The Cat, the Pig, and the Wolf: Blurring the Lines between Domestic, Farm, and Wild Animals
By Lauren Sansregret
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca
For my final paper in my Animal Law class in Allard I asked my professors if I could do a painting instead. To my delight, they said yes.
I’m Métis and, despite growing up in the very urban North Delta, I have always been connected with my culture thanks to my family. I have painted Indigenous art for years in my own style which I call a fusion between modern and Indigenous art. I believe that art can express themes that words can’t grasp. And yet to the best of my ability, in this blog entry I’m trying to describe my painting in words.
In modern North-American society, animals are treated differently based on their species. Some animals, like cats, are kept in our homes as companions and adored as family members. Other animals, like pigs, are raised to satisfy food needs and treated with anodyne disinterest. Even more contrastingly, wild animals like wolves, roam free in decreasingly spacious wild lands and may be admired through Indigenous art.
As is abundantly clear by these examples, animals are treated differently depending on what type of animal they are, but when we consider that all animals are sentient beings with feelings, desires, and personalities, the intense dichotomy in treatment begins to seem more and more arbitrary. In my painting, I aim to blur the lines between the categories of animals set out by modern North-American norms.
A dominant framework for human treatment of animals in modern North-American society is the animal welfare model. This model takes into account the physical and mental health of an animal with regard to its living conditions. It focuses on the humane treatment of animals but accepts some “necessary suffering.” For example, the killing of livestock for meat production is generally accepted. The animal welfare model does not generally challenge established legal and societal norms, such as the killing animals as part of current farming practices. 1
The reader may well be aware that many Indigenous understandings of animals contrast with the animal welfare model, especially with regard to wild animals. While admittedly Indigenous conceptions of animals can vary dramatically from nation to nation, my research on Indigenous relationships with animals has revealed a tendency for Indigenous cultures to consider animals to be sentient beings and to treat them with more respect than in modern North-American society.
For example, Margaret Robinson explains that as a Mi’kmaq woman, she was taught to understand that animals are “self-aware, rational beings whose existence is for themselves rather than for us.” 2 In her article, “Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective” she describes how humans and animals can have a respectful relationship even if the animals are used as food. Animals, she writes, are sentient beings that may “willingly sacrifice themselves” as food for a human. The human accepts the sacrifice gratefully while still respecting the animal as an equal, rather than as a second-class being. This respectful relationship is tied to hunting practices because humans understand the gravity of the sacrifice made by the animal and are careful not to over-harvest. This reciprocal relationship helps support sustainable animal populations.
Similar themes have been expressed by Martina Tyrrell, who writes about how many Inuit maintain respectful relationships with beluga whales. In “Sentient Beings and Wildlife Resources: Inuit, Beluga Whales and Management Regimes in the Canadian Arctic” she explains how notions of sentience and respect are interconnected. 3 Many Inuit consider beluga whales to be sentient beings. Tyrell writes that beluga hunters and belugas have a meaningful and reciprocal relationship where belugas “allow themselves to be harvested” rather than get hunted against their will. She describes belugas as co-species that share the ocean with humans and other animals, rather than live subject to humans. This idea that belugas are sentient invokes respect from hunters, who only hunt as much as they need to survive, make use of the remains of the beluga, and share the harvest with the community. 4 Notably, this respectful relationship between hunter and beluga also has practical benefits by discouraging over-harvesting and helping to maintain a healthy species population.
Sentience is a prevalent theme in many works of Indigenous art. It can be represented through Indigenous art in different ways. Some paintings depict scenes that tell a story, to be instructive or to commemorate a point in time. Others use bright colours to express feelings and exhibit life forces that exist in animals. Moreover, some Indigenous art shows animals with human characteristics, which can be used to either explain the relationship between animals and all their relations or to signify reincarnation. Overall, many works of Indigenous art show that animals are sentient beings with feelings, in a similar or even more profound way than humans. While it varies in form from nation to nation, animals in Indigenous art often invoke feelings of respect from the viewer. 5
This leads us to the crux of my argument. What if we radically extended the respect for wild animals associated with Indigenous nations to all animals, domestic and farm animals alike? Is there something so different about a pig on a farm that exempts it from sincere respect?
My painting depicts a cow, a sheep, a goat, a rooster, a chicken, a pig, and a cat. I painted it in my own art style, but it is the first time I’ve painted animals that are not typical subjects of Indigenous art (I usually paint wolves, bears, and other wild animals). The first thing the viewer may notice is the cat in the bottom left corner of the painting. The cat, as the only companion animal in the painting, is painted in red. This is meant to signal the overarching theme of the piece — that some animals are treated differently depending on categories set by Western society. But perhaps more subtly, the viewer may also feel a sense of curiosity or even discomfort at seeing domestic and farm animals painted in an Indigenous art style.
The name of the painting, “Same Sentience” reveals the final piece of the puzzle. All of the animals mentioned in this article are sentient beings with feelings, habits, and personalities. The way that they are treated under the animal welfare model is reliant on artificial distinctions that have been instilled in modern North American society. Perhaps, considering the way that Indigenous nations maintain respectful relationships with wild animals can serve as an example of how all animals deserve to be treated.
After all, what makes a cat, a pig, and a wolf different?
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca
- Gary Francione, “A Short Essay on the Meaning of “New Welfarism” — Animal Rights The Abolitionist Approach” (2018) blog post: https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/a-short-essay-on-the-meaning-of-new-welfarism/.
↩︎ - Margaret Robinson, “Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective” (2014) 4:4 Societies 672, online: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/87497 at 674. ↩︎
- Martina Tyrrell, “Sentient Beings and Wildlife Resources: Inuit, Beluga Whales and Management Regimes in the Canadian Arctic” (2007) 35 Hum Ecol 575. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Dené Sinclair, “Indigenous Art Across Canada” (2017), webpage: https://katilvik.com/blog/indigenous-art-acrosscanada/?indigenous=true#:~:text=Contemporary%20Indigenous%20artists%20tap%20the,affect%20Canada%2C%20including%20environmental%20ones. ↩︎