cannibal-animals,7Westerners, except in extremis, have not usually then eaten those “savages” they thus “legitimately” slaughtered. Defoe’s Robin\son Crusoe explains to a puzzled Friday, to whom (understandably) the distinction between killing an enemy and/or eating him appears a rather fine one, that the Spaniards they observe coming ashore may indeed kill their prisoners, but they certainly won’t eat them. And Crusoe, flying in the face of observation, logic, and population dynamics assumes that Friday, simply because he is a “savage,” is necessarily (and exclusively) a “cannibal.” The master’s solution is to wean Friday off human flesh by having him eat goat instead. As a Christian subject who hopes for resurrection on Judgment Day, Crusoe does not relish being food for either man or beast; yet dismemberment, consumption, and transformation of his flesh are inevitable, whether the agent(s) be worms, men, or “animals.”8 The very fleshly materiality of (human) being ensures that one is always already the other.
Western ontologies and epistemologies continue to depend-as do capitalism and the world economic order-on obdurate divisions between “first” and “third” worlds and to an even greater degree, on a binarism of “human” and “animal” with the attendant naturalization of exploitation, murder and/or consumption-both literal and figurative-of one by the other. But our very dependence on such categorizations- whether ontological or economic-may increasingly endanger rather than sustain us.Not only BSE/nvCJD, but before it Ebola, AIDS, and after it, SARS, exposed and disturbed complacency about our separateness and specialness. Radical difference from our animal “others” had seemed to guarantee that, with few exceptions (eg. cowpox) diseases could not “jump” the species boundary. Ebola, AIDS, BSE, and SARS showed the general public that diseases made no such distinctions between “human” and “animal”; the so-called savage and the so-called civilized. The “lessons” learned from BSE, aside from the obvious reforms needed in terms of protein stock feeding in intensive farming conditions, were that humans did not have immunity from contamination when eating the (cooked) flesh of animals; nor were animals immune to human diseases.
SARS, like BSE, was also proven to be no respecter of our (human) division between “wild” and “domestic” birds. Pathogens registered no barrier, and neither were they dependent on a particular host. They shared, as William B. Karesh and Robert A. Cook note, “a worrisome key characteristic: the ability to cross the Darwinian divide between animals and people” (38). It is, they argue, “probably just luck that has so far allowed scientists to maintain these distinctions,” (40) but with “increasing [human] population density . . . and intensified livestock production” (38) together with (generally illegal) trade in wildlife and the destruction of wildlife habitats, such diseases are now bringing home the fact that “the health of people, animals and the environment in which we all live are inextricably linked” (39). The Ebola virus, for instance, “infects people, gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys”; and lowland gorillas in Western equatorial Africa have been decimated by the sickness. “Other forest animals such as duikers (small antelopes) and bush pigs may also be infected” (41). Karesh and Cook explain the primary mode of transmission thusly: “When subsistence hunters discover a sick or dead animal in the forest, they view it as good fortune and bring it home to feed their families or trade with their neighbors. The Ebola virus then easily infects those handling the meat and a chain of contacts and infections ensue. Each of the human outbreaks in Central Africa during the late 1990s and the first years of this century was traced to humans handling infected great apes” (41). The Nipah virus in Malaysia and SARS/avian flu both involved the destruction of “wild” areas by humans and thus transmission to “their” domesticated animals of a pathogen previously occurring only in “wild” animal populations. (Malaysian victims of Nipah acquired the virus through handling pigs who had contracted the disease from bats feeding in fruit trees at the edge of newly developed pig farms). In the case of SARS, widespread destruction by humans of wild habitats in China forced migrating birds to mix with intensively farmed chickens (45). Lest wildlife be seen however as the locus of “new” pathogens, Karesh and Cook point out that “studies in South America have shown that, contrary to human opinion, livestock diseases (exacerbated by or precipitated by intensive farming methods) pose many more threats to wildlife than the other way around” (47).
In an era in which land to support human overpopulation and those “other” beings whose habitats have not already been destroyed, responses to disease outbreaks including the annihilating of wildlife, farm animal holocausts, or erecting even more “imaginary” boundaries seem, at least in the long term, quite inadequate. While BSE/nvCJD in particular forced a re-thinking about the dangers of the disciplinary divisions of knowledge-that between the medical and veterinary sciences for example- there is need for a broader, ontological revision not only of disease concepts, but of the nature of the “human” and the binaries and boundaries on which Western selfconception has so far depended-the savage and civilized, wild and tame, animal and human. In his critique of the philosophical strategies of contemporary environmental activists, political philosopher Bruno Latour calls for fundamental changes in understanding the human place in nature. We need, Latour argues, to revolutionize the bases of our thinking rather than simply oppose contemporary scientific/technological and capitalist practices in a game in which the rules are already established. Using chess as his metaphor, he appeals for an entire “redefining [of] the rules” and a “redesigning [of] the pawns,” not merely an attempt, based on our current ideas about the human place in nature, to simply win the game.
The many accounts of the “mad cow” outbreak read, as Robert McKay has pointed out, like popular detective stories wherein scientists, initially baffled, eventually succeed in fitting together the disparate pieces of the puzzle and offer solutions. A second discourse is that of economic loss, to farmers, to the nation, and to international trade. Although these narratives have very different emphases, they have at least one thing in common-the animals themselves remain, in Carol Adams’s resonant phrase, “absent referents,” where our raising and killing of them in order to eat their flesh is taken entirely for granted. But the rethinking of our place in/as nature and a reconfiguring of attitudes to animals are intrinsically interwoven: “Our failure to situate dominant forms of human society ecologically is matched by our failure to situate non- humans ethically as the plight of non-human species continues to worsen. Rationalized intensive agriculture not only inflicts intolerable living conditions on animals, but increasingly requires massive slaughtering events to stem the disease outbreaks its conditions foster” (Plumwood 2). The very public holocausts of “foot and mouth” in 2001-2002, and those occurring in the wake of BSE, together with the sheer scale of the killing outside the confines of abattoirs did, to some extent, draw attention to the cows and sheep themselves, their current suffering and their actual “living” conditions in the mass production prisons of the meat industry. It became rather less easy to imagine “happy” cows or sheep browsing in sunshine on a greensward, somehow magically transformed into a “tasty dish”without confinement, suffering, and an often tragically imperfect murder. But even so, as Robert McKay again notes, the shock experienced by many people at seeing the huge piles of animal corpses being burned involved a “complicated interplay of empathy and disavowal.” Expressions of dismay, he acknowledges, give evidence of a “real sense of loss,” yet at the same time, the mourning for the animals “acts as a screen for a more profound loss to the psyche of the meat-eating public: that of a quasi-pastoral ideal in which meat is produced without the visible reality of death by farmers whose intimate relationship with their loving herd counteracts the meat consumer’s alienation from the animal that is slaughtered. Indeed, despite appearances, it is not strictly the death of the animal in the aftermath of BSE or Foot and Mouth that is mourned, but also its waste as a commodity.” The pyres on which dead cows and sheep were burned forced, however uncomfortably, a Holocaust/holocaust comparison and acted as a reminder that the horrific Nazi technologies of death were in part inspired by observation of the production-line killings of the Chicago slaughter yards.
But perhaps even more significant, though less remarked upon, was the kind of response the “symptoms” of BSE and later, nvCJD elicited. Some members of the public initially found the notion of the “mad cow” risible, with its behaviour (especially the staggering) a source of amusement. After the announcement of the BSE/ nvCJD link in 1996 however, the idea of a “mad cow” acquired a much more sinister cast. “The fear of becoming like a maddened (rabid) animal pervades the coverage of ‘mad cow’ disease in the period after the BSE/vCJD link was made. In particular, in the descriptions of the physical and mental decline of the young people who succumbed to the disease, juxtaposed mentally as they are with images (established through accompanying photographs and television news reports) of uncoordinated and frightened cows, make the clear link between the mad cow animal and the once human being” (Washer 404).Humans and cows, in their suffering, are here no mere analogues: with BSE/nvCJD the one has visibly become the other. Thus it is not only in the realm of the abject that “all flesh is grass,” but before our very eyes humans “turn into” the cows they hav\e eaten for all to see. Human as animal-cannibal is made manifest.
Although nvCJD has resulted in so few human fatalities, the challenges it poses to Western epistemology and ontology-quite apart from national economies-have made it disproportionately significant, particularly in a context of general environmental deterioration. Challenging our very self definition as “civilized humans,” it strikes at the foundations of exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, threatening to collapse those ontological and epistemological distinctions between human and animal, savage and civilized, wild and domestic, cannibal and carnivore. Perhaps, as Fox has also noted (in Mulvaney), it is indeed eating cows that is the real madness.
NOTES
1/ See, for instance,Michael Greger, “U.S. Continues to Violate World Health Organization Guidelines for BSE,” Organic Consumers Association Bulletin, 23 January 2004 and 24 December 2003; Kelly Egan “US hiding mad cow cases: Expert,” Ottawa Citizen, 7 March 2005.
2/ Other books published on the subject include Scott C. Ratzan, ed. The Mad Cow Crisis (London: U College London P, 1998); Stephen Dealler, Lethal Legacy: BSE: The Search for Truth (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
3/ See, for example, Jennifer Cooke; Kieran Mulvaney,”Mad Cows and the Colonies,” The Environmental Magazine 7.4 (July/August 1996); and Stephen Dealler for accounts of public statements and government denials that the eating of British beef might “infect” humans. The most famous of these was made by John Gummer (the then British Minister for Agriculture) as he had his daughter Cordelia photographed eating a hamburger at a boat show in England in May 1990.
4/ See, for example, Mawran Sinaceur, Chip Heath, and Steve Coles, “Emotional and Deliberative Reactions to a Public Crisis: Mad Cow Disease in France,” Psychological Science, 16.3 (2005): 247-54.
5/ A tissue vaccine to prevent distemper was originally thought to have been the source of the outbreak. See Cooke 31-32.
6/ See J.M. Coetzee.”Meat Country,” Granta 52 (1995): 42-52 and Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject? (Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Petter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. New York: Routledge, 1991).
7/ “In prying so narrowly into their [the cannibals'] faults we are in ours,”Montaigne wrote, “I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive, than to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torment a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, to make dogges and swine to gnaw and teare him in mammockes . . . to roast and eat him after he is dead” (112).
8/ Some schools of Christian thought require the body to remain intact, neither dismembered nor (of course) consumed, to be resurrected on the Day of Judgement. Cannibalism is therefore the ultimate threat, not only in the ‘here,’ but in the Hereafter.
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HELEN TIFFIN holds a Canada Research Chair in English and Post- Colonial Studies at Queen’s University, Canada.With Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths, she is the author of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; 2002); Post- Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2000); and with Diana Brydon, Decolonising Fictions (1992). She has edited (or co-edited) the Routledge Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1994; 2005) and five collections of essays on postcolonial subjects, animals, empire, and environment.
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