The novel Animal Kingdom by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is a story that tells how we arrived at intensive farming and what the First World War has to do with it.
On a summer's day in 1914, Marcel leaves for the war — the First World War. He was little more than a boy. On him, the smell of hay, animals and the sweat of a young farmhand. On his return, his face is not that of a man, but of a person disfigured in body and soul by what was then the bloodiest conflict in human history.
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Éléonore, his cousin, welcomes him all the same, with open arms. They marry. But Marcel never goes back to farming. Before long he transforms into a landowner who, to forget his past, takes refuge in alcohol. Meanwhile, what had been little more than a pigsty becomes an intensive farm, an industrial operation housing pigs wallowing in their own waste. A family business becomes a business family.
This is the plot of Regno animale (published by Neri Pozza), the novel by French writer Jean-Baptiste Del Amo that explores a violent world — that of intensive farming — set against the "slaughterhouse" of the First World War and the consequences it had on the evolution of humanity.
We meet Del Amo in Milan, in the lobby of a hotel in the city centre, in the quiet of an autumn morning. Del Amo "dresses the part" of the writer: polo-neck jumper, calm voice, vegetarian build. We order a coffee and begin the conversation.
There seems to be a parallel between violence among human beings and violence towards animals. In what way did the First World War — both in the novel and in reality — influence the birth of the "trenches" in which animals are confined on intensive farms?
There is a link between the violence of industrial farming and the First World War because that was the first historical moment in which violence reached an industrial scale, and weapons produced to kill on that scale were used for the first time. A scale previously unknown. The same violence was then adopted in intensive farming which, particularly from the 1970s onwards, saw a worsening of conditions for animals, kept confined in order to guarantee maximum output. When animals too are enlisted to feed soldiers during the Great War — as I describe in my book — livestock is physically brought to the front and requisitioned from farms. This image prefigures what would become the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. This is the metaphor that connects violence against men to violence against animals.
Is violence against animals a signal that can foreshadow the violence that may be committed against human beings? Because there apparently is no distinction between forms of violence.
It is true that violence is simply violence, yet the kind used against animals has an added element: it has been trivialised over time, belittled, justified in every way. That is why today it is difficult to look at violence against animals any differently. In our past, in our minds, there is the myth of a humanity that is carnivorous at all costs. Man is always associated with the lion and almost never with the antelope. There is this fantastical, imaginary image of carnivorous man. By this reasoning, violence towards animals becomes not only acceptable but necessary.
And then there is also an effort on our part to keep ourselves at a safe distance from animals, because that way we can feel our dominion over them. There is a theory on this, put forward by the philosopher Florence Burgat, which I find very interesting: when we eat a nice steak we know we are eating an animal, we are aware of it. But we no longer see it alive on farms, as we once did. Thanks to this, after years and years, we continue to perceive our dominion over animals, to exist in a relationship of power.
Returning to the man-animal metaphor, the book portrays violence towards the pig. Omnivorous, it eats everything without knowing its origin. Vegetables, fruit, scraps, meat or fish. Like a man who goes to the supermarket and eats whatever he finds. A similarity that makes the parallel between man's violence against the pig — as a metaphor for man's violence against himself — all the more concrete.
That parallel with the pig certainly exists, though it must be said that the pig is an opportunistic carnivore and an omnivore out of necessity. If it finds something to eat, the carcass of some animal, it will eat it, but it is not a hunter. It eats what it finds in nature. So it is omnivorous, but inclined to be vegetarian, as man should theoretically be. Then, however, from the 1950s and 1960s onwards there was an escalation in the popularity of meat — meat every day, at lunch and at dinner. It became a symbol of social status because it was a luxury, something only a few could afford.
Beyond diet, we are linked to pigs by DNA. We share 95 per cent of our chromosomes with them, which makes it clear that we are very close to one another. I read an article reporting the results of some scientific research suggesting that organ transplants between pigs and human beings will soon be possible. We are virtually the same. Let us not forget that the pig is one of the most intelligent animals in the animal kingdom and the one we have mistreated and exploited the most throughout history.
One of your aims is to make the reader feel the same emotions you felt while writing the book, through the characters, in novel form. A commendable choice, because writers often take refuge in the essay to tackle subjects that also concern values, ethics, sustainability. Your colleague Amitav Ghosh, for example, wrote an essay on climate precisely to denounce the absence of climate change in modern literature. Do you confirm this tendency?
I am not a researcher, nor a scientist — I am a novelist and therefore I write fiction, imagination, invented stories. These two genres are not so distant from one another. They can be seen as complementary, because there may be more technical and factual data that pairs well with the emotional experience of a work of fiction. In a novel one probably manages to express something more empathic than an essay can, that much is true. That said, I want to stress that Animal Kingdom is not a militant book, it is not a book with a political purpose; it is a book that raises certain questions through its characters but does not provide the answers. Which is what essayists usually do.
So am I wrong to think that this book can help change people's mindset and diet in a vegetarian direction? It is now an established fact that intensive farms are among the principal causes of climate change.
In my view there is a form of humanity in the discourse on climate change in general and, in particular, on the impact of intensive farming. I have heard a great deal of talk about the hurricanes that have caused and continue to cause devastation in Central America and the United States. Many spoke of climate change as the cause of these phenomena, but no one said that intensive farms represent the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere — we are talking about 14.5 per cent of total anthropogenic emissions coming from cattle farming. That said, it is very important not to lose sight of the fight for animal rights, that is, an effort to try to eliminate their suffering — a suffering that we impose on billions of head of livestock all over the world. And not because we need to in order to survive, but out of our own desire, for our own pleasure. This is an increasingly urgent matter and it would be better if we decided to confront it very soon, to rethink the entire system of animal farming and also our attitude towards animals. Now is the time to change.
Are you vegetarian or vegan?
Vegan.
One can choose to be vegetarian or vegan for different reasons. For animal rights activists, even organic farming is unacceptable because, in their view, there is no distinction in terms of violence. We at LifeGate also find it difficult to handle certain stories, because on social media divisions emerge between vegans and vegetarians on one side and those who say we should moderate meat consumption without eliminating traditions on the other. Have you noticed this contrast between those for and those against?
In France too there are conflicting positions, though it is a somewhat complicated discussion, because there are certainly positions that come very close to anti-speciesism — I don't like talking about vegan ideology or vegetarian ideology. It is a lifestyle one chooses to adopt, but above all it is the practical application in our daily lives of this anti-speciesist attitude. It means having an attitude that does not discriminate between the different creatures that inhabit our planet and that, on the contrary, holds all the various living species in equal regard.
This does not mean giving cows the right to vote; it means that the cow must be regarded as an individual, a single being who experiences emotions and suffering, both physical and psychological. It is a living creature that enjoys rights: the right not to be tortured, not to be locked inside a building where it never sees sunlight, the right not to be exploited and above all not to be killed. All of this is what it means to be anti-speciesist in its vegan application. Precisely on the basis of this principle, it is clear that if one is anti-speciesist one rejects any form of animal farming, because farming generally leads, as its ultimate purpose, to the death of the animal.
There is also another position, another thesis called welfarism, from the English welfare, which holds that the conditions of animals must be improved, but that it is not necessarily required to give up meat consumption entirely; and so there are positions that oppose certain forms of violence against animals, such as keeping farmed animals in cages. The anti-speciesist knows that farming cannot cease to exist overnight: that is a utopia, and one must be aware of it. In light of this consideration, the conclusion has been reached that welfarism can be a very useful transitional period, a strategy for trying to steer things towards the abolition of any form of violence against animals.
