The Vessel-Animal

How are we controlled through the concept of the animal?

Full of Love

I worked as a vet assistant in a mobile clinic operating in a retail environment. Once, a customer introduced her Daschund as being “full of love” when she hauled him up onto the aluminum exam table. She repeated this once or twice more to the vet. Not “loving” or “lovely,” but “full of love” each time.

It struck me as a kind of peculiar honesty people sometimes have when they don’t mean to. Through the smiles, she knew, in some part of herself, that the dog was an animal installed with this kind of love. He had no choice but to love. He was bred for companionship and automatically enrolled in the pet industrial complex, even more so than we are enrolled in the institutions of our own lives.

It’s not that I don’t believe people when they say they love their pets or that they treat them as members of their family, or at least like friends (but obviously, we value the welfare of our human kith and kin much more than our pets). It’s that there’s a splinter of the perverse in every sentiment like that: we’re accepting these conditions without reflection. The most reflection I see is some who’ll bemoan pet owners for their neglect and breeders, but that’s a cloudy one at best.

Does anyone in this state of affairs have any power to do differently, pet or owner? The breed is already cast. The scene is set so that nothing else can thrive, or at least so it seems.

The Vessel-Animal

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posited the idea of “becoming-animal” as an alliance with animals, an affective and collective animality with revolutionary potential. It’s easy to read this idea and feel jaded. We live closely with animals, dedicate a surmountable time and budget to keeping them fed and healthy, is that not “becoming-animal” on some level?

The thing is, though, it isn’t.

Pet ownership is not an alliance, it’s a strict hierarchical relationship, one that can sometimes lapse at intervals. The film Willard is the initial example of becoming-animal given in the “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. Its titular character forms an alliance with a swarm of rats. This is a relation that extends well outside of the bounds of pet ownership—the swarm makes its own demands, sets its own rules, not just the human. In the movie, this is disastrous for Willard, who is torn apart between the swarm and classed society.

Freud’s patient Little Hans, a child held in a casually abusive Edwardian household who develops a phobia of horses, also set into a strange affective relationship with them by witnessing their own suffrage under common abuses.

But you must train dogs to behave strictly in order to survive a world of roadways and retail stores. It is strongly recommended that you keep your cat indoors because of the danger they’ll be exposed to in urban and suburban environments. In order for one to have an even marginally healthy pet, they must buy into the intensive animal farming economy to feed them.

A shadow is cast on one side of becoming-animal.

We have the habit of displacing our feelings in pets as companions. I began noticing this in my own life. A pet brings the family together and makes us expressive in ways they normally wouldn’t be—playful in ways that are normally unthinkable in the radioactive waste of the nuclear family, caring in ways that we would otherwise shy from. Pets present a form of connection lost that is made accessible through the pet’s appeal. There are moments in which alienation can briefly lift, and companionship can turn into actual love, but this is not a testament to any virtue in pet ownership but the strength of love to persist despite all odds. If only we were as earnest as them, we could connect with each other. This phenomenon seems to suggest that if we only liked each other as much as we liked our pets, then we wouldn’t see the appeal. Our feelings are invested in ownership.

But, we may rightly detect the unsustainability of this arrangement and try to aid it. There is a large population of unhoused animals, pets abandoned, abused, neglected, or simply not adequately cared for by otherwise caring owners, as well as a plethora of animal welfare organizations. There is a danger in leaping to help. First of all, it is a danger to oneself, as these organizations, for-profit or not, rely on moral passions to function. They rely on auto-exploitation and rely on the problem of animal exploitation to continue as a natural cost of our cohabitation. Again, an investment in ownership.

This is the state of a vessel-animal. We fill them, inscribe signification onto them as a means of banishing meaning, like burning a missive to banish what we wrote in it.

Much is made of how we are “social animals,” but often to serve health as much as a vitamin D supplement serves hens in a battery: better to lay eggs and grow breasts so as to be more productive and marketable. We seem to float helplessly in an abstract individual position. We are intimate with this alienation, as the corpses in a kurgan are with ice. We can’t nurture the “social animal” in us because our idea of an animal is polluted by an animal instrumentality.

What remains is hollow: the vessel-animal. The symbolism of the animal is written over, made to mean whatever we want it to mean. The sensuality of the animal is taken—they are butchered wholly. We lose them, and we lose ourselves.

Everyday Bioterror

If you’ve had the misfortune of confronting an explicit racist, what is the very first thing they will say to justify their belief? It’ll be something like how some dogs are smarter or stronger or more aggressive than others and that we should just grow up and face the facts. Ignoring how behavior has been over-emphasized as a feature of breeding and is perhaps more a learned phenomenon based on how we treat different breeds, there’s an obvious flaw with this argument. Dogs were bred by people—people were not bred into racialized differences.

Racists can think this because, theoretically, it’s possible if some Elder Things came and took us as pets, breeding us for our exaggerated jowls or sled-hauling capacity or tendency to curl up at their suckered feet, then we’d be bred so. There’s nothing in the human being that excludes us from being treated as any other animal. It’s just that we don’t live in this hypothetical wacky sci-fi world but another.

Once, out of curiosity, in the office of one of these pet retailers I work at, I found an American Kennel Club dog breed bible. It’s very official-seeming but speaks little to the realities of the breeds from a veterinary lens. Instead, you’d be treated to a Victorian image of dogs, complete with descriptions of morphology that’d make Robert E. Howard blush.

Meanwhile, nearly every vet I speak to about the recent trend breed, French Bulldogs, thinks it’s secretly a travesty. These dogs are orders of magnitude more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions due to being bred for their cosmetics, their brachycephalic skulls routinely requiring surgical intervention to remove obstruction in their nostrils. Due to the structure of their pelvis, these bulldogs often suffer from obstructed labor, requiring cesarean section births. French Bulldogs have a life expectancy that is a fraction of the norm for all other dogs. Vets could go on about these issues in breeding till they’re blue in the face, like a French Bulldog suffering from cyanosis, which they are several times more likely to experience. We’ll smile, we’ll love the dogs and their gregarious attitude and the cute way they scream like people, and turn around knowing something diabolical is happening and we’re perhaps somehow enabling it.

Trends continue, and as with trends in every other sector, grow in tighter loops with greater velocity. What will become of biology in such a vector of control?

Intensive animal farming has changed the form of domestic animals. When a farm chicken fell off the caged batteries dragged on eighteen-wheeler truck beds, he was taken in by my aunt to be raised organically. The difference was clear. The intensively-bred cock needed to be slowly nurtured to stand on his own weight and then had to be carefully monitored, compared to the rest of the flock, which could get around their field with relative ease. His body was bred for poultry production, and his heart could barely sustain its hypertrophied frame. We knew he wasn’t going to live long, but she gave him a home nonetheless. The body is malleable and adaptable, and methods of breeding exploit this. Even in pets, this domestication becomes eerie, violent, perverse. Domesticity becomes unhomely.

Imagine an entire species of harlequin babies, created simply so we can feel superior to them, simply so we can displace our insecurity and self-aggression onto them. And we would do this to our best friend. If this estimation is only half-true, then it is still tragic. It seems we are in a struggle against an idea of biologically determined hierarchy that has existed for centuries, altering life to fit its own assumptions. The pressing issue of the last centuries is how do we resist a well-established idea? A bad idea will suffice, as well as a better one, so perhaps this is the wrong question. The one I prefer is, how do we want to live?

The Wolf I Feed

We almost know what we want, but we’re not quite there yet.

One of the points of no return in the 20th Century was the splitting of the atom and the invention of nuclear power, thus nuclear warfare and the ability to enact human extinction through socio-political fiat. Hundreds of years before, there was a different splitting—the splintering of lands and animals. Once upon a time, there was a competition between the herder and the wolf that has slid into myth and metaphor. It was a common thing to be around other animal life, to be at odds with it, in a way that was more than just pets, pests, and roadkill.

The Great Enclosure of Britain was the several centuries-long process of appropriating and selling land that was held in commons, a breaking up of the feudal land order to the property land order we’re familiar with today. It was a scarring of land, evident now on Great Britain’s characteristically cellular fields, the extinction of their wolves as sheep and cattle became a big business. Breeding and domestication became a clearer topic as the practice had more space to grow, more cultural and economic value. A similar devastation happened wherever those colonists touched. The aggression they held for their land they administered tenfold onto others, onto the whole world. Now wherever there is land that is not held in deeds, they are there, making an effort to crack it open for its extractable wealth.

“Thinking Like a Mountain,” by Aldo Leopold, is a landmark article in ecological thought. In it, he describes exterminating New Mexican wolves to protect ranchers and how killing one for himself, he witnessed “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes… there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain.” This spurred a complete change in his thinking—an awakening to the presence of wolves and mountains that were always there, that he and his kind had been blind to for centuries. Leopold’s experience would create an ecological reflection absent in Rooseveltian conservationism.

We must realize that there were wolves inside us, too, not metaphorically but truly, existing because we lived with wolves. The extermination of wolves exterminated something within us that we can’t even name anymore, how remote they have become. In its place is the over-domesticated animal, the modern compulsory harlequin baby.

It is not that we were hard and strong and now we are soft and weak. Wolves are not univocally hard, harsh creatures but show softness, kindness, and love. It is that domestication swallows up love into emotional labor, kindness into fawning. When we are kind, we cannot tell if it is genuine or just how we are programmed, just as we may mistrust a dog’s kindness for the blind service of an automaton, just as the desperately lonely guest mistakes a service worker’s niceness for true interest in them and likewise how that worker lives inside a self-deceit to survive.

This is high cynicism. Literally, dog-like. This coarse, compulsory domesticity, this hollowing out, reigns. The lines drawn between ourselves and others were not as defined as we hoped—as the animal is hollowed out, so are we. As the animal is butchered, so are we. The despair of the 20th Century is a continuation of the despair of each prior century—yelps heard as parts of the body are sliced away, a lingering, narcotic execution assuring the victim is incomplete when they are deceased.

But as powerful as the regime of technical dismemberment is and has been, it is just as contingent as anything else. The fierce green fire that touched Leopold’s heart has always been alive in the world, able to touch us because it has nursemaided us to where we are now. Counter to the hollowed vessel-animal is the oldest image in art, drawn in breathtakingly modern realization with fragments of charcoal from a campfire or pigments made from berries on cave walls: the hallowed animal.

The Threshold Animal

In Ardéche, Southern France, the Chauvet Cave contains artworks created 30,000 years ago. Stencils of hands, speckled abstract shapes, but most famously, portraits of animals. Aurochs and cave hyenas, bears, and ibexes—only one partial human figure amid it all. Since its discovery in 1994, there have been feverish efforts to research, preserve, and communicate it.

One researcher, upon his first encounter with the images within, was haunted by “powerful beings”: lions coming into his dreams to teach him a new, intuitive method of experience, affecting him so greatly that he had to step back from the project. Lingering in the dark are the modern movement-images of rhinos tossing their heads in sequential pieces, of lions’ profiles glancing out of the uneven rock. On the reverse side of that stalactite, which can barely be witnessed, is a woman’s pelvis beneath the head of a bull, the “Venus and the Sorcerer” image, and perhaps the very first anthropomorphic art predating any fully human figuration.

Since the dawn of art, these subject matter have persisted: the anthropomorphic animal, the therianthrope, and the furry.

In the brilliant video essay, Art, Furries, God, by Patricia Taxxon, the word “cynicism” appears, a word from the Greek word kunikos, which means “dog-like.” This is interesting, considering Taxxon is a dog and often makes reference to herself as having paws, a snout, growing up as a puppy—an identity that is left just as that, playful and serious. This, I think, is not ironic intentionally or otherwise, but a key to understanding what she means in this piece. There are two dogs here: the dog as the cynic and the dog as a genuine person. The vessel-animal and the furry, in other words.

“The ‘Furry’ aesthetic… is a concession towards the symbolic, the sensory, the ever-so-slightly autistic,” Taxxon says. From the speculated ritual purposes of the Chauvet cave art, to the very known presence of animals in every religious lineage around the world, to the intuition someone uses when they make a fursona, this is symbolism encountered but not overwritten. It means something to be this animal but not that one, but also not the same thing in an unspecified context. You can see this above—dogs are “cynical” except when they are not because they don’t end at their symbolic nature. Unlike an icon or sigil, there’s a materiality beyond representation. An animal has fur you can touch, horns to be gored by, meat to eat, and so on. It’s a conceptually whole thing, but the small things that comprise it are also legible, interesting, and important. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, it’s a body-without-organs, and organs. Lastly, there is the individuation of all previous aspects—personally, biologically, and spiritually. Each animal is different and not an instance of a norm.

So, how does one not just break up with the vessel-animal but foster and respect the whole animal?

First, with art. Underlined in Taxxon’s video essay are humility and confidence. Humility without the obsequious need to become small and give way, confidence without the prideful will to loneliness. The honesty needed to be a pack, for becoming-animal to play, while not becoming a vessel nor a tyrant—a more participatory relationship with art. This does not necessarily mean becoming an artist, but sharing in the imaginal world, which we are too often told, has either no bearing on reality or a complete dictation over it. The furry fandom has effortlessly excelled at this, emerging first from tape traders and convention-goers and growing into a wide and greatly varied distribution. The imaginal suffuses the culture without pretending at transcendence or being cast out as mental debris.

Then, with animals themselves, and perhaps all life. It’s time to cultivate a better appreciation of the life around us. We need to be with things without owning them. It is impossible not to see the sadness of pets pacing indoors when the mockingbirds have lives full of singing and fighting in the sky, and iguanas bask in the sun with emerald backs, coiffed spines, and flagging crests. Real estate bears no reality against the nodding hibiscus and bird-of-paradise—the bulb of each flower is a gradually opening world, beautiful and terribly alive. Pay attention, and you will have those experiences of depth like Leopold’s wolf or the lions of Chauvet. I have had my own, and I didn’t even need to travel for them. These things will come to your doorstep.