Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in a barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.) But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop.
The comparison is actually not a good one: yes, the way chickens are generally kept for eggs is cruel (which is why I am a vegan). But the people who practice this are often not aware of the cruelty involved (and certainly the vast majority of people who eat eggs do not recognize how terrible the conditions are for the vast majority (99%) of hens who lay eggs. People are not deliberately looking for a way to cause suffering. In the case of sex with hens, on the contrary, the whole point is to cause the maximum amount of suffering, culminating in death. It is the death and the agony that are the source of the male’s pleasure. Singer should not simply omit this important distinction. Moreover, to say that what happens between a dog and a person is ‘mutually satisfying’ is to degrade the use of the word mutual. Something is mutual only if it is consensual, and sex between humans and animals can never be consensual, because animals cannot consent. Singer also misunderstands the gesture of the dog: it only appears to be sexual; in actual fact, dogs engage in mounting behavior in order to test or display dominance. Much as I admire Peter Singer for his groundbreaking work on animal rights, his views on this topic (and I might add, on human euthanasia and infanticide for babies with disabilities) are open to serious criticism.
Just how common are crush (or squish, as they are also called) videos? In the USA, they are still, for the moment at least, common. Alas, so called ‘soft’ crush videos using invertebrates is legal, protected under the First Amendment as ‘free speech’. It is a shadowy world, similar to the world of snuff videos where hard information is difficult to find. A Humane Society investigation found that ‘customers’ can request a video over the Internet with a specific type of animal and a specific torture, and the video will be sent with 48 hours.
I had presumed it was a world inhabited by the dregs of society. That assumption may not be justified. Consider the fact that these videos have influenced ‘higher’ art. Many artists in England, America and Australia, have found their art to be highly appreciated when it involves the suffering of a living animal. A notorious example is the British artist Damien Hirst, the most celebrated of the ‘Young British Artists’ and Britain’s richest living artist. Many of his installations involve animals: Away from the Flock, consists of a dead sheep in a glass tank full of formaldehyde, and Mother and Child Divided, consists of a mother cow and a calf sliced in half in a glass tank of formaldehyde (it won the prestigious Turner Prize). The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living consists of a shark in a vitrine, preserved in formaldehyde. Commissioned in 1991, the piece was sold in 2004 for $12 million to an American art collector who donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. It is considered the iconic work of art of Britart. The Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, in a well-deserved attack on his work, called Hirst’s shark the world’s most over-rated marine organism.
More examples abound. In 2000, the Chilean artist Marco Evaristti exhibited at the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark. The display, entitled Helena, featured 10 blenders containing goldfish. Evaristti said that he wanted people “to do battle with their conscience” (why there would be a battle is not explained) so visitors to the exhibition were invited to turn on the blenders.[57] (As if any invitation had to be accepted.) How many is not clear, but some people liquidized the fish. Singer might claim this is no worse than eating fish for dinner, but he is wrong. It is worse, because it is deliberate cruelty masquerading as high art. (Fish were also part of an installation by the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles at the Tate Modern, where many of them died during the 13-week-long exhibition.)
Victorian artist, Ivan Durrant, is enjoying a retrospective of his work in Melbourne under the title ‘Paddock to Plate’ at the Monash Art Gallery. He is best known for having butchered a cow and left it on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne.
In 2008, Parisian artist, Adel Abdessened, opened an exhibit called ‘Don’t Trust Me’. Among other things, the show included something that has been correctly described as a snuff film using animals. The ‘art’ consisted of six video screens showing a loop of various animals being beaten to death with a sledgehammer. The animals included a pig, goat, horse, sheep, and ox. The point?
All of these artists claim that they are trying to hold up a mirror to society, basically saying: ‘You are all hypocrites. Look at what you do to animals’. But of course the problem is that they are doing exactly that, even as they say it. The hypocrisy belongs as much to the artist as to the society. And what about the gallery or museum that condones the exhibit, or the viewer who stands in front of the piece? None of these artists (Durrant is a wealthy farmer who owns a bull ranch) is doing this as an animal rights activist; rather the artist very much participates in the society he supposedly denounces.
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3 Arts Law: Animal Rights and Artistic Freedom http://www.artslaw.com.au/articles/entry/animal-rights-and-artistic-freedom/.