People who work with animals know their resistance
Take protesting animals seriously too
Cows also have their own will. Escape at the end of 2017 Sister and Hermien en route to the slaughterhouse. Sister was caught quickly, but but Hermien managed to hide in the woods for weeks. Her perseverance and cleverness stood out, she was in the news almost every day. After she was caught, she went with Zus to cow rest home The Leemweg.
Zus and Hermien are not the only animals that escape: at De Leemweg there are more cattle that have run away. Someone also escapes from zoos regularly. Red pandas are known for. A year and a half ago, two chimpanzees who had escaped from their stay in DierenPark Amersfoort were shot dead.
Animals also protest in other ways against how they are treated. Last month, a bull killed a man in the slaughterhouse in Tilburg. The documentary Blackfish shows that killer whale Tilikum killed three people in the dolphinarium where he was forced to work. But often animals have little opportunity to resist. The book The war against animals by Australian philosopher Dinesh Wadiwel begins in a slaughterhouse where chickens try to get away. Laboratory animals can sometimes only turn their heads off. Self-injury can also be a form of resistance. Salmon that is locked in full tanks sometimes intentionally stop eating, causing them to die. In America, many zoo animals are structurally given Prozac, write Laurel Braitman in Animal madness, against their gloom and to keep them calm.
Animal resistance is often not recognized as such. Historian Jason Hribal mapped animal resistance in American circuses, zoos and dolphinariums. He shows that elephants, camels, chimpanzees and others often resist and sometimes work together in this. Animal park directors are trying to keep that structural resistance secret, it's bad for their image. Orangutans in zoos, for example, often work together to escape. One steals a mop, another uses it later as a ladder to climb over a fence, a third distracts the caretakers. Animals from these groups are always taken apart because they manage to get out of their homes too often.
People who work with animals know their resistance. That is why there are fences around meadows, animals are locked in cages and stables, farmers drive them into the cattle truck with sticks, get collars, halters or bridles on them. No animal freely chooses the livestock industry, the zoo, the circus, a cage in the corner of the room, the riding school.
In biology and ethology, the inner lives of non-human animals are becoming increasingly clear. Animals have their own ways of life and forms of intelligence, many species feel love, grief, friendship and empathy. Animal cultures are being taken more and more seriously, just like animal languages. At the same time, exploitation is increasing, more animals are being used and killed around the world every year. Most people see little of that and most animal protest also goes unnoticed. Hermien is an exception.
Every time I read about peasant protests, I think of that invisible protest. Farmers rightly point out that they have the right to talk about the future. As a society, we need to talk about a just transition to a more sustainable model.
But I am in solidarity with the animals that protest day in and day out in the livestock industry, in laboratories and elsewhere, and with those who do not because they do not dare or cannot do so. They too want a better future, they too only have a life. It's time to take their votes seriously, too.
Eva Meijer is a writer and philosopher. She writes a column every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the NRC newspaper dated 5 July 2022
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