Recently David Cameron had his picture taken feeding orphaned lambs at Dean Lane farm. It was a photo opportunity too good to miss to show the ‘caring and compassionate’ side of the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, it also appeared as a cynical ploy to many people, where the corporate media fell over itself to print the pictures, because everyone loves to see ‘baby lambs’.
However, if loving cute fluffy baby lambs involves sending them to the slaughterhouse so we can dine on their flesh, then it is no form of love that I choose to recognise. We no more need to dine on lambs than we need to consume cats, dogs, or any other animal.
David Cameron exploited the extrinsic value of the lamb, because within our society, animals are viewed as commodities that only have value insofar as they can be used in some form or another. Their intrinsic value, that is, their desire to live, is ignored in favour of the dominant human-centred discourse of exploitation.
However, it is not just David Cameron that has used animals to ‘prove’ a point. Nick Clegg decided to show Ed Milliband how to eat a bacon sandwich with absolutely no consideration to the pig that suffered so he could fill his stomach. It was treated as little more than a joke. The three leaders of the main political parties all treat animals as commodities, in a similar way to most of their supporters, and in this way they try to appear as ‘normal’ members of society.
Ed Milliband looking ‘normal’. Unfortunately much has been made of Ed Milliband’s appearance rather than the ‘substance’ of Labour policies.
The view of animal exploitation as normality, perpetuated by politicians and reinforced in the corporate media, has negative consequences for the health of people, the integrity of the environment and of course non-human animals themselves.
Normalising animal exploitation is a boon for industries that feel threatened by the philosophy of animal liberation. Whether it involve meat, dairy, eggs, vivisection, circuses, pets or zoos the system of animal exploitation is rarely undermined but instead reinforced, where alternative narratives around animal liberation are marginalised in favour of reassuring society about their habits and traditions, which when viewed critically are far from the ‘reality’ we were brought up to believe.
The photos of David Cameron and the lamb present a very limited ‘reality’ of animal life. It could be argued that we would have found greater integrity in the slaughterhouse than on the petting farm, but what would the papers have made of that?