Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Antennae
Issue 23 - Winter 2012
ISSN 1756-9575
Marketing Animals
Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi – Eat Me Tender / Barbara J. Phillips – Advertising and the Cultural Meaning of Animals / Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo –
Animal Subjects: Local Exploitation, Slow Killing / Claire Molloy – Remediating Cows and the Construction of Ethical Landscape / Concepcion Cortes Zulueta – His
Master’s Voice / Cluny South – The Tiger in the Tank / Iwan rhys Morus – Bovril by Electrocution / Louise Squire – The Animals Are “Breaking Out”! / Gene Gable –
Can You Say, “Awww”? / Sonja Britz – Evolution and Design / Hilda Kean – Nervous Dogs Need Admin, Son! / Katherine Bennet – A Stony Field / John Miller -- Brooke’s
1
Monkey Brand Soap / Sunsan Nance – Jumbo: A Capitalist Creation Story / Kelly Enright – None Tougher / Linda Kalof and Joe Zammit-Lucia – From Animal Rights and
Shock Advocacy to Kinship With Animals / Natalie Gilbert – Fad of the Year / Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter – The Saddest Show on Earth /
Sabrina Tonutti – Happy Easter / Bettina Richter – Animals on the Runway / Susan Nance – ‘Works Progress Administration’ Posters / Emma Power -- Kill ‘em dead!”
the Ordinary Practices of Pest Control in the Home

Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Editor in Chief
Giovanni Aloi
Academic Board
Steve Baker
Ron Broglio
Matthew Brower
Eric Brown
Carol Gigliotti
Donna Haraway
Linda Kalof
Susan McHugh
Rachel Poliquin
Annie Potts
Ken Rinaldo
Jessica Ullrich
Advisory Board
Bergit Arends
Rod Bennison
Helen Bullard
Claude d’Anthenaise
Petra Lange-Berndt
Lisa Brown
Rikke Hansen
Chris Hunter
Karen Knorr
Rosemarie McGoldrick
Susan Nance
Andrea Roe
David Rothenberg
Nigel Rothfels
Angela Singer
Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir
Global Contributors
João Bento & Catarina Fontoura
Sonja Britz
Tim Chamberlain
Concepción Cortes
Lucy Davis
Amy Fletcher
Katja Kynast
Christine Marran
Carolina Parra
Zoe Peled
Julien Salaud
Paul Thomas
Sabrina Tonutti
Johanna Willenfelt
Copy Editor
Maia Wentrup
Front Cover Image: Original image - Pirelli, Atlante, 1954 © Pirelli
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EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 23
T
his issue of Antennae was developed around the idea that advertising can be much more than
a pivotal marketing tool in capitalist societies. Over the past few years, through the increased
popularity of social networks advertising strategies have more and more come to play a pivotal
role in communication and can be understood as a cultural thermometer of our identities and desires.
The conspicuous presence of animals in advertising is therefore a phenomenon that deserves study; it
is not a new phenomenon in itself but it is one that nonetheless demands renewed attention and
scrutiny through a human-animal studies lens. Whether photographed, illustrated, animated or filmed
the ambivalent presence of the animal, initially seems to facilitate the delivery of consumeristic
messages. However, things are much more complex. What does the animal sell to us and what do we
effectively buy through these instances of visual consumption? What role does the animal play in the
persuasions processes enacted by advertisements?
In the attempt to provide some answers to these questions and more, besides a traditional call
for academic papers, Antennae also solicited short commentaries on advertisements chosen by our
readers and contributors. The colourful variety of examples submitted contributes to the outlining of an
extremely diverse range of animal appearances in advertising greatly varying on the grounds of what is
to be sold and which target audiences are to persuade. These shorter entries have been interposed
between longer and more complex analyses of specific animal presences in advertising. One of the
unexpected result gathered from the collection of the excellent submissions we received, highlights a
perhaps not too surprising, current, overriding interest for mammals against any other animal group.
Anthropomorphism may be an inevitable expedient essential to the success of the identification
process lying at the core of all advertising intending to sell us commodities. This is rather well
demonstrated through the publication of a portfolio of vintage adverts with which this issue comes to a
close. For this essential contribution we have to thank Nigel Rothfels who on a warm June afternoon in
2011 walking lazily around the streets of Zurich came across a very unusual archive. As Nigel recalls, “I
was in the city to attend a small conference on science and before long, I found myself staring into
the windows of the Swiss National Bank! A quite fascinating exhibit had been organized in the windows
by staff at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich focusing on the history of animals appearing in advertising
posters. I went from window to window enjoying the posters and taking pictures. Through the generosity
of Dr. Bettina Richter and Allesia Contin at the Museum, we are now able to bring a selection of this
rarely seen and remarkable collection to Antennae’s readers”.
Besides considering a range of well known and lesser know advertisements, this issue also looks
at the more ethically driven consideration of the use of animal imagery in the advertisements
produced by animal advocacy and conservation organisations through a thought-provoking piece by
Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof, whilst an interview with creative teams at Young & Rubicam
Chicago demonstrates how the presence of animals in advertising can be used to the advantage of
animals through some astonishingly simple but impressive communicational inventiveness.
Lastly I would like to take the opportunity to thank all involved in the making of this issue of
Antennae.
Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief of Antennae Project
3

CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 23
6 Eat Me Tender
Love can be dangerous when it comes to cooking. In this image, the evidence that a ‘lover’ wants to possess his woman just like a ‘meat lover’ wants to eat his steak is
exposed in a grotesque way. Sexist discrimination and animal exploitation are here associated to ‘love’, understood as an abuse mitigated by tenderness and care in the act
of possessing and killing.
Text by Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi
9 Advertising and the Cultural Meaning of Animals
One explanation for the proliferation of animal trade characters in current advertising practice proposes that they are effective communication tools because they can be used
to transfer desirable cultural meanings to products with which they are associated. The first step in examining what messages these animals communicate is to explore the
common cultural meanings that they embody. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the common themes found in the cultural meanings of four animal characters. In
addition, it demonstrates a method by which cultural meanings can be elicited. The implications of this method for advertising research and practice are discussed.
Text by Barbara J. Phillips
20 Animal Subjects: Local Exploitation, Slow Killing
The city of Milan will host Expo 2015, with the theme “Feeding the Planet. Energy for Life”. In view of this occasion, the interest for culinary tradition and the global challenge
of food security is rapidly growing. Farming and livestock raising traditions plays a major role in Italy, homeland of the worldwide renowned Slow Food.
Text by Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo
23 Remediating Cows and the Construction of Ethical Landscape
Concern about the impact of livestock on the environment has generated debates about how best to manage dairy farming practices. Soil erosion and compaction and loss of
biodiversity from grazing and silage production, ammonia and methane emissions, as well as high levels of water consumption, have all been identified as direct effects on the
environment from dairy farming activity. [i] Whilst the issues have been well reported in the press, there has been little in the way of imagery to accompany the environmental
critique of milk production. Instead, much of the popularly available imagery of dairy farming has been generated by advertising which continues to deploy culturally-specific
visions of contented cows in rural landscapes.
Text by Claire Molloy
28 His Master’s Voice
A white dog with brown ears sits in front of a gramophone, head directed to its brass-horn and slightly tilted to one side. The original painting was purchased in 1899, along
with its full copyright, by the emerging Gramophone Company from the artist Francis Barraud.
Text by Concepcion Cortes Zulueta
31 The Tiger in the Tank
Despite the complexities and inconstancies of the human-animal relationship non-human animals [1] have been intimately interwoven within human culture for thousands of
years. Representations of animals exist across many mediums, with roots clearly visible in Palaeolithic cave paintings and early carvings, evolving human language, music and
drama, and narrative fables and folk stories. Unsurprisingly then animal representations continue to be rife throughout our modern lives and across much popular media.
Text by Cluny South
39 Bovril by Electrocution
I first came across this illustration whilst browsing through Leonard de Vries’s fascinating collection, Victorian Advertising, about twelve years ago. I was looking for something
else at the time – examples of late Victorian electric belt advertisements as part of a project on nineteenth-century medical electricity. Instead, this one jumped out of the
page at me.
Text by Iwan Rhys Morus
42 The Animals Are “Breaking Out”!
This paper explores recent TV adverts in which the animals portrayed come to appear before us in new ways. Gone are cosy images of chimpanzees playing house, wearing
flat-caps and frocks, and pouring cups of tea. The animals are breaking out! Mary, the cow (Muller yoghurt), is “set free” on a beach to fulfil her dream of becoming a horse.
More cows (Anchor butter) have taken charge of the dairy.
Text by Louise Squire
49 Can You Say, “Awww”?
Animals have long been a regular theme in advertising, especially when anthropomorphized. Except for obvious ties to products like dog food and pet products, animals
usually have nothing to do with the goods or services advertised, but we connect with them and the products nonetheless, and we get a good feeling when a company is
associated with cute animals.
Text by Gene Gable
51 Evolution and Design
The animal as sign has a long evolutionary history, but with the onset of cultural modernity it began to assume new semiotic forms. Foucault describes a new field of
increased visibility that emerged in the eighteenth century which gave rise to a complex semiotic system within which the sign began to take on a life of its own. If images
could be regarded as living organisms, how could this affect their representational values in society? And, what are the implications for the lives and representation of animals?
Text by Sonja Britz
61 Nervous Dogs Need Admin, Son!
This advert comes from a British magazine The Tail Wagger, October 1940. The Tail- Waggers Club had been founded in 1928 to promote dog welfare stating, ‘The love
of animals, and especially of dogs, is inherent in nearly all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members. [i] All dogs were eligible for membership, not just those
from established breeds. By July 1930 it had become a general legal requirement that all dogs should wear collars and the club and magazine endorsed such measures. [ii]
Text by Hilda Kean
64 A Stony Field
Brand representations proliferate reflexive identities of their producers and consumers. These self-advertisements reinscribe commodified identities reproductively back onto the
subjects and objects – the represented figures – of consumption. In this paper I argue that the cooption of identity politics by multinational corporations like Stonyfield Farm,
Inc. operates within material and virtual domains that conceal fetishized processes of consumption.
Text by Katherine Bennett
80 Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap
Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap was a common, even iconic, presence in the pages of late nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers in Britain. Barely an issue of the London
Illustrated News, The Graphic or The Sketch passed without a full or half page spread of Brooke’s ubiquitous monkey, arrayed in one of its many baffling guises:
promenading in top hat and tails, juggling cooking pots in a jester’s get-up, strumming a mandolin on the moon, destitute and begging by the side of the road, kneeling to
accept a medal from a glamorous Frenchwoman, careering along on a bicycle with feet on the handle-bars, clinging precariously to a ship’s mast, carefully polishing the family
china and here in 1891, sliding gleefully down the banisters with legs spread wide and the hint of a smile while two neat Victorian children watch calmly on.
Text by John Miller
4

83 Jumbo: A Capitalist Creation Story
Today, a profusion of non-human animals inhabit the world of advertising. Consumers see some of them in person and some as brand icons, team mascots, and other moregeneric
endorsers of consumption (sometimes their own consumption, like pig characters decorating BBQ restaurants or matronly cows on dairy product packaging)
embellishing countless products, services and entertainments. This zoological cornucopia provides a naturalizing link to the non-human world, promising us that to absorb
advertising messages and spend is to participate in an inevitable and emotionally authentic activity because, as the belief goes, animals don’t lie (Shukin 2009, 3-5).
Text by Susan Nance
95 None Tougher
Rhinoceroses are rarely anthropomorphized making this American magazine advertisement from the 1950s an unusual specimen. Armstrong, a rubber and tire company,
found the tough exterior of rhinoceroses the prime comparison for its most durable automobile tires, dubbed “Rhino-Flex.”
Text by Kelly Enright
98 From Animal Rights and Shock Advocacy to Kinship with Animals
The visual cultures manifested in the advertising and communication activities of animal rights activists and those concerned with the conservation of species may
be counter-productive, creating an ever-increasing cultural distance between the human and the animal. By continuing to position animals as subjugated,
exploitable others, or as creatures that belong in a romanticized ‘nature’ separate from the human, communications campaigns may achieve effects that are
contrary to those desired. The unashamed, cheaply voyeuristic nature of shock imagery may win headlines while worsening the overall position of the animal in
human culture. We offer an alternative way of thinking about visual communication concerning animals – one that is focused on enhancing a sense of kinship
with animals. Based on empirical evidence, we suggest that continued progress both in conservation and in animal rights does not depend on continued
castigation of the human but rather on embedding in our cultures the type of human-animal relationship on which positive change can be built.
Text by Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof
112 Fad of the Year
At the end of 2010 one of the UK’s commercial television channels, ITV, selected twenty of the most popular TV adverts from the year and entered them in to their own
competition to find the television ‘Ad of the Year’. The winning advert was one featuring a rescue dog called Harvey who is in kennels, hoping somebody will come along and
adopt him.
Text by Natalie Gilbert
114 The Saddest Show on Earth
Since 1884, children across the United States have been dazzled by the sequined wonders of the Ringling Bros. Circus. For many a youngster the spectacle of costumed
elephants performing myriad tricks under the big top is a highlight of the show. Yet the bright spotlight of the center ring casts a dark shadow across this American institution.
Persistent allegations of elephant abuse have trailed the travelling show for years.
Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter
120 Happy Easter
Even if we are talking about this image as an “advertisement”, it is clear that its scope is not business, but to inform and raise consciousness about the slaughtering of
animals. The message itself is rather peculiar: it’s obviously about animals, but without including any image of them in the picture. If a contradiction exists, it has nothing to do
with the message conveyed by the advertisement, but rather with ambiguous attitudes of humans towards animals. In this case, it’s the lambs who are not portrayed in the
advertisement.
Text by Sabrina Tonutti
123 Animals on the Runway
The discussion of animals in graphic art has radically changed since about 1950. In contemporary performances and installations, even living animals are displayed, which
often leads to ethical discussions. Recent work, however, reflects a new societal view of animals: A strictly anthropocentric view has had its day, now animals have come to be
seen as equal creatures and have emancipated themselves in artistic representation.
Text by Bettina Richter
132 ‘Works Progress Administration’ Posters
In 1933 and 1934, as part of the “New Deal” economic plan for the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created a new federal agency called the
Works Progress Administration (WPA) to hire artists to document and promote American cultural life.
Text by Susan Nance
136 Kill ‘em dead!: the Ordinary Practices of Pest Control in the Home
In recent years critical animal geographies have pointed to dearth of stories about the small, the microscopic, the slimy and the abject. The exoskeleton, though painfully
present to anyone bitten by a bedbug or disgusted by a cockroach, has been all but absent in dominant animal geographies. Death and the killing of animals is a further
notable absence. However, this scholarly absence is not parallel within the popular imagination, where cockroaches, files and dust mites loom large at the centre of a
homemaking war focused on the eradication of house pests.
Text by Emma Power
5

S
ince the Sixties, ecofeminist philosophical
thinking has been underlining the strong
connection between sexist discrimination,
exploitation of nonhuman animals, and abuse of
natural resources. These three phenomena have
been seen as so deeply interconnected, both
conceptually and historically, that they can be
adequately understood and handled only as a
single question. What the ecofeminists state –
and the image presented in this advert confirms
– is that in Western patriarchal civilization,
women, nonhuman animals, and the
environment are categories related to ‘animated
properties’, or ‘mobile goods’.
How should these logically fallacious and
discriminatory messages be handled, criticized,
and discouraged? The ecofeminist philosopher
Val Plumwood suggests to contrast the
patriarchal conceptual framework through a
careful work of revaluation, celebration, and
defense of what male dominion subdues. On
the one hand, dichotomical metaphors
underrate the feminine as related to corporeality,
emotions, intuitiveness, cooperation, care, and
sympathy; on the other hand, the masculine is
celebrated as related to opposed concept,
such as rationality, intellect, competition,
dominion, and apathy (Plumwood, 1992).
6
EAT ME TENDER
Love can be dangerous when it comes to cooking. In this image, the evidence that a ‘lover’ wants to possess his
woman just like a ‘meat lover’ wants to eat his steak is exposed in a grotesque way. Sexist discrimination and
animal exploitation are here associated to ‘love’, understood as an abuse mitigated by tenderness and care in the
act of possessing and killing.
Text by Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi
One of the most powerful ecofeminist approach
to the issue of animal exploitation as a practice
focused on – but not restricted to – food is Carol
Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. Published in
1990, Adams’ book combines the author’s
experience as a feminist activist and her
academic researches to formulate the link
between the perception of nonhuman animals
and women as ‘consumable bodies’, offered to
men’s pleasure. Adams suggests that both
women and animals are victims of a process of
objectification, fragmentation, and
consumption, especially in visual, textual, and
discursive texts. Through metaphor, a subject is
objectified, then fragmented and separated
from its ontological meaning, and consumed as
an object, existing only through what it
represents. In the Meat Lovers advertisement, the
woman/cow is an object of consumption and
the representation of the patriarchal idea of love
as dominion and possession.
Many are also the analogies between Adams’
investigation and Derrida’s
carnophallogocentrism. Derrida uses this
neologism to indicate the predominance of
rationality, masculinity, and carnivorous habits. In
his interview ‘Eating Well’, he clarifies this point
admitting that women and vegetarians are

actually ethical, juridical and political subjects,
as well as men and meat eaters. However, this is
a recent achievement, and still «authority […] is
attributed to the man (homo and vir) rather than
to the woman, and to the woman rather than to
the animal». And in fact, Derrida asks, how many
possibilities are there that a head of State
publicly and exemplarily declares himself – or
herself – to be a vegetarian? (Derrida, 'Eating
Well', or the Calculation of the Subject: An
Interview with Jacques Derrida 1991, 114).
Both identify meat eating and maleness
as crucial elements in determining who is a
subject. In particular, Derrida states that there are
three fundamental conditions to recognize a
subject as such, at least in Western cultures:
La Capannina
Amanti della Carne (Meat Lovers), advert La Capannina
being «a meat eater, a man, and an
authoritative, speaking self» (Calarco qtd in
Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat 1990, 6).
Adams develops this idea in a far more detailed
way. In particular she focuses on the implications
of the perception of animal/female bodies as
‘consummable’ through butchery and rape,
underlining the evidences of this analogy in
images, commercials, menu covers, and articles
7
that use the female body to attract the male
meat eaters. In the case of the advertisement
here presented, rigorously male meat eaters are
invited to consume their love for a steak on a
bed of lettuce.
However, rather than aggressive and
pornographic, this kind of love seems tender and
devoted. The cow’s head is ridiculously put on
the body of a sleeping woman and a man
embraces her. The aim of the advertisement is to
arouse a kind of tenderness for the animal killed
without putting into question the meat eater’s
virility. In fact, the tenderness here displayed is
the one that follows the sexual intercourse
between husband and wife, maybe. Curiously
enough, it is the beloved steak that plays here
the role of the absent referent. Both the woman
and the cow are visually present in the image,
but the object of the advertisement – meat – is
only textually summoned. In fact, the proposed
idea is that meat eating is a behaviour of caring
because the woman/cow wants to be object of
that kind of ‘tenderness’, meaning that she wants
to be eaten/consumed.
The scene is not one of seduction, but of

marital love. Carol Adams clearly explains how
the sexual politics of meat begins within the
exploitation of the reproductive functions of
female animals. Living alone milk and eggs –
which are products of maternity –, the majority of
meat comes from adult females and their
babies. Female nonhuman animals are
exploited to satisfy human appetites both when
they are alive and when they are dead, while
male animals are used much less in the food
References
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Twentieth
Anniversary Edition (2010). New York : Continuum, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques. "'Eating Well', or the Calculation of the
Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida" in Who Comes
After the Subject, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor
and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96-119. New York and London:
Routledge, 1991.
Plumwood, Val. "Feminism and Ecofeminism: Beyond the
Dualistic Assumptions of Women, Men, and Nature." The
Ecologist 22, no. 1 (January/February 1992).
8
industry, because they don’t produce anything
during their lives and their meat is considered as
less succulent and tasty. In an analogous way,
female human animals are exploited mainly
when they are alive for their sexual and
reproductive function and, basically, to satisfy
men’s pleasure. The Meat lovers image makes it
clear that not much has changed, since the
Sixties: females of all species are ‘objects’ of love
and properties of men.
Adele Tiengo is a Ph.D. student in Foreign Languages, Literatures,
and Cultures at the University of Milan (Italy), where she graduated
in 2012 with a thesis on the relationship between literature and
ethics in the animal question. In 2011 she spent a period as a
visiting researcher at the University of Alcalà (Spain), thanks to the
Susan Fenimore Cooper scholarship. She is currently carrying on
her research activities in ecocriticism.
Matteo Andreozzi is a PhD student in Philosophy at University of
Milan, Italy. His research is mainly on Environmental Ethics and
Movements, with a special focus on the analysis and the
developing of the intrinsic value concept. He is author of the
book Verso Una Prospettiva Ecocentrica. Ecologia Profonda e
Pensiero a Aete[Heading Toward an Ecocentric Mindset. Deep
Ecology and Reticular Thinking], 2011 and editor of the book
Etiche dell’Ambiente. Voci e Prospettive [Environmental Ethics.
Voices and Perspectives], 2012. He is also representative member
of ENEE (European Network for Environmental Ethics) and MAnITA
(Minding Animals Italy) and member of ISEE (International Society
for Environmental Ethics) and ESFRE (European Forum for the Study
of Religion and the Environment). For further information please
visit http://www.matteoandreozzi.it or
http://unimi.academia.edu/MatteoAndreozzi.

A
merican popular culture has quietly
become inhabited by all sorts of talking
animals and dancing products that are
used by advertisers to promote their brands.
These creatures, called trade characters, are
fictional, animate beings, or animated objects,
that have been created for the promotion of a
product, service, or idea (Phillips 1996).
Commercials with these characters score above
average in their ability to change brand
preference (Stewart and Furse 1986). It appears,
then, that trade characters can be effective
communication tools. However, it is unclear why
this is so. Although trade characters are popular
with advertisers and consumers, their role in
communicating the advertising message has
been generally taken for granted without
investigation. It has been
hypothesized that there are several reasons why
advertisers use trade characters: to attract
attention, enhance identification of and memory
ADVERTISING AND THE
CULTURAL MEANING
OF ANIMALS
One explanation for the proliferation of animal trade characters in current advertising practice proposes that they
are effective communication tools because they can be used to transfer desirable cultural meanings to products
with which they are associated. The first step in examining what messages these animals communicate is to
explore the common cultural meanings that they embody. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the
common themes found in the cultural meanings of four animal characters. In addition, it demonstrates a method
by which cultural meanings can be elicited. The implications of this method for advertising research and practice
are discussed.
Text by Barbara J. Phillips
9
for a product, and achieve promotional
continuity (Phillips 1996). However, one of the
most important reasons for the use of trade
characters in advertising may be that they can
be used to transfer desired meanings to the
products with which they are associated. By
pairing a trade character with a product,
advertisers can link the personality and cultural
meaning of the character to the product in the
minds of consumers. This creates a desirable
image, or meaning, for the product. The first step
in supporting this explanation of trade character
communication is to show that these characters
do embody common cultural meanings that can
be linked to products. Research has shown
that animal characters are one of the most
commonly used trade character types in current
advertising practice (Callcott and Lee 1994).
Animals have long been viewed as standard
symbols of human qualities (Neal 1985; Sax
1988). For example, in American culture,

"everyone" knows that a bee
symbolizesindustriousness, a dove represents
peace, and a fox embodies cunning (Robin
1932). It is likely that advertisers use animal
characters because consumers understand the
animals' cultural meanings and consequently
can link these meanings to a product. Therefore,
the cultural meaning of animals may lie at the
core of the meanings of animal trade
characters. This paper describes a method for
eliciting character meanings, presents a
qualitative analysis of the cultural meanings of
four animal characters, and discusses the
broader implications that these results have for
advertising research and practice. This
qualitative study of animal meanings is
motivated by several issues: Understanding the
cultural meanings that consumers assign to
animal characters will assist in developing
successful advertising campaigns; practitioners
can create characters that embody desired
brand meanings while avoiding characters with
negative associations. In addition, by
highlighting an underutilized research method by
which the cultural meaning of characters can
be elicited, this paper presents a way for
practitioners, researchers, and regulators to
understand what messages specific characters
are communicating to their audiences. This
method may be useful in other types of
advertising research as well. Researchers have,
in the past, asked for measures of cultural
meaning for celebrity endorsers (McCracken
1989) and for symbolic advertising images (Scott
1994), as well. Finally, by showing that animal
characters have common cultural meanings,
this paper builds support for one of the first
empirical explanations of how trade characters
"work" in advertising, and creates a foundation
for future trade character research.
The next section of the paper will present
the theories used to illuminate the research
question: Do there exist shared meanings that
consumers associate with specific animal
characters? If so, how can these meanings be
elicited, and what are their common themes?
The third section will introduce a method by
which the cultural meanings of characters can
be elicited, and will present the procedures used
in this research study. The fourth section will
discuss the results of the study, and the last
section will draw general conclusions.
Conceptual Development of the
Research Question It has been suggested that
advertising functions, in general, by attempting
to link a product with an image that elicits
10
desirable emotions and ideas (McCracken 1986).
For example, the image of a child may invoke
feelings of pleasure, nostalgia, and playfulness. By
showing a product next to such an image,
advertising encourages consumers to associate
the product with the image. Through this
association, the product acquires the image's
cultural meaning.
Trade characters may be one type of
image that advertisers use because these
characters possess learned cultural meanings.
These meanings are similar to the personalities
that consumers associate with characters from
other sources such as movies, cartoons, and
comic books. For example, Mickey Mouse is
viewed as a "nice guy," while Bugs Bunny is seen
as clever, but mischievous. Individuals do not
invent their own meaning for cultural symbols;
they must learn what each symbol means in their
culture (Berger 1984) based on their experiences
with the character. For example, consumers'
ideas about the meaning of "elephant" are
shaped by Dumbo movies and African safari TV
programs, and are colored by news stories about
a rampaging elephant that trampled its trainer.
Consequently, although each individual brings his
or her own experience to the meaning ascription
process, consensus of character meaning across
individuals is possible through common cultural
experience.
In advertising, trade characters' meanings
are used to visually represent the product
attributes (Zacher 1967) or the advertising
message (Kleppner 1966). For example, Mr.
Peanut embodies sophistication (Kapnick 1992),
the Pillsbury Doughboy symbolizes fun (PR
Newswire 1990), and the lonely Maytag repairman
stands for reliability (Elliott 1992). However, the
consumer must correctly decode the trade
character's meaning before it can have an
impact (McCracken 1986). Therefore, characters'
meanings must be easily understood by
consumers if they are to correctly interpret the
character's message. As a result, advertisers
frequently use animal trade characters (Callcott
and Lee 1994) because consumers are thought
to have learned the animals' cultural meanings,
and consequently are likely to correctly decode
the advertising message.
The first step in examining the association
between animal trade characters and the
products they promote is to explore the symbolic
meanings conveyed by the animals used in these
advertisements. That is, if an advertiser places a
bear (e.g., Snuggle) or a dog (e.g., Spuds
McKenzie) next to his product, what do these

animals represent to the audience? Rather than
examine individual animal characters, however,
it is necessary to first study an animal's general
cultural meaning. This is because the animal
category (e.g., bear, dog, etc.) provides the
primary, or core, meaning of an individual
character. Although an advertiser can choose to
highlight certain animal meanings over others
(e.g., "softness" for Snuggle Bear and "wildness"
for Smokey Bear), the core set of animal
meanings dictate what is possible for that
character to express. Snuggle fabric softener
would not find it easy to use a porcupine, pig, or
flamingo to express "softness."
In addition, by studying the broad animal
category to which the character belongs, it is
possible to make generalizations that can help
practitioners create and use animal characters
effectively. For example, if advertisers know that
the animal "cat" shares several positive core
meanings, they can create cat characters that
capitalize on those meanings. Alternatively, if
"cat" meanings contain negative attributes that
reflect badly on the associated product,
advertisers may want to use a different
character.
Method
It is difficult to explore the perceived meaning of
a trade character by asking subjects directly, as
their responses tend to be superficial and
descriptive. "Smokey Bear? Oh, he's brown and
wears a hat." Other qualitative methods, such as
in-depth interviewing, tend to be time- and laborintensive
C features that advertisers may want to
avoid. As an alternative, word association is an
easy and efficient method for exploring
psychological meaning. It can be administered
to a group and can elicit the meanings of more
than one animal per session, yet provides rich
information regarding cultural meaning. Szalay
and Deese (1978) state that because a word
association task does not require subjects to
communicate their intentions, it decreases
subjects' rationalizations, and it taps associations
that are difficult to express or explain. Further,
word association does not require thoughts to be
expressed in a structural manner. Instead, this
technique produces expressions of thought that
are immediate and spontaneous, and this
spontaneity, along with an imposed time
constraint, is thought to reduce subjects' selfmonitoring
and conscious editing of responses.
Finally, the method reduces experimenter bias
because no organization or categories are
11
imposed on subjects to limit their responses C a
primary draw-back of quantitative research. The
word association method is not new; other
marketing and advertising researchers have used
it to understand how consumers perceive
products (Kleine and Kernan 1991) and to
determine a product's attributes to aid in product
positioning (Friedmann 1986). However, perhaps
because it is "old hat," this method has been
consistently overlooked and underutilized in
consumer behavior research.
In the present study, informants were asked
to respond to verbal animal names during the
word association task (e.g., "bear") rather than to
visual images of the animal. Verbal animal names
are thought to elicit broad responses that reflect
much of the information that an individual has
learned to associate with the category, "bear." In
contrast, the way an animal is visually portrayed
can narrow its meaning (Berger 1984). A realistic
picture of a bear may elicit a different part of the
core meaning of "bear" than a cartoon bear.
Images of actual trade characters, such as
Smokey Bear or Snuggle, may elicit even narrower
meanings associated only with those characters.
Therefore, verbal animal names were used to
generate broad, complete responses. However, it
is possible that advertisers could use both verbal
and visual animals in a word association task
when creating characters. Responses to the
verbal animal name would provide core
meanings, while responses to the visual character
would provide a measure of how successfully the
particular representation of an animal captured
desired meanings. This possibility will be discussed
further in the conclusion section of this paper.
The informants for this study were 21 male
and 15 female undergraduate students enrolled
in an advertising management course at a major
state university. Students participated in the study
during their regular class time. Of these
respondents, 92% were between the ages of 20
and 25. The use of this student sample precludes
concluding that the results of this study reflect the
"true" cultural meaning of each animal. However,
this sample is useful to show that a common
cultural meaning for each animal exists in a
homogeneous population and can be elicited
through research, whether that population is
composed of undergraduate students or other
target markets of interest to advertisers. Each
informant received a package containing a
cover page, an instruction page, and five word
association sheets.
The instructions for the word association
task were read aloud and informants' questions

egarding the task were answered. For each word
association task, respondents had one minute to
write one-word descriptions of whatever came to
mind when they thought about the animal listed
at the top of the page (Szalay and Deese 1978).
Informants were instructed to write these words in
the order in which they came to mind and it was
stressed that there were no wrong answers. The
first animal listed in the package was lobster,
which was used as a practice task to familiarize
students with the word association method. After
completing the practice task, informants'
remaining questions about the task were
answered. Respondents then completed four
more animal word associations, responding to the
words: penguin, ant, gorilla, and raccoon. The
particular animals were chosen to reflect the
interests of the author; other animals could
illustrate the commonality of animal meanings as
well. The order in which the four animals were
presented was randomized to control for order
effects.
The words generated by informants in
response to the animal word association were
grouped into categories, or themes that emerged
from the data. Each animal was analyzed
separately, except lobster, the practice task,
which was not coded. For each animal, words
that were similar in meaning or that had a
common theme were grouped together. Each
informant's responses were added to the tentative
themes discovered in the previous informants'
responses, thus supporting those themes or
allowing them to be changed (Strauss and Corbin
1990). Guidelines suggested by Szalay and Deese
(1978) were followed when identifying common
themes.
Words that could not be placed into any
category were placed into an "other" category.
These words did not have an identifiable
association with the animal; they are thought to
be associations to words other than the animal
(i.e., chain associations) or words that show that
the respondent was thinking of something other
than the task at hand. There were only 10 to 16 of
these words for each animal.
A second researcher re-classified all of the
response words into the categories to check the
soundness of the themes. There was an initial 86%
agreement between researchers; disagreements
were resolved through discussion and re-analysis
of informant responses. The response words for all
of the animals are available from the author.
12
COGNITIVE MAP OF PENGUIN THEMES
The themes elicited in response to each animal
were illustrated using cognitive maps, representing
a pictorial overview of each animal's meaning.
The cognitive map summarizes the objects and
ideas that informants collectively associate with
each animal, and organizes these associations
into meaningful themes (Coleman 1992). The
cognitive map also identifies the number of times
each theme was mentioned, giving an idea of
the relative importance of each theme to the
animal's shared meaning.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
General Results
Informants mentioned between 315 and 386
words in response to each animal, or
approximately 9 to 11 words per individual. It was
surprising that more than 90% of informants'
responses could be classified into six or seven
main themes for each animal. In addition,
informants' words were easily coded into these
themes, reflecting a high degree of similarity
between respondents. Also, words with the highest
frequencies were mentioned by 8 to 25
individuals, which suggests a high degree of
consistency across individuals' responses. These
results support the idea that there exist shared
cultural meanings that consumers generally
associate with animals, and that these meanings
can be elicited through word association.
Interestingly, although it was not the intent
at the outset, the themes that emerged from the
data were remarkably similar between animals.
The primary themes mentioned by informants
include: (a) Appearance, (b) Habitat, (c)
Personality, (d) Human/animal interaction, (e)
Popular culture, and (f) Behavior. These six
categories seem to be most salient for
consumers, and may offer the greatest help in
creating animal characters for use in advertising
campaigns. Appearance summarizes informants'
mental images of the animal C how they expect
the animal to look; Habitat describes informants'
expectations of where these animals live and the
objects that surround them; Personality represents
the personality traits that informants associate with
each animal; Human/animal interaction
describes how humans coexist and interact with
these animals; while Behavior describes their
typical actions. Popular culture highlights cultural
references that already exist for each animal,

Fig. 1.
including sources such as television programs,
movies, books, and ads. The themes for each
animal are given below in greater detail.
Penguin
A cognitive map of the themes associated with
"penguin," along with the frequency with which
they were mentioned, are shown in Figure 1. The
dominant themes that emerge from the data are
Habitat and Appearance.
13
Habitat includes a natural habitat made up of the
subthemes of: (a) ice and snow, (b) cold, (c)
places such as Antarctica and the South Pole,
and (d) water. Informants also listed other
inhabitants of this environment such as fish, polar
bears, and whales. Informants also mentioned
Appearance as an important penguin theme,
focusing on the subthemes of: (a) color, which
was mostly black and white, (b) body parts such
as wings, beaks, and feet, and (c) the formal
tuxedo that penguins seem to be wearing.

Fig. 2.
Tuxedo was the most often mentioned word, with
23 mentions. This strong association seems to
have affected other themes, as discussed below.
Both of the dominant themes suggest that a
penguin is associated with rich visual imagery.
When confronted with the word "penguin," it
appears that individuals conjure up an image of
a penguin, and describe him (Appearance) and
his surroundings (Habitat). This interpretation is
supported by a third theme, Behavior, which was
mentioned less often. This category includes the
subthemes of: (a) waddle, (b) swim, and (c) other
actions, which also contribute to visual imagery.
14
Behavior was mentioned 44 times, suggesting that
respondents frequently visualize the penguin in
motion.
COGNITIVE MAP OF ANT THEMES
In analyzing the dominant themes, it seems that
penguins are viewed as having little interaction
with humans. The penguin appears to be isolated
from all but a few Eskimos (according to two
informants) except when viewed in a man-made
habitat (e.g., "Sea World"), and even that type of
interaction is rarely mentioned (2% of the time).

This lack of human/penguin interaction is not
surprising given penguins' remote location in the
world, and the fact that they are removed from
informants' daily experiences. Another theme,
Personality, is characterized by a duality; for the
most part, penguins are personified as silly
creatures (e.g., cute, funny, goofy, playful, etc.),
but they also can be viewed as formal animals
(e.g., distinguished, classy, behaved, mannered,
etc.), even by the same individuals. This
contradiction may stem from the fact that
penguins are strange-looking members of the
bird family and waddle comically instead of
flying, but also appear to wearing a tuxedo, a
cultural symbol of formality and manners.
The remaining penguin themes are
Popular culture and Categories. Penguins are
associated with a surprisingly large number of
popular culture references including movies,
videogames, mascots, and cartoons. Categories
refers to the hierarchical categorization of
objects, in which an object can be placed in a
superset (generalization hierarchy) or a subset
(part hierarchy) (Anderson 1990). For example, a
penguin is a bird (superset), and a type of
penguin is an emperor (subset). In the same way,
a group of penguins is called a flock, or a herd
(at least for one respondent).
Ant
A cognitive map of the "ant" themes is shown in
Figure 2. The three dominant ant themes are:
Categories, Habitat, and Human/ant interaction.
Categories includes: (a) type of ant, such as red
or army; (b) name of ant, such as worker or
queen; (c) group of ants, such as colony; and (d)
classification of ant, such as insect. The
importance of this theme for ant contrasts sharply
with that for penguin; Categories was mentioned
104 times for ant, but only 16 times for penguin.
This suggests that the ant themes are less
associated with images, and more associated
with verbal or propositional knowledge (Anderson
1990). That is, when asked to respond to the word
"ant," it appears that respondents retrieve verbal
information that they have learned in the past,
such as: the head ant is called the queen; the
male ant is called the drone; ants live in colonies;
etc. This interpretation is supported by another
dominant theme: Habitat, where the subthemes
of (a) hill and (b) man-made habitat also appear
to contain verbal associations. For example, the
most-often mentioned words in each subtheme,
"hill" and "farm," could be elicited with a fill-in-the-
15
blank word task (i.e., "ant____"). The same cannot
be said for penguin (e.g., "penguin ice," "penguin
cold," etc.). Some imagery is associated with ant,
though, as seen in the Habitat subtheme of (c)
picnic. For the most part, however, other themes
support verbal, non-imagery based associations
for ant. For example, the ant's image-based
themes, Appearance and Behavior, contain far
fewer words (31 and 7) than do these same
categories for penguin (103 and 44). Also, many
of the words in Appearance, such as antenna,
thorax, and abdomen, seem associated with
knowledge propositions, rather than image.
Surprisingly, even the Popular culture theme
supports a verbal view because many of the
responses in this category make use of word play
such as "Aunt Bea" and "antichrist."
A dominant theme for ant that did not exist
for penguin is Human/ant interaction. This focus on
interaction is understandable given that ants are
usually part of informants' daily environment and
experience. In this category, ants interact with
humans by annoying them and causing them
pain; "bite" was mentioned 19 times by
respondents. Humans interact with ants as
exterminators; we kill them. It is surprising then, that
under the theme Personality, ants are personified
as having more positive than negative qualities.
Words like "strong," "hard-working," and
"determined" are used by respondents. Perhaps
individuals have learned to associate these
positive qualities with ants through stories, songs,
and fables, such as "The Grasshopper and the
Ant," while negative associations, such as pest,
come from informants' own experiences. As is the
case with penguin, there is a duality in the ant's
perceived personality C industrious and diligent,
yet irritating and better off dead. These strongly
negative associations may signal advertisers to
use caution in utilizing this animal in ads.
Advertisers must be sure that only desirable
characteristics are transferred to the brand.
COGNITIVE MAP OF GORILLA THEMES
Gorilla
A cognitive map of "gorilla" themes is presented in
Figure 3. The dominant themes that emerge from
the data are Habitat, Appearance, and
Personality. Gorilla's dominant themes, like those
of penguin, are rich in visual imagery and appear
to be visually based. For example, Habitat
contains images of: (a) natural habitats, such as
the jungle; (b) man-made habitats, such as zoos

Fig. 3.
and cages; and (c) other inhabitants, most
notably bananas and monkeys. In the same way,
Appearance is composed of: (a) hairy; (b) colors;
(c) size; and (d) body parts, like big hands and big
teeth.
Gorilla is the first animal in this study to
have Personality as a dominant theme. As with
penguin and ant, gorilla is personified in two
different ways C as a fierce monster with negative
attributes, and as a gentle giant with positive
ones. The theme Popular culture gives a possible
reason for this duality. "King Kong," the movie(s)
that portrays a giant gorilla destroying cities and
16
battling other monsters, received 15 direct and
indirect mentions, while "Gorillas in the Mist," the
movie that portrays gorillas as human-like,
endangered creatures received 12.
Human/gorilla interaction appears as
another gorilla theme (as it did for ant), even
though the gorilla, like the penguin, is remote and
removed from respondents' daily lives. While the
interaction between humans and ants was
concrete and experience-based, the interaction
between humans and gorillas is viewed more
symbolically by informants, with the subthemes:
(a) ancestor, and (b) research. As our ancestors,

gorillas were associated directly with humans
through Darwin's theory of evolution. Informants
also recognized the research link between gorillas
and humans as we study them for their benefit
(e.g., "endangered") or for ours (e.g., "sign
language").
Raccoon
A cognitive map of "raccoon" themes is shown in
Figure 4. The dominant themes that emerge from
the responses are: Appearance, Habitat, and
Personality, suggesting that a raccoon’s
personality is an important part of its collective
meaning, in the same way as a gorilla's. The
words associated with raccoon also appear to be
imagery-based, like those for penguin and gorilla.
Unlike the observations made for other animals,
there is no separate theme of human/raccoon
interaction. The reason for this is that the idea of
interaction is woven throughout each category.
For example, informants listed both trees and
rooftops, wilderness and drainage ditches as
raccoon habitats. Food included crawfish and
trash, and other inhabitants were likely to be both
possums and coon dogs. This suggests that the
raccoon is not seen as having a separate
environment, like ant (e.g., "hill") or gorilla (e.g.,
"jungle"), which can sometimes overlap with a
human environment. Rather, the raccoon shares
our habitat in an integrated way.
The theme Personality includes: (a) thief;
(b) positive qualities, like cute and playful; and (c)
negative qualities, such as sneaky and
troublesome. Although informants listed both
negative and positive attributes for raccoon, its
personality does not appear to be a duality, unlike
the other animals studied. This is because
respondents viewed the raccoon as possessing
both positive and negative qualities at the same
time as part of the same personality role.
Raccoon is personified most often as a bandit (10
mentions), and also is called a rascal or a
scoundrel. It appears that we admire a raccoon’s
intelligence and audacity, while deploring the
mess they make when they intrude on our
property.
CONCLUSION
This study has supported the view that consumers
associate shared meanings with animals and has
provided a description of the common themes
found in the cultural meanings of four specific
animals. In addition, the results of this study
support the use of the word association method
to elicit those cultural meanings.
17
COGNITIVE MAP OF RACOON THEMES
Respondents generated six common themes of
interest to advertisers in response to each animal:
Appearance, Habitat, Personality, Human/animal
interaction, Popular culture, and Behavior. It is
clear that these themes have practical
applications in advertising. The themes of
appearance, habitat, and behavior can help
define a "natural" look for an animal and its
environment in an ad, while other popular culture
references in response to the word association
task can warn the advertiser if the animal has
already been linked to another product or idea.
The most meaningful themes for advertising use,
however, are personality and interaction. Through
these themes, an advertiser can explore the core
meanings that consumers associate with a
specific animal. If advertisers understand this core
meaning, they can appropriate all or part of the
animal's meaning for their products. Advertisers
can match positive qualities to the product
attributes or the advertising message, or avoid
using the animal if it elicits negative associations.
The benefit of eliciting core animal
meanings is that by using the associations that
already exist in our culture, advertisers do not
have to educate consumers as to what their
animal characters mean. Consequently, an ad's
message will be more quickly and easily
decoded and understood. Many advertisers
intuitively take advantage of shared meanings to
create suitable characters; this paper presents a
method for explicitly capitalizing on the shared
cultural meanings of animals in trade character
advertising.
This study has theoretical implications for
trade character research as well. By showing that
animals have common cultural meanings, the
results support the idea that animal-based trade
characters also embody these shared meanings.
Therefore, it is possible that trade characters can
be used to transfer a common meaning to a
product. Future trade character research should
focus on the transfer process by testing the ability
of trade characters to influence product
meanings.
In addition, the results of this study suggest
interesting avenues for future research regarding
visual trade character meanings. How does the
core meaning of an animal character (as
determined through consumer response to a
verbal animal name) relate to the meaning of the
character's visual image? For example, a study
could compare teens' responses to the word
"camel" on a word association task with their
responses to an image of Joe Camel. Does Joe

Fig. 4.
different? How do Joe's meanings, as an animal,
compare to the meanings of the human
Marlboro cowboy? The meanings of many existing
animal characters could be explored using these
methods. The use of the word association method
has applications beyond trade character
research. McCracken (1989, p. 319) calls for the
creation of an instrument to "detect and survey"
the cultural meanings that are present in celebrity
endorsers. Scott (1994) states more generally that
an exploration of how symbolic advertising
images are interpreted in consumer culture is
needed to advance consumer behavior
research.
18
Given its success in eliciting the cultural meaning
of animals, the word association method seems
suited to explore the cultural meanings of
celebrities and symbolic images in advertising as
well.
In conclusion, this study has shown that
consumers associate shared cultural meanings
with animal characters. These meanings can be
elicited through the word association method,
and contain common themes that can be used
to further advertising theory and practice.

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19
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Barbara Phillips is Professor of Marketing at the University of
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MN.

S
low Food’s aim is to foster an ethical
reflection about food consumption and
waste, encouraging people to become
more careful consumers with regards to the
environmental crisis and to culinary local
traditions. In this perspective, animals are not
mere objects, but sentient beings living in a
complex web of relations with human beings and
the environment, and carefully looked after by
wise and skilled farmers. Healthy and sustainable
meat means happy meat, coming from happy
animals.
In line with this philosophy, there are many
initiatives in Italy aimed at restoring the
relationship between people and their food, to
improve their health and more sustainable eating
practices. People are able to meet happy pigs,
cows, chickens, to visit their farms without a sense
of revulsion for their imprisoned lives, and to
experience a relationship with them, sentient and
social beings as they are, just like us. After all, it is
not only Hannibal the Cannibal’s privilege to have
friends for dinner.
The advertising campaign The young face
of agriculture, launched by the Lombardy Region
for the exhibition at the Museo Nazionale della
Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci,
profits from the ‘happy meat philosophy’ as a
communicative strategy of the rural development
in Lombardy. The aim is to create a bond
ANIMAL SUBJECTS:
LOCAL EXPLOITATION,
SLOW KILLING
The city of Milan will host Expo 2015, with the theme “Feeding the Planet. Energy for Life”. In view of this
occasion, the interest for culinary tradition and the global challenge of food security is rapidly growing. Farming
and livestock raising traditions plays a major role in Italy, homeland of the worldwide renowned Slow Food.
Text by Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo
20
between the eater and the eaten, underlining
that this kind of food is traditional and healthy. The
images seems to claim that there is no need to
worry, animals are treated just as we would like
them to be, healthily and humanely. Cows, pigs,
and ducks would put their face on this business,
so why don’t we just put ours? The campaign is
directed both to organic and local food industry
and it profits from the ‘green’ image of the good
shepherd who personally takes care of his
animals, granting them the well-being that is
necessary to keep them healthy and, obviously,
tasty. Ethical dilemmas on the exploitation and
killing of animals are washed away by localism,
sustainability, and tradition.
In the greening of the food industry,
slaughterhouses can actually have glass walls,
because the consumer is ethically numbed and
convinced that animals must die to feed people,
and farmers are working to do it in the best
possible way. Animals are no more ‘absent
referents’ (Adams 1990), but in their presence
their ‘sacrifice’ is legitimized by tradition. There
can be many different speciesist approaches to
the animal otherness, but they all usually fall
under two main categories: those that recognize
animals as subjects, and those that do not. The
latter has been highly discussed by philosophers
that, like Descartes, see animals as automata, as
matter at human beings’ disposal.

Regione Lombardia
L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture Changes the Face of Your Life) Regione Lombardia
21

Regione Lombardia
L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture
Changes the Face of Your Life) Regione Lombardia
On the contrary, the former perspective,
according to which animals are recognized as
sentient subjects and living others, is assumed by
the new category of the ‘bio-carnivores’, people
increasingly informed about the risks for their
health and, sometimes, for the environment. The
approach of this group of well-informed people
makes it easier to digest the exploitation and
killing of animals, because their suffering and
privation is made less apparent by claims of
tradition and sustainability. Moreover, since the
relationship with animal subjects is restored, the
killing is a much more serious act in ethical terms.
Along with the bio-carnivores, this
advertisement appeals to the category of the
locavores. The locavores are those people that
eat only local and seasonally available food. The
word was coined in 2005 by four women in San
Francisco and in 2007 it was elected as Word of
the Year by the New Oxford America Dictionary [1] .
Many locavores follows the arguments proposed
by Michael Pollan (2006) in his widely known The
Omnivore Dilemma, in which he claims that
sustainably raised local meat is more
environmental friendly than a vegan/vegetarian
22
diet. Their diet certainly opposes the negative
effects of globalization, but in doing so it appeals
to a pastoral ideal of pure and local based
lifestyle that has never existed and that – provided
that it is more environmentally sustainable –
certainly it would not sustain the ever-growing
nutritional needs of the human population. As
Vasile Stnescu (2009) clearly shows, Pollan
argues against organic meat because it
«represents a false pastoral narrative, something
produced by the power of well crafted words and
images yet lacking ethical consistency, reality, or
ultimately an awareness of animals
themselves» (Stnescu 2009, 9), but he can
easily be accused of using the same false
pastoral narrative in his defense of local meat.
In the image, the human-animal
hybrydization is exploited to assure the consumer
that the milk or salami they would like to buy are
perfectly safe and approved by their ‘providers’:
cows and pigs are the young faces of the
agricultural business, willing to feed human
beings’ voraciousness. On their part, human
beings become well aware of the origins of their
food. The absent referent – a concept that
makes the massacre of the animals invisible and
the disregarded eating of meat possible – is
present again. Animals are subjects again and
the advertisement, even though displaying an
hybridization of human and animal bodies, is not
perceived as ridiculous or outrageous.
Nonetheless, animals do not deserve an ethical
treatment that overcomes mere considerations of
utility and profit.
References
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2010). New York:
Continuum, 1990.
Cole, Matthew. "From 'Animal Machines' to 'Happy Meat'? Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary
and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse." Animals 1, no. 1 (2011):
83-101.
OUPblog. Oxfor University Press, http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/ (accessed March 6,
2012).
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin,
2006.
Stnescu, Vasile. "'Green' Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of
the Local." The Journal of Critical Animal Studies VII, no. 3 (2009): 18-55.
Leonardo Caffo is Phd Candidate at University of Torino (Italy),
member of Labont: laboratory for ontology andAssociate Fellow
of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Is editor in chief of "Animal
Studies" - his latest book is La possibilità di cambiare: azioni
umane e libertà morali (Mimesis: Milan 2012).
For Adele Tiengo’s biography please see page 8

Concern about the impact of livestock on the environment has generated debates about how best to manage
dairy farming practices. Soil erosion and compaction and loss of biodiversity from grazing and silage production,
ammonia and methane emissions, as well as high levels of water consumption, have all been identified as direct
effects on the environment from dairy farming activity. [i] Whilst the issues have been well reported in the press,
there has been little in the way of imagery to accompany the environmental critique of milk production. Instead,
much of the popularly available imagery of dairy farming has been generated by advertising which continues to
deploy culturally-specific visions of contented cows in rural landscapes.
Text by Claire Molloy
W
ith little actual access to farmed animal
spaces, the majority of western urbandwellers’
experiences of livestock and
farming practices are heavily mediated, often
through food advertising. In such cases, the
discourse of farming and the spaces in which
animals are farmed are constructed to appeal to
the consumer, and both implicitly and explicitly
offer reassurance that farmed animals are
healthy and emotionally satisfied. Advertisements
for dairy products offer imagery that relies on
previously established associations between cows
and green fields to sustain meanings, such as
“natural” and “healthy,” which are then assigned
to dairy products. In turn, the imagery reinforces
associations between cows and their freedom to
roam in natural surroundings, maintaining
connections between dairy cows’ lack of
confinement and their willing productivity. Dairy
farming thus maintains strong cultural associations
with natural landscapes and rural tranquillity, and
such practices occupy a zone in the cultural
REMEDIATING COWS
AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF
ETHICAL LANDSCAPE
23
imagination that is markedly removed from the
urban industrial experience.
In reality, eighty per cent of the UK
landscape has been shaped by farming
practices. [ii] As a result, the industry has a major
impact on both the management of land and
the development of the landscape. In 2006,
agriculture accounted for seventy-seven per cent
of land use in the UK, amounting to 18.5 million
hectares, of which, around thirty-eight per cent is
grass and thirty per cent is land, given over to
rough grazing for domestic livestock. Employing
over half a million people, the value of farming to
the UK economy is substantial, generating around
£5.6 billion per year, of which the livestock
industry accounts for £7,351 million of
output. [iii] The combined UK cow population
numbers, around 3.8 million, and of these the
larger proportion, slightly over 2 million, are dairy
cows. Decreases in the dairy cow population over
fifty years from 2.6 million, in 1956, [iv] reflect
changes in livestock management, policy,

Ed Edwards and Dave Masterman
Made by Cows Since 1886, Anchor Original Butter Co. CHI and Partners, London CHI and Partners
regulation, and farming practices. In short, fewer
cows are now producing more milk. Indeed, dairy
cows deliver the greatest proportion of output
generated by livestock farming in the UK, which,
in 2006, accounted for £2,501 million worth of
product. In terms of land management, UK dairy
farms continue to use hedges and dry stone walls
to divide fields and, consequently, milk
production shapes the rural landscape.
Although it is a New Zealand brand,
Anchor Butter advertising in the UK has utilised a
range of meanings derived from the symbolic
relationships between cows and the landscape.
Throughout the campaigns of the 1990’s, the
television advertisements featured Jersey dairy
cows, despite the fact that the majority of New
Zealand’s four million dairy cows were black and
white Holstein-Freisans. [v] With a “softer” and more
appealing “look,” Jersey cows were referred to as
“lucky cows,” depicted in lush green fields
dancing, singing and proclaiming their good
fortune at being able to “chew the cud and
browse.” An emphasis was placed on the
consumption of “green green grass” as the
relationship between cows and spaces reworked
the production cycle of milk so that the quality of
the final product, butter, was entirely dependent
on the consumption of high quality pasture. Such
imagery short-circuited the realities of the
processes by which cows are farmed and bovine
lactation is managed, and instead reduced the
cycle to a simplified, and less ethically
24
problematic, process of “grass in- butter out.”
Each advertisement in the “lucky cow”
campaign included some manner of enclosure,
which ranged from white picket fencing, to
wooden ranch-style fencing, and traditional British
hedgerows. This changed in the next campaign
which sought to reflect the company’s awareness
of consumer concerns about welfare standards.
As a result, the meanings of green spaces and
landscape were re-worked to operate within a
discourse of welfare. Repositioned as the “freerange
butter company,” Anchor advertisements
replaced live action commercials with animated
cows that appeared to be made from “Fuzzy
Felt:” soft fabric shapes that were popularly
recognisable and sold as a children’s toy in the
UK. No longer restricted to representations of
Jersey cows, the advertisements also depicted
black and white and brown cows, references to
Holstein-Freisans and Ayshire breeds. In the
television advertisements, an animated cow
kicked its way out of a shed, with an
accompanying voice-over that stated: “There’s
no such thing as the great indoors. Only our cows
are free to roam all year round.” In other ads, two
cows studied a map of their extensive available
space and another kicked off human footwear
whilst a voice-over declared “If cows were meant
to be kept indoors they’d be born with
slippers.” Intertextual references to the film The
Great Escape were used in a further
advertisement that depicted a cow on a

Ed Edwards and Dave Masterman
The Great Escape, Anchor Original Butter Co. CHI and Partners, London CHI and Partners
motorcycle trying to jump a fence to escape
from farmers armed with pitchforks. The advert
used the film’s title music and the setting,
although visually stripped-back to incorporate
impressions of snow topped peaks; reminiscent of
the familiar alpine setting used for the original
motorcycle chase scene with Steve McQueen.
Print advertisements that accompanied the freerange
campaign used Polaroid pictures of cows
in front of well-known landmarks such as the Eifel
Tower and a pyramid, with the strapline: ”Our
cows are free to roam.”
Concerns were raised about the
company’s depiction of “happy cows,” and the
free-range campaign received public criticism in
1997 when an advert that depicted a calf
“hatching” from an egg then relaxing with its
mother amongst other contented Jersey cows
attracted fifty-four viewer complaints to the
Independent Television Commission. Public
objections to the advertisement were reported by
the ITC as including:
a) that the use of the term "free-range"
implied the cows used to produce Anchor
are allowed to keep their calves with
them, are in pasture all year round or are
more humanely treated than usual.
25
(Some farmers amongst the
complainants pointed out that cattle
in New Zealand traditionally have their
tailsdocked);
b) that Anchor butter is no more natural or
pure than other brands;
(ITC, 1997, ”Anchor Butter”)
None of the complaints were upheld by the ITC,
which, in its assessment of the objections, stated
that the advertiser had confirmed that “the New
Zealand cows used to produce Anchor Butter
were kept in pasture all year round which justified
the use of the term ‘free-range’” (ITC, 1997). The
complaints regarding the implication that calves
stayed with their mothers received no response
from the ITC, although the issue of tail-docking
was accounted for in the following way: “The
animals shown in the commercial had not had
their tails docked but the ITC did not think that
inaccuracy was significant enough to make the
advertising misleading” (ITC, 1997). Furthermore
the report noted that “The ITC did not think the
commercial implied that Anchor is better than
other brands, rather that being in pasture all year
is a more ‘natural’ existence” (ITC, 1997). Although
consumer objections to Anchor Butter advertising
were directed toward the misrepresentation of

WPP Agency Grey London
It’s Not About Great Britain WPP Agency Grey London
farming practices and demonstrated tensions
between interpretations of the advertisement and
concerns over the implied meanings about cow
welfare, the ITC’s response made it clear that
what was at issue was the representation of the
product and not the misrepresentation of the
realities of the lives of dairy cows.
In an attempt to recover butter-making
within the discourse of tradition, a 2010 Anchor
Butter commercial returned to live action and
depicted cows leaving the fields to work in a
factory with the strap-line: “Made by cows since
1886.” The aim of the £10 million campaign was
to position the company as the “Original Butter
Co.” [vi] A country music version of the Guns N’
Roses song Paradise City with the lyrics: “Take me
down to a paradise city, where the grass is green
and the girls are pretty, oh won’t you please take
me home” accompanied images of cows
“clocking-on,” operating production machinery,
performing quality checks, and packaging the
butter for delivery in a nineteenth century factory
setting housing contemporary industrial
technologies. In the simulation of nineteenth
century factory production, the advert reimagined
the relationship between cows and milk
by excluding the process of milking. Rather than
“producing milk,” cows “make butter.” In
constructing new associations between the
company and tradition, Anchor Butter also shed
its “free-range” identity. And although the
advertisement placed cows within the confines of
the factory setting, taking on the humanised roles
of operatives, the concept of the advertisement
suggested that butter-making retained links with
traditional agricultural and industrial practices. The
opening and closing images still drew directly on
the aesthetic traditions of nineteenth century
British landscape painting with large romanticised
26
landscapes at daybreak and sunset. In this way, a
nostalgia discourse framed butter-making as
traditional and the company as having
authenticity through the rather surreal imagery of
cows being happily complicit in their own
exploitation.
A challenge to the Anchor campaign
came in the form of a counter-campaign by
Country Life Butter, which used the former
member of the 1970’s punk band The Sex Pistols,
John Lydon, to front its advertising. The central
message of the campaign was that Country Life
Butter is British and Anchor Butter is from New
Zealand. The Country Life campaign underscored
how robust the associations were between the
Anchor Butter brand and national identity, and
the counter-campaign sought to dismantle those
meanings and reclaim imagery of “British” cows
and countryside. The television advertisement
showed John Lydon experiencing various aspects
of British rural life: the British countryside was
depicted as sheep on a country lane, and the
concept of “British milk” was represented by black
and white cows chasing Lydon through an
expanse of green fields. The pack shot at the end
of the advertisement returned to the image of
open green fields. The print adverts that were
placed in broadsheets and the popular press
used an image of Lydon bursting through the
page of the newspaper under the “headlines:”
”Revealed: Anchor Butter is from New Zealand”
(broadsheet advertisement, July 2010); and
“Anchor’s from New Zealand” (tabloid
advertisement, July 2010). The campaigns
mounted by Anchor and Country Life revealed
the high investment of meaning in cows and the
landscape, and by extension, the commercial
value of both.
Macnaughten and Urry argue that
representations of natural space are socially and
symbolically produced and that “different
features of the landscape are celebrated within
different societies” (Macnaughten and Urry, 1998,
p.182). The spaces appropriated in advertising by
Anchor Butter, for the UK market, and Country Life,
borrowed from established conventions of
representing “the countryside” as peaceful, green
and fertile, and symbolically opposed to the
industrialisation of towns and cities. In this way, the
production of meanings around cows and
landscape are mutually reinforcing. Landscape
can operate through a multiplicity of discourses
as a form of nostalgia that recalls an idealised
past and as a symbol of freedom, of
“naturalness,” and in opposition to
industrialisation. Each of these meanings

translates into context for the bovine body, which
is then understood as part of a cultural and social
heritage, and which, in turn, reproduces the
sense that cows have always had freedom to
roam and have always been apart from
industrialisation. Locating cows within the
idealised landscapes of a particular country or
region thus reinforces symbolic associations
between a sense of place, conceived through
the highly organised imagery of the natural world,
and the ”naturalness” of the life of a dairy cow. In
doing this, the connections allude to milk
production as a wholesome process that takes
place in only the most ideal of locations. A
proliferation of cow imagery in UK advertising
suggests that, at a symbolic level, some animals
are more economically significant than others.
This concurs with a 2002 survey in which cows
appeared as the eighth most effective animal for
advertising purposes.
One reason for the popularity of cows (as
images) may be that their meanings within the
circuits of capitalism have a legacy in nineteenth
century landscape painting, where benign
bovine bodies have long been associated with a
calm and tranquil British rural life - a culturally
imagined antidote to industrialisation and
urbanisation. In this way, the reality of the bovine
experience has been mediated by landscape
painting and remediated by the advertising
discourses discussed here. The landscapes take
on new meanings in the light of welfare
discourses. Open spaces that signalled nonindustrialisation
are transformed by welfare
discourses which reconfigure the landscape as
an ethical space through associations with the
meanings of “free-range” and “free-to-roam.” As
a result, in advertising for dairy-related products,
agricultural spaces overlap with the meanings
and values that are assigned to nature and “the
countryside,” and these in turn close down the
opportunities for questions about welfare
standards and reduce dairy farming practices to
an extremely narrow range of representations.
References
[i] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock
Production
[ii] Source: The National Trust (2001) Farming Forward
[iii] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock
Production.
[iv] Source: Miller & Robertson, 1959, p.432.
27
[v] Source: NZ Government website, “Dairy cattle numbers
1895-2005” online at http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/dairying-
and-dairy-products/10/1/1 [accessed 4 May 2010].
[vi] Source: Marketing Week, 26 February 2010 online at
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/anchor-launches-
%C2%A310m-ad-push-to-support-brandrepositioning/3010501.article
[accessed 3 March 2010].
This piece is adapted with permission from ‘Farmed: Selling Animal
Products’ in Popular Media and Animals (Molloy, 2012).
Professor Claire Molloy is Professor of Film, Television and Digital
Media at Edge Hill University. Her publications include the books:
Popular Media and Animals (2012), Memento (2010), Beyond
Human:xfrom animality to transhumanism (2011) and American
IndependentxCinema: indie, indiewood and beyond.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE
A white dog with brown ears sits in front of a gramophone, head directed to its brass-horn and slightly tilted to one
side. The original painting was purchased in 1899, along with its full copyright, by the emerging Gramophone
Company from the artist Francis Barraud.
Text by Concepcion Cortes Zulueta
Francis Barraud
His Master’s Voice, Oil on Canvas, 1899 His Master’s Voice
28

T
here seems to be some confusion regarding
the early history of the painting: if it was
made while Nipper, the dog, was still alive; if
it is based or not on a photograph; what was
Barraud’s initial plan; what was the phonograph,
then replaced by a gramophone, supposedly
playing, or whose idea was its final title, among
others. What remains obvious, though, is the
worldwide diffusion of an image that acted and
has been used both as a brand and as an
advertisement by several companies, past and
present.
Apart from the mystery surrounding its
historical details, the legend accompanying this
domestic scene shared more or less the same
features everywhere. In fact this myth is what
fascinates me the most. As for its overall content I
feel inclined to keep the version offered by my
Spanish parents, born in the fifties, when feigning
ignorance I asked them if the phrase “la voz de
su amo” - literally, “his master’s voice”- sounded
familiar to them. Both burst out: “of course!”,
talked about records and then took turns to
explain the touching story of the dog who froze
close to a gramophone playing the voice of his
late master, seemingly recognising it and maybe
trying to make sense of what was happening.
Besides the cuteness of the little dog, it is
plausible a considerable chunk of the strength
and virality of the picture lie in the questions
pointed out by those two words, seeming and
maybe. Do dogs identify the sounds coming out
of gramophones as someone’s voice? Many
people, common people, guided by the slightly
cocked head and their own experiences would
answer positively, stating that dogs do identify
people’s voices in recordings and react to them,
in some way or another. But are dogs able to
understand these recorded sounds as such, and
not as an actual person? To what level do they
understand what is happening? This is, in fact, a
more complex issue.
In any case, the development of devices
that recorded our audiovisual environment
prompted comparisons between our senses and
perception, and those of animals. For example,
to what degree they were tuned to each other, if
animals saw, heard and perceived as we did or
not. Recorders interposed another step between
the actual world and perception. A level which
could be easily manipulated and played with,
fabricating products, such as photographs, films
or audio-recordings, that in some circumstances
even posed as reality. But knowing what a
gramophone was and what it did, kept ourselves
aware and complicit with its secrets, and safe not
29
to be fooled by the machine.
However dogs, poor little dogs, were
suspected of not being so smart. So maybe
Nipper did recognise his master’s voice, and sat
there interested, wondering, head titled to one
side. Nevertheless, apparently he never reached
any final conclusion. For what we know, he may
be puzzled by the event in the same way that he
may not recognise his own reflection on the
brass-horn, or in a mirror. This scene was a
harmless alternative to persuade about the fidelity
of the recorded sound without the risk of
offending the intelligence of the human - male?-
customers, and strengthening simultaneously their
confidence and dominant position back at
home, sweet home. Maybe this was not just a
portrait of man as master of animals and
creation. After all, one could be the master not
only of his own dog, but also of servants, children,
wife and the whole household.
The success of the main strokes of this
scheme can be validated by the existence of
recent variations, very similar although focused in
sight instead of hearing. Like two 2011 Samsung
Galaxy commercials that show a hen and a little
girl deceived by the smart-phone vivid images.
The hen, brooding the eggs in a screen, and the
girl dropping the gadget inside a goldfish bowl
trying to save a clownfish that was not really there.
There are also plenty of Internet videos with dogs
tilting their heads when faced with persons in
online video-chats. This may be possibly because
we find that charming, as well as the floppy and
genetically selected neotenic ears that may
partially cause so much tilting in order to avoid
the obstruction of the sound waves.
Beyond the puzzlement that we attribute
to the dog, there is another strong emotional
content in the painting. Is Nipper aware of what
death is? Is he mourning his beloved master?
Perhaps to feed our human pride we would feel
tempted to answer that he is, but we don’t know
for sure. On the other hand if the depicted
vignette were a scientific experiment to check if
Nipper possessed a death concept, nowadays it
probably would have been considered as
ethically unacceptable like the experiment in
which Colin Allen and Mark Hauser described and
then challenged, consisting on studying the
reaction of a female monkey when listening to a
recorded call of her dead infant. However, the
brown and white dog can be labelled as an
update of the Victorian topic of the mourning
dog. A topic also found in other times and
cultures. For instance, in Japan, where a statue
remembers Hachiko the faithful.

All these melodramatic associations seem
especially suitable for a company devoted to
music, which entangles love, life and death.
Matters perfectly captured in what looks like a
plain homey scene. If we mix together these with
the human-animal perception riddle, the
shameless compliment to our amazing human
abilities and the appeal of the dog’s slightly tilted
head, what else could we ask for in an ad?
Concepción Cortés Zulueta is a PhD candidate in art history at
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Her thesis project,
interdisciplinary in its scope, focuses in the presence of non human
animals in contemporary art from the '60s to the beginning of the
XXIst Century. She explores issues of animal agency, perception,
creativity, and changes in the attitudes of contemporary artists
towards animals. Specially in their attempts to collaborate with them.
She has being doing research stays at National Art Library, V&A,
London; New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (NZCHAS),
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, and she is currently at MIT,
Cambridge, until January 2013.
30

P
revious academic research looking at how
animals have been portrayed in popular
culture – specifically the tabloid press
(Herzog and Galvin, 1992), greetings cards (Arluke
and Bogden, 2010), visual arts (Kalof et al. 2011),
and T.V. and print adverts (Lerner and Kalof, 1999;
Phillips, 1996; Spears et al. 1996) - has generated
a number of themes, or roles, in which animals
are frequently cast. The popular media has often
used animals as a symbolic and allegorical short
hand to quickly conjure up simple constructs;
loved one, saviour, pest, object of wonder,
attacker, and victim, to name a few. Animals
have also been repeatedly presented in roles
such as that of human tool and emblem of
nature at large. However, there are additional,
more complex, factors affecting representation
that have also been identified by previous
research. These include the degree of
anthropomorphism of the animal, whether social
or moral valuations are made regarding the
animal, if any transformative effects can be seen
THE TIGER IN THE TANK
Despite the complexities and inconstancies of the human-animal relationship non-human animals [1] have been
intimately interwoven within human culture for thousands of years. Representations of animals exist across many
mediums, with roots clearly visible in Palaeolithic cave paintings and early carvings, evolving human language,
music and drama, and narrative fables and folk stories. Unsurprisingly then animal representations continue to be
rife throughout our modern lives and across much popular media.
Text by Cluny South
31
between product and animal, and finally whether
our understanding of the meaning of a product
or an animal is likely to be fundamentally altered
by association with the other. This latter point, the
potential power of popular media to shape the
human-animal relationship, has been notably
considered by Spears et al. (1996), who
constructed a symbolic communications model
(SCM) in order to examine how a culturally
constructed world (CCW) might interact with
representations of animals in marketing contexts.
Such was the backdrop to the study I
decided to carry out when my curiosity was
ignited by a parallel advertising research project.
My previous industry experience background in
factual animal programming had already amply
fuelled my interest in popular animal
representations. For some time I had wondering if
animals suffered in the popular media, a little like
typecast actors, constrained by culturally
constructed roles - roles that were generated by
human stereotypes and biases of what it was like

Fig. 1.
Symbolic communications model (SCM) Nancy Spears
to be a given species? For example, did hyenas
ever get cast as anything but the bad guys in
adverts; were dogs always “mans best friend;”
and were butterflies ever anything but beautiful?
Added to this, I now wondered if there were any
signs of changing uses of animals in advertising,
and whether different products used animals in
different ways. Finally I wasn’t just interested in how
the media was portraying the outside world, like
Spears et al., I also wondered if stereotyping in
the media could have an impact on an animal’s
real life world? Perhaps this project would give me
a chance to find out more.
I set about a review and content analysis
of animals in car advertising to see if the use of
animals in a single product category displayed
any of the themes previously noted by
researchers, or revealed interesting new trends.
Over several months I documented and analysed
over 500 car advertisements that had aired
globally during the period of 2000 to 2012. My
limitations were as follows: The adverts must have
been in print advertising (as opposed to video or
web); any contextual copy (text) crucial to
meaning must be translatable using Google
32
translate (if it was not originally in English); that the
advertisements were available using web based
search engines (Google, Bing) or through
advertising agency archive site searches; that the
category was auto or bike related; and finally,
that at least one animal was featured as an
integral part of the advertising message.
Bulls pull….but Cheetahs are Go!
What I found confirmed past research, but also
provided interesting variations, perhaps some
unique to car advertising. The symbolic themes
previously identified: threat, victim, tool use, pest,
imaginary person, wild nature and object of
wonder, could all be seen fairly consistently
across depictions of animals in car advertising
over the last ten years. For example, sharks and
crocodiles were nearly always coded as
attacking or threatening, and likewise brown and
black bears were frequently cast in a threatening
role. However, there were also unexpected
nuances. Polar bears were often depicted as
victims, perhaps due to associations with melting
polar ice caps and sensitivities regarding climate

Leo Burnett France
500 Black Jack, 2009 Leo Burnett France
33

Leo Burnett Istanbul
How Far Can You Go?, 2010 Leo Burnett Istanbul
change from an auto related industry. Another
bear exception was the teddy bear, widely used
to represent cute and cuddly, and one that
provides one of the more thought-provoking
contributions regarding representation of animals
in auto advertising through its depiction in the
2009 Fiat Blackjack campaign.
Moving away from animal threat use,
elephants and hippos were consistently popular
animals for symbolising both wild nature and
large size/carrying capacity in car advertising.
Rhinos were synonymous, likewise, with toughness
across a range of auto related products, and
bulls were without exception representative of
unbridled engine power. When it came to power
in general, however, there were other animals
waiting in the wings. Horses, in contrast to bulls,
were often used to discuss bridled, controllable,
even intelligent, power; a concept that appears
to be growing in popularity, perhaps in reference
to increasing concerns of responsible energy use
and a potential move away from the heady days
of raw power, as one of the main selling features
in auto advertising.
Despite this move, however, acceleration,
speed and power continue, to date, to be
attributes that feature prominently in car
advertising and, not surprisingly, big cats excel in
34
this category of symbolic use. While tigers, and to
a lesser extent leopards, jaguars and pumas,
were often used to indicate a powerful ride, the
cheetah, as a single species, appeared the most
frequently representative of “fast” across the
adverts surveyed. Cheetahs were linked to
acceleration and speed time and again in car
advertising, to the extent that even the smallest
hint of some spots or the blur of its feline shape
was often enough to suggest a sports car model.
More camels, pandas and frogs…
As much as cats seem eternally popular in car
advertising, there were some clear shifts to be
seen in terms of animal popularity in the adverts
over the decade reviewed. While bulls have seen
a representative decrease in car ads, there
appears to have been a rise in adverts containing
polar bears, penguins, frogs, fish, butterflies and
pandas; all of which were frequently associated
with environmental vulnerability and habitat
concerns within the adverts. Increasing
environmental awareness has, in all likelihood,
also contributed to another animal’s popularity
levels - the camel. This species, clearly on the rise
in the adverts surveyed, was almost always

DDB Berlin
The Golf GTI Edition 30, 2007 DDB Berlin
associated with fuel efficiency. The camel’s
newfound popularity across many types of
vehicle is perhaps not surprising in a world of
changing car priorities. On a more specific level,
the increase of the 4x4 SUV market has hailed a
trend shift in certain animal usage, with
”surefooted” goats, and animals traditionally
associated with wild nature (elephants, hippos,
lions, to name a few), seeing increased exposure.
Perhaps most notably, all the rising consumer
expectations of car attributes, combined with
increasing audience sophistication in terms of
advertising language, has also heralded the birth
of animal combinations. Assisted by
improvements in computer graphics, these
animal combinations have allowed several
aspects of a car, such as fuel economy and
speed, or ruggedness and beauty, to be
promoted in a single advert. This in turn has
resulted in more complex characterisations in
terms of animal usage, and will be an interesting
trend to follow.
35
Seriously not like us.
In terms of areas in which car advertising
appeared to diverge from other advertising,
anthropomorphism somewhat stood out. Animals
were occasionally portrayed as human-like but
more often the reverse was true. When animals
are used anthropomorphically in popular culture
humour is often a part of the equation, and this
understandably sits uncomfortably with car
publicity. Cars are a serious purchase and this
was reflected in how animals were associated
with the product in car advertising. It was
generally rare for an anthropomorphic animal to
be shown representing the product itself.
Rather, car advertisers, as we have noted,
showed a tendency to trade on the powerful
transformative potential of animal symbolism and
preferred making their products seem more
animal-like. The hope was frequently that
associations between a favoured animal’s
attributes and the car would improve the
perceptions of the car’s features in this category,
even when links were fairly tenuous. For example,

McCann Erikson
Opel Astra, 2007 McCann Eriksson
an elephant image might be used to make a
family car appear more spacious, and a
cheetah image could suggest racy, even if in
reality these attributes in the product were
relatively minor.
Looking at how transformation might
happen in reverse drew me into the area of
social moral valuations. A number of animals
have historically become so tightly associated
with certain human values that this association
may be considered to have had a transformative
effect on cultural perceptions of the animal itself.
Butterflies and doves have historically been the
beneficiaries of an association with the human
values of freedom and hope, and in adverts
these animals are rarely seen in a negative light.
Likewise ants and bees have frequently been
associated with human constructions of
industriousness, and are favourably considered as
a result, whilst conversely bats and wolves have
lost out for centuries due to our cultural tendency
to link them with human notions of darkness and
evil. The badges of honour, or dishonour, we dish
out, unfortunately tend to “dog” the recipients,
36
colouring how we understand them as an animal
species within a wider cultural framework.
The lot of animals in car advertising is
similar to that of animals in other advertising
categories, as well as that of non-animal
characters, in this respect. For better or worse,
advertising, along with much popular media,
uses shorthand to efficiently evoke meaning and
mood, with minimal explanation. Animals are a
useful tool in this undertaking, and one that has
been utilised for decades. While the good guys
and bad guys are typecast in roles that are rarely,
if ever, questioned, the degree to which
movement may be possible, in terms of altering
these associations in popular culture, is an
interesting debate. Recent research into the
improving North American public perceptions of
cetaceans (whales and dolphins) following the
popular TV series “Flipper,” as well as the shifting
North Korean categorization of dogs, from food
item to pet animal, suggests that attitudes
towards animal groups can alter surprisingly
quickly and dramatically under certain
circumstances, bringing a ray of hope that one

David&Goliath
Fast and Fuel Efficient, 2009 David&Goliath
day the hyena may indeed star as a film’s happy
hero!
So, finally, my last question - does the
representation of animals in advertising matter in
terms of human attitudes to animals in the real
world? For me it’s a clear “yes,” for the reason that
the repeated casting of animals in stereotyped
roles across the popular media inevitably serves
to reinforce and perpetuate the prejudiced
constructs we have amassed around non-human
species, as evinced by Spears et al. The effects of
species bias based on the “charm effect” are
surprisingly pervasive, and even academic
researchers admit to preferencing charismatic
animals in scientific research (Lorimer, 2007).
While a tendency to categorize animals
into “good and bad” and “them and us” may be
a natural product of the human-animal
relationship, and our very anthropocentric worldview,
it comprehensively fails to evaluate and
understand animals as they really are. An
appreciation of the natural world is not served by
portraying certain animal species as harmless
emblems of peace and innocence whilst casting
others as dark villains of nature, since these are
projected human constructs. Animals are clearly
37
more complex and intrinsically valuable, both as
species and individuals. Like many marginalised
out-groups, animals will likely benefit from a
deeper scrutiny, and perhaps this will prove the
best way to tackle one of the last major
challenges of human prejudice – that of
speciesism.
Notes:
1) Non-human animals from now on will be referred in this
text to simply as animals for reasons of brevity.
References:
Arluke, A. and Bogdan, R. (2010). Beauty and the Beast:
Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo
Postcards, 1905-1935. Syracuse University Press.
Herzog, H.A. and Galvin, S.L. (1992). Animals, Archetypes,
and Popular Culture: Tales from the Tabloid Press. Anthrozoos.
Vol. 5 (2). Pp. 77-92.
Kalof L., Zammit-Lucia, J., and Kelly, J.R. (2011). The
meaning of animal portraiture in a museum setting:
Implications for conservation. Organization & Environment.
Vol. 24 (2). Pp. 150-174.

Jung von Matt
They Will Survive Jung von Matt
Lerner, J.E., and Kalof, L. (1999). The animal text: Message
and meaning in television advertisements. The Sociological
Quarterly. Vol. 40 (4). Pp. 565-586.
Lorimer, J. (2007). "Nonhuman charisma." Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25(5). Pp. 911 – 932.
Phillips, B.J. (1996). Advertising and the cultural meaning of
animals. Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 23. Pp. 354-
360.
Spears, N.E., Mowen, J.C., and Chakraborty, G. (1996).
Symbolic role of animals in print advertising: Content analysis
and conceptual development. Journal of Business Research.
Vol. 37. Pp. 87-95
38
Cluny South is currently working on an Interdisciplinary PhD at the
University of British Columbia, in the area of Conservation Psychology
and Marketing. Her PhD research looks at how attitudes to animals
are shaped, and what effect perceiving animals as “in-group” or
“out-group” members has for preferences towards them. Previously
she worked for over a decade as a Natural History producer in the
UK, primarily creating factual programming for the BBC NHU. She has
a B.A. in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s School of Art and worked
with live animals in installations and performances in London in the
late ‘80’s. She has experience in journalism, production design,
publishing and freelance writing, and currently works part-time as a
researcher and consultant in the area of public attitudes to animals,
the environment and conservation. She lives in Vancouver with her
partner, two children, a dog and two gerbils.

Kessanlv
Bovril by Electrocution from The Graphic, Christmas Number, 1891
39
BOVRIL BY
ELECTRICUTION
I first came across this illustration whilst browsing through Leonard de Vries’s fascinating collection, Victorian
Advertising, about twelve years ago. I was looking for something else at the time – examples of late Victorian
electric belt advertisements as part of a project on nineteenth-century medical electricity. Instead, this one jumped
out of the page at me.
Text by Iwan Rhys Morus

Electric belt advertisements have a certain
charm all of their own and can be extremely
informative, but this illustration fascinated me
– and still does. It seemed to capture in one
rather quirky scene the whole curiosity, complexity
and contrariness of electricity’s place in late
Victorian culture. The picture itself is an
advertisement for Bovril – a thick, dark brown,
gloopy beef extract, usually consumed either as a
spread on toast or diluted to make beef tea – that
appeared in the popular magazine The Graphic
in 1891. The ad shows some remarkably
complacent looking cattle about to be
sacrificially electrocuted in order to manufacture
that wonder-working product. The date is
significant of itself of course, being only the year
after the first electrical execution of a human
being took place in New York on 6 August 1890.
The Graphic, in which the advertisement
appeared, had been established in 1869 as
competition for the relatively well-established
Illustrated London News. Both publications took
advantage of the Victorian proliferation of
industrialized printing technologies, particularly
those that made the mass-production of relatively
cheap high-quality illustrations possible.
For researchers who spend much of their
time delving into Victorian journals, magazines,
and newspapers the visual transformation of print
culture between the 1830s and the 1860s is
remarkable. Illustrations in 1830 are crude and
few and far between. By the end of the ‘60s they
are both sophisticated and everywhere. The same
goes for advertisements. New technologies, new
markets and new audience expectations
transformed them from being a few lines of
closely packed text in columns during the 1830s
to the sort of visually dense representation you
can see here.
So why is this such a great picture? In the
first place, it’s because it’s advertising Bovril, a
substance that needs some introduction to a non-
British audience. It was first manufactured in 1886
and was the sort of thing I was still being given as
a child in the 1970s after being ill. The name has
an interesting etymology that helps explain why
this advert is so fascinating for a historian of
electricity. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race,
the English pulp writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton
introduced the “vril-ya,” a race of subterranean
super-beings that did everything through the
power of vril. Vril, as Bulwer Lytton’s description
made quite clear, was electricity, and animal
electricity at that. Manipulating it, the vril-ya “by
operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism,
electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied
40
scientifically, through vril conductors ... can
exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal
and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the
romances of our mystics.” So, Bovril was meant to
be understood as bovine vril, the concentrated
animal electricity of beef. It was named in order
to invite its consumers to draw the link between
the life-enhancing and health-giving virtues of
Bovril and the virtues of the mysterious electrical
vril.
That’s what makes this picture so peculiar –
and so clever. It shows Bovril, which the Victorian
consumer is meant to imagine as being some
sort of electrical essence of bovine life, being
produced through electrocution. It elides together
the life-giving and death-dealing connotations of
electricity, a nice example of postmodern
slipperiness a century before postmodernism. By
the 1890s, the tradition of electricity as life was
well-entrenched. From James Graham’s Celestial
Bed in the 1780s, to Giovanni Aldini’s and Andrew
Ure’s experiments on electrified corpses, to
Andrew Crosse’s electrical insects, to medical
electricity and the electropathic belt, the
connection seemed secure. By the early 1890s,
advertisements for electric belts and corsets
manufactured by C. B. Harness and his Medical
Battery Company were everywhere, though
Harness was to find himself in court and at the
beginning of the slippery slope to bankruptcy
within the year. After all, if the connection weren’t
so obvious to The Graphic’s readers, the Bovril
advert would make no sense.
After 1890, though, electricity had
acquired a quite different connotation as the
latest technology for dealing scientifically
administered death. The link between death and
electricity wasn’t entirely novel; professional
electricians, as part of their discipline’s folk
tradition, had wild tales of intrepid natural
philosophers experimenting on the Leyden Jar.
From the 1880s, as towns and cities across Europe
and North America electrified, there was a steady
stream of newspaper reports of incautious workers
killed by touching the electric wires. William
Kemmler’s death, as the first victim of the electric
chair – and the invention of the word
electrocution to describe the process – made the
link between electricity and death just as secure in
late-Victorian minds as the connection between
electricity and life. There were debates in
electrical and medical journals about just how, in
practice, electricity killed.
The advert shows us the multiplicity of ways
in which electricity might make sense for the
Victorians. It was life, it was death. It represented

progress and humanitarianism. It was thoroughly
embedded in consumer culture making it a
wonderful illustration to use with students. If nothing
else, it’s a great talking point and a way to start
conversations about electricity’s place in Victorian
culture and the importance of doing cultural
history of science in general. What it suggests is
that such cultural histories never stop. You can
always dig a little deeper, see things from another
angle, and follow another lead to come up with a
new perspective. The transitions from science to
technology and culture in this picture are
seamless. You can’t tell exactly where they merge
into one another. Most important of all, it’s funny,
or at least I think it is. There’s an old truism that if
you want to understand a culture you need to
laugh at its jokes.
Iwan Rhys Morus MA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab) is a historian of nineteenth
century science, technology and medicine. He also has interests in
the history of the body and nineteenth-century popular culture. He
has published widely on these topics and recent books
include Shocking Bodies (History Press, 2011), When Physics became
King (Chicago, 2005), Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century
(Icon Books, 2004) and Frankenstein's Children (Princeton, 1998). His
current research projects focus on nineteenth-century optical
illusions as philosophical and experimental practices as well as the
more general history of scientific performances in the nineteenth
century. Dr. Morus is the editor of History of Science. He is also the
Project Director for the ‘Memory and Media in Wales’ JISC-funded
research project and a senior collaborator on the John Tyndall
Correspondence Project at Montana State University.
This piece was originally published by the HSS Newsletter
www.hssonline.org and is here reproduced with permission of the
author and thanks to the kind help of Jay Malone
41

This paper explores recent TV adverts in which the animals portrayed come to appear before us in new ways.
Gone are cosy images of chimpanzees playing house, wearing flat-caps and frocks, and pouring cups of tea. The
animals are breaking out! Mary, the cow (Muller yoghurt), is “set free” on a beach to fulfil her dream of becoming
a horse. More cows (Anchor butter) have taken charge of the dairy. An elephant (LG) climbs a tree, breaking
through the forest canopy to view the world from a new perspective, and a car is given magnificent new tyres
(Michelin), enabling it to screech to a halt to allow creatures to cross ”the sad stretch of road” unharmed. What
has happened to our conceptions of animals? Why at this particular point in time – a time perceived as one of
“environmental crisis” – do we find ourselves gazing from our sofas upon these representations of boundarybreaking
animals? From what are they breaking out? And, more to the point, what kind of shift renders such
portrayals valuable tools in the world of commodity, wherein the conduits linking supply-and-demand assume
some general need to envision animals as “free-agents?” While we are accustomed to seeing animals presented
to us as “free-agents” in books or films, the use of such portrayals is a notable development in the world of
television advertising. This paper considers how this phenomenon might be linked to the challenges we face
wherein an environmental “crisis” of our own making calls us to radically rethink our modes of being in relation to
the world about us.
Text by Louise Squire
T
here are several difficulties to consider in
relation to this investigation of animals as
“free-agents,” not least of which is how we
conceptualise the terms “freedom” and
“agency.” Such terms, of course, participate in
the ways, within a Western paradigm, that we
have historically defined humanity. Both terms,
once we investigate them, are heavily
dependent (at least traditionally so) on a
capacity for “rationality” (for example Kant, 1959),
and the established view has been, as Mullin
remarks, that “Humans might be animals, but
humans alone possessed rationality, language,
consciousness, or emotions” (Mullin 1999, 206;
THE ANIMALS ARE
“BREAKING OUT”!
42
emphasis added). If both “freedom” and
“agency” require capacities beyond the
wherewithal of animals, rendering them
incapable of either, then our various constraints of
them would appear unproblematic. On this view,
we might say that the adverts selected, in
portraying animals thus, take a merely whimsical
approach to enrolling the viewer – and no doubt,
to an extent, they do. We might add to this the
more telling notion that the adverts serve – or at
least seek – to counter issues related to animal
welfare, especially where the utilisation of animals
lies behind the products marketed. This
countering in itself, arising in part from the work of

Fig 1. VCCP
Muller “Thank You Cows”, two stills from tv advert, 2010 VCCP
the likes of Regan (1983) and Singer (1977),
begins to implicate the adverts as signifiers of
shifting attitudes towards animals, indicative of
the “reassessments of the capacities and status
of animals coming from environmental
philosophy” (Jones 2003, 294-295).
However, we can take this further. The era
within which we currently dwell has profoundly
challenged and is currently shifting our thinking
about our place in the world. The modernist
project for which “[t]he scientific domination of
nature promised freedom from scarcity, want,
and the arbitrariness of natural calamity” (Harvey
1989, 12), as founded upon the assumption of an
infinitude of “natural resources,” has of course
grossly misfired. The devastating losses of
countless species and their habitats add up to
“disappearances” which now endlessly
“reappear” on our television screens in
programmes such as BBC’s Last Chance to
See (2009). This is no mere aesthetic loss, nor is it
confined to the ethical; it takes on the scale
presently defined by anthropogenic climate
change, in turn threatening our own survival – not
to mention that of endless non-human beings.
This environmental “crisis” appears not only “out
there,” but manifests as a phenomenon of our
living rooms, where the world of commodity
continues to reach out to entice us with its
products. Seen in this light, in “setting animals
free” these adverts, regardless of their location in
the realm of commodity, seem to signify a new
desire to return animals “to landscape;” a desire
which, I intend to show, has resonance beyond
issues of animal welfare, which it nonetheless
includes.
The first two adverts for consideration both
feature animals that are commonly contained
within human systems of production – cows:
Muller’s “Thank You Cows”
43
Overview 1: This first advert features Mary
the Cow who “has always dreamed of being a
horse.” We watch as she is “released” to gallop
freely on a beach, thus her dream is made to
come true. Cows, collectively, are then “thanked”
for the natural goodness of their milk, which they
provide for Muller’s fruit corner yoghurts.
Comment,1: Three points are of
particular note for our discussion: (a) the act of
“release,” setting Mary free; (b) the act of thanking
cows generally; and (c) the statement that Mary
has “always wanted to be a horse.” The portrayal
of Mary as “thanked,” as Jonas notes, at least
acknowledges that there is some “cost” to the
cow (Jonas, 2010 Survey), signalling a shift in the
ways we think about farmed animals; on the
other hand, as Cole has noted, this kind of
“discursive reconfiguring” of “the relationships
between humans and farmed animals” is also
“incidental” to the real welfare of the animal (Cole
2011, 84). That Mary has “always wanted to be a
horse” further separates the real from the farfetched,
yet also performs an interesting function:
horses, we might note, possess a more privileged
position in human (Western) society than do
cows; they “participate in ... society in the
capacity of subjects;” we converse with them
and give them personal names (Sahlins 1976,
174). A horse, therefore, has a degree of
“personhood” which the cow, in becoming horse,
is portrayed as moving closer towards.
The portrayal of cows as “free-agents” in our
second advert is quite different: Anchor’s “Made
by Cows”.
Overview 2: A herd of cows bring
themselves into the dairy to be milked and then
proceed to carry out the production process from
start to finish, giving their “approval” to the packs
of butter which appear on the final conveyor. We
watch as they “man-handle” the pallets of

Fig. 2 CHI & Partners
Made by Cows, two stills from tv advert, 2010 CHI & Partners
product, operate the gadget that dispenses
brown packaging tape, stack up the boxes on
pallets and then load them into a lorry for
distribution.
Comment 2: That the cows take on the
roles of human workers purports to render them
“free-agents” to the extent that we, as citizens of
our socio-economic framework, are free-agents.
While this advert makes less of an imaginative
leap from traditional anthropomorphic portrayals
of animals, the “message” here is clear: cows
participate actively in the production process and
give their approval to the end product – butter.
This, as Kali notes, gives the appearance that
they are “complicit in the use of their bodies” for
production (Kali, 2010 Survey).
Growing popular concern for the
wellbeing of animals, of course, poses particular
challenges for those companies whose products
are entangled with the rural, which, as Jones
points out, is “the space where much of the
subjugation of animals on behalf of modern
society takes place” (2003, 287). In both adverts,
we can see that the matter of subjugation,
mentioned here by Jones, is reworked (thus
concealed) via its own antonyms for the viewer’s
own comfort or amusement, presenting the
animals as set free and thanked, or rewarded
and in control. Whatever concerns we may have
about the wellbeing of farmed animals, these
adverts seek, on some level, to allay them. At the
same time, this move to portray animals as “freeagents”
might lead us to consider more
specifically what a growing popular concern for
animals might seek to see animals freed from. As
Cranston notes, in order to discern what is meant
by “freedom” in any given application, we should
ask the question “Freedom from what?” [i] (1967, 5-
44
6). We can explore this in terms of two kinds of
limitations: (a) our “physical” constraining of
animals; and (b) our “ethical valuing” of them.
In terms of the first, Foucault provides a
useful means to view the “constraint” of animal
bodies in human systems. He claimed that it
was out of the longstanding struggle to relieve
humans from the constraints of the natural world
that a shift in the use of power arose, changing
emphasis from one of absolute power (controlling
the “right to life”), to one of “discipline” –
emerging as finely tuned and subtly rendered
control over the living body at the level of life
itself, giving “power its access even to the body”
(Foucault 1984, 265). The models of
governmentality applied to cities were then
extended to police the “whole territory” – a
“historical rupture,” which Darier describes as
becoming” a condition for environmental “crisis”
(Darier 1999, 23). Farmed landscapes
thus translate as designated food-resources for
“livestock”; “shady meadows” function alongside
buildings designed to “... ensure the successful
enrolment of domesticated animals into humandriven
networks” (Jones 2003, 294-296); and
through this enrolment, the living body of the
animal, as described by Noske, becomes
alienated in a number of ways: once steered by
the animal, the body is now controlled by others
“and is actually working against the animal’s own
interests.” An animal is thus alienated from the
natural life of his or her species, from the ecosystem
within which he or she evolved, and often
also from his or her own fellow animals (Noske
1997, 18-19).
Regarding the second limitation, our
ethical valuing of animals has, of course, long
been clouded by our assessments of their mental

Fig. 3 TBWA/Chiat/Day New York
Sad Stretch of Road, two stills from tv advert, 2009 TBWA/Chiat/Day New York
“capacities”, due in part to the philosophical
difficulties with ascribing them rationality or
powers of conceptual thinking. But possessing a
“concept of freedom” or no, it is not hard to see
that animals, when constrained, strive to be free
(Ingold 2000a; Jones, 2003). As Ingold notes, our
relations with animals have produced a whole
range of “tools of coercion, such as the whip or
the spur, designed to inflict physical force and
very often acute pain” (2000a, 307). The
presence of this need to coerce clearly reveals
the countering by the human of some otherwise
free movement of the animal. Williams adds the
point that such coercive practices often do, in
fact, recognise the sentience of the animal, a
recognition which can boost the success of
coercion (Williams, 2004). Successful coercion, of
course, benefits production, but as Carr states:
“coercion, it is all but universally agreed, is
antithetical to freedom. To be coerced to do (not
do) something is to have one’s freedom
abridged” (Carr 1988, 59). What this highlights is
the tenuous nature of the links between
our valuing of animals and the matter of their
capacity to be “free.”
Interestingly, so-called “human” capacities
have, in turn, informed the very concept of
“freedom” itself. Kant, for example, and very
influentially, argued that it is only in the rational
actions of a moral agent that true freedom can
exist (Kant, 1959). Philo and Wilbert point to this
“long-standing human belief in a basic distinction
between” the rational human and “base passions
and instincts,” which, they observe, “allegedly
obliterate a being’s potential for agency” (2007,
14-15). This provides a curious situation, in which
what we may actually desire animals to be free
45
from is the very idea itself that they cannot be
free.
The next two adverts provide a means to
consider the “free-agency” of animals that
lie outside our direct containment or control:
Michelin’s “Sad Stretch of the Road” and LG’s
“Clever Elephant”.
Overview 3: this rather gruesome advert
features a “sad stretch of road” littered with “roadkill”
casualties. As a pink rabbit begins to cross the
road one dark night, the headlights of a blue car
rapidly approach. Will the rabbit be killed? No –
because the Michelin Man throws out a set of
tyres for the blue car, enabling it to screech to a
halt and leaving the pink rabbit unharmed.
Comment 3: What is striking about this
advert is that the agency of the animal manifests
at the point where the car responds to it by
screeching to a halt. When learning to drive, we
are taught, in relation to the UK’s Road Traffic
Act, [ii] not to swerve or stop for animals such as
badgers, foxes, rabbits etc. for fear of
endangering “persons.” If in swerving for an
animal we harm a “person,” we have driven
“dangerously,” which amounts to a criminal
offence. This advert therefore appears to suggest
that animals might be “persons” too.
Overview 4: Here, an elephant steps
gracefully through an Amazonian forest
landscape. We watch as he or she reaches a tall
tree and proceeds to climb up it, step by step,
branch by branch. Reaching the top, he or she
emerges from the canopy to encounter a vast
and beautiful vista of the landscape at large – a
view from on high.
Comment 4: In climbing a tree, the
elephant breaks out from his or her own

Fig. 4 Y&R New York
Clever Elephant, two stills from tv advert, 2010 Y&R New York
limitations; but who really climbs trees? The
elephant, we might note, has borrowed the skills
of primates, who in turn we conceive of as
dwelling at the borders between human and nonhuman
animal (Mullin 1999, 213). Jonas (2010
Survey) very eloquently describes this advert as
“a Plato’s Cave image,” in which “climbing out of
the world of shadow, the elephant reaches the
awesome light of pure reason.” In terms of the
rational requirements for freedom and agency,
this reveals the elephant as therefore breaking
free from our very conceptions of him or her as
animal.
These two adverts portray animals not as
integrated into systems, but as dwellers of the
wider landscape. Within a Western mode of
being, we have long had a habit of objectifying
our world, so that “the meaning or identity of a
thing is given in itself alone, rather than the ‘living’
context of which it is a part” (Taussig 1977, 153). If
we look at (or think of) an animal and only see
“the animal,” we have objectified it. The animal is
at once put at risk, for we can reposition it into
whatever context we choose – literally so in the
case of farmed animals, where a pig is an
animal that “lives in a sty,” cows “give us milk,”
and so on. But the emergence of our adverts
coincides with an era wherein which
“environment” has become an arena of
contention and intense examination. New
awareness of ourselves as impacting upon the
natural world raise a parallel shift in our
understanding of “animal,” from animal “as
object,” to animal as active participant in the
wider landscape. In his work on “Dwelling”
(2000b), Ingold views landscape as “continually
coming into being through the combined action
46
of human and non-human agencies” (2000b,
155). He states: “The most fundamental thing
about life is that it does not begin here or end
there, but is always going on ... Environments are
never complete but are always under
construction” (Ingold 2000b, 172). This temporal
“becoming” of landscape, in which many agents
participate, can be considered as a Latourian
Actor Network, wherein which it is “no longer just
the human who transports information through
transformation, but the nonhuman as well” (Latour
1999, 122), underscoring the function
of association between a range of
heterogeneous, agential elements involved in
any coming-to-be (Latour 2005, 5). When viewed
as an ecological construct, this positively
demands the recognition of non-human “agents”
as “acting” dwellers in the wider landscape.
From within the climate change era of
“environmental crisis,” a phenomenon evoking
responses that range from alarmism or
zealousness to apathy or even denial, the retreat
of the “natural,” together with the decline of its
non-human dwellers, appears as one of the more
palpable of major concerns. While such a
recognition might further the valuing of the
animal per se, it does so within a broader context
of risk to the wellbeing and survival of not only the
natural world and its parts, but in turn of the
human species. My contention, then, that the
portrayals of animals as “free agents” in these four
adverts indicate a desire to return animals to
landscape, is on these grounds. Where Lerner
and Kalof, in a survey of television commercials
during the late 1990’s, noted that animals used or
consumed by humans tend to be portrayed as
“distanced” by avoiding “humanising” them

(Lerner and Kalof 1999), the four adverts in this
analysis distance us from the animals in varying
ways and, in doing so, simultaneously tap into an
overarching popular concern, that of the security
of the natural world – a concern
which includes the wellbeing of animals via their
“release” from our physical and ethical
constraints. [iii] This “camouflaging” (Grauerholz
2007) and repositioning of the real animal
both removes responsibility from the consumer
(Grauerholz 2007, 347-348), in terms of
commodity and ongoing consumer status, and
yet offers the consumer an ersatz opportunity to
participate in the reinstatement of animals as
“free-agents,” [iv] and thus to “contribute” to the
safeguarding of the natural world.
If to reposition animals in landscape is to
render them “free-agents,” then advertisers are
clearly tasked with the reversal of our assessments
of them as incapable of free-agency. How does
this work? The main difficulty, as noted, is that of
ascribing animals rational thought. Yet our
conceptions of freedom and agency can be
challenged, for example, by the work of Thrift who
points out that cognition functions at the level of
the body (and the senses) much of the time (Thrift
2003, 314). He uses this point to extrapolate the
notion of body at the imparting moment of its
existence, “bare life,” which, unfolded, becomes
“axvastxbiopoliticalxdomain” (2003,313). Conceivi
ng bodies this way, he argues, highlights “new
paths along which we move,” creating relations
with the world about us that become
“exfoliations of the space of the body that can be
treated separately” (2003,114, quoting Gil: 1998,
127). On these terms, the “exfoliations” of a cow
confined in a dairy turn out to be dairy (or meat)
products, while the “exfoliations” of an animal “in
the wild” emerge via the animal’s participation in
the ongoing construction of landscape. In both
cases, the animal is therefore an agent, but only
in the second case is the animal “free.”
Kant’s claim (1959) that it is only
in the rational actions of a “moral” agent that true
freedom can exist, points to “morality” as a further
difficulty for animals and free-agency. Whilst it has
been shown that animals may in fact possess
altruistic behaviours (e.g. Bekoff 2004; de Waal
2010), the idea of “morality” remains grounded,
philosophically, in our notions of human minds.
We can, however, take a different approach to
this and think instead in terms of a “capacity to
achieve the wider good.” As long as we are
content to believe that animals possess no such
capacity, nor a capacity for “rationality,” then it
appears unproblematic to reposition them within
47
our systems, provided that they are “properly
looked after.” But if the “becoming” of landscape
requires the involvement of both human and nonhuman
agencies (Ingold 2000b, 155), then our
assumptions start to look flakey. The “free-agency”
of animals contains a wider good, even under
the terms of those who are unable to see it as a
benefit for the animal him or herself.
The four adverts between them clearly
evoke a poignant message, one to which viewers
seem largely to be attuned. Expanses of rainforest
(through which a “clever elephant” strides);
endless natural habitats across the world; the
animals themselves, once living creatures strewn
across our (“sad stretches of”) roads; whole
species of “wild” animal – all are vanishing, it
seems, before our eyes (Franklin 1999, 58, Serpell
1996, 233). We seem at a loss as to how to
“remake” disappearing “nature,” for whatever we
“make” by human hand appears to us as no
natural thing, but rather artefact. In distilling the
animal out of ourselves (e.g. Midgley 1994) we
seem to have lost our way and thus now need
that “animal” to be “free.” Hence these adverts,
while they are incontrovertibly tools of the world of
commodity (together with all that this implies),
and while they assuredly function to obfuscate
the real lives of animals (Cole 2011), on the other
hand do point to a profound shift in popular
thinking. What these adverts, I suggest, portend –
and in this sense encouragingly – is at least a
growing popular “desire” to rematerialise, through
the release of the “animal,” the disappearing
natural world. The question of course is ... how to
render “desire” dynamic, so that it enters the
deeply exigent sphere of change.
Research Statement
This paper originates from a larger dissertation,
the research for which included two short
qualitative surveys (2010), [v] each straightforwardly
requesting a response to three or four of the
adverts. One survey, via H-Animal.net, collected
responses from scholars with interests in animal
studies; the other was distributed to a range of
individuals across different professions, a portion
of whom had environmental interests generally
(e.g. members of Transition Town, RSPB, HDRA,
Greenpeace, and so on). While only some
aspects of the findings are included in this shorter
piece, I nonetheless wish to thank all who
participated in these surveys for their comments,
and in particular Eric Jonas
of Northwestern University and Dr. Audrey Kali
of Framingham State University whose comments,

with their permissions, I have cited.
Notes
1 As Cranston points out, if someone were to approach us on the
street and claim “I am free,” we would have little idea what they
meant (1967, 3). Have they just walked out on their partner? Have
they been let out of jail? Is it a political statement? We are obliged to
ask the question “freedom from what?” if there is to be any hope of
our ascertaining what is meant by “freedom” in a given application
(Cranston 1967, 5-6).
2 The Highway Code: “Dangerous driving” is an offence;
“dangerous,” according to the Road Traffic Act 1991, means
“danger either of injury to any person or of serious danger to
property” (RTA Part 1, Section 1, No’s 1-3).
3 In the 2010 qualitative surveys undertaken as part of the research
for this project, those directly expressing concerns in relation to
animal welfare tended to be alert to the gaps between the real and
the portrayed lives of animals, whereas roughly two thirds of those
disclosing no such concerns took a supporting or even celebratory
stance towards the “release” of animals depicted. Both groups
therefore support the “release” of animals from human constraints,
while a third, but smaller group, actively defended farming
practices.
4 Even the child participants of the survey noted the “cover-ups;”
one, for example, stated: “Having animals in this advert [LG’s “Clever
elephant”] defeats how un-environmentally friendly TV’s are,
because you are seeing all this nature, which makes people forget
how bad it is for the environment.”
5 Conducted in accordance with the ASA Ethical Guidelines for
Good Research Practice (1999); website of the Association of Social
Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth.
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Louise Squire has an MA with Distinction in Philosophy (Nature Pathway), from the University of
Wales, the present article being based on Louise's MA dissertation: 'The Animals Are
‘Breaking Out’! Critical Analysis of a Discerned Shift in TV Advertising Towards Representations
of Animals as ‘Free-Agents’' (2011). Louise is currently registered as a PhD Candidate at the
University of Surrey, and her thesis examines the problem of "death" in relation to
"environmental crisis" in Contemporary Literature. Louise has primary interests in Literary
Theory, Poststructuralism, and Contemporary (especially 21st Century) Literature, within
English Literature, whilst also having an interdisciplinary background, with additional interests
mainly in Environmental Philosophy and Anthrozoology. Louise's central concern is in
exploring the value of the works of the French thinkers--and Continental Philosophies more
generally--to the analysis of literary and media sources in the contemporary "environmental
crisis" world.

I
often wonder what the meetings at an ad
agency are like when the topic of animals
comes up. It must be hard to think of anything
new to do with them, although special effects
have allowed us to make animals seem to talk,
dance, and do other human-like things. And we
always seem to fall for animals (or talking babies)
with an irreverent or comical persona.
So I wasn’t surprised to find a great series
of print ads featuring animals from the Eastern
Corporation, a paper maker in Bangor, Maine, for
its line of Atlantic bond printing paper. They all
appeared in a series from 1946 that ran in
American Printer magazine. Click on any image
for a larger version.
The company managed to vaguely
connect the animals to the product through small
poems that appeared with each illustration,
which then tied in loosely to the ad copy. But like
many paper company ads, the main point was
to simply show off the paper and the printing
quality you could achieve with it.
49
CAN YOU SAY,
“AWWW”?
Animals have long been a regular theme in advertising, especially when anthropomorphized. Except for obvious
ties to products like dog food and pet products, animals usually have nothing to do with the goods or services
advertised, but we connect with them and the products nonetheless, and we get a good feeling when a company
is associated with cute animals.
Text by Gene Gable
Eastern Corporation
Atlantic, 1946 Eastern Corporation

Eastern Corporation
Atlantic, 1946 Eastern Corporation
50

Representations of animals in advertising are
persuasive constructions of how animals are
perceived. They can convey notions as
disparate as the domestic, the exotic, or the
‘natural’. Certain animals such as cows and pigs
conventionally appear as commodities, whereas
others such as pet cats and dogs are presented
as individuals with their own specific likes and
dislikes. And across the world the corporate arena
tends to favour charismatic animals, particularly
the Lion. I wish to consider the use of animals in
advertising through the lens off Foucault’s notion
of the Western episteme and how cultural spaces
are governed by it. However Foucault was writing
in another era and, as Bill Mitchell has observed
‘….’cyberspace and biospace’ have introduced
new frontiers for ‘technical innovation,
appropriation and exploitation‘ (2005, p. 309).
Current Posthumanist discourse challenges
the tenets of five hundred years of normative
Humanist thinking which postulated the centrality
of human consciousness. Post-humanist thinking
foregrounds the question of the animal by
critically re-assessing established boundaries
51
EVOLUTION AND
DESIGN
The animal as sign has a long evolutionary history, but with the onset of cultural modernity it began to
assume new semiotic forms. Foucault describes a new field of increased visibility that emerged in the
eighteenth century which gave rise to a complex semiotic system within which the sign began to take on
a life of its own. If images could be regarded as living organisms, how could this affect their
representational values in society? And, what are the implications for the lives and representation of
animals?
Text by Sonja Britz
between humans and animals. The animal as
signifier has assumed many roles and identities
throughout history, often at the expense of the
animal. The apparent evolution of the animal as
signifying element in design, could rather be
described as one which has been subjected to
an inverse process, an involution, that denotes a
retrograde action turning in on itself.
Foucault assigns three major divisions to
his notion of the Western episteme: firstly
Renaissance, secondly Classical and lastly
Modern. The latter is governed by scientific inquiry
as well as urbanization. The resulting changing
perceptions of natural history, provide, to my
mind, a framework wherein views on animals
could be located. His exposition of natural history
and sign systems serve to inform cultural
representations of animals: importantly, culture
never admits unmediated access to actual
animals. (Baker 2001:10). The culture of design
provides a good example of how urban
experiences of the animal are mediated by
means of semiotics and technology and, thus,
how either prejudices, or sympathies and other

Albrecht Dürer
Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London
stereotypical attitudes towards animals filter quite
seamlessly through these representations. The
producer, designer and viewer (the latter as
intended consumer) are forced into complicity.
In order to establish an acceptable
evolutionary model, it is important to compare
our episteme to preceding ones with regard to
natural history and representational strategies.
According to Foucault, the first division of the
Western episteme, namely the Renaissance,
consisted of a complex system of similitude, in
which the concern was not so much related to
the animals themselves, but to what they signified
for human beings. Developing from Medieval
bestiaries, strange and exotic animals were
assimilated into an existing cultural order which
was based on an emblematic, imperialist visual
tradition. The results of empirical observation
52
played a minor part in 16 th century
representations of animals: the normative, which
fitted into the cultural matrix, rather than the
observed animal, was represented.
A good example of this would be Dürer’s
rhinoceros (1515) (which became the
acceptable icon/emblem of the animal - even
though it differed from existing contemporary
empirical observations and studies of the actual
animal.
On another level, there was a great
curiosity for the visual relationship of one thing to
another - which favoured the symbolic - and
stood in opposition to the 16 th century rhetoric of
science, which has been described as
“diminished in visibility” ( Baker 2001: 20) due to its
fascination with the hidden, organic structural
connections between things.

In the second section of the Western episteme,
called the Classical, the great tripartition between
observation, document and fable (differences
between, firstly, what one sees; secondly, what
has been observed and thirdly, what others
imagine or believe) did not yet exist, and the
reason for this was that signs were then regarded
as part of things themselves. In the 17 th century
they became modes of representation (Foucault
2002:140-141) evolving their own sign systems.
In the 18th century, Linnaeus (Systema
Natural, 1759) initiated a new system of
connecting things in the world to observation and
to discourse: the strangeness of animals was no
longer regarded as spectacle (as in the 16 th
century) but became the object of study for
taxonomic purposes. The causal relationship
between this view and the birth of natural history
as we know it today, is quite obvious. It was clearly
not the result of a new interest in nature and its
creatures (because the origins of this interest can
be traced back to pre-history) but really the
construction of a new field of increased visibility -
which depended on both exclusion and
systematisation (Foucault 2002:144-145). That
which could not be seen, was utilized as a
classificatory tool, giving rise to the development
of complex sign systems, dislocating the sign
from the thing itself. Signs began to take on a life
of their own.
In the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries, the
positioning of the human species in nature can
be described as heavily mediated by
technology. As both visual and audio-visual
media govern most mass media imagery,
including that of the animal, there should be no
problem to present the consuming public with
accurate, in situ representations of animals.
Verisimilitude, rather than similitude in some
representations, serves as ersatz quality for
contact with actual animals.
To a large extent, for human urban
populations, biological diversity has definitively
become a pure virtual reality: one that has its
origins in, and also is constructed by and given
content by three communication forces, namely
computer generated imagery, television
documentaries and branding strategies. It is a
fact that, in their daily living, current human urban
populations are exposed to a very limited number
of animal species. The viewer’s experience of the
animal therefore happens to be primarily a
mediated one. The consequent
simulation/representation of the animal, therefore
divorces the animal from its proper life context in
53
order to fulfil the requirements as set out in the
consumer industry.
W.J.T. Mitchell compares the iconologist to
a natural historian: images and pictures are
compared to species and specimens in order to
explain how new images appear in the world,
what these effect , what they mean and how they
change (Mitchell 2005: 86-87). According to this
theory, images could therefore be subjected to
extinction, mutation and evolution or, exist, at
least, as co- evolutionary entities with human
beings. Darwinian evolutionary theory propounds
that common ancestral stock adapts to existing
conditions and are susceptible to gradual
modification over time. Populations are held in
check through natural selection and survival of
the fittest, the latter fulfilling the demands of the “
economy of nature” (White & Cribbin 1995:2000).
Transmutation is a resultant process in which the
modified offspring of all dominant and increasing
forms tend to become adapted to many and
highly developed places within the economy of
nature. An interesting view developed by Deleuze
and Guattari explodes the old model of the
evolutionary tree of descent. They introduce - as
they themselves call it - a schema of aparallel
evolution; I quote from A thousand plateaus:
“rhizomes operating already in the
heterogeneous and jumping from one already
differentiated line to another” (2004: 11). It follows
that evolutionary processes are not judged, but
simply are: a species is neither good nor bad
(Mitchell 2005:86).
By contrast to evolutionary theory, historical
analysis is traditionally linear, a process of
analogue and chronology. An historical survey of
the animal as sign will be helpful in identifying
certain classificatory paradigms in which the
animal had been manifested. Abject
representations of the animal as exotic other can
be traced from Roman times through to the 19 th
century and early 20th century circus productions.
More recently, to use Steve Baker’s term,
“disnification” of animals in representation, has
led to animals being trivialized, signifying
cuteness, humour and disempowerment.
“Disnification” immediately conjures up its prime
referent – signification – a term which is
employed to bestow meaning and credibility on
the subject. By juxtaposing these two concepts,
Baker points to the trivializing nature of animal
representation wherever it occurs in the mass
media. It is a common phenomenon to notice
that marginalized, disempowered groups are
often metaphorically classified as one of a

Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson
Jumbo, colour lithograph 1896
54
Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer
Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London
Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer
Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London

number of animal species, because in the
hierarchy of the “anthropological machine”
(Agamben 2004:37) the animal is seen as
humanity’s lowest denominator .
The metapicture suggested by Mitchell, of
regarding images as living organisms, opens up
an important arena of debate around the value
of representations in a social context. Biologists
also question seeming certainties within their field
of knowledge, and the worth and validity of their
classificatory systems. Similar to biologists, one
cannot evaluate species/images but needs to
consider the values introduced into the world by
new forms. These might possibly contest existing
criteria and effect a change of mind. Images are
therefore not merely passive entities requiring
human hosts to activate them. They “re-function
our memories and imaginations, bringing new
criteria and new desires into the world” (Mitchel
2005:92).
The question that needs to be asked here,
is whether the images that do survive the cultural
evolutionary process are necessarily beneficial to
the iconotype of its life form, in this case being
the animal. Walter Benjamin reminds us of this
danger when he says: ”For every image of the
past that is not recognized by the present as one
of its concerns, threatens to disappear
irretrievably” (1999:247). It is also important to
identify and recognize the semiotic structures
underlying these survivor images, not so much for
purposes of classification as for clarification.
The cultural matrix imposed by economic
forces in society on the representation of animals
can ironically be metaphorically equated to the
“economy of nature” – a concept I borrow from
the field of evolutionary theory. Large corporate
companies in S.A., like Vodacom, Investec,
Hollards and Impala Platinum, each employ their
choice of animal in order to enforce a specific
brand image. This brand image ostensibly implies
environmental awareness and sustainability; or at
worst, it suggests a false metaphor which is de
facto harmful to the animal.
Large corporations - as mentioned above
- often willingly write blank cheques to protect
certain animal species. In fact, policies in regard
of sustainability and social responsibility are today
essential strategies for economic exchange. This
willingness to pay may be on the increase,
thereby posing the following risk: businesses like
mining and other industries, might feel less
burdened by the fact that their particular
industries may be affecting less visible habitats or
less attractive animals that are usually not referred
55
to as icons of species loss. A recent Reuters report
states that: “ As world wealth tends to grow,
willingness to pay to protect species is growing
even faster” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11).
“However, spending money to save is not as
important or valuable as not spending money to
not destroy” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11). A UN
report in March 2006 (The Star, 11 May 2006:11)
stated that: ”humans were causing the worst
spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished
65 million years ago.”
In the section to follow, I will be discussing
three examples of animal representation as they
appear in advertising material. I will pay attention
to the following four tropes respectively employed
in each of the chosen examples: metaphor,
metonymy, anthropomorphism (or
personification) and totem.
My first example: The computer generated
figure for the cellular phone company,
Vodacom, named “ Mo”, is a case in point. The
topos of the computer animated meerkat (a
species in the mongoose family) finds its roots in
the world of Disney entertainment and then
matures in Vodacom’s marketing campaign with
promises to share profits aimed at benefiting the
upgrading of the meerkat enclosure at the
Johannesburg Zoo. The image of the computer
generated meerkat has enormous eyes and a
corrupted, cute appearance. This image can be
classified as both anthropomorphic and
neotenous. Furthermore, the metaphoric and
metonymic dynamics of this representation
complicate the strategies employed in the
creation of this image. These will be discussed in
the paragraph to follow.
Anthropomorphic interpretations of
animals are common-place in art and the
media. The roots of the attribution of human
motives and behaviour to animals can be traced
to traditions like Greek mythology, fables,
children’s stories and, more recently, the banality
of Disneyworld and movies like Ice Age. This
phenomenon most often conflates with that of
metaphoric language and sign. John Berger
argues that: “it is not unreasonable to suppose
that the first metaphor was animal” (Berger
1980:90).The animal as metaphor proposes a
relationship between humans and animals which
may not at first glance seem exploitative, and in
many, especially literary examples, actually are
not.
However, when the animal is used as
metaphor denoting the Other, binary oppositions
are activated and the animal is usually

Unknown Artist
The Orang-Outang Carrying Off a Negro Girl, in Nederveen Pieterse 1992:38
56

2006. Image showing advertisement for Vodacom’s
advertisement for cellular technology. ‘Mo’ Vodaworld: Autumn.
represented as negative or inconsequential. In
this case, Mo is neither human nor animal, but
created through technology, operating in the
realm of the cyborg. He is a metaphor for gobetween
vis-à-vis consumer and what is being
consumed. The actual animal - its appearance
and nature – is, to a large extent, ignored. His
attire, reminiscent of the tourist and the safari,
immediately places him on the opposite side of
the animal world with its connotations of the big,
white hunter and trophies. With camera in hand
and safari hat jauntingly pulled over his one eye,
he seductively gazes at the viewer. This vaudeville
aspect of his manipulated personality is further
revealed by his animated actions in the TV
adverts, namely to jive along in a downtown
setting while being followed by a constantly
increasing crowd of fans, reminiscent of the Pied
Piper and his mesmerised followers. Only in this
case the rapid growth of the crowd and its
increasing noise levels, exposes, as Canetti
(1981:20) claims, the inherently destructive
potential of the crowd, transforming it into a
scene which is more frightening than entertaining.
Neoteny is employed as a popular device
in animal representation in the media. Neoteny
refers to “a condition in which there is retention of
youthful characteristics in the adult form” (Baker
57
2001:181). This kind of representation encourages
sentimental adult response, thereby assuring
involvement from the consumer. The neotenous
character of Mo displaces the distancing effect
of otherness as achieved through metaphor. His
proximity to the familiar world of humans and their
interests, calls for a metonymic reading. Being
part of human society, his participatory
relationship to the company’s credibility as a
conserver of the environment and indigenous
animals, as well as one of the fastest expanding
markets in Africa, is ensured.
A second example: Investec refers to the
actual - as opposed to the animated,
technologically engineered - animal in its
branding strategy. The Zebra is utilized as a living
icon of the company’s progressive vision for
sustainability, partnership and strength. At first
glance it has probably been selected for its
aesthetic appeal, geographical habitat and
behavioural characteristics, but the sub-text spells
a belief in an absolutist view of nature, which can
be defined as one of plenitude, adaptability and
survival. Selected features of the Impala are
isolated, such as its adaptability, alertness and
mutualism, in order to highlight and impress in a
metonymic fashion the company’s image.
But what is this image signifying? Does it
represent the organic living substance within
nature in opposition to culture, in the culturenature
debate? Or can it be termed in Foucault’s
words: “forms of animal visibility” (Mitchell
2005:177) - real objects in the world, but which
are also images and verbal expressions (Mitchell
2005: 176). Could one therefore refer to it as a
totem, a sign which occupies a strategic position
at the nature-culture frontier? Totems can take on
several forms: one of them being the animal
itself. However, the image as such is always more
sacred than what it represents (Mitchell 2005:
178). In this case, not under imminent threat of
extinction as yet, but a successful commercial,
corporate image, which hardly touches upon the
existence of the actual animal.
My last example: The Hollards branding
strategy takes this notion of the animal as brand
symbol into the biocybernetic domain. By
combining two diverse species –the horse and
the cheetah that you can see here, as well as the
image of the duiker buck joined with the caracal I
showed in my introduction - the notion of the
original two animals is displaced. A sense is
created that the modification is an improved
version - rather than a weakened copy of the

Ivestec
Here Tomorrow Investec
58

Morrisjones & Company
Unique Partnership, 2006 Morrisjones & Company
original. Digital manipulation ensures
improvement and flawlessness.
The representation of this newly
constructed image, can also be interpreted as
providing a symptomatic example of “image
anxiety” (Mitchel 2005:12) pointing to an
uncertainty regarding the future – including the
possible extinction of species. Here, the potency
of the cloned image becomes a central concern
, because it exemplifies the uncertainty of the
future while fulfilling the dream of creating living
forms which lead to living images - a viable
simulacrum of a living organism (Mitchel 2005:12-
13).
In conclusion, the representation of the
animal is central to the history of animals –
“because that history is fully shaped by human
documents” (Fudge 2004).The repercussions of
this plethora of documentation, which includes
design, are central also to ethical debate
focusing on the question of the animal. As
Mitchell states (2005:178-179):
59
natural organisms are not just
entities in themselves but a system
of natural signs , living images, a
natural language of zoographia
or ‘animal writing’ that, from
ancient bestiaries to DNA and the
new book of Life, continually
reintroduces religion – and
animation - into things and their
images.”
Current Posthumanist discourse does indeed
challenge the tenets of 500 years of Humanist
thinking. Instead of adopting a position supportive
of an idea that can be used to attempt to
illustrate the evolutionary development of the
animal as sign in design, I - by contrast - prefer
the notion of a rhizomatous change as
expounded by Deleuze and Guattari (2004:12) -
stemming from a cultural matrix which embraces
diversity, collaboration and multivocality in order
to represent that which can never be adequately
represented.

Bibliography
Agamben, G. 2004. The Open: man and animal. Stanford
University Press: Stanford.
Baker, S. 2001. ‘Animals, representation and reality’. Society
and animals. Volume 9: no. 3.
Available;http//www.pyseta.org/sa/sa9.3/baker.shtml. [0].
Baker, S. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. Reaktion Books:
London.
Baker, S. 2001. Picturing the Beast: animals, identity and
representation. University of Illinois Press: Urbana.
Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. Pimlico: London.
Berger, J. 1980. About Looking. Vintage Books: New York.
Canetti, E. 1981. Crowds and Power. Penguin Books:
Harmondsworth.
Clark, K. 1977. Animals and Men. William Morrow and
Co:New York.
Counting the cost of preserving biodiversity. 2006.The Star 11
May: 11.
Darwin, C. 1859. The Origin of Species. Signet Classic: New
York.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus.
Continuum: London.
Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things. Routledge: London,
2004
Ground, I. 2011. “Only in the application that a Living Being
makes”:Wittgenstein Signs and Animal
Minds.Tartu:Zoosemiotics conference.
Gröning, K. & Saller, M. 1999. Elephants: a cultural and
natural history. Köneman: Cologne.
Maclennan, B. 2003. The Wind Makes Dust: four centuries of
travel in southern Africa. Tafelberg: Cape Town.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What do Pictures Want? University of
Chicago Press: Chicago.
Morrisjones&company. 2006. Hollards Duiker, Hollards
Horse:Johannesburg.
Cover picture. 1994. National Geographic (186, no. 6),
December.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. 1992. White on Black: images of
Africa and Blacks in Western popular culture. Yale University
Press: New Haven.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, v.1. 1973. Sv “evolution”
and “involution”. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Thompson, N. 2005. Becoming Animal: contemporary art in
the animal kingdom. Mass Moca: North Adams.
White, M. & Cribbin, J. 1995. Darwin: a life in science. Simon
& Schuster: London.
60
Sonja Britz is a painter and writer born in Durban, South Africa . She
studied painting at the University of Natal, completing her MFA
Between 1991 and 2009 she was based in Johannesburg, whilst also
undertaking artist’s residencies and exhibiting in Europe. She is
interested in the socio-cultural aspects of animal representation and
have explored subjects such as the predicament of the African wild
dog and urban animals. She is represented in a variety of public
and corporate collections including the World Wildlife Fund.
In 2009 she moved to the UK and now lives on the coast
of Cumbria. She has recently completed on an Arts Council England
funded project, Companion Species: Portrait of a Community.
Current interests are animal portraiture and contemporary
wunderkammer.

he same issue of the monthly magazine
included photographs of Winston Churchill
patting a Great Dane and of a Kerry Blue
champion. There were adverts including
those for Hackbridge Kennels to which dogs
could be evacuated for ‘the duration’, Spratts
dog food ‘still carrying on!’ and canine gas masks
and gas –proof kennels. The editorial written at
the height of the so-called Battle of Britain was
headed with the much-used epithet ‘We can take
it’, endorsing the myth of a resilient Britain
standing alone. [iii]
This jocular advert is aimed at dog lovers.
The cartoon bulldog, recognised as a specific
breed by the Kennel Club from the 1870s, wears
its regulation collar and acts symbolically for
Britain reassuring the nervous puppy. As Steve
Baker has argued ‘any understanding of the
animal is inseparable from the knowledge of its
cultural representation’: Britain and bulldogs go
together. [iv] T
The dogs’ male gender is
NERVOUS DOGS
NEED ADMIN, SON!
This advert comes from a British magazine The Tail Wagger, October 1940. The Tail- Waggers Club had been
founded in 1928 to promote dog welfare stating, ‘The love of animals, and especially of dogs, is inherent in nearly
all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members. [i] All dogs were eligible for membership, not just
those from established breeds. By July 1930 it had become a general legal requirement that all dogs should wear
collars and the club and magazine endorsed such measures. [ii]
Text by Hilda Kean
61
emphasised by the language: ‘sir’ and ‘son’.
However this particular ‘bulldog’ would not have
been eligible for show since he has no testicles-
this absence is clearly displayed given the angle
of the image. Despite his firm four-footed stance
and iconic status this great British bulldog has no
balls, rather like the depiction of the former
deputy prime minister John Prescott in Steve
Bell’s The Guardian cartoons. In the image of an
emasculated bulldog ‘full of sound and fury and
signifying nothing’ with collar but no balls -
Prescott’s crucifixion on croquet mallets was a
particular delight- I always knew I was reading a
stand-in for a blustering man. [v] But here the
bulldog is not intended to represent a particular
human.
The querulous complaint of the puppy
plays upon a war rumour. In 1940 measures were
taken to regulate food for non-human animals. In
Britain a Waste of Food Order obliged animal
keepers to act reasonably, while stressing that

Admin
Cooper Dog Products, The Tail-Wagger Magazine, 1940
pets could still be fed. [vi] At a similar time there
were (inaccurate) reports that Hitler had ordered
all dogs to be killed since they were taking food
from humans. [vii] However, there was a rumour
62
that German dogs were being killed because
Germans allegedly liked eating dog meat. [viii] This
rumour has been exposed as such.But I do not
read this cartoon as a serious comment on

alleged Nazi dietary habits. The magazine
contains a serious article critical of the fascists’
utilitarian approaches to dogs and does not
mention this rumour at all. The advert de-bunks
the rumour by treating it jocularly - and we know
that it is jocular since the ‘dogs’ are not dogs but
cartoon characters.
The text also debunks the idea that
animals were anxious because of bombardment
– although some clearly were - [x] stating ‘Nervous
dogs are usually the victims of wrong feeding’.
Importantly this problem (unlike bombing!) was
soluble with Admin vitamins. An irony of the ad is
that it is published in 1940 because of the war but
the war itself (aside from the Nazi speech bubble)
is not mentioned explicitly. Even potential meat
shortages are only alluded to elliptically. The
puppy who is too young to know better ‘speaks’
about the war but his comments are dismissed
with a ‘stand firm’ message. While playing to the
Nazi-dog-eating story the advert simultaneously
undermines it. The young puppy has ‘got it
wrong’. However it is surely the puppy who
articulates human anxieties. The anxiety is
responded to by another, older, dog. The human
/puppy is being calmed by an older dog.
Arguably the reader is expected rationally to
identify with the older dog but emotionally with
the puppy. (If Admin powders were given to real
dogs, it would apparently benefit the anxious dog
as well as the human anxious about the dog.)
Paul Wells has approached cartoon
animals to suggest that they should be read as
animal depictions: ‘… animation demonstrates
an intrinsic respect for animals, and rather than
making them safe through humor, it actually
begins to articulate relevant narratives to support
their cause’. [xi] We are not expected to take the
advert seriously on one level since it is juxtaposed
with journalism about ‘real’ dogs: but we are also
intended to read the cultural representation of
the bulldog as a national icon.
But my use of the word ‘we’ is inaccurate
and ahistorical. This was neither aimed at the
twenty first century reader nor was the product for
contemporary dogs. The product, the advert and
the intended reader were all rooted in the lived
experience of war some 70 years ago. The
animal-human relationship (and its
representation) was of a very particular time and
this advert helps remind us of this.
63
References
[i] The Tail-Waggers Club, Tailwaggers, nd 1931
[ii] An Urgent and Important Notice for all Tail-Waggers and dog
owners generally! Tailwaggers Club June 1930
[iii] Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, Pimlico,1991
[iv] Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast, Manchester University Press,p.25
[v] http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,1974790,00.html
[vi] RSPCA, Annual Report, RSPCA,1940
[vii] Animals Defender, NAVS, July 1940. The Home Office believed
dogs were being killed to provide glycerine and fertilisers. TNA:HO
186 /1419
[viii] Veterinary Record, October 1940. Also The Times of 18
November 1940
[ix] Mieke Roescher The Nazis and their animals (unpublished paper).
See too Maren Mohring, Cats and cities. ‘Hygienic helpers’: cats in
the cities of the ‘Third Reich’.
library.panteion.gr:8080/dspace/bitstream/.../479/1/MMOHRING.pdf
[x] Measures against this, including medication or ear covering, were
promoted by the RSPCA and National Canine Defence League
[xi] Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary Animals, Cartoons, and
Culture, Rutgers University Press, 2009, p.11
Hilda Kean PhD, FRHistS is former Dean and Director of Public History
at Ruskin College, Oxford and currently Adjunct Professor at the
Centre for Australian Public History at UTS, Sydney. She has published
widely on cultural and public history and the position of non-human
animals. Her numerous works on animals include Animal Rights.
Social and Political Change in Britain since 1800 (Reaktion Books
2000), chapters in several books (most recently in Lest we Forget ed
Maggie Andrews 2011 and in Animals and War ed Ryan Hediger
2013) and articles in Society and Animals, The London Journal,
International Journal of Heritage Studies, Anthrozoos and History
Workshop Journal. She serves as history editor for Society and
Animals and on the advisory board for Minding Animals and the
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is currently researching and
writing about the animal – human relationship on the home front
during the Second World War. Her latest books are The Public History
Reader (edited with Paul Martin) Routledge 2013 and Public History
and Heritage Today. People and their Pasts (edited with Paul Ashton)
Palgrave 2013. http://hildakean.com/

64
A STONY FIELD
Brand representations proliferate reflexive identities of their producers and consumers. These self-advertisements
reinscribe commodified identities reproductively back onto the subjects and objects – the represented figures – of
consumption. In this paper I argue that the cooption of identity politics by multinational corporations like Stonyfield
Farm, Inc. operates within material and virtual domains that conceal fetishized processes of consumption. I
redeploy Stonyfield’s representational vocabulary in looking to uncover these processes as hidden ‘stones’ in a
relational ‘field’ of embodied power. I begin by reviewing selected theoretical literature on material and virtual
forms of identity, consumption and power. I then apply these perspectives to a recontextualized ‘stony field’, as
figured through the work of artist Michael Mercil. I suggest that his project The Virtual Pasture (2009-11),
considered in relation to Judith Butler’s re-readings of Foucault and Hegel, reconditions the proprietary terms of
Stonyfield’s cow fetish.
Text by Katherine Bennett
Fig.1. Michael Mercil
The Virtual Pasture, postcard, 2009 Michael Mercil

Fig.2.
Stonyfield yogurt carton front center, photograph by author.
“M
y marketing spend is a rounding error
[compared with competitors]," he
says. "But you can go on Stonyfield's
web site (YoTube), and watch cows chewing their
cud”.
Gary Hirschberg, Stonyfield CEO (Reingold, 2012)
My Stonyfield yogurt carton depicts a pastoral
landscape identified as Wayside Farm, Vermont
(USA). The reproduced image wraps around a
white plastic cylinder. Its colors are polarized and
focal depths multiplied. A golden light bathes the
verdant pasture and grazing cows in sharpest
focus at the center. The curved plastic surface
foregrounds the cows spatially and graphically.
They are the closest figures in the ‘field’ to me. A
picturesque New England barn set in the forested
edge some distance back echoes the modeled
browns of their bodies. The words “Organic” and
“Plain” intrude into the landscape’s middle ground
and vertically frame the cows. The font is serifed
and traditional but playful. Floating above in a
hazy sky, the more stylized torso and head of a
cow peep winsomely between flat, primary yellow
and blue banners for ‘’Stonyfield” and “Organic”.
The same head reappears decapitated and
vertically centered in a margin left of the
landscape, bearing in its mouth an invitation for
“SF Rewards” – an incentive program for “our loyal
yogurt eaters" [i]. Aligned above is the product
bar code, and below are a list of bacterial
cultures attributed to it, a stipulation to “KEEP
REFRIGERATED” and two certifications: “Organic”
and “Gluten-Free”. A standardized chart
quantifying “Nutrition Facts” bounds the image to
the right. Text dominates the rear panel,
presenting the corporation’s story and
environmental ethic. A beaming 'mother' is
incorporated into the border for a bacon salad
recipe under the caption “Meg’s Recipe Box”. The
ingredient list is titled “Our Family Recipe”.
65
Stonyfield’s package reproduces the living bodies
of cows through multiple levels of abstraction as:
representational figures in a pastoral landscape,
the iconic brand of a multi-national corporation,
a purchaser reward system, a codified market
commodity, a matrix for bacterial life, a food
product requiring artificial temperature control, a
regulated and certified object of consumption,
numbered grams of nutrients and percentages of
“daily values” for an idealized diet, and an
ingredient in a heteronormative ‘family meal’. In
this article I question the representational terms
and conditions of such abstractions. Their
idiomatic reformulations appear in pictures, words
and numbers. Their commingled figures produce
reductions and multiplications of the bodies of
cows in relation to the bodies of people, and of
both in relation to their environments. Material
bodies are both subjects and objects of the
abstractions, reduced by them to caricatures,
labels and calorie counts. They are also
multiplied, virtually, into new identities and
relations through entangled processes of
commodification and advertising. I question how
these representations proliferate reflexive identities
– self-advertisements – of their human
producers/consumers, which are then inscribed
back onto the cows, the people and their
environments. How do these representations
naturalize new identities and relations, which are
recursively rendered through a marketing spincycle?
My inquiry traces materialities and
virtualities of its subjects: the cows in a stony field,
the field and its stones (where are they?), and the
presumed but unpictured human viewer.
At issue are the material and virtual
embodiments, continually refigured, of animals
(including cows and people) and their
environments. How can the frames of
representation be opened so that a mutuality
is seen between these subjects/objects that are

Fig.3.
Stonyfield yogurt carton left, right and back, photograph by author.
cows, people, fields and stones? What I’m after is
the responsiveness that Donna Haraway (2008)
conditions in terms of “respecere”, drawing on the
Latin ‘to look again’, but also “the act of respect”
(19) with its combined meanings of consideration,
perception and looking back [ii]. The Stonyfield
cartoon-cow looks at me, but I am not seen to
look back. The more privileged subject that is ‘I’
sits swallowing her yogurt outside the carton’s
frame. But I am not alone. Who and what else is
out here, beyond the frame, re-producing ‘my’
relationship with the cows and ‘our’ environments?
Can these ‘I’s be brought into the frame to
stretch, or bend (without necessarily breaking), the
reiterative identities of the commodity chain? For
a Haraway-inspired response, I begin with Julie
Guthman’s chapter on “The ‘organic commodity’
and other anomalies in the politics of
consumption” in Geographies of Commodity
Chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004), which takes
me briefly back to Marx and Capital on the
commodity fetish. From there, I turn to Judith
Butler’s investigation through Foucault into political
economies of the body in her talk “Bodies and
Power, Revisited” (2002). Butler leads me to a
reconsideration of materiality and virtuality,
examined in relation to contemporary capitalism
by James G. Carrier, Daniel Miller, Leslie Sklair and
Nigel Thrift in Virtualism: A New Political
Economy (Carrier and Miller, 1998). I then look to
artist Michael Mercil, whose project The Virtual
Pasture (2008-2011) re-forms the frame in a
manner suggested by Butler in The Psychic Life of
Power (1997).
66
A cow fetish: What is represented?
The multiply abstracted cow-commodity is
imprinted with domesticated standards of health.
Its plastic container fetishizes not only the “Smooth
and Creamy” bodily substance within, but also its
representations of consumer and environmental
protection, localized agricultural practices, and
fair trade for small farmers. Guthman (2004, 234)
writes of a politics of consumption that centers on
eating as 'green', ethical and local. This politics
implicates a Marxian commodity fetishism – that
is, a concealment of the hierarchical relations
productive of commodities. The masking of
capitalist interests behind organic certification
ascribes to the commodity an innate mystical
“preciousness” (245). Yet its valuation and
formation in a market-based system of
production belies its ethical representations.
Guthman shows that the multinational market
structure behind the organic label contradicts
and in practice de-links it from idioms of “smallscale,
populist agrarianism” (240). Organic
certification does not limit the scale or mechanics
of production, does not inherently or effectively
regionalize food systems, does not minimize food
processing, and does not promulgate labor or
localized trade standards. Rather, ‘Organic’ is now
relegated to standards for production practices,
and more specifically to ‘organic’ inputs,
themselves incorporated into an ‘organic’ market
for fertilizers, pesticides, soil modifications, etc.
(240-1). An internationalized industry, evolved

Fig. 4. & 5.
The Miracle of Milk and Down to Earth, Stonyfield Farm, Inc, film still Stonyfield Farm Inc
67

from interstate agribusiness, has appropriated the
organic label. Stonyfield’s corporate genealogy
[iii] exemplifies this tension between ethical
standards and market standardization. Its
expansion into international markets [iv], big box
retail outlets, café chains [v] and an array of
processed "food products" asserts a capital
growth model that dominates its localized picture
of health for cows, people and their
'environment'. Guthman reveals the underlying
paradox:
[Organic labeling] fetishizes the
process of social change itself, by
suggesting that purchasing a
commodity is sufficient to effect
such change. If organic food was
truly an antidote to processes of
commodification, the ‘organic
commodity’ surely would be seen
as an oxymoron. (245)
What terms and conditions are operative in the
capitalized field behind Stonyfield’s cow fetish?
Marx, Guthman notes, writes of a veiling of
human-nature relations by exchange value and
fetishism. He argues, "the objective appearance
of the social characteristics of labour” (Marx,
1990, 176) and its products obscures their social
constitution. Marx distinguishes the contradictory,
“twofold” form of the commodity, as both
physical object of utility (possessing use-value)
and virtual depository of exchange-value.
Conflation of the physical/natural object (e.g.
yogurt) with its value form ($3.49) masks the
socially dominant conditions of its production (by
Stonyfield Farm, Incorporated). Marx examines
the role of seeing in the making of commodities:
the products of labor become
commodities, sensuous things
which are at the same time suprasensible
or social. In the same way,
the impression made by a thing on
the optic nerve is perceived not as
a subjective excitation of that
nerve but as the objective form of
a thing outside the eye. In the act
of seeing, of course, light is really
transmitted from one thing, the
external object, to another thing,
the eye. It is a physical relation
between things. As against this, the
commodity-form, and the valuerelation
of the products of labour
within which it appears, have
68
absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity
and the material relations arising
out of this. It is nothing but the
definite social relation between
men themselves which assumes
here, for them, the fantastic form
of a relation between things. (165)
Marx’s insight might return us to the
Enlightenment's rational-empirical divide, but for
his recognition of the fetishized
commodity’s twofold configuration as
object and exchange value, yogurt that is $3.49.
He points to the self-contained interdependence
of its dual value form, and further the
“antagonism… developed concurrently within
that form itself” (160). Despite – and because of –
this inherent self-contradiction, Stonyfield’s twofold
formation of ‘organic yogurt’ has led to a 20%
annual growth rate and $360 million in sales in
2010 for it and multinational owner Groupe
Danone (van Rensburg, 6-7).
How does the commodity fetish refigure
the bodies of cows and people? The bodies
under question here are those of cows, people,
and by extension their environments. The social
processes at issue are those of capitalized food
trade and the marketing practices of
Stonyfield. In “Bodies and Power, Revisited”
(2002), Butler turns to another model in revisiting
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The model
directly associates bodies and power as terms
and conditions of each other. They figure each
other. Butler writes of a “constitutive paradox”
embedded in recognition (17). This built-in
antagonism binds the body to social processes
that delimit yet lend it the terms necessary to
formulation as a viable subject in the world.
Foucault examines “a certain ambiguity between
subjects and power” (14). He attaches ‘body’ to
both prisoner and prison as material structures.
The reiteration articulates his formulation of the
body as not exclusively human, or singular. It is,
also, social, taking form in the prison. The double
reference abstracts at the same time that it rematerializes
the term’s signification. It enables a
representation that is twofold in its materiality and
virtuality. Both subjects, the prisoner and the
prison, are quite material things – as are the cow
and the (stony) field, the consumer (‘I’) and the
grocery store. But their materiality does not
represent the full extent of their identities, which
are constituted also through their relation with one
another. Bodily imprisonment is one configuration
of power relations. Capital is another. The

Fig. 6.
Down to Earth, Stonyfield Farm, Inc, film still Stonyfield Farm Inc
materiality of each subject is an active condition
of the other, through which the power of identity is
produced and continually reproduced in a taut
mutuality. Butler writes, citing Foucault:
the very materiality of the prison
has to be understood in terms of its
strategic action upon and with the
body: it is defined in relation to the
body: '[the] very materiality [of the
prison environment is] an
instrument and vector [vecteur] of
power’ (Foucault, 30).
The institutions of power (e.g. the market) and the
body (e.g. the cow, the person, 'the environment',
the field, the stone) each require the other for
recognition. And recognition is essential to persist
in the shared context of multiple subjects that is
society. The body is the material condition of the
social identity and its institution. It serves as the
medium through which a “technology of power”
(14) acts and activates, produces and
69
exchanges. The power technology that is capital
fabricates and sells the product that is yogurt
through the institution that is the
market. Materiality can then be understood as
itself twofold, denoting “the process by which one
passes over into the other (or indeed the process
by which both ‘institution’ and ‘body’ come into
separate existence in and through this prior and
conditioning divergence)” (15). So markets, cows,
people, fields and stones are embodied and coproduced
symbiotically. No one of these
subjects, scaled individually or multiply by an
incorporated genealogy, appears able to survive
without the others. At least, we can’t see how
within the currently represented tableau,
reproduced within an exclusively capitalized
frame.
So what else may be out here, reproducing
these relationships of bodies and
power? Where are the stones in this field? Societal
norms are heavily implicated in the terse
antagonisms of bodies and power. They operate
to filter the communicable, hierarchical terms of

Fig. 7. Michael Mercil
The Virtual Pasture, T-Shirts, 2009 Michael Mercil
recognizable identity. They name, for instance,
“Stonyfield”, “Wayside Farm”, "Vermont", and
“Meg”. That which is non-normative is not
recognizable and cannot be named or
perceived. Yet Butler finds in the unrecognized an
opening of possibility through “critical distance”
(19) from its constraints. This distance lies tellingly,
even promisingly, within the constraints and is not
independent of them. Power can only have
effect, and therefore can only exist, through
imposing “norms of recognizability” (17) on a
subject. Still, the subject has to desire recognition
in those institutionalized terms. S/he must attach
to them, be named. Desire figures the precarity,
but also the possibility, of the unrecognized
subject(s), the cow(s), the person(s), the field(s)
and/or the stone(s). The subject wishing to move
beyond the surveyed frames of identity opens
his/her/its self to questions of what he/she/it might
become. Desire animates possibility by
exceeding the norm while demanding
70
recognition. Into a two-sided border between
desire and recognition reaches “the limited
freedom of not yet being false or true” (19). In
relation to the stony problem at hand, Butler’s
refiguration of possibility through the very process
of desire that fixes – institutionalizes, markets – it,
offers the becoming of other identities, other
relations, other interdependencies. Haraway, too,
invokes the futurity of becoming, and adds a
significant ‘with’: “Touch, regard, looking back,
becoming with – all these make us responsible in
unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape”
(36).
Materialities and virtualities: How to
become with?
So how can those outside the frame re-enter it to
embody additional figures of mutuality and
produce new bodies of exchange? Can we
name technologies of power that might resist

Fig. 8. Michael Mercil
The Virtual Pasture, sheep with visitor, 2009-2011 Michael Mercil
capital? A difficulty remains in
identification. Foucault writes in Discipline and
Punish that “systems of punishment are
to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of
the body” (cited in Butler, 13). Carrier (1998) ties
the political economy of consumer values to a
concept of virtualism, “the attempt to make the
world conform to an abstract model” (25) and
idealized images of reality (5). Desire, abstraction,
imagination and conformity are at the core of
virtualism’s practice. While it shapes abstracted
systems of thought such as neo-classical
economics, virtualism also permeates “daily life
and practice”, as “practical abstraction” (25). I
find Carrier’s ultimate “tale” problematic in its
abnegation of “general social relationships like
kinship, gender and craft identity” (42). Such
“nuances” give way to a static “distinctive logic
that springs from the calculations of commercial
institutions in a competitive environment” (42). The
universal claim deriving from – or driving – his
reductive argument, seconded by Miller, is I think
precisely the problem. Dismissing agencies of
political economy explored productively by
Foucault, Butler and many others can only
71
regenerate new forms of capitalism (19). Still, an
integral logic of Carrier’s and Miller’s argument
holds: Continual virtualization of abstractions
reinforces rather than resists their representational
terms and conditions. Miller writes:
my critique of postmodernists is not
that they raise the spectre of
abstraction – a project that this
essay clearly shares. Rather, it is
that postmodernism is based in
large measure upon a misreading
of the experience of consumption,
that theorists abstract in a way that
reinforces abstraction as virtualism.
They replace consumption as
human experience with the virtual
figure of the postmodernist
consumer. As such, they contribute
to a consequence of economics
and auditing, a general
experience of alienation from what
is viewed as an abstract and
distant world. (212)

Fig. 9. Michael Mercil
The Virtual Pasture, detail with temporary signage, 2009, photo: Justin Brown Michael Mercil
Sklair and Thrift in the same volume find that the
practice of virtualism cloaks the practical
identities of a fin de siècle bourgeoisie. Sklair links
“the transnational capitalist class (TCC)” to a
global realm of regulatory bureaucrats
“dominated by big business” (144). Thrift finds that
the practice-oriented abstractions of
contemporary business lurk in a “reflexive
capitalism” (170) seeking generic operational
tactics. Both Sklair and Thrift, as Carrier notes,
suggest “a kind of embeddness for the powerful,
abstraction for the weak” (17). All four examine a
cooption of Marxian formulations by mutual,
transnational business and state interests. They
presage Guthman’s deconstruction of organic
trade and certification oriented to capital growth.
But are these members of the elite academic
class (which they critique) looking in the right
places for resistance to capitalism? For that
matter, are they even looking for resistance?
Because if so, the glitterati world of the capitalist
elite seems hardly the best place to start. I agree
with Guthman that “preciousness is a dubious
solution” (251). An acknowledged situation of their
theoretical positions within the capitalized
academy, as Haraway recommended a
72
decade earlier (1988), would be illuminating. Their
stance outside the frame barely dents it.
How do I refigure cows through consuming
their milk? My routine consumption of yogurt may
be said to further virtualize the bodies of
Stonyfield’s cows. I say “further” because these
cows are already abstracted. Stonyfield ceased
to own cows early in its business life, contracting
milk from dairy farmers since 1984
(http://www.stonyfield.com/about-us/our-storynutshell/full-story,
10-23-12). A reference to
Baudrillard’s fourth phase of simulation and thirdorder
simulacrum (1995) is easy here. But
following Carrier’s and Miller’s insistence on
“actual practice” as model, I brush reiterative
simulation aside to look more into the virtualized
daily lives of the abstracted cows in Stonyfield’s
landscape. Stonyfield.com/yotube, links to videos
of family farmers belonging to the Organic Valley
Family of Farmers/CROPP collaborative. They
portray commitment to the ethics of “populist
agrarianism” that Guthman reframes, in particular
the health of cows, people and their
'environment' (as if there were only one). The
Organic Valley “family” extends to 1,687
members across the United States (1,606),

Fig. 10. Michael Mercil
The Virtual Pasture, site, 2009-11, photo: Justin Brown Michael Mercil
Canada (61) and Australia
(20) (http://www.farmers.coop/producerpools/cropp-producer-map/,
10-23-12). Of these,
1,411 are dairies, representing about 270 organic
milk contracts for Stonyfield (Carper, 2010, 36).
Notably, Organic Valley’s product line, limited in
its yogurt options to a “lowfat smoothie”
drink (http://www.organicvalley.coop/products/yo
gurt/, 10-23-12), competes minimally with
Stonyfield’s yogurt products [1]. CROPP, renamed
from Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool
to Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer
Pools, opened stock options to non-members in
2004. Preferred shares valued at more than $75
million dwarf the voting member shares totaling
$42,175[2]. The Organic Valley label exports to at
least twelve Asian countries, and plans to grow in
China (Carper 2010, 34, 36). No wonder CROPP
advertises itself as “the nation's largest and most
successful organic farmer
cooperative” (http://www.farmers.coop/, 10-23-
12).
The National Organic Program’s
regulations for Livestock Living Conditions
generally require accommodation of "the health
and natural behavior of animals,” and stipulate
73
year-round access to the outdoors, to uncrowded
space and to daily grazing in season. Quality
Assurance International (QAI), Inc., a private
organic certification company authorized by the
U. S. Department of Agriculture, certifies the
compliance of Stonyfield yogurt with these
regulations. QAI itself holds certifications outside
the US in Europe, Canada and Japan, and from
the International Organic Accreditation Service.
QAI’s founding in 1989 likely anticipated the 1990
federal Organic Foods Production Act. Guthman
points out the trade-based origins of the national
legislation, an evolution of the California Organic
Foods Act. What is now the Organic Trade
Association was founded in 1984 by certification
agencies and larger-scale producers to define
the organic label as primarily “a production
standard for farmers (and later processors) rather
than as a food safety standard for consumers”
(239). She goes on:
Certainly it did not represent an
alternative system of food
provision. The organic movement
thereafter evolved into a drive for

Fig. 11. Michael Mercil
Michael Mercil with Shetland lamb at Stratford Ecological Center, Delaware, Ohio, 2010, photo: Matthew Keida Michael Mercil
institutional legitimacy and
regulation of the term ‘organically
grown’ in the interests of trade… So
although codification arose from
multiple intentions, its greatest
success was to open up markets.
QAI, the third-party certifying agency of Stonyfield,
belongs to this capitalized institutional lineage. Its
identity lies within the virtualized frame of
transnational capital propounded by Carrier,
Miller, Sklair and Thrift.
A virtual field
“What, however, if human labor power turns out
to be only part of the story of lively capital?”
(Haraway, 46). I know Michael Mercil as an artist
and professor of art at the Ohio State University in
Columbus, Ohio where we both work. Mercil
situates his practice within the structure and history
of the land grant university. A series of projects
under his “locally focused forum”[3], The Living
Culture Initiative, materializes within the academic
institution the instantiation of possibility that Butler
proposes. Mercil’s installation The Beanfield (2006-
08) refigured Thoreau’s 2.5 acre beanfield at
Walden Pond. The project consisted of 49 bean
74
poles on a 500 square foot plot outside the
university’s Wexner Center for the Arts. It entailed
collaboration with the OSU College of Food,
Agriculture and Environmental Sciences as well as
the Wexner. In his notes for a 2011 talk, Mercil
describes it as his cultivation of art as practice
and as ‘work’, in its verb form:
Thoreau’s work at Walden
was Walden, or the becoming
of Walden through the
living/writing/working through of it.
Thoreau went to Walden to
naturalize himself (to configure his
relation to nature) where he then
planted a field of beans to
socialize himself (to configure his
relation to society). His work in the
bean field was a working out of
conversation with neighbors and
passers-by (advice given/advice
ignored). Likewise, I planted The
Beanfield near the Wexner Center
and along College Road to
engage in conversation with the
society of the university (advice
given/advice ignored).

Fig. 12. Michael Mercil
Michael Mercil, The Virtual Pasture, detail of Shetland ewe with LED monitor, photo: Matthew Keida Michael Mercil
I asked Mercil at that talk about his use of
nostalgia in The Beanfield (2006-08), and in his
next Living Culture installation/plantation on the
same plot, The Virtual Pasture (2009-11). The
latter, three-year ‘work’ involved breeding what
became a flock of 16 sheep (from an initial three)
at the Stratford Ecological Center, an educational
organic farm and nature preserve 25 miles north
of campus. Mercil trucked several of his sheep to
the fenced campus plot for monthly visits during
the school year, a recurring event advertised
through a series of postcards. Artist and flock
occupied their small 'field' outside the Wexner
from 10 am to 3 pm on the "first Mondays". Mercil
planted his field with livestock forage grasses,
apple trees, and a large LED monitor. The
monitor's pixelated screen virtualized the sheep’s
country home via continuous live video feed from
Stratford.
This discussion of the project draws mostly
from Mercil’s written response to my question
about nostalgia, a Haraway-style response, but
also my on-going conversations and co-worker
relation with the artist. Mercil begins with a set of
quotes from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the
Garden (cited in Mercil notes, 2011, n.p.):
75
The soft veil of nostalgia [for the
pastoral] that hangs over our
urbanized landscape is largely a
vestige of the once dominant
image of [America as] an
undefiled green republic, a quiet
land of forests, villages, and farms
dedicated to the pursuit of
happiness. (6, Mercil’s annotations)
[By design] most literary works
called pastorals… qualify, or call
into question, or bring irony to bear
against the illusion of peace and
harmony in a green pasture. And it
is this fact that will enable us,
finally, to get at the difference
between the complex and
sentimental kinds of pastoralism.
(25, Mercil’s annotations)
It is industrialization, represented by
images of machine technology,
that provides the counterforce in
the American archetype of the
pastoral. (26)

Mercil goes on to write about his own work:
The LED monitor in The Virtual
Pasture acts as a counterforce to
the rural nostalgia re/presented by
the landscape of the central
campus Oval (once an actual
pasture, then re-engineered in the
image of a pasture — without
animals)
From the Stratford Center (where
the sheep are kept) to the Wexner
Center (where the artwork is
located), the image of the farm, its
pasture and grazing animals, is
captured by remote camera,
transferred by satellite, streamed
through a computer network and
viewed through the screen of
contemporary technology.
In his notes, Mercil muses on the origins of
Cheerios in an unseen and disconnected oat
field owned by General Mills Corporation. He
considers a recent evolutionary theory on the role
of cooking in the development of the relatively
large brain and small stomachs of humans:
Cooked food is more easily and
quickly digested than raw food.
Less energy needed by the
stomach to digest = more time for
the brain to daydream. From this
might we suggest that food =
culture? At the table (or round the
fire) lies the context for
conversation = the context for
chewing over ideas (e.g. “Try this.
You might like it.”).
I am not speaking here (though I
could) of nutritional impacts, but
rather I am speaking about the
cultural impacts of removing farm
animals from our daily living. With
no contact with farm animals, how
can we come to know them, or
what can we know about them?
Without contact with farm animals,
what kind of conversations can we
have either with or about them? So
now, if we speak about farm
animals that we no longer see
and, consequently, we no longer
know, then when speaking about
76
farm animals we, in fact, do not
know what we are talking about.
Yet of all animals it is with farm
animals that we have an
evolutionary covenant. We have
co-evolved together. Farm animals
are dependent upon us. We are
dependent upon them—not only
for food, but for our thinking.
The Virtual Pasture overlooked Ohio State’s
traditional campus green, named The Oval. The
Boston-based Olmsted Brothers landscape
architecture firm integrated the former farm field
into a master plan for the university in 1909. The
Oval's picturesque scenography inherits a
pastoral ideology from the brothers' pater and
Central Park's landscape architect, Frederick Law
Olmsted. Mercil, representing The Machine in the
Garden, references (Leo) Marx’s account of the
pastoral’s elite history in 18 th century landscape
painting.
Returning to Mercil's notes on the project:
... this image of farm animals
outside the Wexner Center is
spectral. The Virtual Pasture haunts
the Oval with images of animals
that at one time actually grazed it.
When, on the first Monday of each
month, I bring my sheep to
campus to graze this 500 square
foot patch of grass, it becomes a
pasture in fact—and it is the Oval
that remains a virtual image.
To encounter (see) an animal’s
image is not, however, to
experience or to know the animal.
To know a farm animal one must
handle it. This is what farmers do.
At The Virtual Pasture I do not offer
lessons in animal handling—even
if, at times, it seems the entire
university is my classroom there. Yet
from encounter we build
experience. By making farm
animals once again visible within
our daily comings and goings, The
Virtual Pasture seeks to inform our
thinking about them and our
talking about them…
With the rise of industrial scaled

farming, the animals have
disappeared from our sight. Is this
a good or a bad thing for the
animals? Is this a good or bad
thing for us? Is that a stupid
question? Might a better question
be, whether or not raising animals
in sheds is a necessary thing to do?
And, if so, what condition(s) make it
necessary? While we may choose
to raise farm animals in this way,
must we choose to do so?
Is to pasture raise a cow a
(nostalgic) picture of farming, or is
it a farming practice? The Ohio
Dairy Association describes the
pasturing of cows as an
“alternative farm management
technique.” Alternative to what?
Might we think about that? How
might we talk about it? What, if
anything, might we do about it?
Where do we find ourselves? And
what is the nature of the culture we
produce here now? I am an artist,
not a farmer. The substance of my
practice is to work from the
tangible facts of my world toward
a shaping of my experience of/in
it.
Mercil dismantled The Virtual Pasture and
"dispersed" his flock in December 2011. The artist's
upcoming film Covenant extends the installation's
central question into the human encounter with
farm animals. The release description reads:
Covenant (42:35 minutes) is a film
about farm animals and us that
narrates the fact and the way
these animals become food. In it,
farmers reflect upon the nature
and economy of keeping livestock,
while calling our attention to the
rewards, anxieties and challenges
of the human/farm animal bond.
Antagonism and desire, retold
If we had no appetite, we would
be free from coercion, but
because we are from the start
given over to what is outside us,
submitting to the terms which give
77
form to our existence, we are in this
respect – and irreversibly –
vulnerable to exploitation. (Butler,
2002, 9)
Guthman applies a concept of "aesthetic illusion"
(Fine and Leopold, cited in Guthman, 236) to
brand name. The concept addresses the
interpretive gap between a commodity's
"(physical) use value" and its exchangeable
"imputed use value" (236). The gap permits the
introduction of rent, a disparity between
attainable prices and actual production costs. A
consumer culture that fetishizes the organic
imaginary enables the production of signs,
“voluntary labels”, as a tactic for creating rents.
Such signs, though, are “highly ambiguous”,
subject to reinterpretation and redeployment.
Their openness to unintended, socially reinscribed,
values and desires suggests Foucault’s
concept of proliferative power. Guthman points
to the classed, raced and regionalized
economic disparities that produce rent and that
rents re-produce. Butler, in her chapter “Stubborn
Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel
on the Unhappy Consciousness” (1997, 31 -62),
interrogates the reiterative and proliferative
exchanges of power that produce disparity. Butler
re-narrates Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”
figures, the lord and the bondsman. Here, I insert
into a retelling of Butler's rewriting a parenthetical
inscription relating to a stony field. I assume in this
uncertified act of re-inscribing an artifice to which
Butler might object. But I do this to posit another
frame, wrapping around two figures, a person
(named Lady Stonyfield) and a cow (named
Cow), in a stony relational field (named
Commodity).
The lord (Lady Stonyfield) and the
bondsman (Cow) are figures in a stony field
(Commodity). These two appear at first to be
opposed and completely different. But the Two
each co-figure the Other in a singular yet not
static mutual interdependence. The lord (Lady
Stonyfield) depends on the bondsman's (Cow’s)
body and products of labor (milk) for the material
conditions (yogurt) of his (her) daily life (breakfast).
Through this dependence, the lord (lady)
produces the bondsman's (Cow’s) body, which he
(she) subsumes into his (her) own body. The lord
(lady) thus consumes the bondsman's (Cow’s)
labor and products of labor (milk and more
cows). For this show of power ($360 million in sales
in 2010) to work, the lord (Lady Stonyfield) must
selectively ‘forget’ his (her) involvement in
effecting the bondsman's (Cow’s) body and

(food) products. He (she) must ‘disavow’ his (her)
dependence on the bondsman’s (Cow’s) work. A
paradoxical result is the lord’s (lady’s)
disembodiment in assuming the body of the
Other, embodying him (her) as bondsman (Cow)!
The bondsman (Cow), too, must take part in the
substitution (commodification) of his (her) body
and products for the lord’s (lady’s) body and
possessions (cartons of yogurt to sell for $3.49).
The bondsman (Cow) must conspire, is allowed
no choice but to conspire, in the concealment
(Commodity) of that exchange
(commodification). The bondsman’s (Cow’s)
recognition or nonrecognition, consciousness or
unconsciousness, of the conspiracy (Commodity)
does not at first change that relational field. The
bondsman (Cow) is embodied (incorporated),
without regard for his (her) response (looking
back), into the duplicitous simulation of a
substitution (Commodity). The bondsman (Cow) is
conscripted into the relational field on which he
(she) depends for sustenance (grass) and value
(exchangeability) by the lord (lady). Butler
formulates the substitution (incorporation)
rhetorically as: “you be my body for me, but do
not let me know that the body you are is my
body” (35). Still, the bondsman (Cow), bonded to
the lord (Lady Stonyfield), cannot ultimately
escape an unhappy consciousness (fear) of selfloss
(death). This conscripted reflexivity occurs first
when the bondsman (Cow) sees himself (herself),
and his (her) own erasure in the course of
production. These signs of self he (Cow) must
submit, has no power but to submit, to the lord
(Lady Stonyfield) and his (her) embodiment
(incorporation) of possession
(commodification). The submission of identity and
agency refigures self as an expropriation and
erasure. The bonded (cow) and bonder
(Stonyfield) logically converge in a field of
disembodiment and “fearful transience” (39).
Each is materialized and virtualized through a selfperpetuating
process of consumption.
My reinscription stops where the
bondsman’s and cow’s stories diverge. Butler
(Hegel) traces a sequential, reflexive exchange of
objectivity and subjectivity between the
bondsman (human) and lord (same species).
Each subject pursues a desire for permanence
(life) represented by his (her) object (product) of
labor. The dominated human after many selfrepresenting
(self-advertising) acts of exchange is
enabled to re-inscribe upon his/her self some,
though not full, agency of identity. Through this
work, the person concealed within the frame of
78
bondage is seen, and named. Butler (Hegel) finds
desire – the suppressed desire that drives the
bondsman’s work – to be operative in the
possession of agency (40). But the cow,
regardless of her desire, possesses no terms
through which to enter the relational field. The
(incorporated) person(s) condition the
representational terms of relation. For the cow to
even appear to her (them) in that field, the
person(s) must look back and see her. Butler finds
that the socially proliferative process of
consumption destabilizes agency and identity in
human terms. The proliferation opens possibilities
to resist erasure. It binds subject and object
together in a recognized interdependence. If
Lady (people) and Cow (cows) are each seen as
the internalized subject(s) of the Other(s) (ladycow),
each can become the desired object of
the other. Both can become with.
I see in Mercil’s acts of work a desire to
know and to respond, respectfully, to the other
animals that enable him to think and work, that
take part in that thinking and working. His acts are
epistemological and ontological, concerned with
possible logics of knowing and being. In this work I
find an openness to becoming with that
Guthman alludes to, but doesn’t get to, in the
conclusion of her chapter – despite its critical
openings. The chapters by Carrier, Miller, Sklair
and Thrift on a reductive virtualism seem to
foreclose more possibilities than they open.
Butler’s work, in contrast and resistance to that
closure, represents new possibilities. I credit it in
doing so with making possible. Mercil’s
installations and his words, like Butler’s reprinted
here, co-figure bodies and power. Mercil, unlike
Stonyfield, physically and daily works with animals,
including sheep, chickens, cows and people,
and their grassy and stony fields. An exchange of
subjectivity and objectivity takes place in the
work’s refiguration of bodies and environments
and their co-scripted relations of power. I suggest
that the possibilities Mercil’s work instantiates
emerge through its materiality in cooperation
with its virtuality. I reiterate here Butler’s
and Marx’s materiality as twofold, and Haraway’s
“becoming with” as “coflourishing” (41). These
shared materialities and flourishings can, should,
be manifold. But only two must be seen to start
the co-productive reflexivity that Butler and
Haraway name. As both demonstrate, and as we
already knew, death and fear recur. Some stones
remain hidden. But hiding can be constructive or
destructive interdependent with situation. And
death need not be an erasure, like the

incorporated subsumption of Stonyfield’s cow
fetish.
Notes
1 Stonyfield does have a line of organic yogurt smoothies.
2 In 2011, the first series was valued at $25,137,147, and the latest,
closing in 2010, $45,612,958. (CROPP Audited Financial Statement
2011, http://www.organicvalley.coop/about-us/invest/stockprospectus/
10-23-12).
3 http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html
References
i myStonyfieldRewards.com (15 Oct 2012)
ii I refer to Haraway’s usage of “to respond” in her critique of Derrida’s
lecture “And Say the Animal Responded” (cited in Haraway, 2007).
iii The French food conglomerate Groupe Danone holds an 85%
stake in the US Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (van Rensburg)
iv e.g. Groupe Danone owns 80% of Stonyfield Europe. The other
20% of Stonyfield Europe is held by U.S. Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (Dairy
Industries International, 11)
v “Stonyfield CEO founder opening NYC organic, natural food cafe
concept” (Sustainable Food News)
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Mercil, Michael. "The Living Culture Initiative".
http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html (30 Oct, 2012).
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Miller, Daniel. “Conclusion: A Theory of Virtualism”. Ed. Carrier, James
G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg.
1998.
Reingold, Jennifer. “How to sell sustainable foods to the Wal-Mart
shopper”. CNN Money.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/17/boundaries-sustainability/
(24 Oct, 2012).
Sklair, Leslie. “The Transnational Capitalist Class”. Ed. Carrier, James
G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg.
1998.
“Stonyfield CEO founder opening NYC organic, natural food cafe
concept” Sustainable Food News (2012)
http://sustainablefoodnews.com/story.php?news_id=15988 (26 Oct,
2012)
"Stonyfield Comes to Europe, Buys Glenisk". Dairy Industries
International 71 (2006).
Thrift, Nigel. “Virtual Capitalism: The Globalisation of Reflexive Business
Knowledge”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A
New Political Economy. Berg. 1998.
van Rensburg, Deryck J. "Strategic brand venturing: the corporation
as entrepreneur", Journal of Business Strategy 33:3 (2012). 4 – 12.
Katherine Bennett is an assistant professor in the Landscape
Architecture Section, Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio
State University (OSU), where she teaches design studios,
representation workshops and research seminars that investigate
interspecies habitat. She is a registered landscape architect and has
practiced in Boston, New York, Cape Cod, Savannah, San
Francisco, Seoul and Hanoi – the latter while a Visiting Professor of
Landscape Architecture at the University of Seoul. Her degrees in
Landscape Architecture and Painting are from the Graduate School
of Design at Harvard University (MLA) and The University of Georgia
(BFA). Katherine has begun research toward a PhD in the
Department of Geography at OSU, integrating her collaborative
research with agroecologists, anthropologists, artists and architects in
the US and Asia.

M
onkey Brand Soap, Brooke’s boasted,
‘cleans, scours, scrubs, polishes [and]
brightens everything’, with one notable
exception. The catchphrase ‘won’t wash clothes’
features in the majority of the series (here printed
on the stair carpet), offering a guarantee of the
otherwise illimitable scope of Brooke’s hygienic
pledge. One striking image demonstrates the
soap’s extensive powers by posing the monkey
gazing with an air of self-satisfaction at his own
likeness in a frying pan’s sparkling base, his face
altered miraculously from black to white,
accompanied by the explanatory note, ‘For
Happy BRIGHT reflection, MONKEY BRAND is just
perfection’. Significantly, the frying pan generally
features somewhere in Brooke’s simian mise-enscène,
although it sometimes takes a second
look to find it; as if, fascinated by his own protean
form, the monkey wishes to always keep to hand
the possibility of sneaking a glimpse at his new
body, reminding himself of his transfigured skin in
the gleaming world Brooke’s promises.
Brooke’s monkey is, of course, very much
BROOKE’S MONKEY
BRAND SOAP
Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap was a common, even iconic, presence in the pages of late nineteenth-century
illustrated newspapers in Britain. Barely an issue of the London Illustrated News, The Graphic or The
Sketch passed without a full or half page spread of Brooke’s ubiquitous monkey, arrayed in one of its many
baffling guises: promenading in top hat and tails, juggling cooking pots in a jester’s get-up, strumming a mandolin
on the moon, destitute and begging by the side of the road, kneeling to accept a medal from a glamorous
Frenchwoman, careering along on a bicycle with feet on the handle-bars, clinging precariously to a ship’s mast,
carefully polishing the family china and here in 1891, sliding gleefully down the banisters with legs spread wide
and the hint of a smile while two neat Victorian children watch calmly on. [i]
Text by John Miller
80
a political animal. The ‘new imperialism’ of the
1890s saw an intensification of British expansionist
energy that gave consistent emphasis to the
importance of commerce. Empire provided both
an abundant source of industrial raw materials
and potential new markets for manufactured
commodities. Reflecting and supporting this
national endeavour were various forms of popular
imperialism. Images of empire were voraciously
consumed in music halls and theatres, in copious
works of travel writing and adventure fiction,
ensuring that the idea of Britain’s civilizing mission
became part of the fabric of cultural life. British
interests in Africa were particularly prominent in
the media at the fin-de-siècle. H. M. Stanley’s
1890 In Darkest Africa, Lord Kitchener’s successful
campaign in the Sudan in 1898 and the start of
the Second Boer War in 1899 were among the
notably newsworthy events that were grist to the
mill of writers, artists and illustrators. Hardly
surprisingly, therefore, Africa is a recurring theme
in Victorian ad pages. Bovril, Eno’s Salts and
Guinea Gold Cigarettes were among numerous

Brooke’s Soap Monkey Brand
Wont Wash Clothes , 1910 Lever Brothers
81

companies that forged a marketing strategy in
relation to the myth of the Dark Continent with its
familiar ideological pattern of savagery and
bestiality inviting in the ‘enlightening’ influence of
British rule. Brooke’s monkey is part of this history.
As our most proximate and troubling animal
relatives, monkeys have long evoked questions of
human origins and identity; concerns which, in
the context of imperialism, frequently return to
ideas of race. Victorian soap advertising drew
consistently on an association between otherness
and filth: in the logic of imperialism, the
animalized African, or the Africanized animal, was
a lamentably unsanitary creature. Anne
McLintock’s important study Imperial Leather,
which explores, among other things, the central
connection of ‘commodity racism and imperial
advertising’, provides a compelling analysis of the
way that ‘soap-making became the emblem of
industrial progress’, as ‘soap was invested with
magical, fetish powers’. [ii] Britain, the argument
ran, was bringing the world cleanliness, washing
away degeneracy and backwardness. Dirt was
an evolutionary issue. Consequently, Brooke’s
monkey is a truly global animal, illustrating the
terrestrial scope of imperial ambition, even in one
incarnation skipping around a tiny Earth, with his
trademark frying pan in paw, a citoyen du
monde, heralding a worldwide regimen of
spotless civilization. He is, the byline runs, ‘the
world’s polisher’; himself a reformed subject of
imperial capitalism, lifted from his beastly state to
the appearance of a man.
Above all, the moral of Brooke’s Monkey
Brand is a message of order. ‘The poetics of
cleanliness’, McLintock writes, ‘is a poetics of
social discipline’, [iii] recruiting us all into rituals of
work, consumption and aspiration, redolent with a
larger philosophical proposition. This is what it
means to be human. At first glance, there is a
certain perilousness about the monkey on the
stairs. The blond girl’s arm holds back her
younger, dark-haired companion, but their faces
betray no fear. Rather, they are making space for
the spectacle of the monkey’s chaotic nature
reconfigured as fun, at worst a case of
schoolboyish high spirits. If there is a touch of
weepiness about the big-eyed brunette, there is
an assurance in the older girl’s poise that keeps
the tears at bay. Very little literal connection to the
product’s functionality is apparent in the
exhilaration of the monkey’s descent, unless
perhaps in the polished smoothness of the
surface that allows him to glide so effortlessly to
the floor. Indeed, the concealment of work is a
characteristic trope of the Monkey Brand
82
campaign, except occasionally when the
monkey himself is displayed as a labouring
subject in images that add social class to race as
another category of the animal in human form.
As such, Brooke’s offers both an inducement to
and an erasure of toil. So, despite the advert’s
insistence on Monkey Brand’s cleaning, scouring,
scrubbing utility, what matters most is not the
substance or effect of the soap, but the glittering
ideal it encapsulates: a domestic utopia that
derives its political force from its relationship with
the Earth’s remote, dark places. Behind the
monkey a pot plant’s spreading foliage gestures
towards a distant jungle habitat. As he zips down
and away from this hint of his past, flying by the
seat of his tailored pants, precarious but
ultimately secure in his new environment, the
monkey represents the triumph of
empire, realised in the urbanity of the middle
class home that safely contains him. In the
deeply conservative Victorian attitudes he
announces, Brooke’s anthropomorphic monkey
reminds us of the discomforting ideological uses
non-human primates have long been put to in
the semiotic repertoire of capitalist modernity.
References
[i] London Illustrated News, October 3, 1891, p. 453
[ii] Anne McLintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in
the Colonial Contest. New York and London, Routledge, 1995, p.
217; p. 207
[iii] McLintock, Imperial Leather, p. 226.
Dr John Miller arrived in Sheffield in September 2012 to take up a
lectureship in Nineteenth-Century Literature. He completed his PhD
at the University of Glasgow in 2009 and then held postdoctoral
research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in the
Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Northern
British Columbia. He also held a teaching fellowship at the University
of East Anglia. He is general secretary of the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland):http://asle.org.uk/
His research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and
empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular
emphasis on the late Victorian period. His first monograph Empire
and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the representation of
exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. He is
currently working on the co-authored volume Walrus for the
Reaktion Animal series and on his second monograph, Fur: A Literary
History. Other work currently in progress includes co-edited
collections on Henry Rider Haggard and on globalization and
heterotopias, and a special edition of the Journal for Victorian
Culture, ‘New Perspectives on Victorian Animals’ (with Claire
McKechnie).

It is tempting to take for granted that mature
consumer societies are thusly marked by “arkloads
of animal figures—realistic and
fantastic—which parade a veritable carnival of
significations” through our commercial culture, as
Reuel Denny noted already a half century ago
(1989, lv-lxix). Yet they could not function as such
if it were not for the crucial training ground an
elephant called Jumbo provided advertisers and
consumers over a century ago. He was the
primordial case, a Gilded Age signpost showing
marketers and manufacturers how to use animal
figures to tell emotive stories endorsing a modern
consumer subjectivity, stories that could be
essentialized and associated with any product.
Although an individual with a particular history,
over time Jumbo’s tale was boiled down until he
became “an adjective” in both colloquial and
commercial use (Harding 2000, 11). And, he asks
us to think about how animal figures have guided
consumers through one hundred and thirty years
of economic change by persuading them to
internalize a central premise of modern
capitalism; namely that one can best achieve
personal liberty through ever-expanding
consumption and the ethic of “more.”
JUMBO: A CAPITALIST
CREATION STORY
Today, a profusion of non-human animals inhabit the world of advertising. Consumers see some of them in person
and some as brand icons, team mascots, and other more-generic endorsers of consumption (sometimes their own
consumption, like pig characters decorating BBQ restaurants or matronly cows on dairy product packaging)
embellishing countless products, services and entertainments. This zoological cornucopia provides a naturalizing
link to the non-human world, promising us that to absorb advertising messages and spend is to participate in an
inevitable and emotionally authentic activity because, as the belief goes, animals don’t lie (Shukin 2009, 3-5).
Text by Susan Nance
83
Everybody Needs a Story: Gilded Age
Jumbo
In the beginning, there was a modest but
enthusiastic consumer culture in North America,
inhabited by citizens known to expect timely and
fashionable things at the lowest possible price
(Breen 2004, 131-32). Prominent among the
products and services they patronized were
itinerant displays of anonymous exotic or wild
animals shown in barns and empty lots for a fee.
For consumers, paying to see unusual animals
spoke of a desire for worldly novelty and security
through trade (Somkin 1967, 11-54; Weeks 1994,
485-95). The handbills and newspaper ads
employed by showmen provided the first graphic
commercial representations of the animals that
most North Americans would see, including the
young female pachyderm known famously as
“The Elephant,” an educational and exotic visitor.
That first elephant’s popularity with audiences
inspired showmen to spend the next century
working out how to use animals and their
representations to sell.
Phineas T. Barnum would become a
crucial pioneer in this art of communicating to

consumers with animals that promised
compelling consumer experience. Barnum was a
media genius who instructed his agents to
embellish fences and newspaper columns with
line drawings, steel plate images and textual
depictions of real and invented animals,
contextualized with intriguing stories that enticed
viewers to visit in order to judge those beings for
themselves. At the same time, he invited
Americans to determine how, as residents of a
largely unregulated capitalist economy, one
might wisely evaluate advertising to find the
frauds and truths they contained. Americans were
willing partners with Barnum in valorizing this idea,
hoping that each person would be free to form
an opinion and exercise it through spending as a
patriotic mode of self-improvement (Adams
1997, 147-63; Cook 2001, 73-126; Harris 1981,
74-75).
When he got into the circus trade in the
1850’s, Barnum knew that audience fascination
with the notion of abundance, as well as
competition between companies, had driven
show producers to develop a “MAMMOTH SHOW”
(as the ads often read) marketing practice
whereby companies strove to create “grandness”
and “giantism” in their productions, presaging the
broader marketing of excess in the late twentieth
century. Bull elephants especially articulated the
industry’s overall promotional aesthetic. Circuses
were the only ventures that held living elephants
at that point, since there would be no network of
zoos in North America until the end of the century.
With their vast bulk and unique shape, elephants
on circus bills and in circus day parades
functioned “as an advertisement” for the whole
performance genre. “Any alert advertiser [knew]
that the elephants were the thing to ‘bear down
on hard’” in order to stay in the public eye, as
circus press agent Charles Day recalled of the
industry wisdom at the time (1995, 66, 69).
Later that century, when ad men said “Bill
it like a circus,” they referred specifically to the
dramatic and colorful promotional techniques
developed by early showmen to entertain and
amaze just so (Laird 1998, 44). More broadly, the
dominant advertising theory of the period
advocated for liberal spending on messaging
that presented consumers with the same
information—usually plain-spoken details on what
could be bought, where, and for what price—
over a period of weeks or months. Barnum and
other aggressive marketers in various trades would
develop this practice by piquing audience
interest with novel ads offering puzzles,
observations on current events, compelling
84
graphics or grandiose claims, and repeating
them until no person could possibly ignore them
(quoted in Rowell 1870, 83). Circuses were the
most prolific employers on the continent of
grand, surreal and colorfully graphic lithographed
advertising, which advance men liberally pasted
over fences and buildings in cities and the tiniest
towns. They easily flattered audiences as a
privileged citizenry by exclaiming how much risk a
given impresario had taken on to bring the
most extraordinary animals to all ticket-payers,
regardless of their station in life, illustrating those
claims with bizarrely surreal and glamorous
images of people and animals in every
imaginable pose.
Barnum was additionally notorious that
century as a master of “Humbug” (today we
might say hype). He was an early expert at issuing
press releases, interviews to friendly journalists,
letters to the editor, and various day-by-day bits
of information that contextualized his advertising
with a broader controversy or shared public story.
Thus, when Barnum considered Jumbo at the
London Zoo in 1881, he saw an elephant who
might carry a dramatic individual story while
serving as the perfect agent for the penultimate
execution of mammoth marketing in history. The
elephant was then a much-loved resident of the
Zoo and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself. Born
in 1861, in the French Sudan (Mali), he had
resided for a short time after his capture at
the Jardin des Plantes in Paris before arriving in
London around age four, where he spent plenty
of time accepting food from visitors and being
driven by his trainer William Scott about the
grounds, carrying a howdah filled with the
children who paid for a ride. By the late 1870’s,
Jumbo was maturing into an adult, and so was
experiencing dangerous periods of irritability
known as musth (central to elephantine
reproduction and social organization in the wild).
He had also begun to resist the dominance
training used to subdue him by becoming
unpredictable when Scott was not immediately
present.
Jumbo had a strange dual personality as
far as the British public could see. As portrayed by
citizens and the press, he was at once a friend to
children and a dangerous wild animal surely
bound to kill someone. Looking to relieve himself
of the responsibility of the elephant, London Zoo
Superintendent Abraham Bartlett agreed to sell
Jumbo to Barnum, who would acquire the largest
elephant in the world, as the advertising would
insist, as the centerpiece for a show branded
“Greatest Show on Earth Combined with the

Fig. 1.
The iconic Jumbo broadside, 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art , Saratosa, FL.
85

Great London Circus,” produced by his merger
with the ventures of legendary circus impresarios
James Hutchinson and James A. Bailey (Saxon
1995, 284).
When news of the sale became public,
the British press ignited a public controversy that
would lay the groundwork for the elephant’s
transformation from mildly famous zoo captive to
provocative advertising symbol. In London, the
newspapers and plenty of angry citizens,
including children, called Barnum and all
Americans “Philistines” and “slave-owners” who
would make the noble Jumbo mere “chattel”
held captive to entertain a “Yankee mob.” (The US
had abolished slavery sixteen years earlier, but
that cliché along with older suspicions of the
America as a degenerate and rebellious nation
had stuck) (Harding 2000, 43-45; Harris 1981, 257;
Jolly 1976, 57-58; Rubin and Rubin 2005, 3-20).
At first, the controversy had little resonance
since North Americans could not closely follow
the scandal in the London papers. So Barnum
encouraged the local press to give over many
column inches over to Jumbo’s arrival in New York
on April 9, 1882. Thereafter his marketing team
used broadsides and show programs to
reconstruct media representations of the difficult
evacuation of Jumbo from Britain found in
newspapers and illustrated magazines like The
Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated, much of which consisted of pseudoevents
devised to lengthen and make more
theatrical the shipping of the elephant.
Barnum’s lithograph broadsides, show
programs and newspaper spots certainly billed
Jumbo’s journey “like a circus,” with a colorful and
dramatic giantism (Figure 1). One iconic poster
globalized “THE GIANT AFRICAN ELEPHANT JUMBO”
as “The Biggest Elephant in the World” in tapered
typeset that evoked the curvature of the earth,
reminding viewers that Jumbo’s “Removal” had
been “remonstrated against by the whole British
nation and was accomplished in the face of
seeming insurmountable objections” by Barnum
and company. It showed a resistant Jumbo
“FORCED INTO HIS BOX” and bracing himself
against the outside of the crate. It also portrayed
“JUMBO CHAINED,” wearing an angry expression
and straining against his halter. Other promotional
materials depicted Jumbo’s height and size with
great exaggeration, as was Barnum’s frequent
practice with animal attractions (Presbrey 1968,
215). One show program offered “All-Famous and
Gigantic ‘JUMBO’ The Mighty Lord of all Beasts…
The Largest Living Quadruped on Earth…[and]
Towering Monster” with Jumbo drawn twice his
86
actual size, and a horse and carriage passing
comfortably under his belly. [i]
Jumbo’s advertising told viewers that he
was an extraordinary and powerful individual
reluctantly forced to the United States, a feat only
Barnum could produce. That narrative drew its
cultural sense from the century’s hunting
narratives, a genre that was popular in book
publishing, magazines and newspapers. Hunting
narratives provided dramatic tales of western
men who, with the aid of local servants, tracked,
captured or killed wild animals in Asia and Africa.
Their prey, including elephants, were routinely
portrayed as fierce and noble adversaries of the
hunter, beasts who fought valiantly against their
pursuers, then died in dramatic fashion—all the
better to display the honor and strength of the
hunter (here Barnum as financial risk taker) brave
enough to initiate the chase (Donald 2006, 50-
68; Wylie 2008, 83-84). An editorialist in the
influential Harper’s Weekly agreed that citizens,
too, had “reasons for satisfaction” in Jumbo’s
acquisition because he seemed the largest and
perhaps the most robust captive African elephant
left in a world in which the ivory trade was
decimating wild elephant populations. [ii] Soon, he
speculated, the American public might
possess the last African bull elephant on earth!
Barnum’s victory was a victory for the whole
nation, the colloquial and promotional wisdom
insisted. One Greatest Show on Earth broadside
got this point across with an image of Jumbo
towering over the preserved skeleton of a North
American mastodon, a late eighteenth-century
totem of national prestige that people
remembered well. [iii]
On both sides of the Atlantic, pundits
noted frequent public fatigue in the face of such
tactics, yet also noted that many Britons and
North Americans seemed sincerely interested in
Jumbo’s life. So did the naysayers hasten to
participate in the Jumbo scandal by lampooning
the deftness with which Barnum and his staff were
making an international incident out of the sale of
a captive animal (a transaction zoos and circuses
performed regularly with no public notice). The
lampooners probably only heightened Jumbo’s
versatility as a “rhetorical animal” since they
made cultural space for reticent observers to
make their own interpretive use of Jumbo by
complaining or taking ironic enjoyment from
Jumbo as symbol of consumer credulity (Ritvo
1989, 5-6). Funny Folks, an illustrated humor
tabloid supplement added to the British
paper, Weekly Budget, [iv] stayed relevant with a
cover (in its own way an advertisement for the

Fig. 2.
Funny Folks, 1882. McCaddon Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, Princeton Library, Princeton, NJ.
87

magazine’s contents and character) depicting
Jumbo as a figurative and literal vehicle for
Barnum’s marketing efforts (Figure 2). Drawn with
circus handbills and broadsides glued to his skin,
he was a caricature of Barnum’s entrepreneurial
persona as an American media monarch. In a
satirical Roman or British style, he rides Jumbo with
paste-brush scepter in hand while wearing a stars
and stripes suit and jaunty crown. Below him, a
grumpy looking Jumbo passes a handbill
celebrating his own captivity to a small girl.
Plenty of people understood that Jumbo
had become a living communication medium.
He was a figurative billboard onto which, not only
Barnum and the British and North American press,
but also citizens—the customers of zoos, circuses
and the media—were projecting their own needs
and identities. Jumbo was then the most famous
animal in the world and a turning point in the
commercialization of the human habit of using
animals “to think”—in this case about nature and
national rivalries. And as Jumbo toured the US
and Canada with Barnum’s company over the
next three years, the public noise around the
elephant came to be known as “Jumbo Mania.”
Certainly, Jumbo’s arrival in New York in
April of 1881 was a moment many saw as a sign
of the American public’s right to have privileged
access to whatever the world contained. If
Barnum wrestled that “whatever” away from the
British for his own profit, he did so equally on
Americans’ behalf, many believed. In a widely
republished telegram to the editor of the London
Telegraph, Barnum insisted the elephant was a
right owed to “Fifty-one millions American citizens
[for whom] my 40 years’ invariable practice of
exhibiting [the] best that money could procure
makes Jumbo’s presence here
imperative.” [v] Here—and this was crucial—
Barnum’s bombastic claims of sparing no
expense or effort to bring the most gigantic land
animal on earth to the American public were not
signs of fraud, but elements of an authentically
American cultural event. Each citizen-consumer
could speak his or her mind about Jumbo’s story
and vicariously capture the mighty elephant. In
effect, Barnum’s advertising told consumers:
Expect more. You deserve it.
Jumbo Mania was possible, in part,
because the elephant’s ads constituted a radical
departure from previous circus advertising for
elephants, or any animal for that matter. Since
the 1870’s, when it became possible to
inexpensively produce detailed illustrations,
advertisers had begun experimenting with ads
featuring animal and child figures, especially for
88
products aimed at women (Laird 1998, 93). Spots
for foods and medicines depicted anonymous
animals as spirits of transformation representing
the power of the product at hand. Some even
linked human and non-human life in whimsical
and ancient ways by offering amusing animals
portrayed in human clothing or, particularly in the
case of patent medicines like liniments, assuring
viewers they could use the product on a horse’s
body or their own (Lears 1994, 145). These
promotional animal representations revealed an
early industry understanding that advertising
should engage the viewer with an open-ended
interrogation of some common truth (for instance
the complexity of citizens’ constructions of the
non-human), the memory of which the customer
could link to purchasing the product. Traditionally
the circuses had advertised their elephants even
more simply as naturalist’s curiosity or happy
performer.
Jumbo, however, was depicted as a
complex individual experiencing a broad range
of human-style emotions and personality traits:
frustration, love, fear, stubbornness, sadness,
anger and melancholy resignation. As much as it
asked the viewer to pay to see him at the circus,
Jumbo’s advertising also invited consumers to
empathize with his feelings over his fate, while
imagining themselves as his captors. It was that
mediated representation of Jumbo as traveler
that gave the elephant his real value. “Men and
women are selfish,” Barnum had advised fellow
entrepreneurs of why this was so. “We all prefer
purchasing where we can get the most for our
money,” he explained, knowing that in the case
of his animal exhibitions he sold not just the
chance to view an animal but an opportunity to
participate in a story about the animal that
reflected one’s own identity (quoted in Rowell
1870, 82). Barnum had pioneered the “exchange
of story for value” in his earlier promotions of
human performers as celebrities and freaks, but
tread new territory when he extended it to the
non-human Jumbo (Twitchell 2000, 25; see also
Presbrey 1968, 219-22). And, in fact, it appears
that the Greatest Show on Earth circus sold far
more tickets than usual because of the fame
Jumbo achieved in the US. Barnum boasted, in
one of his biographies, that he earned several
times over the reported $30,000 he invested in
importing and maintaining the elephant (Barnum
1888, 333).
Jumbo Mania continued unabated for
three years. North Americans immediately began
making colloquial use of the elephant’s title, for
instance as a name for horses and household

Fig. 3.
Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek
and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker
Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA.
pets. Consumers identified with Jumbo further
because the elephant complimented
contemporary technologies for the inexpensive
reproduction of images, which were proving a
boon to the work of persuasion by way of
storytelling with characters (Laird 1998, 69, 93,
149-51). In the spirit of Barnum’s “Jumbo chained”
vignette, a Boston thread manufacturer issued a
color trade card advocating for the strength of
their product, showing a fierce, red-eyed Jumbo
being dragged through the streets of London to
the ship that would send him to America
“Because Drawn by Willamantic Thread!” [vi] Clark’s
Spool Cotton company produced a series of ten
trade cards showing: Jumbo arriving in America;
with suitcase in trunk playing tourist; in a tuxedo at
the Opera; in a bathing suit at the beach at
Coney Island; in a bow tie, guzzling beer at the
bar (here as a male overindulging at the saloon
in reference to the reality of manly alcoholism
89
and media reports, probably accurate, that
Jumbo liked alcohol) [vii] (Figure 3). A billiard ball
company similarly presaged the abstraction of
Jumbo as promotional ideal. They ignored the
fact that Jumbo had broken off his tusks back in
London to offer ivory “Jumbo Billiard and Pool
Balls” to consumers in a “Jumbo Catalogue” sent
by mail. Linking Jumbo’s notoriety to their the
product they offered a simple, opaque profile
elephant with the word “JUMBO” superimposed
across the hide in white letters. [viii]
Indeed, most companies appropriated
Jumbo into scenarios divorced from the persona
of P.T. Barnum or their even their own company
profiles. That is, while many companies had been
branding with the rags-to-riches story of their
proprietors (which indeed P.T. Barnum did as an
impresario and self-declared celebrity), others
opted to connect their products to the viewer’s
experience of the media blitz around the
elephant’s transformation into American pet. The
main purpose of Jumbo as celebrity was to
empower and endorse an emotional and selfinterested
consumerist subjectivity beyond the
context of circus advertising. And that act set the
stage for all consumers to appropriate the power
of Jumbo the bull elephant just as P. T. Barnum
had, but with less effort and expense.
Jumbo as the Liberty to Enjoy More
Then Jumbo died, hit by a train in the small town
of St. Thomas, Ontario. It was 1885. Barnum,
Bailey and Hutchinson pressed on, exhibiting
Jumbo’s skeleton and taxidermied skin for some
years, then donating the former to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York and the
latter to Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts.
Yet, the idea of Jumbo had been such a
great step forward in using animal figures to link
spending to the consumer’s symbolic
appropriation of the animal’s energy that it did
not die. Jumbo first reappeared as “jumbo,” a
promotional notion in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the
world of music production, seen as a “craze of
composers and concert-givers for long
compositions and monster performances,” and
other works featuring “long-drawn-out arias” and
other gimmicks. [ix] Later the word became a term
for the marketing of newspapers with sensational
stories and “Jumbo editions,” and the drive to
produce ever-taller skyscrapers. [x] Early twentiethcentury
jumboism—“the tendency to esteem art
in proportion to its bulk” (as circuses similarly had
in their mammoth marketing programs)—was a
sign of gauche excess and imprudent faith in

Fig. 4.
Fruit crate label, ca. 1933. Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives, London
scale. [xi] The phenomenon showed how Barnum’s
satire and celebration of American pretensions to
greatness was so often repeated that it had
become a cliché, now devoid of its original
tongue-in-cheek roasting of the public’s
fascination for “firsts” and “mosts.”
Whether nervous or dismissive of the trend,
critics noted that jumboism seemed a peculiarly
American aesthetic, a code for lowbrow
abundance. [xii] Fueled by the booming consumer
culture many urban Americans were experiencing
in those decades, it was also promoted by
consumers’ groups and ad men determined to
establish mass consumption as a basic element
of national identity and social participation. In
doing so, they were reinvigorating the old “politics
of ‘more,’” introduced by trade unions in the
1890’s, as an alternative to radical economic
reforms, to offer workers a bigger cut of the
wealth they helped to produce (Currarino 2006,
17-36; McGovern 2006).
90
Meanwhile, advertisers turned to “scientific
advertising” campaigns that assumed the
emotional pliability of consumers and so
associated products with experiences of
satisfaction or the creation and display of
personality (Marchand 1985, 68-69). In moving
from the carnivalesque to realism in their art, ad
men emphasized aspirational consumption of
home appliances, automobiles, jewelry, clothing,
and cosmetics. Anonymous elephants continued
to appear in various kinds of advertising in those
years, for instance as icons for India (pictured as
a decorated Asian elephant carrying riders), or in
cartoons, as symbols for the American
Republican Party, and (if pink) for a state of
intoxication.
When the Great Depression hit, the
contemporary ethos evoked “Fear and
Hoarding,” as one recent interpretation put it, as
consumers focused especially on food
staples. [xiii] It was also the era of safari-style “tooth

and claw” movies and other cultural products
that celebrated a forceful and independent
manhood in order to reassure Canadians and
Americans who saw the men in their lives buckling
emotionally under the humiliation of chronic
unemployment. Inviting vicarious participation by
viewers, in safari films, wild animal wranglers like
Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty dominated their
animal subjects—tigers, lions, elephants and
others—who were noble adversaries because
they were equally powerful as their captors.
(Stokes 2004, 138-54) Indeed, had it not been so
for Barnum and his audience with Jumbo as well?
Consequently, for parity products like
food, the old aesthetic of abundance became
newly important and jumboism as marketing
theory for musicians and newspaper men jostled
in those days with an archetypical African bull, a
generic Jumbo of sorts. He appeared on cans
and boxes to give “regenerative” meaning to
oversized produce like “Jumbo Olives” (Lears
1994, 157-58). Strength Valencias oranges of
California created a series of animal themed
labels for their wooden crates featuring rhinos,
lions, and others. The Strength-brand African
elephant sniffed down his trunk at the viewer with
his ears outstretched displaying his size and might
(Figure 4). For consumers weary of restraint and
uncertainty, this jumbo elephant was a sign of
gigantism to be sure, yet not as hype or satire, but
as relief. He was a comforting promise for the
future and metaphor for citizens’ inner fortitude,
mental and physical. (Indeed, the University of
Alabama still uses an “angry” African bull
elephant as promotional mascot for their sports
teams.)
Older forms would overlap with these new
trends. The formal “Jumbo” still served as a
nostalgic stock character of the circus arts,
advertising the genre in films and Broadway
shows set in circuses. And after the Cole Brothers
Clyde Beatty Circus had the gumption to offer an
elephant as “JUMBO 2 nd – The Only African
Elephant with Any Circus” in the 1930’s, there
would be more than thirty zoo and circus
elephants around the world given that
name. [xiv] One 1948 Levi’s ad for working-class
men combined jumbo as circus trope and
metaphor by portraying two elephants giggling
about a third, who vainly struggles to pull his leg
free from a stake to which he is tethered with a
pair of jeans: “Since they tied him up with those
Levi’s – he never gets away,” one explains to the
other. [xv]
Still, post-War advertising practice
expanded to include promotion by the selling of
91
lifestyles (enacted through specific products) such
that jumboism proliferated to a broad array of
products promising modernity, joy and liberty in
unrestrained consumption, especially for the
valuable adult female market segment (Leiss,
Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 190-98). The 1955
mail-order catalogue Housewares for
Homemakers proposed that the Pearl-Wick
Jumbo Shelf Hamper could make post-War
laundry storage elegantly functional: “Super
giantized hamper with handy built in shelf for
cosmetics… Largest hamper ever made.” In the
Miss America Pageant Official Yearbook for 1963,
an ad for Toni Home Beauty Collection offered,
“for the girl who wants just curves, not curls. Big,
big jumbo size body curlers.” [xvi]
Jumbo had come to mean “enjoy more –
you deserve it”—more volume, more options,
more convenience—as a sort of
consumerist carpe diem. Jumbo as modern
abstraction offered acquisitiveness without the
taint of gluttony. It reified a corporate,
government and popular consensus that North
Americans would be defined by what Lizabeth
Cohen has called “an economy of inexhaustible
abundance,” that many consumers appear to
have embraced wholeheartedly as a right they
had earned (Cohen 2003, 10). Indeed, every
agricultural fair and carnival offered “Jumbo
Malts” and milkshakes for carefree summer eating
in places of commercial leisure, and so
employed jumbo as a food design element
evoking relaxed celebration.
It made sense for Jumbo to become so
abstract. New streams of conceptual advertising
were emerging just then to explain products,
services, whole companies, and even political
candidates with impressionistic and highly
symbolic or metaphorical messaging. The
Volkswagen Beetle “Think Small” ad miniaturized a
Beetle in the upper left hand corner of a blank,
white space in order to advertise the car by
engaging its critics (resulting in “The most admired
print ad of all time,” by one telling) (Tungate 2007,
opposite 118). Such advertising asked consumers
to do the mental work of interpreting and
incorporating promotional communication into a
persona evincing membership in subcultures
defined by particular modes of consumption.
Accordingly, in the context of growing public
awareness of the abilities and complex mental
lives of elephants publicized by media-savvy
ethologists and behaviorists in those years, North
Americans soon found advertising bearing trained
elephants pictured attempting to crush luggage
in order to demonstrate its durability or pictured

Fig. 5.
Consumer as astonished innocent. United States Postal Service, “Jumbo Jets,” 1999
with home computers as a metaphor for memory
[xvii] (Mitman 2006, 175-94).
Perhaps the peak of innocent faith in
jumbo as product design concept came in 1970
with the advent of commercial travel by the
Boeing 747 (Figure 5). The “Jumbo Jet”
incorporated the essence of a long-dead animal
to express an ethos of “more” by its very form. It
evoked a sense of wonder for the can-do-ism in
American industrial production, linking consumer
emotions and ideology in every flight (Kramer
2006, 156-59). Like the promotional stamp the
United States Postal Service would issue in 1999 to
celebrate the first commercial flight of the Boeing
747, the aircraft would advertise American power
and affluence as it traveled the globe.
92
Jumbo: “Help Yourself to Happiness”
Today, Jumbo seems, in many respects, a
throwback to simpler times. In our contemporary
“fifth frame” of promotional communication,
much advertising refrains from telling consumers
that products and services are tied to a particular
lifestyle, social group or persona; instead offering
that it can be a medium for the creation of one’s
own meanings (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill
2005, 563-72). Yet, Jumbo remains more
ideologically rigid. It is a tenacious classic that
paradoxically speaks of an admiration for “more,”
while promoting products and services directed
at people for whom more is often less. To be sure,
many uses of jumbo remain innocuous enough

(and thus all the more persuasive because
seemingly free of ideology): jumbo paint tray,
jumbo raisins, jumbo paper towels, jumbo frame
(ethernet network), Jumbotron. This is particularly
so with utilitarian products for which “more” is
indeed a practical matter of convenience.
Yet, as a term, jumbo has become a
broadly applicable cloak for the marketing of
overindulgence—the post-War consumerist carpe
diem taken to the extreme. Some commentators
have labeled the resulting phenomenon,
“affluenza,” an affliction suffered by “The
Overspent American,” strung out on credit and a
facile belief in the cheapness of buying in
bulk. [xviii] Recent uses of the jumbo idea bear
troubling testament to that self-destructive streak
in North American consumers. With the economic
bubbles North Americans created at the end of
the twentieth-century, there came robust modes
of consumption and display to celebrate them.
The conceptual jumbo became a marker
(satirical for some, invigorating for others) of
brands encouraging proud rejection of modesty
and self-restraint, with food as a particular fixation:
Jumbo 2 for 1 Pizza, jumbo hot dog, Super Size
meal, Super Big Gulp, Meat’Normous Omelet
Sandwich. Jumboism materialized as an entire
genre of “all-you-can-eat” restaurants unique to
the continent (the most unintentionally depressing
slogan being attached to the Golden Corral
chain: “Help Yourself to Happiness”). We see it in
the branding of box stores and bulk retailers like
Costco, Big Lots and the Direct Buy Club that
promise the consumer economies of scale but
actually burden them with the costs of
transporting, storing and financing inventory that
supermarkets and department stores once
bankrolled. Those patterns were in turn facilitated
by the public’s desire for increasingly large
vehicles (remember the Hummer?) to carry
warehouse shopping finds to spacious “monster
houses,” all of it financed by “jumbo loans.”
(Figure 6)
Eagles, beavers, elk, bison, coyotes and
other symbolic species aside, the African bull
elephant—the Jumbo elephant—has been the
iconic animal of North American capitalism.
Unlike the fictionalized and essentialized animal
figures that represent human feeling in advertising
for cellular companies, zoos, foods, animated
films and countless other products, services and
experiences, jumbo advertises the overarching
ideal by which consumption has constantly
expanded. Although embraced sporadically
across the population, the ethos of jumbo has
been grounded in a simple but very old idea: if
93
Fig. 6.
Asian elephant as stand in for jumbo as suddenly precarious
product design concept, 2010. Image courtesy of Diamond
Funding Corporation.
some is good, more must be better; North
Americans should have the most, and it will be
easy. Since Jumbo’s day, images and stories
extracted from events around his life seem to
have had a mysterious power to communicate
manifestly fraudulent claims with a sense of
authenticity that have made them seem
normative and comforting. The puzzle and power
of jumbo as advertising trope is that this effect did
not fade as the generations passed. Today he still
naturalizes the most unsustainable consumer
desires and habits.
Notes
[i] “The Great African Elephant Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals
Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2,
2011;
http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/4/title
-asc?t:state:flow=9dc5b092-f73d-4076-ada6-c44123d3e916; “Barnum &
London: 8 United Monster Shows,” 1883, C-131a, Circus Poster Collection,
Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ.
[ii] “Jumbo,” Harper’s Weekly, April 1, 1882.
[iii] “Barnum & London: Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital
Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011,
http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/1/title
-asc?t:state:flow=04cd6684-1e6b-4674-8c76-74dfb893acc5.
[iv] “History of the Collection – Funny Folks,” British Comics Collection, British
Library, retrieved April 17, 2011,
http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/britcomics/.
[v] “Barnum and His Elephant Jumba (sic.),” New York Times, February 24, 1882.
[vi] The Willamantic trade card is reproduced in Deborah Walk, Jennifer Lemmer
and Marcy Murray, “Colorful Circus Paper Traces the Spread of
‘Jumbomania’,” Ephemera Society Articles, retrieved March 21, 2011,
http://www.ephemerasociety.org/articles.html.
[vii] Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner
Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, retrieved March 27, 2011,
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard/. The full series can be
viewed at http://www.tradecards.com/articles/jumboBL/index.html.
[viii] “Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls,” Puck, June 27, 1883.

[ix] “A Few Lines,” Review of Reviews 4 (1891): 289; Henry Theophilus
Finck, Songs and Songwriters (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 28.
[x] “Journalism,” The Spectator 114 (June 12, 1915): 805.
[xi] Finck, Songs and Songwriters, 19.
[xii] “Jumbomania,” Littell’s Living Age 287 (1915): 187
[xiii] “An American Dream Timeline,” Vanity Fair, March 13, 2009, retrieved May
2, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/an-american-dreamtimeline.html.
[xiv] http://www.elephant.se/database.php.
[xv] “Levi’s,” Hoofs & Horns 43, no. 3 (September 1948): 21.
[xvi] John Wanamaker Department Stores, Housewares for
Homemakers (Philadelphia: Whipple & Kelley, 1955), 13; Official Yearbook of
the Miss America Pageant, 1963, 31, Miss America Programs Collection. Both
these sources reside in the Digital Archives of the Hagley Library and Museum,
Greenville, DE, http://digital.hagley.org/.
[xvii]
For a sampling of such advertising see
http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/.
[xviii] At least five books by different authors bear the title Affluenza. Juliet
Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1999).
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Presbrey, Frank. 1968. The History and Development of Advertising. 1929; repr.
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Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the
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Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live
entertainment. She is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph
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She is currently working on the nature of animal celebrity as well as a
book-length history of rodeo animals in North America.

T
his ad for Armstrong tires depicts a burly,
brash rhinoceros slouching somewhat
tauntingly, hat askew, and cigar in hand. He
looks like a Hollywood gangster. “Really,” the
rhinoceros seems to say, “you’re going to
question my toughness?”
The slogan “None Tougher” appears as the
headline of the ad, intended to sell durable tires
to American consumers. Armstrong’s advertising
strategy meshes a presumed toughness of
rhinoceros skin with an imagined toughness of
rhinoceros personality. Yet the imagined
“personality” of this rhinoceros has more to do with
a stereotype of a car salesman or auto
mechanic than of actual rhinoceroses. He is
made human through bipedalism, clotheswearing,
and cigar-smoking. This is, in fact, a very
human version of toughness; it says nothing about
the natural traits of rhinoceroses that might make
them good examples of robustness.
Armstrong’s advertisement is selling both
nature and artifice. First, the product itself, Rhino-
Flex tires, are constructed from rubber. Rubber is
a natural product, though it is likely that Armstrong
also used artificial ingredients available at the
time, perhaps even artificial rubber. While they
make no claims to the tires’ composition, they
use a second natural product as a sales pitch:
rhinoceros skin. The tires are not made from rhino
skin nor, as far as we can tell, do they directly
95
NONE TOUGHER
Rhinoceroses are rarely anthropomorphized making this American magazine advertisement from the 1950s an
unusual specimen. Armstrong, a rubber and tire company, found the tough exterior of rhinoceroses the prime
comparison for its most durable automobile tires, dubbed “Rhino-Flex.”
Text by Kelly Enright
mimic (as today’s biomimicry might) its
construction. The comparison is presumptuous.
Yet Armstrong’s illustrator makes the point. Look at
the tires lined in a neat row of increasingly deep,
rugged traction. Then move your eye to the right
hip of the rhinoceros. His skin is pocked and
wrinkled and has warts that visually resembles the
most rugged of the tires (the one at far right). Here
is the image of rhino toughness the consumer is
meant to buy—figuratively and literally.
While this gangster rhino appears as a
character in several ads, Armstrong’s logo for
Rhino-Flex tires is the smaller rhinoceros seen on
the top of the tire rack. Represented here is a
comparatively younger, more jubilant member of
the species. It is engaged in a carefree jaunt, its
tail bouncing in the breeze, its mouth turned
slightly upwards in a smile. This rhino, known as
“Tuffy,” appeared printed on several marketing
products such as ashtrays, paperweights, and
patches, and despite its name hardly conveys
toughness. The fiction of the ad creates a world in
which a rhino salesman uses another rhino image
to sell tires. Tuffy is a rhinoceros representation
within a world of personified rhinoceroses. Is the
larger one the real rhino? Or is the logo?
And which is really selling the tires? While
the tough rhino glares at the viewer, Tuffy, smiles.
From toughy to Tuffy, the admen cover all their
bases. They convey the durability of Rhino-

Keith Ward
Armstrong Rhino-Flex Tires, 1953
Flex tires and employ a charismatic image of an
animal to ensure likeability.
So where is the animal in this animal ad?
Why not just depict a real rhino looking as if he
were about to charge the viewer? Would that not
convey toughness? Perhaps Armstrong could not
commit to a realistic rhinoceros representation
because it would be too real. The destruction of
rhinoceros habitat, in part for rubber plantations,
96
decreased rhino numbers throughout the
twentieth century.[i] Thus, Armstrong had to
separate product from its place of origin. The
rhino image, perhaps unwittingly, is both tribute
and façade. By not showing anything resembling
a real rhino, consumers disassociate product and
place. Yet the product itself is a tribute to the
genius of nature, wanting to replicate the skin of a
rhino as industrial product.

Referring to real rhinos might have also forced
Armstrong to confront the actual vulnerability of
the species. Rhinoceroses may have tough skin
and confrontational attitudes (though their
charges are usually bluffs), but they are
increasingly unable to survive in the wild. They are
extremely susceptible to environmental changes,
breed slowly, and despite legal protections suffer
from excessive poaching. What is most striking
about this advertisement is that it promises traits-longevity,
durability--that rhinos, in fact, do not
possess. The irony is further evident in the ad’s
subtitle: “unconditionally guaranteed!” What can
a vulnerable animal guarantee? The ad is ripe
with denial about the destructive relationship
between nature and technology.
Notes
[i] Dinerstein, Eric 2003. The Return of the Unicorns: The Natural History
and Conservation of the Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros. New York:
Columbia University Press and Martin, Esmond and Chryssee Bradley
1981. Run Rhino Run. London: Chatto & Windus.
Kelly Enright is the author ofThe Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in
the American Imagination, Osa & Martin: For the Love of Adventure,
and Rhinoceros. She has a doctorate in American history and a
master’s in museum anthropology. Her work focuses on portrayals of
nature in American culture, human-animal relationships, museums,
explorations, and travels.
97

B ad Marriage, Quick Divorce.
The above subtitle from a paper by Marc Sagoff
(1984) summarizes the state, then and now, of
the relationship between the animal rights
community and those concerned with the
recovery and protection of endangered species.
Accusations of flawed views and unreasonable
behaviour flow both ways, reflecting seemingly
irreconcilable values and ways of seeing.
Different Worlds
For the biologist interested in wildlife and habitat
conservation, animal rights advocates are
irresponsible, single issue activists who have failed
to take on the issue of species extinction and who
embark on emotionally driven activities without
due consideration of their consequences. For
instance, the “liberation” of thousands of farmed
animals (such as mink) contributes to the already
precipitous decline to near extinction of native
species. Almost total opposition to captive
breeding and scientific research on animals
harms, in the long run, the chances of species
FROM ANIMAL RIGHTS AND
SHOCK ADVOCACY TO
KINSHIP WITH ANIMALS
The visual cultures manifested in the advertising and communication activities of animal rights activists and those
concerned with the conservation of species may be counter-productive, creating an ever-increasing cultural
distance between the human and the animal. By continuing to position animals as subjugated, exploitable others,
or as creatures that belong in a romanticized ‘nature’ separate from the human, communications campaigns may
achieve effects that are contrary to those desired. The unashamed, cheaply voyeuristic nature of shock imagery
may win headlines while worsening the overall position of the animal in human culture. We offer an alternative
way of thinking about visual communication concerning animals – one that is focused on enhancing a sense of
kinship with animals. Based on empirical evidence, we suggest that continued progress both in conservation and
in animal rights does not depend on continued castigation of the human but rather on embedding in our cultures
the type of human-animal relationship on which positive change can be built.
Text by Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof
98
survival. The animal rights focus on sentience as
the main criterion for awarding rights to animals
leads to the following position: “What the rights
view denies, at least in its current articulation, is
that plants and insects are ‘subjects-of-a-life;’ and
it denies as well that these forms of life have been
shown to have any rights, including a right to
survival” (Regan 2004, xl) – a position that is
anathema to the conservation biologist and the
environmental philosopher.
For the animal rights advocate, on the
other hand, conservationists are more concerned
with science and with abstract technical
concepts such as “species” and “ecosystems”
than they are with the actual animals. The
keeping of animals in captivity, the chasing,
sedating, tagging, biopsy-ing and constant
studying, monitoring and otherwise harassing
animals in the wild causes pain and suffering,
subordinating the very real everyday lives of
individual animals to intangible and uncertain
species and ecosystem benefit – not to mention
that a significant proportion of studies are of
doubtful benefit to the animals themselves, but
rather serve either to feed the publication
requirements of the involved researchers or the

perpetuation of the self image of the
conservation biologist as intrepid field explorer.
The sanctioned culling of animals in the interests
of preserving “ecosystem integrity” is difficult to
reconcile with the rights view. The animal rightist
would also argue that beyond abstract and farfrom-convincing
arguments, the wildlife
conservation community has, to date, failed to
come up with persuasive ethical and
philosophical underpinnings for the preservation
of endangered species. Absent such
underpinnings, it is unacceptable to subordinate
the rights of individual animals to abstract and
intangible concepts.
Our aim in this paper is not to enter into, or
take sides in, the above debate. Rather, our
intention is to show that, in spite of fundamentally
different underlying values, there are similarities in
the visual cultures of animal rights activists and
those concerned with the preservation of natural
species and spaces, and that, in both cases,
those visual cultures may be counterproductive to
their goals of persuasion. Based on the results of a
study of animal imagery, we offer an alternative
approach to visual communication that, we
believe, can have important positive implications
for human-animal relationships to the benefit of
both animal rights advocacy and endangered
species preservation and recovery.
The Human vs. The Animal
The narratives and visual cultures of animal rights
groups and wildlife conservation groups reveal
similar attitudes about the relationship between
humans and other animals. Much of the visual
99
language adopted by animal rights groups
highlights the sorry plight of the animal at the
hands of the human. Images are largely
designed to be distressing to the viewer and to
engender support through a combination of
outrage and guilt. This is a visual culture that
Fig. 1. The Humane Society International
Seal slaughter. Image courtesy of The Humane Society
International
Fig. 2. & 3.
Human destruction of Indonesian forests as the cause of orphaning orangutans and leading to their decline towards extinction. Left: Photography by
David Gilbert, Rainforest Action Network (Creative Commons). Right: Photography by Lam Thuy Vo (Creative Commons)

Fig. 4. Joe Zammit-Lucia
I Am Series #1, photography, 2007 Joe Zammit-Lucia
creates a divisive dichotomy – and a distance –
between the Human and the Animal: the Human
as the callous aggressor; the Animal as the
helpless victim.
A similar set of principles governs the
conservationist’s visual culture. Here the Animal
occupies an idyllically untamed space – the
animal “running free in our imaginary and
mythical wild” (Baker 1993, 294). This is part of a
romanticized vision of a “Nature” that is separate
from Culture, with the
Human as the intruder, aggressor and destroyer
of spaces and species that need to be
protected.
While coming at the issues from almost
opposite poles, the animal rights and the wildlife
conservation movements end up in essentially
the same place. The animal is portrayed as
something separate and distant from the human
– in one case separate as a captive or
persecuted victim, in the other, separate as part
of a romanticised nature – and, in both cases, a
casualty of an undesirable human disposition and
reprehensible human activity.
100
Is this visual culture the optimal way to encourage
the sort of human-animal relationships that might
lead to altered human behaviours that bring
unnecessary pain and suffering to other animals?
Using Animal Portraiture
To address this question, we examined a different
approach to animal representation and the
impact that approach has on viewers. “Animal
Portraiture” is a broad term that can cover a
multitude of artistic approaches, each having
potentially different effects on viewers. We
evaluated the specific approach taken to animal
portraiture by photographic artist Joe Zammit-
Lucia. Zammit-Lucia explores the use of animal
portraits to examine the human ability to see
animals as individuals with character and
personality, rather than as generic specimens of
species (see also Zammit-Lucia 2008a). Rather
than traditional animal imagery, the artist uses, as
his starting point, the techniques of classical
human studio portraiture and applies them to
animals.

The Human Portrait
Portraiture is deeply embedded in human culture.
When viewing a human portrait, we reflexively
project imaginings of personality onto the subject
portrayed. We “see” characteristics like wisdom,
vulnerability, power, glamour, and so forth,
depending on the particular portrait. The portrait
has been used over the ages as a powerful
propaganda tool. From the sculpted portraits of
Roman emperors, to the recent, and now
infamous, Shepard Fairey/Associated Press “Hope”
image of presidential candidate Barack Obama,
the portrait has been used to create strong,
positive images of the subject portrayed. In
achieving such positive projections, the physical
likeness of the portrait to the subject is a small
and largely insignificant part of the whole. Rather
it is the overall form and content of the portrait
that constitute the repository of the message
being conveyed.
For instance, in the Obama “Hope”
poster, the message is largely conveyed by the
overall composition of the image. The central
positioning of the portrait combines with the tilted
stance of the face to create a diagonal
composition that leads to a feeling of strength
and dynamism (Condit, 2010). The use of
repeating blocks of red and blue not only
heighten the diagonal composition, but are used
to evoke the American flag and, in Fairey’s own
words, “convey the idea of blue and red states,
Democrats and Republicans, converging” (Fairey
and Gross, 2009, p7).
Context, on the other hand, conveys the
message in Jacques-Louis David’s famous
“Bonaparte Crossing the Great St Bernard
Pass.” Here Napoleon’s “greatness” is implied as
he follows in the footsteps of Hannibal and
Charlemagne - the unstoppable hero on a
symbolic white horse (Welch, 2005).
The individuality, or what Pope-Hennessy
(1979) describes as “The Cult of Personality” that
we read in a portrait, is not a result of physical
likeness, but is transmitted through symbolism –
be that symbolism contained in physiognomic
codes and ciphers; in the carriage, bearing or
gestures of the individual portrayed; or in the
ancillary elements of dress, jewellery, context, or
allegorical or other symbols.
Animal Imagery
Animal images can also create strong, positive
values. For example, experimental work has
established that animal “attractiveness” increases
101
Fig. 5. Shepard Fairey
Hope, 2008 Fairey/Garcia
people’s support for protection and conservation.
More support is expressed for large animals and
those who resemble humans (Gunnthorsdottir
2009). However, traditionally, “animal art” has
been about humans not about animals. In large
part, animals have been shown as symbolic
icons, as decorative items, or as human
companions. “Portraits” of companion animals or
working animals provide a commentary on
human achievement or human possession. In
contemporary art, many artists are concerned
with social commentary. Again, much of this
engages with human behaviours in relation to
animals, and with human social and cultural
frameworks as they affect animals rather than with
the essence of the animal.
The animal becomes more central in
genres such as wildlife photography, wildlife
illustration, and in art which is concerned with the
natural world. Here the animal is predominant,
but in a way that is detached from the human.
Scientific illustration objectifies the animal as a
subject of study, whereas wildlife photography,
while glorifying the animal, treats him as a

Fig. 6. Joe Zammit-Lucia
#2, photography, 2008 Joe Zammit-Lucia
specimen of species and, as we shall see later,
places him or her in a “nature” that is separate
from the human.
Few artists depict animals as “specific
individuals.” Instead they “use animals as
metaphors or symbols for the human condition,
or as generic signifiers for the natural world” (Watt
2010, 77). In fact, “most forms of contemporary
animal representation, whether or not in lensbased
media, fail effectively to communicate an
animal’s individuality, singularity or particularity”
(Baker 2000, 179) [1] .
Zammit-Lucia’s animal art focuses
unashamedly on animals as unique individuals in
the same way as the human studio portrait
focuses on the individual portrayed. The artist’s
hypothesis is that our embedded, reflexive
reaction to human portraiture can be turned to
an advantage when used in animal
representation. Focusing largely on threatened or
endangered species, the artist adopts a
representational approach that (i) alters the
context in which the animal is presented (i.e., a
studio-like setting vs. in the wild or in a captive
102
setting), and (ii) frames the animal representation
to mimic a human studio portrait (i.e., in a way
that is culturally more often associated with
human representation). The idea of animal
individuality in these images, therefore, does not
depend exclusively (nor even primarily) on the
representational form of the animal – the
recognition of the specific features of the
individual animal – but rather on the
appropriation of the general style of the human
studio portrait and the impact of that style on the
viewer’s spontaneous reactions to the imagery.
This approach builds on the fundamentals of
human portraiture where, as we have discussed
above, individuality, personality and status are not
communicated through uniqueness of features,
but through the overall form, composition,
context, and other features of the complete
portrait.
Zammit-Lucia uses other devices to
influence the subject-viewer interaction. Direct
eye contact is common and can create a
tension between the observed and the observer
in the viewer-portrait interaction. The subject’s

Fig. 7. Joe Zammit-Lucia
Hunted, photography, 2008 Joe Zammit-Lucia
stance is also chosen to allow viewers to project
character and personality on the individual
animal portrayed, while the overall composition –
central composition or, alternatively, the use of
large negative spaces – are used to enhance
visual impact, substituting for the ancillary
elements contained in human portraiture.
A further important element distinguishes
animal portraiture from human portraiture: human
portraiture suffers from a strong undercurrent of
inauthenticity, driven by the fact that the subject
tends to engage in a performance. As Roland
Barthes (1981) puts it: “I do not stop imitating
myself, and because of this, each time I am (or
let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer
from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of
imposture.” (p13-14). What has been variously
described as “Fictions of the Pose” (Berger, 1994)
or the “The Theatre of the Face” (Kozloff, 2007) is
absent from the portrait of the animal. The animal
is not complicit in the creation of his or her own
image, thereby lending the portrait an
unavoidable feeling of authenticity absent from
the human portrait.
103
Using this approach, Zammit-Lucia
hypothesizes that such images emphasize the
very animality of the subjects portrayed. The
imagery uses our own embedded cultural
responses to human portraiture to enhance the
viewer’s sense of kinship with animals, while
maintaining respect for the animal for what he or
she is (Zammit-Lucia 2008b). In his artist’s
statement, Zammit-Lucia (2010) states:
In creating images of animals, I have
little interest in what the animal looks
like; in the animal merely as observed
object. Rather my interest is in the
deeper reality of what the animal
might possibly be. Through these
images, I am interested in exploring
questions: How do I feel in relation to
this animal? Can I relate to this animal
as an individual rather than as a mere
specimen of species? And, more
interestingly, what could be the
experience of being this animal?

Fig. 8. Joe Zammit-Lucia
Untitled, photography, 2010 Joe Zammit-Lucia
Does it Work?
We were interested in testing whether the artist’s
hypotheses were borne out when viewers
interacted with these animal portraits. While
animal visual imagery has been the focus of a
substantial body of research, to our knowledge
there are no studies that have collected
empirical data on whether animal visual imagery
has the potential to change cultural perceptions
of animals. Indeed, given the widespread use of
visual material to persuade audiences to change
attitudes and behaviours, it is surprising that there
is a paucity of research on the impact of visual
material on the public’s view of any single issue
(Joffe 2008). Our study was designed to fill some
of the gap in our knowledge of the impact of
animal imagery on viewers’ perceptions of
animals. We evaluated visitor experiences of the
artist’s work mounted as an exhibit entitled Monde
Sauvage: Regards et Emotions, which was
displayed during Fall 2008 and Winter 2009 at the
National Museum of Natural History in Paris,
France. The detailed methodology and
104
approach to the study have been described
elsewhere (Kalof, Zammit-Lucia and Kelly, 2011).
Here we focus on the main findings and their
potential implications for animal rights and other
forms of animal imagery.
Our findings showed that the widespread
traditional imagery and methods of
communication about endangered species in
Western Culture do seem to convey the
expected messages. Prior to viewing the animal
portraiture exhibit, visitors defined animals
primarily as wild, free and sometimes violent and
dangerous creatures that are part of “Nature.”
Pre-exhibit, the thematic cluster of “Nature,”
“Wild/Free” and “Violence” accounted for 60% of
respondents’ overall perceptions of the Animal.
After viewing the exhibit, visitors gave a
different meaning to the word “Animal”
compared to the meanings they expressed
before entering the exhibit. The biggest single
change was seen in the significant increase in the
attribution of “Personality” to animals. However,
the impact of this artwork was seemingly much
broader than the increased attribution of

Fig. 9.
Animal Portraiture Exhibit Flyer Image courtesy Muséum
national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris
.
personality to the concept of “Animal.” We saw a
wholesale shift from the Animal being perceived
as something wild, natural and hostile – and
therefore separate from the Human – to a
perception of closeness and kinship between
animal and human. Post-exhibit, the relevance to
visitors of the thematic cluster of “Nature,”
“Wild/Free” and “Violence” fell to 25% from the
pre-exhibit level of 60%. Conversely, the
combination of “Personality,” “Kinship” and
“Vulnerable” now accounted for a full 75% of the
aggregate intensity scores (a measure of the
depth and emotion in the visitors’ perception of
“Animal” based on the degree of elaboration and
detail given in their response). These changes
suggest that the effect of the exhibit went beyond
isolated changes in perceptions around individual
themes, to changes in the overall cultural
perception of the Animal with possible
implications for the nature of the relationship
between the Human and the Animal.
105
Implications for Animal Rights and
Conversation Imagery
In the case of endangered animals, we believe
that, in the long run, it is counterproductive to
perpetuate a visual culture that portrays animals
as wild, free creatures who are part of a Nature
that is not only separate, but in conflict with
human culture. We believe that this simply
embeds the classical Cartesian dichotomy of the
animal as inferior “other,” creating a sense of
distance between the Human and the Animal – a
sense of distance that is increased further by the
scientism that is so prevalent in the conservation
culture.
We suggest that this dualism between the
Human and the Natural has no productive
future. Successful conservation efforts can only
be built on a greater sense of closeness and
kinship between the Human and the Animal (and
the Natural) – a sense of kinship that fosters
support for expanded conservation efforts and
sees such efforts in a positive cultural light, rather
than as the result of the job-killing, economystifling
efforts of an environmental lobby wedded
to the politics of “No.”
There are similar questions to be
considered in evaluating the long-term
effectiveness of the visual culture associated with
animal rights. There is little doubt that the heartrending
images that form the staple diet of
animal rights groups represent effective fund
raising fodder. Indeed, research has found that
animal rights protestors are directly recruited to
the animal rights agenda by moral shocks from
visual imagery (Jasper and Poulsen 1995), and
empirical work confirms that animal advocacy
messages intensify pre-existing dispositions toward
animals and animal abusers (Scudder and Mills
2009). Animal rights advocacy images are based
on good versus evil, with clubbed baby seals and
neurotic monkeys presented as the innocent
victims of evil. Victimized animals who are furry,
whimpering, crying, and spilling red blood elicited
more sympathy because viewers could more
easily anthropomorphize them (Jasper 1997).
Yet, animal rights organizations that use
images of animal abuse in their own campaigns
have also been critical of picturing animal
suffering when they consider it gratuitous or when
they do not feel that the context justifies it. In
2008, the artist Adel Abdessemed exhibited a
video that included footage of six animals being
bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer on a
farm in Mexico. His exhibition was closed down
after protests from animal rights groups (Watt

2010). The web site for People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) encourages people
to take action against portrayals of animal cruelty
on the internet, but makes a clear distinction
between animal cruelty imagery that is
“educational, depicting the cruel behind-thescenes
reality of industries that thrive on animal
exploitation and abuse” and “(o)ther sources
(that) are merely depicting cruelty for shock
value” (PETA, 2011). When is shock advocacy
legitimately “educational?” When does art that
depicts animal cruelty as part of its social
commentary become simply gratuitous? Surely it
is not simply a question of who is doing the
dissemination that determines the acceptability
of shock imagery.
There is no doubt that picturing the
suffering animal has legitimacy as part of what
we might call investigative journalism. Exposing –
and documenting – animal abuse must be an
essential component of the work of animal rights
organizations. But it is a big step from that to
creating a visual monoculture of grisly imagery
and justifying its widespread dissemination as
educational. What are the long-term effects of
these shock advocacy images on the cultural
relationship between the human and the animal
– particularly now that exposure to acts of animal
cruelty has moved beyond the still image to the
almost ubiquitously available graphic video? In
the context of exhibiting captive animals in a zoo
setting, it has been argued that such a setting
only serves to convince visitors that humans
106
dominate the natural world (Kellert, 1997) and
substantiates “the dualism at the very origin of the
relation between man and animal” (Berger 1980,
28). Is this effect also possible when we are
bombarded with constant imagery showing
human domination of animals in other contexts –
such as images of factory farming, seal culls, or
dog fighting? Could these images serve to
undermine further the standing of animals in
human culture by confirming them as the objects
of human subjugation, entertainment and
cruelty?
It could be argued that generating
shocking visual imagery is the easy option. It takes
little thought and gets attention – and sometimes
headlines – simply by its sheer awfulness. Yet it
does so because of its unashamed, cheaply
voyeuristic nature. To paraphrase Randy
Malamud’s commentary about the zoo-going
experience (1998), these images of animal
abuse can be considered minimally imaginative,
cheaply vicarious and inhibitive, rather than
generative of a positive experience of the animal
and its valued place in human culture. Further,
according to Sontag (2003, 109) “our capacity to
respond to our experiences with emotional
freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped
by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling
images.”
It may be undeniable that outrage is an
important element in the fight against continued
cruelty to animals. But how does it work and for
how long? Myers (2006) points out that imagery,

Fig. 10.
Animal farmed for his fur in Kemijärvi, Finland. This photograph was published by the Finnish animal rights organisation Oikeutta
eläimille ("Justice for Animals") after an undercover investigation of Finnish fur farms (Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oikeutta_el%C3%A4imille_-_Fur_farming_in_Finland_02.jpg)
Fig. 11.
Sharks after Finning (Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shark_finning.j
pg)
107
Fig. 12.
A baby monkey before being removed from the University of
California, Riverside (Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Britches.jpg)

.
Fig. 13.
Pig and piglets in a gestation crate (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schweine-lsz61.jpg)
Fig. 14.
Elephant killed by poachers, Voi area, Kenya
(Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Elephant0567.JPG)
. Fig. 15.
Edith, a chimpanzee born in the Saint Louis Zoo, found
by a PETA investigator 37 years later in a roadside zoo
in Texas called the Amarillo Wildlife Refuge
(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edith,_PETA.jpg)
108

particularly highly disturbing imagery, is not
immune to having unintended consequences.
Such imagery may generate a form of mild posttraumatic
stress disorder in viewers and evoke selfprotective
responses. These responses are both
immediate (turning away, shutting the eyes, etc.)
and long-term adaptation mechanisms that may
involve pre-emptive avoidance of such imagery
as well as habituation to it. “(T)he “reality” of the
image will count for nothing if that reality seems
too horrific to be countenanced” (Baker 2001,
220). Further, at the emotional level, the effects of
such imagery become attenuated over time
and/or, at the cultural level, the idea of violence
may become normalized.
Myers points out that such imagery does
not work on its own, but as part of a complex
interaction with people’s moral and cultural
values. He suggests that “(e)ven ‘hard hitting’
images need to be analyzed for their nuanced
meaning in the context of the moral narrative that
is constructed” (Myers 2007, 30). Absent such
understanding, one may end up only appealing
to those who are essentially already convinced.
Conclusions
Although animal rights groups and conservation
groups are seemingly at odds on many of their
fundamental values, they display remarkable
similarities in their visual cultures and narratives.
Both display the animal as separate from, and a
victim of, the human. In an attempt to gain
attention through shock, outrage and guilt, visual
imagery constantly reinforces the negative
aspects of human behaviour, and creates an
ever-increasing cultural distance between the
human and the animal.
We believe that such approaches are, in
the long run, counterproductive as people adapt,
tune out, or even accept, the portrayed
negativity both emotionally and
culturally. Worrisome trends in the direction of
cultural adaptation can already be seen. For
instance, mobile platforms using the Android
operating system have recently seen the release
of KG Dogfighting - a video game application
that allows players to “feed, water, train and fight”
their virtual dog against other players (Android
Market, 2011) [2] .
We suggest that continued progress both
in conservation efforts and in animal rights
advocacy does not depend on continued
castigation of the human, but rather on
embedding in our cultures the type of humananimal
relationship on which positive change can
be built. Rather than positioning animals as
109
subjugated, exploitable others, we believe that
visual and narrative approaches that culturally
position animals as our kin, while having their own
“personality” and their own visible worth based on
their unique animality, are more likely to
encourage the development of the sort of
human-animal relationships that could resolve
some of our most devastating animal
exploitations.
This approach finds support in the
philosophy literature. It has been suggested that
humans have “nested communities” of relations
to others, some of which are closer to us and
some further away (Callicott 1992). An ethics of
care approach to this issue would suggest that it
could be productive to explore ways that
encourage humans to extend their more intimate
circles of care outwards, developing greater
kinship with animals – be they farm animals or
those who are threatened or endangered.
“Appropriate” animal representation may be a
valuable tool to achieve kinship with animals with
whom we cannot so easily develop a day to day
relationship based on direct contact. A similar
concept arises in Warwick Fox’s Theory of General
Ethics where, as part of a much broader theory of
ethics, he proposes that we have “an obligation
to offer saving help only to supersignificant and
significant others” (Fox 2006, 3838). He includes
companion animals in these categories. While it is
unlikely that we can elevate animals, other than
companion animals, to the status of significant
others, cultural constructs that emphasize
concepts of personality, kinship and vulnerability
are more likely to move us in that direction than
the more distancing concepts of the animal as a
dominated, violated other, or as a wild, free and
violent creature who belongs in a distant, nonhuman
Nature.
Some animal advocacy groups are
moving away from, or trying alternative
approaches to, shock imagery as the bread-andbutter
approach to highlighting and
communicating the very real issues in animal
exploitation that need to be tackled. We could
not find any shock imagery on the web site for the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (www.aspca.org). The web site for The
Humane Society of The United
States (www.humanesociety.org) contains a
number of sections clearly targeted at building
positive relations with animals – though many of
these sections still contain embedded videos of
animal abuse. PETA has for some time added a
“glamour” approach to broadcast their animal
advocacy messages – especially when these
messages are targeted at younger audiences.

.
Fig. 15.
PETA anti-fur campaign (Image courtesy of People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals)
We have shown that one particular
approach to animal imagery has the potential to
promote a shift in how the animal is perceived.
Our aim is not to promote any one approach
over others, but rather to use our findings to raise
questions about how different visual cultures may
affect the human-animal relationship over the
long term. We suggest that animal advocacy
groups, like wildlife conservation groups, could
usefully examine different approaches to their
visual cultures and narratives. There may be
opportunities to create more productive
approaches before the easy option of shocking,
voyeuristic imagery beats our audience into
numbness and runs out of steam, even as it
continues to embed the Animal’s position as a
subjugated, exploitable object in our society.
Notes
1 Baker also argues that the self-consciously serious post-modern
artist may fear that attempts at individualizing the animal will be
read as a sentimental over-investment in the animal’s appearance,
thereby undermining the perceived “seriousness” of a piece of art
based on rationality with a rather distasteful indulgence in emotional
content.
110
2The publishers of this application make the following comments:
“We are confident this game will be a net benefit to dogs as it has
been in our operating agreement from the start of this project that a
portion of the proceeds go to animal rescue organizations. Further,
this is a satire about the ridiculousness of dog fighting and we
believe in the power of a modern media tool to educate and raise
awareness of the real horrors.”
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Kozloff, Max. 2007. The Theatre of the Face. New York: Phaidon Press
Inc.
Malamud, Randy. 1998. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals
and Captivity. New York: New York University Press.
Myers, Eugene Olin. 2006. The Psychology of Photographic Imagery
in Communicating Conservation. Unpublished contribution to the
International League of Conservation Photographers.
PETA 2011. http://www.peta.org/action/get-active-online/cruelty-onthe-internet.aspx.

Pope-Hennessy, John. 1979. The Portrait in the Renaissance: The AW
Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press.
Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Sagoff, M. 1984. Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad
Marriage, Quick Divorce. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 22, 297-307.
Scudder, Joseph N. and Carol Bishop Mills. 2009. The Credibility of
Shock Advocacy: Animal Rights Attack Messages. Public Relations
Review, 35, 162-164.
Singer, Peter. 1998. Interview on Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 11 May
1998.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York:
Picador.
Watt, Yvette. 2010. Art, Animals, and Ethics, In Marc Bekoff (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, Volume 1, 77-
81. ABC-CLIO.
Welch, David. 2005. Painting, Propaganda and Patriotism. History
Today 55(7), 42-50.
Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2008a. First Steps: Conserving Our Environment.
New York: Matte Press.
Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2008b. I AM - Musings on Animal Portraiture and
Its Role as a Conservation Tool. Unpublished. www.jzlimages.com.
Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2010. Artist Statement. Unpublished.
www.jzlimages.com
Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia is an artist, author and independent scholar.
Working at the intersection of many disciplines he explore issues
relating to the relationship between how we organize human
societies and our interaction with the non-human world around us. A
widely recognized animal portrait artist, his work has been featured in
the leading fine art photography magazines worldwide and his
exhibition of photographic art entitled “Experience, Personality,
Emotion” is currently touring across museums and public exhibition
spaces in Europe. He is the President of WOLFoundation.org, a
member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the College of Arts and
Sciences, Florida International University, and has served as Special
Adviser to the Director General of the International Union for
Conservation of Nature. He is a Board Member of the African
Rainforest Conservancy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Linda Kalof is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of
Michigan State University’s interdisciplinary doctoral specialization in
Animal Studies (http://animalstudies.msu.edu). She has published
widely in animal studies and currently edits The Oxford Handbook of
Animal Studies (Oxford University Press) and The Animal Turn
(Michigan State University Press). She is serving a three year
appointment to the National Academy of Sciences’ National
Research Council Committee to review the US wild horse and burro
management program, and is co-curator of Interspecies, an exhibit
on cross-species cooperation at The Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, MI.
111

T
o be clear, a dog rescue centre did not
make the advert, it was made by an
advertising agency called Thinkbox who use
Harvey as an example to demonstrate how
powerful TV advertising can be.
In the advert a young couple visit a dog
rescue centre. They look at each dog in turn
112
FAD OF THE YEAR
At the end of 2010 one of the UK’s commercial television channels, ITV, selected twenty of the most popular TV
adverts from the year and entered them in to their own competition to find the television ‘Ad of the Year’. The
winning advert was one featuring a rescue dog called Harvey who is in kennels, hoping somebody will come along
and adopt him.
Text by Natalie Gilbert
Thinkbox
Harvey, 2010 Thinkbox
through the bars of their kennels, clearly looking
make a choice about which of them they will
adopt as their pet and take home. They reach
Harvey’s kennel and the dog turns on a TV behind
him to show them his own advert: in the advert he
cooks, cleans, mows the lawn, washes the
windows, collects the children from school,

Thinkbox
Harvey, 2010 Thinkbox
entertains them and tucks them in at night; he is
also seen using the human loo. In essence,
Harvey is the ‘perfect dog’ in the eyes of most
domesticated households. His advert impresses
the couple and he packs his bag ready to leave
the kennels.
The advert is of course meant to be light
hearted and humorous, but its very existence tells
a much deeper story about our relationship with
dogs and the outcome of their domestication –
the advert could not be a success if there were
not a strong foundation to this story that engaged
a TV viewing audience. Thinkbox has naturally
chosen an animal and a situation to maximise
impact and Harvey did just this: “Thinkbox’s TV ad
has seen Thinkbox.tv traffic increase by over
400%, Harvey’s Facebook page attract over
7,000 fans... It has also attracted over a million
online views following 260 million broadcast TV
views” (thinkbox.tv: 2010) and won the ‘Ad of the
Year’ competition. It’s doubtful that a cockroach
called Harvey could generate such an enormous
surge of interest and likeability, or the tagline for
the ad: ‘Every Home Needs a Harvey’.
Harvey is the very idea of domesticated
bliss between Man and Dog where the essence
of domestication is to operate as part of a team.
This “cooperative behavior” (Budiansky, 1992: 54)
is merely a reflection of what happens in the wild:
“In mixed-species flocks, such as
the herds of giraffe, zebra, and
wildebeest that are always grazing
on African savannas in picture
postcards and wildlife
documentaries, the members of
the group gain an added
advantage because the
especially acute senses of one
species can make up for the
deficiencies of another... Pooling
113
Thinkbox
Harvey, 2010 Thinkbox
their resources gives them a
greater chance of detecting an
approaching lion than any one
would have on its own,” (ibid.).
Harvey is forming a contract with his new owners
in a domesticated setting where there is washing
to be done, clothes to be ironed and children to
be fed. He knows that new owners will feed him
and offer him shelter so, in return and to convince
them to take him, he advertises his ability to help
around the house.
However, in reality, humans are not
keeping their part of the bargain. It is a sad fact
that in the UK in 2009 the RSPCA found new
homes for 90,493 abandoned or rescued
animals (rspca.org.uk, 2011) and “investigated
141,280 cruelty complaints” (ibid.). Battersea
Dogs & Cats Home looks after 10,600 cats and
dogs every year (battersea.org.uk, 2011), whilst
The Dogs Trust is looking after a further 16,000
dogs (dogstrust.org.uk, 2011). The advert may be
imaginative and effective, but it only forms a
contract between Thinkbox and its clients. Harvey
is a mere tool for entertainment and to generate
sales. His situation, however, is very real.
Natalie Gilbert has worked professionally in online, marketing and
editorial in diverse capacities for sixteen years across many different
industries, but has always found her feet firmly in language, creation
and progress. She takes every opportunity to explore the realms of
artistic, literary and visual possibility. With volunteer experience at
animal care centres around the world, a degree in Wildlife
Photography and a postgraduate in Anthrozoology, she has followed
a keen interest in the human-animal bond and artistic portrayals of
animal beings in modern society, on and offline @Animal Theory

S
ensitive to the rising influence of the animal
rights movement and challenged by an
increase in local governments who have
enacted bans on animal acts, Ringling Bros. has
adopted what it considers to be a transparent
approach to its training methods. On its website
the circus portrays itself as a responsible, ethical
purveyor of animal entertainment, claiming its
training is “…based on reinforcement in the form
of food rewards and words of praise. Verbal or
physical abuse…are strictly prohibited.” There is
even the inference that its elephants enjoy their
place before the cheering crowds due to “the
mental stimulation of performing.”
But according to People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA), a group dedicated
to exposing and ending animal cruelty, Ringling
Bros. Circus actively engages in wrongful animal
handling. A video obtained and posted to
Youtube in 2009 exposes what PETA describes as
“relentless abuse”. However, the limitation of such
shock videos is that they fail to reach the
audience most likely to influence ticket sales:
middle income parents who have little inclination
to search out gruesome footage exposing such
inconvenient truths.
114
THE SADDEST
SHOW ON EARTH
Since 1884, children across the United States have been dazzled by the sequined wonders of the Ringling Bros.
Circus. For many a youngster the spectacle of costumed elephants performing myriad tricks under the big top is a
highlight of the show. Yet the bright spotlight of the center ring casts a dark shadow across this American
institution. Persistent allegations of elephant abuse have trailed the travelling show for years.
Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter
In late 2010 PETA contacted Y&R Chicago, the
Midwestern hub of the global Y&R advertising
network with an assignment to pull back the
curtain on Ringling Bros’ animal cruelty in a way
more likely to break through to parents. The
response was a series of circus posters that
showed a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth
comes at a great price indeed.
Recently Antennae spoke with Y&R
Creative Directors Jeremy Smallwood and
Pamela Mufson, who created the campaign,
about the challenges of bringing PETA’s message
to moms and dads — and the Cannes awardwinning
campaign that resulted.
Chris Hunter: What are your memories of
the circus as children? Did you ever go to
a circus?
Jeremy Smallwood: I actually have very fond
memories of going to the circus as a child. I
mean other than the general fear of clowns, I
think most kids think it’s a great time. And that's
sort of what drove us to make this work. It's difficult
for a child to understand exactly what's going on
behind the scenes, but if parents know, maybe

Y&R Chicago
Welcome to the Saddest Show on Earth, 2011 Y&R
115

Y&R Chicago
Welcome to the Saddest Show on Earth, 2011 Y&R
they'll skip that activity.
Pam Mufson: I actually never went to the circus
as a child. But I always wanted to. That's why it's so
imperative to inform parents of the truth. After all,
they're the ones who decide what entertainment
their kids take in.
CH: Did it occur to you then – or as a
parent now – that circus animals may in
fact not want to be part of these
performances?
JS: I think most parents know that something isn't
right. But the idea of depriving their kids of that
experience overrules their instincts. With a little
push though, and armed with the right
knowledge, its an easier decision.
CH: What happens to elephants when
they’re trained by Ringling Bros.?
JS: A pretty traumatic experience to start. I mean,
it's not a stretch to train an animal, of any kind, to
do amazing things with the right motivation.
116
Sadly, it's almost always the fear of pain being
inflicting for an unwanted action. Elephants are
very communal animals. Remove them from
each other, isolate them, and you completely
shatter their nature. That, even more than the
physical pain, might be the cruelest part of it all.
CH: What was the key insight on the
creative brief that struck you as the most
surprising?
JS: That such a historicized business hasn't
evolved, hasn't even tried. They assume that
parents don't care - that the public doesn't care.
CH: In many such campaigns, it’s
common practice to put up a real
photograph of an animal being abused
along with a very straightforward
plea. Your campaign has the look of
cheerful circus posters that, on closer
viewing, reveal a very dark twist. Why did
you choose this approach?
JS: It's so hard to break through the familiar, the

Y&R Chicago
Welcome to the Saddest Show on Earth, 2011 Y&R
already established idea of what the circus is -
the idyllic vision. We see what we want to see, it
makes us feel better, makes buying that ticket a
little easier to stomach. The use of the cheerful,
celebrated illustration style played into that
construct and then turned it on its head.
CH: In a world where Youtube shockvideos
and stories of animal abuse
spread like wildfire through social media
why is traditional advertising — old
fashioned posters in this case — still a
powerful way to raise awareness of this
subject?
JS: Youtube and most videos online are
consumed at such a staggering rate, that it all
blends together. We've become desensitized to
all those videos, nothing rings authentic and true
– just entertainment. I think effectiveness in raising
awareness is all about context; that
becomes paramount. Where did I see it and how
was it served up to me? If I'm expecting the shock
and awe video, the message isn't likely to stick in
the same way as a less in-your-face approach
117
that catches you off guard.
PM: It all comes down to how you use
advertising. We chose to make the poster interact
with its surroundings. Just seeing around the
corner changes how you see something, in this
case the circus. That can be just as powerful as
any video.
CH: Now did PETA and the general public
react to your concept?
JS: Like most causes worth fighting for, it's not
going to be one magical solution that solves the
problem, but many. PETA is a great organization
that knows you can't just say the same thing, be in
the same places all the time and expect the
result to change. They are nimble in how they act
and flexible with their tactics. They liked, I think,
that this was one unique approach to both the
problem and target. Hopefully, the folks that saw
it decided against buying tickets that year. And
maybe instead just had a fun day at the park.

Y&R Chicago
Welcome to the Saddest Show on Earth, 2011 Y&R
118

Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson have worked together for
nearly 9 years. They met at LBWorks, an agency within Leo Burnett,
which specialized in technology and oddly enough, mints. Jeremy
was a designer interested in switching to art direction. Pam was a
writer who needed a new partner. They joined forces and voilà, a
team was born. At Leo Burnett, they worked on many brands
including Altoids, Turner Classic Movies, Kellogg’s, Maytag, Nintendo
and when they were really lucky, Tampax and Always.
After 6 years, they moved to mcgarrybowen. Their first
year, they found themselves working on everything from JP Morgan
to Kraft Salad Dressings to Chevron. Eventually, they were handed
the reigns of Lunchables and Oscar Mayer. They ran the meat
business for a year and a half. They enjoyed their time, but no longer
eat cold cuts.
Currently, They’re Creative Directors at Y&R Chicago. For
the past year and half, they’ve managed DieHard Batteries, Greater
Chicago Food Depository and most recently, BMO Harris Bank. Every
day is filled with adventure, challenges and of course, adjustable
interest rates.
Chris Hunter is an SVP Group Creative Director at the Chicago office
of Y&R Midwest
119

W
hat we see in their place is the red blood
which streamed from their slit throats.
Thus, in the same way, the lambs who
crowd abattoirs before Easter (and not only then)
are absent - as living, sentient beings – from the
discourses and the consciousness of those who
eat them. In other terms, we could say that lambs
are either “lamb meat”, “Easter roast”, or do not
exist.
In antiquity, Marcus Aurelius emphasized
the importance of “representations” in guiding our
approach to the world: “how marvellous useful it is
for a man to represent into himself meats, and all
such things that are for the mouth, under a right
apprehension and imagination! As for example:
this is the carcass of a fish; this is of a bird; and
this of a hog (…)” (Marcus Aurelius). The way we
represent things, think about and speak of them
(our metanarratives) is a form of our thoughts in
action. Mainly for this reason, farm-animals
destined to the abattoir must be thought of in
terms of “slaughterable” objects or food matter.
As George Bataille wrote: “(…) to kill an animal
and alter it as one pleases is not merely to
change into a thing that which doubtless was not
120
HAPPY EASTER
Even if we are talking about this image as an “advertisement”, it is clear that its scope is not business, but to
inform and raise consciousness about the slaughtering of animals. The message itself is rather peculiar: It is
obviously about animals, but without including any image of them in the picture. If a contradiction exists, it has
nothing to do with the message conveyed by the advertisement, but rather with ambiguous attitudes of humans
towards animals. In this case, it is the lambs who are not portrayed in the advertisement.
Text by Sabrina Tonutti
a thing from the start; it is to define the animal as
a thing beforehand” (George Bataille). However,
despite this process of serial slaughtering being
embedded in our socio-cultural system, there are
many highly controversial elements in it, which
have to do with the act of taking the life of a living
being, an act that always needs to be culturally
legitimized, and “properly” codified within the
cultural context. The legitimization process relies
on several integrated actions:
- the classification of animals in specific
categories regarding the animals’ use (“meat
animals”, “farm animals”, etc.);
- the projection onto these categories of
utilitarian-mechanistic connotations (these
animals are portrayed as, and transformed in,
“animal machines”, quoting Ruth Harrison);
- the exclusion of any form of familiarization with
farm animals (which might enable the
emergence of the individual, biographical
dimension of animals, and, in the same way,
stimulate in humans possible forms of empathy);

Campagne Per Gli Animali
Buona Pasqua, 2011 CA
- and, last but not least, the dissociation of
different levels and dimensions of reality.
Dissociation only works if we compartmentalise
elements which belong to the same
phenomenon, and concur to the same process.
The killing of animals in slaughterhouses enacts
several forms of dissociation.
A spatial dissociation, to begin with: the processes
of raising and slaughtering of animals take place
far from the public eye, and remain almost
completely unknown to those who don’t belong
to the farming sector.
Parallel to this, there is an iconic
dissociation regarding the presentation of animal
food: while in many countries in the past etiquette
requested whole animals to be presented on the
table, with no need to disguise the origin of the
food, nowadays the opposite tendency guides
culinary habits and also the planning of food
commercials and marketing. In advertisements
for meat, animals either do not appear (and so
121
what is shown is only the “products” in which their
bodies have been transformed), or are portrayed
in a fake bucolic context, evoking a natural,
healthy life and freedom.
A linguistic dissociation concurs with this
same process: people eat pork, not pig, at a
supermarket they buy sausages, mince, ham,
and so forth, and many are often at a loss when
they try to guess which animal some products
have belonged to.
This process is rooted more deeply in
ideology: a teleological representational process
operates, in that it implies that animals are “born
to” be eaten, no matter what we feel about it,
that are “destined” to be used by humans, “ends”
of the “creation” (as Aristotle dixit and Kant
underlined).
Just because lambs are absent from the
image above, they allow us to argue, in a
metonymic way, about the entire farm-animal
category, since we are dealing with animals who
share the same status (objects, instead of

subjects-of-a-life, in Tom Regan’s words), as a
consequence of human attitudes and practices
towards them. Being “animal” is a condition, not
an essence. However, even if we can think of
lambs in terms of a species representative of a
wider category (farm-animals), their tender age
and some relevant morphological and
behavioural traits which characterize them add
complexity to the legitimization of their
slaughtering (and tells us something significant on
humans as well): these traits - white vellum
(symbolically recalling the idea of purity, and
innocence), their cries resembling those of
human babies, and also their neotenic
morphologies (like rounded heads and features,
typical of babies and young animals) - all these
elements constitute et-epimeletic signals
(appeals for care and protection), which (ought
to!) elicit in adult human beings the appropriate
epimeletic behaviour: nurturing. To ignore this
“appeal” and suppress the potential expressions
of human epimeleia (caring behaviour) constitute
another obstacle in the dissociation process on
which the acceptance of slaughtering is based.
The aim of campaigns like “Campagne
per gli animali” is to bring “obstacles” and
contradictions to the surface, to denounce the
silence which surrounds certain practices, such as
the sacrificial slaughter of lambs, to give faces,
names and voices to animal suffering. Against
this background, the choice of not portraying the
lambs in an image which speaks about them is
unusual, but, at the same time, appropriate, in
that it epitomizes the absence of animals per se
in people’s thoughts and the cultural removal of
those practices which every single person, with
their daily choices, contribute either to
maintaining or changing.
Bibliography
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Filiquarian Publishing 2006.
George Bataille, Theory of Religion, Zone Books 1989.
Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry,
Vincent Stuart, London 1964.
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, University of California Press,
1983.
122
Dr Sabrina Tonutti, PhD, is a Lecturer and a Researcher in Cultural
Anthropology at the University of Udine, Italy. Her studies focus on
human-animal relationships, new social movements, anthropology
of food, and epistemological reflections on the human-animal
divide in anthropology. Sabrina carried out ethnographic research
on the animal rights movement in Italy, Switzerland, and Great
Britain, which resulted in the publication of the book Diritti Animali.
Storia e antropologia di un movimento (Forum Ed. 2007).
Among her other publications on these subjects: Manuale
di zooantropologia (Meltemi 2007, with R. Marchesini), ‘Umano,
troppo umano’. Riflessioni sull’opposizione natura/cultura in
antropologia, ed. by Tonutti, S., Lutri, A. and Acerbi, A. (SEID 2009),
the book chapters: “Cruelty, Children, and Animals: Historically One,
not Two, Causes”, in Linzey, A. (ed by), The Link between Animal
Abuse and Human Violence (Sussex Academic Press 2009);
“Anthropocentrism and the definition of ‘culture’ as a marker of the
human/animal divide”, in Boddice, R. (ed. by), Anthropocentrism.
Humans, Animals, Environments (Brill 2011); and the entry “Reform”
for the Cultural Encyclopedia of Vegetarianism, ed. by M. Puskar-
Pasewicz (Greenwood Publishing Group 2010).
Sabrina Tonutti is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

A
lready very early on in the history of the
poster, animals were depicted, mostly in
purely illustrative form without educational
goals. Still, it is worth examining examples from
this medium in order to see in what ways the
animal came to be represented, how the view on
the animal has changed, and for which products
the animal will be seen as suitable for advertising.
Be it for alcohol, floor wipes or an evening at the
ballet, animals are extremely eye-catching
figures in advertisement and often earn the
important “ahhh”-effect in a marketing strategy.
However, the humanization of the animal world
on posters has also been extensively explored.
The tooth brushing squirrel and the clothed
penguin belong to a former fantasy and fairytale
world of illustrated posters. In addition to posters
where the animals become the main
protagonists, there are also many depictions of
the animal-human relationship. The extravagant
woman, who advertised for the fur fashion line of
Paul Rückmar in 1924, completely tamed her
wildcat. She symbolized the dominion of people
over animals, which had not been deeply
questioned for centuries. In 1913 the PKZ-Mann,
with the company of dogs, was her male
counterpart, and the trendy punch advertisement
from 1960 was her successor.
123
ANIMALS ON THE
RUNWAY
The discussion of animals in graphic art has radically changed since about 1950. In contemporary performances
and installations, even living animals are displayed, which often leads to ethical discussions. Recent work, however,
reflects a new societal view of animals: A strictly anthropocentric view has had its day, now animals have come to
be seen as equal creatures and have emancipated themselves in artistic representation.
Text by Bettina Richter
The dog as faithful friend of man is seen on many
poster images. As the devoted guardian of an
Olivetti, he stands in the center of the picture, but
in passing he mostly appears at the people’s feet.
The cat is presented completely differently, based
on its assumed characteristic as an independent,
individualistic animal. With enormous eyes for the
“Black Cat” liquor advertisement, the cat almost
appears sinister. The trunk of the mighty, goodnatured
elephant is finally not only a picture motif
found in children’s books, but also in a particularly
original image used by the Pirelli-Reifen tire
company.
What the cultural scholar Thomas Macho
has asserted about the use of animals in
contemporary art applies as well to their portrayal
in posters: “The animals are not used exclusively
for reasons alien to themselves as animals. In
many cases, they also demonstrate how much
the animal is not merely a fantasy of our minds,
but also a possibility of creaturliness, existence,
and happiness that we ourselves may have lost.”
Dr. Bettina Richter is Curator, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich,
Plakatsammlung. Original Exhibit Co-Curators: Dr. Bettina Richter and
Alessia Contin (Registrar), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich,
Plakatsammlung. The above text was translated by Abigail Gottinger,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. With special thanks to Dr Nigel
Rothfels for initiating and co-ordinating this adaptation of the original
exhibition project for Antennae.

Paul Rückmar
Pelzwaren Fourrures, 1924 Paul Rückmar
124

Schwarzer Kater
Garantie für gute Laune, 1966 Schwarzer Kater
Tierschutz!
Tierschutz!, 1925 Tierschutz!
125
Gordon’s
It Must be Gordon’s, Gordon’s Dry Gin, 1967 Gordon’s
PKZ
Die Nuance vom Mann zum Gentleman, 1971 PKZ

Co-op
Bodenwichse, 1946 Co-op
126

Laboratories Ed. Mottier
Colle M Elephant, 1952 Laboratories Ed. Mottier
127

Zimmerli Tricots
Zimmerli Tricots, 1943 Zimmerli Tricots
128

PKZ
Burgher, Kehl & Co, 1913 PKZ
Lupolen Basf
Hausgerät aus Lupolen, 1955 Lupolen Basf
129
Pirelli
Atlante, 1954 Pirelli
Setter Set
Nylons, 1959 Setter Set

Punch Boutique
Pumch, 1960 Punch
130

Télévision Ducastel
Satisfaction réelle, 1955 Télévision Ducastel
131

L
ike most New Deal projects, the jobs and
government spending of the agency were
too modest to end the Great Depression.
Nonetheless, the WPA employed a small army of
photographers, writers, painters, poets and
illustrators that left behind a cache of creative
work that is an invaluable window into the culture
and politics of the decade. Among that work is
the famed WPA art posters and its “Zoo”
promotional series, which endeavored to boost
the local economy of a given city by promoting
the urban tourism of zoo attendance. Housed at
the Library of Congress, today these beautiful
advertising tools mark out for us the moment in
American public culture when zoos and wild
animals became modern in a twentieth-century
sense.
The WPA series ordered American citizens
to collect the kids and “Visit the Zoo.” The
silkscreened posters offered such institutions as
both portal into the natural world and modern
entertainment option featuring wild animals as
embellishments to urban American life. Indeed, in
the “Zoo” series we sense no bars or cement or
feces, no stereotypic pacing, no jostling zoo
patrons, no man-made noise or overflowing
garbage bins, no bread lines or homeless
camps, that is, none of the troubling realities of
animal captivity, city living or the Depression.
What we do see are idealized creatures
‘WORKS PROGRESS
ADMINISTRATION’ POSTERS
In 1933 and 1934, as part of the “New Deal” economic plan for the United States, President Franklin
Roosevelt’s administration created a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to
hire artists to document and promote American cultural life.
Text by Susan Nance
132
set in artist’s canvas-style backdrops that eschew
detail in favor of stylish efficiency. These
advertisements seem aimed at questioning the
perceived dividing line between nature and
culture, which we often associate with modernity,
because they portray nature as culture. Here
animals captured from wild or foreign places are
extracted from those histories and geographies
and presented as living works of art. Being statefunded,
with no advertising agency accounting
department to answer to, the WPA artists created
advertising posters that were indeed experimental
and sleek, although they may have seemed too
high-minded for many zoo patrons.
What is more, the WPA “Zoo” animals
come across as works of modern art with speciesspecific
personalities. Indeed, the ads depict the
conventional characters that each of these
species carries even today: panda bear as cute
stuffed toy, hippo as rotund comic, herons as
silently elegant posers, panther as lithe stalker,
polar bear as ice berg, stampeding bull elephant
as powerful provocateur who addresses the
viewer directly and dares him or her to stare in
awe as long as possible before jumping out of
the way. Each of these artistic animal essences
represents a particular emotion, be it
(anthropocentric) paternalism, delight, mirth, or
awe. And, here is advertising in its most powerfully
efficient and democratic mode. The WPA zoo

WPA
Brookfield Zoo WPA
ads edit out the complexities of product and
consumer context in order to get across a simple,
user-friendly message about each animal that
flatters the viewer as a person amused and
enriched by his or her consumption of animal
images.
133
To be sure, the WPA zoo was a museum of
animals seen as natural art for a deserving public;
it was a “New Deal for Animals” zoo. Why portray
zoos that way? In those days, many in the zoo
business were reimagining captive animal

WPA
Brookfield Zoo, WPA
134

displays as a modern entertainment that could
help support both local public education and a
broader conservation agenda. WPA artists
supplied ways of conceptualizing and
communicating this linking of show business and
uplift in accessible ways that still gave a nod to
the American elites, government officials and
social engineers who worried that most urban
Americans were ignorant of animals. Advocates
for conservationism, they believed most city
dwellers were unfamiliar with the idea that wild
animals were intrinsically valuable parts of
national and global ecosystems. If impressed with
the artistry of nature—even in a zoo animal—
citizens might be less likely to support activities
that destroyed habitat and more likely to see a
connection between zoos and state-supported
conservationism, the thinking went. Of course, the
taint of old sins remained as the modern zoo of
the WPA was an educational institution
advocating for conservation although it remained
a net consumer of wild-born living things.
Viewed up-close by citizens who saw them
on walls in the subway, the post office or the zoo
lobby itself, the WPA posters attempted to
persuade by portraying tourism at zoos and
national parks as patriotic, educational, modern.
The WPA would similarly supply workers and
funding to various zoos for the repair and
expansion of their facilities. That infrastructure
development worked in tandem with the
enhanced advertising and rebranding provided
by the “Zoo” art posters and other WPA funded
promotional publications like Who’s Who in the
Zoo (1937), a $1.69 gift shop pamphlet that
explained the natural history of species common
to American zoos. It came with a cover depicting
a cartoon monkey smiling at the viewer while
hanging by one foot and one hand from the “Z”
and final “O” in the title. Thus did many American
zoos reinvent themselves during the hard times of
the 1930s – perhaps not as famously as the
movie theatres in these years – but successfully
enough that they flourished by remaining relevant
in age when Frank Buck movies and other
popular “tamer or wild beasts”-type
entertainments offered wild animals, too,
although with less modern sensibility and style.
135
WPA
Visit the Zoo WPA
Back Cover Image: Olivetti, Valentine, 1972

T
he last decade has witnessed a reinvigoration
in studies of human – animal relations. In the
field of animal geographies this development
has been particularly significant, with animals
increasingly recognised as significant players in
social worlds across diverse places and scales,
including across urban and rural locations, and
even within intimate spaces that are traditionally
the site of close human relations, such as within
home and family. Yet despite these
developments some animals continue to occupy
a fringe position in the scholarly imagination. In
particular, microscopic creatures and those that
are slimy, scaly, or with an exoskeleton have
received little attention in scholarly studies (see
Bear 2011 for discussion and an important
exception), and are a particular absence in
studies of home, which have predominately
focused on domestic pets (see for example
Franklin 2006; and Power 2008; Power 2012a).
The absence of these organisms contrasts with
the significant place that many such animals
have in everyday human activity. For example, in
the context of home these animals are typically
categorised as pests and are a key target of
homemaking activity. Killing and the death of
KILL ‘EM DEAD!: THE
ORDINARY PRACTICES OF
PEST CONTROL IN THE
HOME
In recent years critical animal geographies have pointed to dearth of stories about the small, the microscopic, the
slimy and the abject. The exoscheleton, though painfully present to anyone bitten by a bedbug or disgusted by a
cockroach, has been all but absent in dominant animal geographies. Death and the killing of animals is a further
notable absence. However, this scholarly absence is not parallel within the popular imagination, where
cockroaches, files and dust mites loom large at the centre of a homemaking war focused on the eradication of
house pests.
Text by Emma Power
136
animals – the outcome of these homemaking
practices – is a further notable absence in animal
geographies as well as within geographies of
home, a curious absence given that many of the
animals that people come into contact with in
the context of home are dead in the form of food
and clothing, or will die as a direct result of
human activities ranging from the euphemistically
termed ‘pest removal’ to the euthanasia of loved
pets (see Animal Studies Group 2006 for an
exception that does examine killing practices,
though does not examine domestic pests or
homemaking practices). In this paper I bring
attention to relations between people and animal
pests in the context of homemaking, looking at
the normalised practice of pest removal within
the home and the ways that it is represented and
promoted through advertisements in Australian
homemaker magazines.
Pest removal processes typically entail the
exclusion and killing of animals categorised as
pests. They are an essential component of
everyday homemaking practice and are a key
way that a house is maintained as home.
However, at the same time that these practices
consolidate home, in bringing practices of killing

into the home pest removal also connects home
and homemakers to practices (killing and death)
that are practically and conceptually separate
from the ideas of warmth, cosiness and security
that underpin representations of the domestic as
a ‘homey’ space. The necessary violence is
ignored through the necessity of the act. The
apparent tension between ideas of home and
practices of killing through pest removal are the
focus of this paper. These practices are
examined through advertisements from popular
Australian homemaker magazines from the
1950s, 70s and 2000s to highlight the popular
discourses that surround pest killing and the ways
that they seek to normalise and make pest killing
an essential part of everyday domestic practice.
The ways that ‘pest’ animals are made available
for killing and that killing is managed within
homemaking are examined.
Nature-culture separations in
homemaking
In the western imagination home is a human
place: a place of culture in opposition to nature
and wildness, elements that are imagined to lie
outside of home. This view of home has its origin
in the Neolithic when home was first constituted in
opposition to nature, a construction captured in
the oppositional concepts of domus and agrios.
Domus is literally the house-as-home, but also
references the symbolic and material processes
through which wildness was brought within the
sphere of human influence through practices
around pottery, plants and animals. Agrios, by
contrast, lay outside of home and was
associated with masculinity and practices around
hunting, weapons and death (Hodder 1990; and
see Power 2012b). Since the Neolithic these
separations have underpinned understandings of
home as a safe, secure, and comfortable space,
and provided practical and conceptual
guidelines for what does, and does not, belong in
home. These separations do not simply exist, but
rather are made through conceptual, symbolic
and practical relations around nature and the
nonhuman world, and inform homemaking at
multiple scales. At the scale of the house,
elements perceived as not belonging within
home are excluded to create and maintain
home as a safe, secure space.
Separations between home and nature
are most strongly articulated within the modern
home, which is separated from nature and the
outside through an array of practices from the
city scale and the institutional to the everyday.
137
Reflecting the modernist ideal of separating
spheres and functions, home – nature
separations are written into the city through
planning processes such as land zoning,
restrictions around the presence of livestock
(Gaynor 1999; Philo 1998) and webs of
infrastructure that regulate the flow and supply of
natural resources such as energy and water
(Hinchliffe 1997; Kaika 2004). These symbolic and
institutional relations with nature are consolidated
in the material structures of home, including walls
and rooves, which at the most basic level
manage the interface between home and its
immediate outside through the exclusion of the
elements. Infrastructure that supplies water and
electricity consolidates this separation, lending a
sense of home as a site that is autonomous from
broader environmental rhythms (Kaika 2004),
including seasonal weather changes and the
diurnal rhythms of daylight and darkness (Power
2009b), and facilitating the cleaning of home.
Such structures are further supported by everyday
practices such as cleaning that strengthen and
secure home – nature separations through the
localised exclusion of undesirables such as dirt,
pests and germs (Berner 1998; Ger and
Yenicioglu 2004; Martens and Scott 2005). In
effecting this exclusion the modern home is
made to appear as a secure space that is
separate from nature and the outside world.
Through the apparent exclusion of nature the
material dwelling place is transformed into a
home, a site that is shaped by feelings of
belonging and security.
Practices of cleaning are an important,
localised practice through which nature-culture
separations are produced and (re)secured within
home, and are instrumental to the maintenance
of home as a safe and clean space. Crucially,
this everyday practice not only secures home, but
can also compensate for leaks in home’s borders
through the identification and removal of
undesirable and disorderly elements such as dust,
pet excrement and hair, and insects and other
pests that are discovered within home.
Cleaning practices are historically and
culturally situated. Understandings of what is
‘clean’ and hygienic, and conversely what
constitutes ‘dirt’, in the domestic sphere, are
culturally contingent and have changed over
time (Douglas 1966). The discovery of the germ in
the late nineteenth century was a watershed in
these practices and has significantly impacted
domestic practice, including categorisations and
perceptions of ‘pest’ species. In particular, the
discovery of the germ affirmed the centrality of

Fig.1
Advertisement for Cyclone Screenwire (AWW, October 13, 1954, p.68)
cleaning to the production and maintenance of
home and saw scientific concepts of germ theory
increasingly inform everyday domestic practice
(Martens and Scott 2005), from cleaning to
broader practices such as interior design and
furnishing (Berner 1998). Historically these
practices have had broad social and cultural
implications. In addition to maintaining the safety
and security of home, effective and ‘correct’
cleaning and home maintenance also speaks to
the identity and character of the inhabiting
household. In the Victorian era a clean home
spoke to the moral fortitude of the household and
was a sign of “competence and social
respectability” (Berner 1998: 318). Such values
have also been significant in the construction of
contemporary middle-class identities, with the
appearance of order through a clean and tidy
home becoming central to this construction (see
for example Berner 1998 on the Victorian era;
Lauster 2010 for a discussion of American
homemaking from the 1940s; and Dowling and
Power in press; and Power 2012a for
contemporary Australian practices).
Germ theory prompted a profound shift in
the focus of cleaning activities. While cleaning
had historically been oriented toward dirt that was
visible, the invisibility of the germ made cleaning
a complex task and saw a shift in the nature and
orientation of cleaning practices. Products that
disinfect and destroy invisible organisms
138
increased in significance, but constituted a
significant challenge to cleaners by drawing
attention to the presence of dirt within even the
most visually clean spaces. Marketers managed
this tension by conflating visual order with an
absence of germs. As Martens (2007: 39) has
shown, ‘In a context where practitioners could not
know that germs had been effectively
eradicated, this priority emerged and fused in
complex ways with a specific aesthetic of shiny,
white, sparkling and pleasantly smelling interiors.”
In their research on cleaning products within
homemaker magazines Martens and Scott (2006:
53) show that pest animals became part of this
narrative through products which targeted
‘airborne’ germs, a concept they argue
“suggests the equation of germs with insects and/
or dust, as germs are themselves not airborne
and they do not leave an odour.” In this
framework pests, as visual evidence of disorder
within home, become an appropriate target of
homemaking activity: they were no longer simply
a nuisance or dirt in and of themselves, but also
represented the presence of invisible disorder in
the form of germs. Pest removal processes offer a
means of combating this threat through the reordering
of home.
However, the relationship between pest
control and the production of home as a clean
and safe space is not straightforward: pest control
entails the use of chemicals that can themselves

Fig.2
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, February 10th, 1954, p.44)
be dangerous to human residents and even to
the material structures of home. Martens and
Scott’s (2006) work has been important in
underlining the significant threats that cleaning
products import into the home and points to the
related threats of pest oriented products, such as
DDT, which was contained in most insecticides in
the 1950s. In addition to chemical dangers, and
as explored in this paper, pest removal also
connects home with a more conceptual danger:
practices of killing and death, which have been
separated from home since the Neolithic, appear
as central homemaking practices that are
effected within home and are at the heart of the
maintenance of home as a secure space. This is
a paradox which sees a distinctly unhomey
activity situated at the heart of the home and
challenges long-standing cultural
conceptualisations of home as a site that is
separate from killing practices. Historically
practices of killing have been materially and
conceptually removed from home: in the early
twentieth Century this separation was
consolidated in western cities through the
removal of slaughterhouses, which had formerly
been located in the centre of town in many
major cities. At the time, as Philo (1998) shows,
these spaces were associated with the
degeneration of the city through imagined
connections with undesirable and purportedly
139
immoral activities such as prostitution and
gambling. The removal of slaughterhouses was
an important component of the modernisation of
the city and the concomitant production of
home. Such separations continue to be culturally
significant in the contemporary era. Today,
individuals and households that are associated
with the killing of animals in the domestic space,
including for cultural/ religious purposes, are
frequently viewed as backward, uncultured,
dangerous and uncivilised (see for example
Wolch, et al. 2000). Dominant constructions of
home and the perversity of animal killing belie the
very significant place that pest removal practices
assume within everyday homemaking. Despite
involving the destruction of large numbers of
animals these practices are an invisible yet
central component of the production and
maintenance of home. The ways that these
tensions are managed within pest control
marketing is the topic of the remainder of the
paper.
Methods
The paper draws on a critical in-depth review of
four popular Australian homemaker and women’s
magazines, conducted as part of a broader
project about animals and homemaking
practices. Reviewed were the Australian Women’s

Weekly (AWW), Australian House & Garden (AH&G)
and Australian Home Beautiful (AHB) in the periods
1951-55, 1971-75 and 2001-05, as well as Better
Homes & Gardens (BH&G) 2001-05. The
magazines were chosen for their historical and
contemporary significance and popularity in
Australia. Each magazine is a top selling
magazine its category, the ‘women’s’ market for
AWW and the ‘homemaker’ markets for AH&G,
AHB and BH&G. The magazines are published
monthly and all editions of magazines were
analysed within the study period. The exception is
the Australian Women’s Weekly, which was
published weekly in the first two time periods: in
these years only the summer editions (January –
March and October – December) were reviewed
as this was when the majority of animals as pests
appeared.
The reviewed magazines are diverse in
content. The AWW is oriented toward the
‘women’s’ market. Traditionally it has had a strong
focus on women’s roles as mother and
homemaker; although this focus has broadened
in the contemporary period themes around
motherhood and homemaking continue to be
strong. It is in this context that the majority of
references to animals, whether as pet or pest, are
made. The AH&G and AHB are both home
focused in the contemporary period with an
emphasis on high end design and products,
whereas in the 1950s their depictions of ‘ideal’
homes were complemented with a stronger
focus on Do It Yourself and ‘ordinary’
homemaking tasks. BH&G is the contemporary
version of these magazines, providing more price
accessible products and a strong emphasis on
Do It Yourself tasks from home decorating to
basic maintenance and building.
Magazines provide an interesting and
insightful window into popular constructions of
‘ideal’ homes as well as providing practical
advice, advertisements and images that depict
homemaking practices. As such, magazines
have frequently been used in research about
homemaking, including research investigating
cultures of consumption and house design (Greig
1995; Leslie and Reimer 2003; Lloyd and Johnson
2004), constructions of housework and the
‘housewife’ (Johnson and Lloyd 2004), and
cultures and practices around kitchens and
cleaning (Berner 1998; Martens and Scott 2004;
2005; 2006). Studies that use home magazines
typically offer a discursive reading of magazines
and document changes in the ways that they
represent home over time (Blunt and Dowling
2006: 54). This paper offers a related but distinct
140
reading of these magazines by foregrounding the
place of nonhuman actors in the relations of
homemaking, with a particular focus on domestic
pests including insects and rodents.
Written and pictorial depictions of pest
animals were the focus of the analysis.
Advertisements and articles, including editorials
and reader advice columns that mentioned pest
animals were transcribed and analysed, with a
particular focus on advertising which is where the
majority of references occurred. For the purposes
of this paper, strategies that constructed insects
and other animals such as rodents as ‘pests’
within home and that emphasised the
importance of their removal and/ or killing were
foregrounded, with particular attention given to
the communicative practices and
representations that sought to make the
destruction of pest animals a normal, essential
and urgent task. Advertisements typically
appeared multiple times throughout the study
period, appearing on a monthly basis and also
regularly reappearing across a number of years.
Discussions of these advertisements are
referenced to one appearance in a particular
magazine. Images and quotes from
advertisements have been selected as typical
examples. Across each period a small number of
brands predominated. Mortein, a company
selling pest control chemicals, was the major
advertiser across each period often advertising
multiple times within each reviewed edition.
Representing pests and the urgency of
pest removal - Practical asymmetry
A key way that advertising constructs the killing of
pests as not just morally neutral but essential is by
establishing a practical asymmetry between
human residents of home and pests as invaders.
Ideas about disease and the dirtiness of animals
are key to these depictions, with pests
constructed as a threat to the safety and security
of home and of particular danger to children who
are represented as innocent and vulnerable.
Depictions of insect pests such as the
cockroach and fly most strongly reflect this
theme. In the 1950s flies were the key organism
depicted as responsible for importing dirt, disease
and death into the domestic sphere. Images and
text captured a sense of flies as wily and mobile
creatures, bringing germs into the house and
connecting food, toys and rubbish bins as they
flew through the home. These fly-borne
connections were shown to challenge home’s
safety and security by contaminating food and

Fig.3
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 6th, 1954, p.36)
making family members sick, with children
particularly vulnerable to illness (see similarly
Martens and Scott 2006 on germs and cleaning
more broadly). Concerns about flies’ disease
carrying capacity proliferated across
advertisements and ranged from the generalised
concern that flies would bring ‘sickness’ into the
home, to more specific concerns about
gastroenteritis and polio that referenced broader
public health campaigns and the perspectives of
health experts, including doctors. Public health
authorities were concerned about the spread of
polio at this time, but it was the product marketers
that most readily mobilised and carried this fear
into the public domain, depicting flies as carriers
of death rather than simply illness. These
representations were enacted across a range of
products from fly screen like barriers (59 per cent
of advertisements) to poisons and baits (41 per
cent of advertisements). An advert for AGCO
Supascreens, for instance, pointed to the
imminence of death and its place at the dinner
table – the conceptual heart of the 1950s family,
observing:
‘The filthy annoying fly can carry
death to your dinner table. Shut him
out – for if he enters, typhoid and
polio may be riding with him.’
(AWW, Dec 23, 1953: 32).
141
Advertisements were never subtle. Headlines like
that accompanying Cyclone’s popular
screenwire product: “You may be revolted but
that’s better than being dead!” (see Figure 1)
were common, and sought to consolidate and
build upon homemakers’ senses of insecurity
within home.
Allusions to the capacity of flies to carry
death into the home declined over the reviewed
periods in line with their decreased public health
threat, and paralleling the declining prevalence
of diseases such as polio. More recent
advertisements shifted attention to cockroaches,
with flies appearing predominately amongst lists
of other insect pests. However, despite the shift in
the type of pest depicted, these adverts played
on similarly exaggerated themes that placed
emphasis on the violence caused by pests and
their inevitable connection with disease (rather
than death). All advertisements emphasised the
importance of killing cockroaches found inside
the home and setting up poisonous barriers so
that those outside could not enter. The multinational
company Mortein was responsible for the
vast majority of these advertisements, appearing
multiple times in key positions throughout
magazines in each year and edition. As in the
earlier periods the offending pest was
represented as disturbing the cleanliness of
home, an outcome affected by connecting
home’s cleanest spaces with its dirtiest. A series of

Fig.4
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 9th, 1953, p.68)
advertisements for ‘Mortein home pest control
products’, for example, observed that:
The worst thing about cockroaches is
that they can be everywhere. Even in
the cleanest of kitchens. Nocturnal
creatures, they scuttle about after dark
feeding on anything from garbage to
sewerage and even dead skin cell
debris. (Mortein, AHB, January 2001,
p131).
DIY Pest control: Advice from pest
Control, Reg Mercer, on how to target
outdoor problem areas and stop pests
from coming into your home. […]
Cockroaches: Feeding on garbage
and debris, cockroaches spread
bacteria that can cause food
poisoning and dysentery, and their
droppings can trigger asthma attacks.
(Mortein, BH&G, March 2002, p111).
PEST CONTROL MADE EASY:
PREVENT OUTDOOR CRAWLING INSECTS
COMING INSIDE NO MATTER WHAT
YOUR CRAWLING INSECT PROBLEM
ANTS, SPIDERS OR COCKROACHES
MORTEIN HAS AN EFFECTIVE SOLUTION
142
BEST OF ALL, NEW PRODUCTS MEAN
YOU CAN KEEP PESTS OUTDOORS,
WHERE THEY BELONG! Is there anyone
who doesn’t find cockroaches
disgusting? Not only do they seem
indestructible, but they spread disease
and germs, and can even trigger
asthma attacks. There are two types of
roaches American and German and
your house doesn’t need either.
Luckily, Mortein can help you eliminate
cockroaches. (Mortein, AH&G, March
2002, p131).
As in these three examples, cockroaches were
linked with germs and disease that originate from
sites that are either practically or conceptually
outside of home. The former appears through
broad statements such as in the third
advertisement that pests are coming in from
outside; the latter appears through connections
that are charted between pest animals and
unhomey spaces and products within home,
such as garbage and sewerage.
Across each period connections with
disease are substantiated through highly
evocative descriptions of the very unhomey
places that pest animals visit. Advertisements play
on the imagined geographies of insect lives to
chart connections between sites of refuse and
waste – particularly garbage bins, tips and
manure – and homey, family spaces such as
kitchen benches, food and even children (see
Figure 2).
Stop that fly - he’s
dangerous …
Every fly is a dirt-and-disease-laden
menace. His favourite crawling places
… outside your home … are
loathsome. His hairy legs are efficient
instruments for collecting and carrying
filth and germs. (Cyclone screenwire,
AWW, Feb 24, 1951: 56).
I’m safe behind SCREEN WIRE
Flies breed in refuse and filth and bring
into your home the germs of gastroenteritis
and other dangerous
diseases. You’re right to be frightened
every time a fly touches Baby or the
family foods. Just ask your doctor!
(Cyclone Screenwire AWW 1954)
As in these and previous examples, notions of
home as a secure space in opposition to a
dangerous outside world are evoked. Flies were

Fig.5
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, March 16th, 1953, p.49)
connecting home to spaces “outside your
home”, and bringing germs “into your home”;
cockroaches similarly are “outdoor crawling
insects” that come from “outdoor problem areas”
(see examples in previous paragraph). Screening
products and chemical boundary sprays were
promoted as the first line of defence against this
threat, securing home’s leaky borders against
insect pests and extending the homemakers’
reach through time and space so that they could
relax within the security of the domestic. Topical
fly sprays (and more recently cockroach sprays)
consolidate these borders; they are promoted as
enabling the homemaker to quickly and
efficiently kill any pest that manages to cross the
border into home. Associated images depict
homemakers arming themselves and deploying
cans of spray against flies in the 1950s and
cockroaches in the 2000s (examples of these are
in Figures 2, 4 and 6).
Magazine representations suggest that the
power of domestic pests is in their capacity to
rupture and contaminate home through
connections to sites of disorder, which include
rubbish tins and bathrooms, through drains and
sewerage: even as the homemaker identifies
143
waste products and places them in sites of
disposal the pest disrupts this activity, bringing
waste back into circulation within the home as it
travels the domestic space. Through this activity
pests highlight the presence of waste products
within home, including those shed from an
unstable human body. In touching this waste and
travelling through the home pests are shown to
connect waste with the productive and central
sites of domesticity such as the kitchen, food
preparation areas, and even family members. At
the same time advertisements, and the activities
of pests themselves, highlight the capacity of
home to not just accommodate, but also nourish
the Other. Capable of housing and providing
nutrition to pests the domestic is an always less
than secure and more than human space, an
idea drawn upon to build and consolidate the
homemaker’s sense of insecurity and anxiety.
Finally, the natural and animalistic dimensions of
the human body are foregrounded. Even the
most cultured human body is at risk and
vulnerable to invisible germs that penetrate from
outside; the body also creates dirt and disorder
as it sheds skin cells and other forms of waste
which are themselves shown to have a

Fig.6
Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 19th, 1955, p.35)
productive capacity in supporting the life
opportunities of pest species who consume them.
Highlighting these flows, insect pests foreground
the always limited reach of human culture over
the boundaries of the body. In travelling and
connecting the conceptual and material spaces
of home, the human body and waste sites, pests
link inside with outside, culture with nature,
challenging the homemakers control over home,
and disrupting perceptions of home’s autonomy
and safety. These actions afford insect pests a
power over the human homemaker so that they
constitute a constant and invisible threat to
human homemaking activity and the security of
home, an asymmetrical threat that these
creatures hold over all but the most vigilant
homemaker. The killing of pest animals appears
as the natural and responsible endpoint, a way of
restoring the security of home and protecting its
inhabitants.
Scalar threat
A second and related way that pests such as
insects are substantiated as a significant threat
within home involves the use of exaggerated and
out of scale depictions that highlight the revolting,
unfamiliar and abject qualities of these pests.
These depictions play with numbers and scale,
144
associating individual nonhumans with a
population threat, connecting visible pests with
hidden hordes, and providing large scale images
of microscopic creatures.
The first type of representations are
exaggerated, anthropomorphised and cartoonish
depictions that foreground the canniness of the
insect pest and its love of human spaces. Flies in
particular are shown to enjoy the home and the
easy opportunities that it affords. As the human
homemaker secures, tidies and cleans home, the
fly delights in its destruction. Figure 3 is an
example of these types of depictions. Here the fly
is shown magnified and as a chariot for germs.
The reader is reminded that “Germ warfare isn’t a
myth!”, a reference to broader geopolitical
concerns and a reminder that pest removal within
home is a vital task. The germs themselves are
depicted with unpleasant and evil grins. These
anthropomorphised features, coupled with their
gesticulations in the direction that the fly is
heading, afford a sense that their journey into the
home is planned and intentional. Another
significant example is Louie the Fly, a human-like
creature introduced by Mortein in 1957. Although
rarely appearing in the reviewed print depictions
Louie is important to consider due to his
significant position in the public imagination in
Australia, which most recently placed him at the

centre of a large social media campaign in early
2012 (and see Mortein’s website for historic and
contemporary depictions
http://www.mortein.com.au/louie_the_fly.php).
Louie is the epitome of the canny pest. He is
afforded intentionality and a wilful
destructiveness; he has chosen to be in the home
and delights in the havoc and sickness that he
can wreak in this space. Louie’s sneakiness is
effected through his very personable yet dirty
character and appearance. His large eyes look
out at the reader, and he is depicted with a
sneaky grin and often carrying a piece of rubbish
picked out of the garbage: a vagrant within the
domestic. In endowing pest animals with a
thoughtfulness and intentionality advertisements
afford pests a wilfulness, which establishes them
as a worthy and significant foe within home, one
whom it would be foolhardy to ignore. These are
smart pests who threaten to outwit the human
homemaker. Despite their personal charm, they
seem intent on living within home and express
delight in their capacity to connect home to dirt
and disease.
Related depictions magnify the insect
form, foregrounding their bodily Otherness
through text and images. Pests are either shown in
large form, or in multiple. Figure 4, an
advertisement for Mortein Plus which appeared in
1953, is characteristic of these advertisements. In
this image the fly is magnified to capture the
bristly hair that protrudes from its body, as well as
its large, multiple eyes. Such depictions highlight
the essential nonhuman nature of the insect.
Similar adverts build upon visual representations
with detailed and evocative textual descriptions
that capture ‘disgusting’ bodily behaviours. The
descriptions seen in Figure 1, and reproduced
below, are characteristic of this practice.
Each fly is covered with myriads of
tiny, sticky hairs and each hair can
carry enough infection to wipe out
your whole family.
The eating habits of flies are even
more disgusting. The moment the
toothless fly lands on your food, it
vomits an infection-charged fluid to
liquefy it before eating, then sucks
through its hairy, syphon-like mouth.
Cyclone Screenwire (AWW, October
13, 1954, p68).
The first element of this description establishes the
magnitude of the threat posed by the flies’ ‘tiny’
145
hairs which, although invisible to the human eye,
are charged with the power to eradicate an
entire human family. The second element of this
description plays with the Otherness of the fly: its
lack of teeth, siphon like mouth and practice of
regurgitating its food. These descriptions seek to
generate senses of disgust and horror in the
human reader and lend the fly an otherworldly
edge, a creature not just physically distinct from
humans, but also culturally. The idea that food
should be liquefied, regurgitated and then reingested
stands clearly outside of western cultural
constructions of appropriate eating practices. It
also plays with human horror about non-solid,
leaky and wet bodily forms and processes (see for
example Longhurst 2001). These descriptions are
particularly effective in establishing flies and
cockroaches as out-of-place by activating the
senses of disgust and fear that research has
shown characterise human encounters with these
types of invertebrates (for example Arrindell 2000;
Bjerke and Ostdahl 2004; Kellert 1993).
A second and related technique employs
‘iceberg’ representations, where one visible or
even partially visible ‘enemy’ is sure sign of a
takeover. An example of this is an advertisement
that appeared throughout editions published in
the 2000s promoting Mortein’s rat kill products.
These ‘rat packs’ are designed to be thrown into
the ceiling and floor cavities of homes, where the
rat would encounter and eat them and then die
after receiving a fatal dose of poison. The
advertisements for this product are striking. They
use a bright, fire engine red background which
covers a full glossy magazine page.
Superimposed on this background is the foot and
tail of a rat, protruding from the edge of the page
as though the creature has been caught as it
scurries back into its secret, hidden living spaces.
The image of the rat captures the scaly otherness
of its tail, distinguishing this animal from a
domestic pet or any associated imaginary of a
cute and furry creature. The accompanying text
states simply “Makes you want to hurl”, alluding to
the way that the poison pack is hurled, or thrown,
into the ceiling space, and using the vernacular
term for vomit to capture the sense of horror and
disgust that a homemaker would feel upon
sighting one of these animals in the home. The
advertisement also operates within the context of
the broader magazine: the alarming red of the
background image stands out against the
otherwise neutral surrounding images which,
through advertisements and editorial pieces,
capture and promote the ‘ideal’ home. This
advertisement and the sudden appearance of

the scaly rat seek to disturb the reader, reminding
of the many liminal spaces and creatures that
are part of home and in doing so generating a
sense of insecurity and disgust. This is a visual and
very catching reminder of the unhomey spaces
and creatures that are part of home. Similar
advertisements focused on cockroaches,
alluding to their: seemingly endless number of
‘friends’ lurking in cracks and crevices, behind the
fridge, underneath the cupboards etc. (Mortein
and Australian Home Beautiful promotion, AHB,
Jan 2001, p131), and offering products that “get
rid of insects you can see and those you can’t.”
(Mortein DIY control bomb, Feb 2005, p106). In
these types of advertisements, visual evidence of
pests is connected to home’s liminal places, the
ceiling and wall cavities and sub-floor spaces that
house electrical, water and waste infrastructure
and threaten to remind the homemaker of
home’s connection and dependence upon sites
of nature and waste outside home. The hidden
parts of home are foregrounded to play on the
uncanny sense that these spaces and unhomey
pests evoke (see Kaika 2004 and ; Power 2009a
for a broader discussion of these spaces as the
domestic uncanny).
A scientised death: Speed, time and
clinical precision
A third set of representations focus on the
practice of killing. Interestingly although terms like
killing and death are widely utilised within
advertisements, and illustrations of dead insect
pests are provided, the practice and process of
the death itself is absent. Further, the techniques
suggest a killing that is largely hands off: they do
not require that people come into contact (and
hence conversation) with the insect pests. These
are purified accounts of the killing process that
make the moment of contact invisible. This is in
contrast to the often very embodied and sensory
experience of an actual killing: the bloody residue
of a mosquito’s last victim, or the cockroach: it’s
popping crunch when squashed, or its body
slowed after walking over a barrier poison, or in an
animated frenzy after being misted with a
contact spray.
Advertisements create a sense of urgency
around pest removal practices through the
evocative descriptions of pest’s otherness, their
sneakiness and threat to home, as outlined in the
previous sections of this paper. The sense of fear
and insecurity ideally generated in the
homemaker are designed to precipitate into the
purchase of pest removal products and their
deployment within home. Marvin (2006) provides
146
a useful frame for understanding these killing
practices, counterposing what he terms ‘cold’
and ‘hot’ killings. The former are practices
associated with industrial agriculture and medical
laboratories where animals are removed from
their living space to the highly ordered killing
spaces of the industrial slaughterhouse or
laboratory. These places “are governed by rules,
routines, repetition and predictability related to
minimizing suffering but more importantly related
to efficiency and hygiene.” (Marvin 2006: 16).
‘Hot’ killings by contrast are associated with the
killing of pests and are argued to be driven by
“emotional reactions ranging from annoyance or
anger to repulsion and disgust.” (Marvin 2006: 17).
Marvin couches these ‘hot’ killings in a language
of violence, noting that the killing is “usually
expressed in terms of destruction, removal,
eradication, extermination, annihilation, or
cleansing” and uses “a variety of weapons, traps,
poisons, and other chemicals, and they may
even use other animals for this purpose” (Marvin
2006: 17). These ‘hot’ killings are characterised by
passion, aggression and pursuit and stand in
clear distinction to the “unemotional, clinical
killing” that characterise the former set of
practices.
Representations of pest killing in
homemaker magazines are of a third, or
intermediate type that combine Marvin’s
categories. The motivation for the killing is
represented as being underpinned and
necessitated by a sense of fear, insecurity and
disgust, a hot killing that pits homemaker against
a destructive and polluting pest. However, the
practice and moment of death is framed as one
of clinical, scientific coldness: a very modern
process in which animal and human are held
apart by safe, scientific and modern products.
Advertisements across each period employ this
idea though it is framed differently. Adverts in the
1950s emphasised products as new, scientific
and modern. These terms were used widely
throughout advertisements and the specific
chemicals employed in products were identified
to the reader. By contrast, more recent
advertisements focused on the clinical and tidy
nature of the process of killing, while connections
with science such as through the chemical
make-up of products is a notable absence. This
perhaps reflects the growing public distrust of
chemical use within home. Instead, the
intelligence of products is foregrounded, with
emphasis on the capacity of poisons and baits to
attract pests.
Building on contrasts between motivation
and practice advertisements across each period

construct subject positions that counterpose ‘hot’
and ‘cold’ killings. In the 1950s these position the
female homemaker as fearful mother. An
example of this is seen in Figure 5 with its headline
“every wise mother is afraid of flies”. These types
of advertisements encouraged a ‘hot’ killing
motivated by feelings of fear, hate and even
dread. The second subject position was that of
the mother as armed warrior. As seen for example
in Figure 6 these advertisements created the
mother as armed warrior taking a stand against
pests as her baby sleeps. Again motivated by a
hatred, the killing itself here is shown as cold,
necessary, calculated and pre-meditated, a
killing that makes use of the most modern
products. More recent advertisements create this
interplay in a different way, counterposing the
panic that would be experienced if the house
was not correctly and thoroughly protected
against incursions with the recommended
clinical, calculated and multi-pronged, multilayered
approach where homemakers are
prompted to instil a range of barrier sprays
alongside traps, surface sprays and quick knock
‘em down sprays as a last line of defence in the
homemaking war. One Mortein promotion, for
example, describes the American Cockroach as
a creature “that can send a normally placid
homeowner into a roach-whacking frenzy”, a
panic that contrasts with the calm possible if a
recommended combination of barrier sprays,
surface sprays, traps, bombs and baits are
employed within the home (Mortein, AHB, January
2001, p131). These layers of poisonous barriers
co-create home, mirroring and solidifying its
material form through their chemical boundaries
and offering to seal even the most microscopic
of places against the pest incursion. Again,
although inspired by a fear or dread the process
itself is disembodied and mediated by chemical
products that are shown to safely and silently
destroy the household pest.
The scientised and modern nature of the
killing process is a key tactic through which killing
practices are established as appropriate within
home. They purport to separate the homemaker
from the practice and moment of killing through
chemicals that are deployed remotely. These
separate the homemaker from the killing through
time and space: killing occurs in the hidden
spaces that pest animals inhabit and is affected
around the clock in the absence of the human
homemaker. The disembodied nature of this
process is critical, affording a detached
experience of the killing. In this process success is
gauged circuitously through an absence of pests
147
and the good health of human residents rather
than through the sighting of dead animals.
Conclusions
As previous research has shown in relation to
practices of cleaning and germ management,
popular marketing activities have kept the pest
threat at the forefront of domestic concern. The
‘iceberg’ threat is perhaps the most insidious and
effective of these representations, equating
individual pest incursions with vast numbers of
hidden pests and the disintegration of home. In
these depictions the presence of one insect pest
signifies these hordes and highlights the limitations
of human control over home and the easy
permeability of home’s borders. In this context
pests are creatures that unstitch home,
highlighting the constructed and always insecure
nature of boundaries between home and its
dangerous and disordered outside. More than
this, they point to home’s enormous underbelly –
the liminal spaces that accommodate pest
species within home and allow these animals to
feed off the home itself. Pests represent the
inadequacies of homemaking and cleaning
activity, signifying the presence of dirt within the
domestic, including the dirtiness of the human
itself. Killing practices thus become an essential
component of homemaking, a tension that is
managed through reference to the scientific and
modern nature of pest removal processes and
through practices that separate human from pest
by facilitating disembodied and detached
killings.
The gender politics of pest removal
advertising are striking. Advertisements are
targeted at women and construct two key subject
positions: the woman as fearful and the woman
as warrior. Women’s role as homemaker is
activated through each of these positions which
place responsibility for pest management and
home protection in the hands of the mother. The
masculine subject position has not been
discussed in this paper, but is significant in
positioning the male figure in three key roles. First,
the masculine subject position is tied to DIY home
construction: men are depicted as fathers and
husbands who have the responsibility to choose
construction products that are pest resistant to
ensure a solid and stable home environment.
Second, men are positioned as expert through a
range of advertisements: they are the scientist,
professional pest controller and public health
authority rolled into one who warn women about
the risks that pests afford within home. Third, and

perhaps most interestingly, pests themselves are
gendered as male. Advertisements refer to pests
using male pronouns such as ‘him’ and ‘he’ (see
for example Figure 2) and, as shown in Figure 4
even as a ‘guy’. The threat to home is a
masculine one. This connects with broader
discourses of home as a domestic and feminine
space that is separate from the outside and
‘public’ spaces, which are associated with men
and masculinity. The pest as male offers an
enhanced threat to the domestic, a threat that
husbands and fathers must combat through the
provision of a solid and stable home and that
women as mothers and wives must combat
through ongoing and vigilant homemaking. In this
way pest advertising connects with broader
discourses of home and homemaking, perhaps
underpinning the efficacy of these
advertisements and the importance of pest
control within everyday understandings of home.
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Emma Power is a Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at the
University of Western Sydney.
Emma is a cultural geographer. Her research examines urban
natures, everyday practices of sustainability and homemaking, and
human – animal relations. She teaches cultural and social
geographies, human-nature relations and urban sustainability and
planning as part of the Bachelor of Social Science and Master of
Urban Management and Planning.
Her PhD titled ‘A more-than-human geography of homemaking’
examined the ways that people interact with nature and nonhuman
animals in the home and garden. It used qualitative methodologies
to examine the experiences of people living with dogs in the home,
and people cohabiting with uninvited common brushtail possums.

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