Accountable killing

How do we reclaim an ethico-animal accountability in an era of pacifist-sanctioned

corporatism?

“It’s because of you we killed three roosters last night; so much fun; so

delicious. You taught Tania and she showed us. It was so much fun.”

This is how a local man recently introduced himself to me as I entered a café in my

hometown. His hetero-camp exuberance, his mediated vernacular, “so much fun”, could

have easily been ignored, but instead it stayed in the room, as did his “it’s because of you

we killed…” comment. His language choice seemed incongruous in the transition town in

which we’ve both made our homes and yet so much part of a broader cultural view,

where animals are solely for our pleasure and amusement, and resource accountability is

someone else’s business.

This opening scene, no doubt for some, is sounding very Portlandia – the TV series that

parodies urban and back-to-the-land X and Y-gen hipsters wearing Derrick Jensen op

shop woollens going about their day, making their choices. For those amused by such

parody let’s localise the satirical trope Portlandia, bring it back to a local context and

rename it Daylesfordia, where all of us in the café are performing versions of ourselves

mediated by a colossal dependence on cheap crude oil, yet sense the end of it. It was only

later I found out the fun-killing-rooster guy works as an entertainer on a cruise ship and

on hearing this I instantly sensed a kind of Pee-wee Herman about him and somehow his

camp intransigence, the thoughtless “fun” of his killing seemed more acceptable, the

killing after all was for food.

I would guess that many if not all in this room would say that killing an animal for fun,

for sport is unacceptable and most would express some form of outrage towards duck-

shooting season for this reason. However moral outrage tends to shift to broader

acceptance if the hunter says I only kill to feed my kin and myself. Killing for food is as

old as our species and much older in other creatures. By contrast killing purely for sport

is fairly recent and it jolts our animal ethics. Killing for sport comes from the very

ideology that attacks our creaturely selves, civility. Civility needs to entertain its land-

estranged subjects because we are no longer ecological playmakers but incarcerated

workers and addict-consumers or those civility has rejected and can neither work or

consume in any significant way. Killing as sport is a perversion of our former selves as

ecological playmakers. Even though the majority of people in the rich countries can eat

out of the oil drum by opening the fridge door some still want to express their predatory

selves by blasting some ducks out of the water with industrially manufactured weapons.

But a true predator takes life to enable life; sport is an aberration to this, it blurs the

animal-ethical clarity of ecological predation.

Killing for sport represents a deeply pathological mindset, one that has lost a proper

relationship to death and dying. Similarly, killing an animal for food industrially, via

slaughterhouse conveyor belts or eating fruits, grains and pulses farmed on such a scale

that require the systemic destruction of soil faunas and autonomous birds and their

habitats, signals a systemic unwellness that has been wholly normalised under the brutal

industrial banner of supermarket idolatry. Leo Tolstoy pre-industrially pronounced that

“A�s� �l�o�n�g� �a�s� �t�h�e�r�e� �a�r�e� �s�l�a�u�g�h�t�e�r�h�o�u�s�e�s�.�.�.� �t�h�e�r�e� �w�i�l�l� �b�e� �b�a�t�t�l�e�f�i�e�l�d�s�.�” And I would extend, as

long as there is unaccountable resource consumption there will be permanent techno-

scientific war. In other words, as long as there are vegans, vegetarians and omnivores

driving and flying around the planet, consuming far away foods and technologies and

thus causing all the associated suffering these activities ordinarily inflict, we will be a

species that harms unaccountably.

The correlation that slaughterhouse killing has to torture is well expressed and

understood, and for the great majority of us industrial slaughterhouses are unacceptable,

at least in theory. However, it seems likely that most of us don’t make the assumption

that our café, restaurant, supermarket, tuckshop, or romantic dinner meat has anything to

do with such torturous violence, let alone make the assumption that our grains, pulses,

nuts and fruits, including the wine sitting on our romantic dinner tables, have anything to

do with the wholesale gassing, poisoning, shooting and incinerating of wild birds. Interior

designers do not usually style cafés and restaurants to demonstrate the brutality behind

the food they serve. The places in which we get our food are emptied of the pain and

suffering of others so as we can take pleasure. The practice of locavorism attempts to

reappear our resources so as we can be once more witnesses to the production of our

basic needs. If more of us witnessed the production of our resources, could monitor what

is actually going on with our food supply, systemic violence against animals would

decrease proportionately. This is not just a project for those who eat meat, but those who

eat anything that has come by a truck, is packaged or refrigerated. But this is not easy in

an urbanising world. Cities demand we remain oblivious to the will of others because

cities favour mainly one species. The city is the most anthropocentric of human tropes

and the more full of people they become, the more difficult it is to have a close

association with the land, its diverse interrelationships and its fruits. Likewise if

monotheism, another essential anthropocentric trope for the mission of civility, was more

animist we wouldn’t see such widespread violence against other animals. But one-god

ideology is hardly in the business of animal inclusivity.

The politics of transition towns, which quite simply involves the slow, step-by-step and

conscious move from what poet Gary Snyder once called the ‘oil pipeline philosophy’, is

not a politics of doom and unhappiness. Fun, in the accountable sense of the word, and

play, are very much activities of this movement. For me transition concerns becoming

diverse societies of ecological playmakers again, and corporatism is composted, along

with boring work. Like its parent permaculture, transition concerns positive activism.

Killing your own rooster fed from your diverse garden ecology and roasted with the fruits

of that garden, or nearby community garden (that you are actively involved in and walk

or ride to), is the means to making a meal that has relied on few if any fossil energies,

plastic packaging, pesticides or refrigeration. This, of course, is a significant anti-

corporate, pro-biota politics. A politics of direct, everyday action and one that speaks,

walks, digs and chops the fuel for one’s meaning, for making life non-industrially. This

poethical politic of everyday accountability and reruralisation doesn’t necessarily engage

with two-party politics but rather works up from the household economy first, the

community economy second before such domestic and achievable transitions can begin

to reshape the state, national and global economies as tertiary political domains.

If 20% of Australia’s human population rapidly became locavores, it would smash

corporate profit requirements and send most, if not all, bankrupt. It would help stop the

spread of GMOs and other noxious so-called solutions to world hunger that are false

solutions and just corporate profiteering. But let’s not confuse locavorism with eco-

consumerism. Eco-consumerism is just another market requiring the growth of the

monetary-military economy. Accountable resource consumption requires dropping out,

giving up on middle-class privileges, fast-tracking ecological knowledges and, dare I say

it, moving to the country. To do this in collectives would be a social advantage; bring

your love miles with you. A 20% exodus of people from cities would prick the bubble of

immoral real estate prices and rents, free up land to grow food ecologies and generally

make them more liveable places for humans and non-humans alike. This could in fact

help speed up the already on its way descent economy that we desperately need to overt

total planetary ruination and run away climate choas.

Currently the global economy – that giant radiating fridge in the sky that we affluent folk

can access wherever we are and dip into its violent resources and services whenever we

wish to – is the dominant economy and it’s still politically and ideologically supported by

many who either fail to imagine or want alternatives. Such is the legacy of our

industrially funded modern school system that insists we all become incarcerated workers

and addict-consumers, rather than ecological playmakers. But this politics of state,

corporation, symbol, money, image, entertainment and city-centrality is systemically part

of the problem of ecological crisis, which is inherently the problem of the global pool of

oil that has enabled such rampant and unaccountable economic growth.

It is civil symbolism and privatisation – precursors of the corporate form – that have

spawned the raft of anthropogenic tremors and traumas, industrial spills and holocausts,

reshaping our climate while our once ecological minds dissolve into callous and cruel

consumers numb and oblivious to our heavy footprints and our systemic and

unaccountable damages. We forget we were each aboriginal beings not all that long ago,

that is we once belonged to place, and we all had a proper relationship to living and

dying, conceiving and killing, fun and play, knowledge and technology. The global-pool-

of-money world now ensnares many privileged and not so privileged folk into transported

resource modes, and because city dwelling is now at such a high degree it is often

impossible to imagine growing our own food let alone killing it or belonging to land that

we love and would defend as tenaciously as though it were our own kin. The digi-

industrial urbanisation of human populations is only ever spoken about as a foregone

conclusion, as an inevitable progress, but this ideology involves oil, barrels and barrels of

cheap crude oil, and other damaging fossil energies and extracted minerals, tearing the

world apart so some can have smart phones and cars, mass entertainment, overseas trips

and a smorgasbord of food and shopping options – vegan, vegetarian and omnivore

shopping options. Aggregating cities and now the megacities are also forms of nineteenth

and twentieth century pollution ideology. The more people are removed from the diverse

biotas that fuel’s civility’s wealth, the more civility can exploit them without protest and

struggle. We can’t properly defend what we don’t see and sense and live close to.

Pollution ideology precedes industrialisation; it goes back to the first municipal dump in

ancient Greece marking the beginning of the Anthropocene.

We have only been able to domesticate just a handful of animals over the past twelve

thousand years, including old-as-the-dinosaur roosters, as part of our own domesticated

history. But the great majority of animals have refused to be domesticated in one way or

other. As John Zerzan reminds us, the enslavement of these few animals has been the

enslavement of ourselves into the bargain – domestication is the precursor to class

warfare that begins with a fence and carries into systemic privatisation, prisons, torture,

genocide and permanent oppression. There is little difference in the architecture of

assembly lines in sweatshops and the assembly lines in battery egg farms; only the

conditions for human animals are marginally better.

Cities have always been and today remain progenies of agriculture. Without industrial

agriculture industrial cities could not exist. Industrial civilisation – that is culture

dependent on cutting open far away soils and rock – has lost sight of the land that

nourishes it and provides its wealth. Growing and killing is now wholly outsourced to

farmers, factory workers, miners and soldiers working in far away lands, and somehow

pacifists, especially on the left of politics, believe an ethical victory has been won

because many of us can now live without witnessing the violence that belongs

unconditionally to such digi-industrial activity.

But it is nonsense we live in a digital age. We still live in an agricultural age shrouded in

industrial energy inputs. Without these fossil energies, which in turn are dependent on

permanent war and damage, we could not have wind farms and solar panels, so patting

ourselves on our backs for ‘going green’ is just more civil delusion. While running

ourselves and our fellow species to the cliff’s edge we can celebrate our alternative

technologies and give ourselves awards for our technical brilliance. But by dismissing

ecological knowledges and by embracing more and more technology we have turned

ourselves away from witnesses and stewards of land to groundless slaves or slave-

masters, or both at once in the case of the middle classes. An app might tell us what bird

belongs to a particular birdcall, but it will never enable us to perform ecologically; an app

relies technological hardware that in turn relies on mined resources, destroying

environments and habitats and driving bloody wars.

To return to the subject of domestication: If domestication is akin to slavery why then do

I keep, fence in and regularly kill chickens and roosters and teach others to do the same?

This seems contradictory. And similarly what will I do when my 10-year old mobile

phone finally falls victim of planned obsolescence and I refuse to replace it? My answers

lie with transition. The first step towards an accountable food supply, and accountable

tools and resources more generally, involves non-monetised economies; it involves

moving towards an economy of home place, not state. This goes for my future modes of

communication. Money makes exchange veiled and indirect. In almost all climate regions

of the world a vegan diet would not be sustaining without cheap fossil fuels and thus

systemic violence attached to it, so if we know we need in our diets a little animal protein

(be it eggs, insects or meat) in order to relocalise all our basic resources, then how we go

about obtaining this nutritional energy becomes the next considerable question. It takes

time to transition to an accountable food supply and contradictions and ethical dilemmas

will avail themselves early on in our transitions. Keeping roosters, free-ranging them in a

garden forest and allowing them to perform their social and ecological functions with a

brood of hens is a basic first step to providing an accountable protein. We keep chickens

for their invaluable eggs and nitrogenous shit for the garden and occasional meat. In

return they get a safe environment, healthy food to forage for and reproduce according to

their own will or desire. While this is all still a form of slavery we have deemed it better

to witness the lives and occasionally cause the deaths of our main protein source than

fully participating in the monetised-militarised economy. On such a small non-monetised

scale, love can still exist; nurture and accountability can flourish.

Ethically I am opposed to fences; pragmatically I fence in our chooks and rooster so as

they are protected from foxes and roaming dog packs that occasionally come together in

our neighbourhood. Ethically I am opposed to factory farmed and processed meats; very

occasionally I eat some either out of politeness (civility) or in a moment of lapsed

consciousness. But ultimately I know that hunting an animal with non-industrial

weapons, in one-on-one predation, to be one of the most ecologically intelligent modes of

protein gathering alongside forest food gardening and foraging. Stalking an animal allows

me to be an animal, makes me more acutely aware of my creaturely self and more aware

of the habits and character of my creaturely other, my prey. Hunting equally makes me

aware of my status as prey, as meat and blood for others, even if I’m only fed upon and

not necessarily killed.

Most humans, if they are lucky, start life with the richest of animal proteins – colostrum

then raw human milk. When we become a civil child and then adult consumers, leaving

our creaturely selves behind, we begin to eat food that has no ecological significance to

us. Bananas and coffee in Melbourne is a form of civil insanity, but Melbourne is known

as a coffee capital, whatever that means. Meat consumption for many in Australia is more

than a once daily enterprise and yet the only animals many of us see and sense are cats

and dogs. The amount of meat consumed has necessitated technologies that speed up

animal growth to keep up with demand. This abuse of animals based on growing profit

has significantly contributed to the great debts of animal suffering, human ill-health and

broader environmental catastrophe – pollution, toxicity, cruelty and waste that

vegetarians and vegans so often legitimately raise. Capitalism must grow demand, even

fabricate the illusion of demand, in order to grow supply otherwise it will fail as a system.

As the poet Stephen Collis asks, how did we go from meeting our needs to excess and

waste? And after one short line break he answers: “History of plastic. History of

capitalism.” And I would spell out: these are the histories that belong to unaccountable

violence.

According to anthropologist Richard Wrangham we (or our primate relatives) began

eating meat around 2.3 million years ago, which radically grew our brains. As scrawny

primates the added protein and fat didn’t go into muscular development so as we could

run like a lion or a leopard, it went into developing brain tissue. And then about half a

million years ago we started cooking which made a range of foods including meat and

roots immanently more digestible and more efficient to process, freeing up surplus

energy to further grow our brains. Wrangham writes in his book, Catching Fire (2009)

that “[i]n primates the tendency to use energy saved by smaller guts for added brain

tissue is particularly strong, presumably because most primates live in groups, where

extra social intelligence has big payoffs.” [2009:113] By mastering fire as our first great

technology we outsourced our energy and by doing so slowly changed our physiology.

Our jaws, teeth and guts shrunk as cooking did much of the work for us. Sure we lost a

little nutrition from our new cooked diet, but the energetic gains were enormous.

That we are technical animals says Bernard Stiegler (2004) is why we are a species who

questions. The transmission of historical data is enabled through aggregating memory

supports found in technical prostheses – arrow heads, baskets, axes and now smart

phones, bananas trucked to Melbourne, almonds from California and drone missiles – and

with technical transmission comes questioning, and with questions, so it goes, we have

ethics and politics, poetry and philosophy. But I would also argue, alongside indigenous

sensibilities and influenced by writers like Deborah Bird Rose, that ethics are not only

ascribed to technocratised animals. Animal ethics clearly exist across species. Rose

(2011) issues to us the point that the way a dog comes forward to us wagging his tail is a

universal ethic of welcome and greeting. The collective pain of a flock of sulphur-crested

cockatoos, expressed as intensely shrill crying en masse, having witnessed the death of

one of their kin, is another example of such universal ethics – outrage, grief, care. I

witnessed this ethic a few years ago as the hunter that caused the outrage and grief. But I

defend my actions; I was operating as an ecological playmaker. My family thanked and

ate the bird; we have not had one cockatoo ravage our food garden since this event. They

are extremely intelligent animals. As it grows in density and diversity many smaller

autonomous birds make their homes in the garden, they are welcome as they aren’t so

destructive and they mutualistically kill pest species. Many ecological playmakers

autonomously use this food garden ecology as habitat and as a foraging commons. We

are beginning to understand our home place as a shared domain with unpredictable

interrelationships.

When my eleven-year-old son reads Tintin comics he giggles joyously. Tintin in the

Congo is his current read. Drawn by his pleasure I venture over and he asks me to read

with him. He’s on page 12; Tintin has just landed in Africa. On page 13 after narrowly

escaping being chomped Tintin inserts a rifle into the guilty crocodile’s jaw and walks off

leaving her to suffer the indignity. On page 16 Tintin kills fifteen antelope and jests to his

trusty companion Snowy, “Well, at least we’ll have enough meat.” On page 17 Tintin

kills a monkey for its skin in order to make a disguise for himself. We don’t see or sense

the monkey’s wasted remains; only the joke of Tintin in a monkey suit is represented on

the page. On page 18 Tintin tricks and beats with the end of his rifle another monkey who

thinks Tintin is one of his kin, further insulting his animal intelligence not to sense his

own kind. By page 19 he has come in contact with local tribes people who are all

depicted to look like stupid monkeys. By page 22 co-hero Snowy has bitten the tail off a

lion and by page 24 Tintin is leading the noosed creature to the village saying, “Perhaps

we could tame him…” On page 31 Tintin blows a snake’s head off with his rifle. On page

32 the villain of the book – it’s asserted there’s only one bad white guy – beats Snowy

over the head, ties up Tintin and hangs him from a tree over another crocodile infested

river. On page 33 a Christian missionary paddles by with a number of monkey-like

converts in his canoe, shooting all the crocodiles in sight that are subsequently left to die.

A bloody massacre comically floats upon the river and our hero Tintin is saved once

more. On page 34 another large serpent comes into the picture and eats Snowy whole.

Tintin maims the snake to free Snowy then leaves it to choke after he stuffs its tail down

its throat. As they wander off Tintin cheerily says to Snowy, “Come on, let’s find the

good father from the mission…” On page 37, in the mission schoolroom, where the

primitive ‘monkeys’ are being taught to be civil humans, Tintin rescues the frightened

tribes children from a free-roaming leopard. He tricks the once again stupid beast into

eating a chalkboard sponge, gives him a drink to wash it down so the sponge quickly

swells up in the leopard’s belly, causing severe abdominal pain. Tintin kicks the suffering

leopard out the door. Over the page, a very angry Jimmy MacDuff, “supplier to the

greatest zoos in Europe!” marches into the classroom. He chastises Tintin with an idiotic

morality fit only for a true capitalist, “You’ve been ill-treating my poor tame leopard!”

By the bottom of the same page Tintin is already in another animal harming scene and

running for his life after an elephant he has shot comes after him. He escapes by running

up a tree, gets out his magnifying glass and burns the angry elephant’s head with the help

of the Congo’s penetrating sun. The elephant retreats for a few pages. On page 41 another

monkey finds Tintin and Snowy sleeping in the heat of the day, he grabs Tintin’s gun to

play with it and accidentally fires it killing the elephant. On page 42, after the monkey

had run off frightened by the gunshot, Tintin marches proudly back to the mission with

two enormous tusks.

The comic continues on in this way for another twenty pages, my son’s giggles had

previously brought me so much joy, as I was caught up in my simplistic civil prejudices

believing that literacy somehow makes us intelligent. Somehow I missed out on reading

Tintin when I was younger and never knew the utter normalised abuse of colonial

violence represented in Georges Prosper Remi (AKA Hergé)’s children’s books, which

are still so popular in our local library today. Tintin in the Congo first appeared in print in

a Brussels newspaper in 1930 where it was serialised over the course of the year in the

children’s supplement. In Adam Curtis’ third groundbreaking programme The Monkey In

The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, from his epic three-part TV series All

Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, he illustrates the relationship between

Belgium’s violent colonialism in the Congo from 1885-1960 and the continuation of

colonial mass death there today. He details how Europeans strategically instigated such

bloody hatred between previously tense but never genocidal ethnicities, the Hutus and

Tutsis like a Tintin-led expedition of death only not pictorially jokey, but real and blood-

filled tragedy. Curtis argues that European superiority – under the banner of another

civilising mission – extended that war into the nearby Congo where today the raw

materials for our computers and mobile phones are sourced, mined, raped and murdered

for; an industry that continues to perpetuate permanent war. These minerals are called

Blood Minerals, coltan being the most desired by western corporations and their digital

consumers. Tintin and our mobile phones – vegan, vegetarian or omnivore smart phones

– belong to the same linage of loveless destruction that begins with civility’s fenced

farms and so far ends with drone missiles, gas fracked and acid job biotas.

War is an obvious component of civility – agriculture begat cities, cities begat techno-

scientific warfare – but where does pacifism fit into all this? What do I mean when I use

the phrase ‘pacifist-sanctioned corporatism’? Pacifism is a middle class ethic that calls

for universal non-harm while enabling corporate harm to proliferate and our acceptance

of it to aggregate. Pacifism is thus a false ethic, a loveless ethic that relies on the

monetised state and its militarised controls. The most sustainable human societies are

bioregional gift economies embedded in the intelligence of the land, where the land and

its many inhabitants are our teachers and technology plays a minor role. Resource

skirmishes between species and tribes are part of life, but these violences are nothing in

contrast to permanent techno-scientific warfare that the industrial civil-state must enact to

grow itself. Reverting to bioregional violence and leaving behind permanent planetary

warfare may seem like an impossible idealism, an unclimbable romance, but it’s not. It’s

an achievable reality and a necessary one if we are to cease being hopeful technocults or

apocalyptic fatalists and just go along with the status quo. It is only a matter of time

before we have to get serious about violence again, we can mask it no longer. The

monetised state supports unaccountable violence against animals and biospheres for

profit. The forms of this violence are many and varied and are what enables our current

modes of living.

Pacifism contributes significantly to maintaining the status quo, maintaining our standard

of living within a digi-industrial agri-technoculture because it protects corporate abuse by

agreeing with the state that under no circumstances should people fight back; that people

should never use weapons violently to protect their environments from corporate abuse or

use weapons to feed themselves. Pacifism sanctions the monetised state’s endemic

violence, while helping to disarm local and indigenous peoples of place and autonomous

activism. Each year the civil state’s of the anthropocentric world destroy more and more

life so as we can be hyper-mediated hipsters prancing civility’s high streets thumb-

pumping our smart phones, employing our eco apps and brands, believing the solutions to

the world’s problems lies with better and better technology.

This is the great delusion of our time. Unless we can reencounter an earthly presence,

become accountable killers and regenerators of local, fenceless lands again, we will

remain at war with the worlds of the world. This project of accountable violence involves

thinking seven generations forwards again. If our species has this much time on earth,

which is likely though in much fewer numbers, then how do we transition to economic

accountability again? How do we stop our veiled and systemic violence and accept one-

on-one predation as contiguous with a creaturely epistemology, once again schooled by

the land and by the play we make on the land? I believe that in order to kill off civil

corporatism we have to become accountable creatures of place again. We have to grow,

fend and kill as ecological playmakers. While some will enact their transition in the cities

while there is still some affluence, this really calls for a permacultural reruralisation in an

era of fossil energy decline and depopulation. Such things are inevitable as resources,

especially mined resources dwindle this century, but are we going to remain fixed to our

disposable ideologies and civil mindsets until the last drop of crude oil is syringed into

our veins? Will we go along with pacifism-sanctioned corporatism until this ideology

looses all its oily privileges and we are forced to become animals of place again? Or will

we begin our transitions, backgrounding technology, foregrounding ecological

knowledges and work towards reopening the commons, stewarding it by a post-spectacle,

free-to-learn sensibility?

In an attempt to make clear my argument I conclude with a few more similar questions.

Are there times when direct violence is not only ethical in the fullest animal sense of that

word, but also absolutely necessary in stopping the systemic abuse of the worlds of the

world and all the diverse creaturely communities that dwell in them? Shall we go along

with corporatism until it has no more oil to feed itself and the planet lies desolate and

empty, or will we reclaim the sensible – our gardening, hunting and foraging senses – and

build non-monetary communities around resource accountability again?

Patrick Jones, Daylesford.

This lecture was first presented at Melbourne Free University on the 30 May 2013 as part of a free series of

lectures on Animals. Please note this paper is in draft form and does not include full references as yet.