I’m dancing at the club, I wrap my arms around my new dance-partner, and I feel the texture of skin against my palms. It’s not the warmth of another, bare human skin sticky with sweat, but the soft artificial touch of skin that has been stretched out to dry, cleaved from the body of an unwilling animal, and it’s hanging from the shoulders of another. Skin becomes jacket; body becomes object.
I’m setting up a new page on my notes app to make a media plan, I’m choosing an icon for the page, and, as I type the word ‘pig’ into the search bar, alongside images of a pig walking, a pig’s face, a boar, and a pig’s snout, up pops an image of bacon. Flesh becomes food; body becomes object.
I’ve been reading Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass, and it’s brilliant by the way. Hayes explains that in the past fences were used ‘for the purpose of containing livestock, not for the restriction of free movement’. In the confines of this statement, free movement applies only to humans; dismissed as ‘livestock’, the right to roam does not extend to other animals. Animal becomes livestock; body becomes object.
For years I would refer to other animals as ‘it’. I would say “look at that rabbit, it’s so cute”, and see nothing wrong with my language. I would never refer to another human as ‘it’, because I knew to do so would be degrading. But I called animals ‘it’ anyway. Someone becomes something; body becomes object.
From these cracks in the surface of society, emerges the familiar stench of death. When we see an animal as a jacket, an animal as food, an animal as someone undeserving of rights, an animal as ‘it’, we reduce them to someone whose exploitation is excused by their implied inferiority.
It’s in the details that we find the everyday reduction of a living being to a thing. It’s in the details that speciesism is at its most insidious, where habits and norms are used to build up a wall between us and them, and enable the killing of billions.
© Zuki Yasmin
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