Alex Lockwood, author of The Pig in Thin Air
In 2014, this valliant pig made a bid for escape from the back of a lorry in South America.
Those working within the animal justice movement will be familiar with the ways that outrage can manifest itself in the body: sometimes as tears; at other times, as profound feelings of distress and un-comfort. For some decades, the movement has tried to dodge accusations of sentimentality by distancing itself from these visceral responses, making instead the case for the ethical protection of animals as sentient beings in their own right.
The approach is invaluable but arguably, something is lost in the mix. In The Pig in Thin Air, writer, educator and activist, Alex Lockwood seeks to redress the balance by critically exploring the relationship of the body to animal activism, through a wealth of personal experience, academic scholarship, interviews with influential activists such as Jo-Anne McArthur and Gene Baur from Farm Sanctuary and his own time with animal advocacy groups including Toronto Pig Save, both in conversation and on protests. Written with passion - and compassion, facts about the impact of animal agriculture (“it is estimated that showers taken by each of us consumes 5,100 liters of water per year; producing just one pound of beef uses 5,200 liters”) sit alongside searing reflections on the way we treat animals today. About the CO2 touted as a more ‘humane’ and efficient method to stun pigs before slaughter, Lockwood reflects: “The CO2 is a tasteless and odorless irony; we kill them now by subjecting them to our greenhouse gas emissions, literally choking them to death in our waste air.”
In Chapter 3, Lockwood asks: “Does working across animal rights and climate change together offer the best hope for animal equality and justice, and a safe future for everyone”? It clearly does, which is why Lockwood is one of the co-founders of Animal Rebellion, the mass NVDA movement campaigning to bring about a transition to a just and sustainable plant-based food system. Inspired by a single 2014 image - of a pig in China leaping from a moving truck in a bid for freedom - The Pig in Thin Air is an intellectual and emotional rollercoaster, but it is anchored in a single, deeply humane vision: that “an end to animal suffering is the thing that could save us all.”
TEP: Tell me about the book, its genesis and its intent.
Lockwood: The book is a hybrid academic piece. It’s not a researched monograph but it’s grounded in the idea that the body is the vehicle by which we move through and experience the world. It’s a piece of ethnography about trying out many forms of activism and seeing which ones are the most impactful, in terms of changing values, attitudes and behaviours. It’s not purely an embodied experience but much of the body and the embodied experience has been written out of the engagements with animals.
It wasn't always so. Peter Singer and Tom Regan were trying to intellectualise animal rights philosophy to move it away from the risks of being sentimentalised. Plus it was very gendered. Most animal rights activism was done by women, for example, the anti vivisection movement. Or, more accurately, the leaders were men but the activists were mainly women. In a way, it was as if the swing of the pendulum moved more towards the intellectual rationalisation of what we should do and lost the body. This was putting the body back into activism, to create a combination of the cognitive and the embodied experience.
It was just my experience in the end. The most profound impact that I had as an activist and by speaking with many many more people who were doing activism [was] the rise of bearing witness and the rise of the embodied encounter with the animal was being experienced as something more profound than people had been used to always expecting. That was certainly the case for me. I found that to be the truth of the story that I was exploring.
TEP: A philosopher from the Enlightenment might say that intellectual perception, as opposed to physical or emotional, is the only one of value.
Lockwood: All the popular mythologies that flowed from that were that humans were exceptional, in contrast to the nonhuman. If the nonhuman was vulnerable and defenceless and helpless and corporeal and fleshy, then the human was not those things. The human was rational and intellectual and the human soul was based in a completely other place. Take, for example, Descartes' famous experiments on dogs, [in which he attempted to demonstrate] that the dog was purely an embodied machine, whereas the human was a higher form of being. So the pendulum had swung very far that way. A particular gendered response tried to bring it back with - particularly women's activism in vivisection through the late 19th century - and then obviously you've got Singer and Regan and others who tried to de-sentimentalise animal rights and philosophy.
TEP: Your thoughts remind me of Jem Bendell’s work on Deep Adaptation - bringing back real grief into big issues such as, in his case, the climate emergency. There is, underlying this, a feeling that without registering the enormity of the loss and the suffering, we can’t act in ways that are appropriate to it. Does that resonate with you?
Lockwood: In academia, they've labelled it the affect theory; a re-understanding, re-imagining and re-entrance of emotion into lived experience. My PhD was based on affect theories, [referencing] the Chicago School and people like Lauren Berlant, who was examining public culture and public discourse through the emotions and the affects on display - or refused display. We all know our relationships with animals are very emotive. And emotion and the body are therefore essential elements to explore, understand and work with in both studying animal activism and philosophy, but also practising it.
Animals and gender studies: “Men aren't expected or allowed to have those kinds of compassionate, feeling relationships and exhibitions of those feelings. It’s changing, but it's still quite hard to express in that way,” says Alex Lockwood.
TEP: Is the missing link in our relationship with animals - particularly the animals used for food - is the slaughterhouse? We see the animal, we see the meat: we don’t see how the awful process by which one is transformed into the other, which is where a lot of grief and compassion could come into play. Is that a particular challenge for the animal justice movement: that the very event that could change people’s minds is the event we can’t talk about?
Lockwood: It’s not one link. Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart's Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood is an academic but accessible account of the socialisation process. Essentially, we are socialised by our particular cultures into particular relationships with others, whether that be human others or nonhuman others via particular categories, whether it be species or gender or race or whatever. It is a constant repetition of socializations into particular relationships with animals. Those socialisation processes are the cultural norms and they are accepted and understood and repeated. Very often, it’s repeated three or four times a day at the dinner table. The alternative process that would get us to reconsider those animals that we think of as food, they're not happening. It's so obvious to see how fragile these socialisation processes are.
Cole and Stewart use the example of the rabbit. The rabbit sits in all four of the quadrants of their socialisation map. The rabbit is simultaneously a vivisection test subject, a valued family companion; it’s wild and it’s also food. So individual rabbits are placed in all of those different categories. And that just shows how it's simply a socialisation in context. What animal activists need to do is understand and unpick all of the socialisation processes that lead us into one direction and create, as much as we can in society, processes that challenge that and that lead us into other practices. Bearing witness to animals going into slaughter is a stark way to do that [but] most people who do it very rarely go back to treating animals in the same way as they were doing before, because of the profound embodied encounter with an animal at the moment they are about to be killed. [We need] the practice of socialisation in another direction.
TEP: This links to the perception of vegans as a threat to social cohesion, as those who threaten, by their choices, to unravel society. Something that seems to be happening more, however, is the coming together of human and animal rights. There seem to be more animal lawyers, who are using the tools of human law to find justice for animals, which seems to indicate a growing awareness that all beings deserve consideration. Is this something you're coming across?
Lockwood: It has very much shifted. We've all been on journeys as thinkers. I remember a time where my understanding of intersectional approaches to social justice was growing. It really shifted my sense of comfort and discomfort with the forms of activism I was seeing: quite old school animal activists using quite old school methods of blood-covered bodies outside a shop selling fur, for example, shaming people in the shop and outside. I initially took part in that but felt uncomfortable without really understanding why - and then later on feeling uncomfortable with it and not taking part. It's the wrong approach ethically and it’s the wrong approach, practically. It's not as impactful.
Where I sit now is within a belief that challenging oppression means challenging the structure of oppression, not just individual manifestations of it. If you simply challenge the oppression of animals, but support the oppression of black people, you are not challenging the structures of oppression, which reinforce each other. As well as being ethically wrong, you're not going to achieve what you want. Any oppression, against any group, whether animal or human, should be challenged. For me, it only gains credibility for the animal justice movement to be intersected and supported by and working for climate justice and environmental justice.
TEP: There’s also a growing realisation that ethical consumerism and individual choice are just never going to go far or fast enough.
Lockwood: The problem [with ethical consumerism] is that you’re feeding the existing liberal ideology rather than challenging it. The liberal ideology of freedom of choice is essentially what’s got us into this mess because it's a very human, anthropocentric model of existing in the world. Individual choice matters but it’s not the way we're going to change systems, because it only feeds the paradigm, the narrative, that knits together the oppressive structures. We absolutely need to move away from vegan messaging to anti-speciesism and anti-oppression messaging, in which vegan practices are an obvious part of what you do. The challenge is to rewrite the narrative so that what is common sense now is not common sense in the future.
TEP: How did you get into animal justice?
Lockwood: I probably came at it through an intellectualising of a real discomfort with injustice. And when you recognise the scale of injustice, you recognise where your efforts need to go. When you grow up in a working class, urban environment, you don't have a full engagement with many animals. But the animals you do grow up with, you have a very strong bond with us. I certainly grew up with cats as companions. Adopting a cat at the same time as going vegan for more ethical and health reasons was a large part of my transformation into someone thinking: ‘we need to do more for all species of animals.’
I visited Farm Sanctuary and I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks there working, and I got a tour of the farm with the founder Gene Baur. I also got to spend the day with Susie Coston, the farm director. They’re at the extreme ends. Susie said to me, Gene doesn't really think about the animals as individuals while Susie knows all their names. One doesn't have a massive connection with individual animals; for the other, that connection is her whole life. But they're both absolutely committed to the same outcome. I would say I'm probably a little bit more on the side of the ethics, rather than individual relationships. But I’m affected by both.
TEP: I wonder if it’s the gender thing.
Lockwood: Absolutely, gender comes into play. Men aren't expected or allowed to have those kinds of compassionate, feeling relationships and exhibitions of those feelings. It’s changing, but it's still quite hard to express in that way.
TEP: Some men might be outraged by the way animals are treated - but still say they’re going plantbased for the planet. It's an interesting reflection on masculinity.
Lockwood: I've just written the chapter on gender for the new Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, edited by Laura Wright.. And it’s something I’ve had to grapple with. I’m a straight, white, middle class man, writing about gender issues, an area where the most marginalised people are women. So I'm speaking from a position of privilege and power. But it's incredibly important that gender studies and masculinity are tackled by men and nowhere more so than in terms of our relationship with animals. Gender is the most statistically significant factor - above class, above race - in terms of the exploitation of animals. Men eat more meat, men kill more animals. Gender is the absolute bottom line of what we need to challenge, if we’re going to challenge the domination of animals.
TEP: Just to end - why are animal rights important to people? Why should we be caring about the animals when we're facing so much threat at the moment?
Lockwood: We've touched upon it. If we have social structures that rest upon hierarchies and oppressions, then we will continue down the road that we are going. The civilizations we have are in decline, and they will either decline peacefully or barbarously. And, if we do not challenge the way that we oppress others now, we will decline in a barbarous fashion. Our relationship with animals gives us one of the best chances to reflect upon our relationships of dominance to others. So, if we frame this as why is it important for humans: if we can re-imagine and re-structure our relationship to the nonhuman, we can re-structure our entire relationship with the planet and with ourselves, saving us from the more catastrophic possible futures that we are heading towards. Unless we change, we are on the wrong path.
