Keywords

The study of rural communities informs us about aspects of modern life in a predominantly urban world. (Thomas et al. 2011, p. 175)

When I (a city-dweller) accepted an academic position at a small, liberal arts college in central Iowa, I imagined that I would rent and move into an old Midwestern farmhouse. Along the lines of something out of the movie, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, perhaps: I pictured a clothesline, lace curtains, and ample land on which my two dogs could roam. From the very beginning, then, animals (and my relations to them) provided a defining, albeit perhaps romanticized, framework for making sense of life in rural Iowa. Little did I know or understand the extent to which human-animal relations do, indeed, shape the economic activity, sociopolitical concerns, and physical contours of the region. However, the reality of the dominant form of human-animal relations in central Iowa—industrial meat production—bears scant resemblance to the images I had conjured in my mind.

Historian Charles Fruehling Springwood (1996) would note that my early, bucolic assumptions about rural Iowa reflect the Pastoral Ideal : a nostalgic motif of agricultural innocence and wistful simplicity. Dairy product packaging, meat advertisements, and children’s toys with a “farming” theme often evoke the Pastoral Ideal: they feature architecturally interesting red barns, human-scale windmills, and smiling pigs. The ever-popular Fisher Price farm set, for example, contains a bevy of diverse farm animals, doors that “moo” when opened, and movable fencing for children to create outdoor pastures. Yet this contrasts with the reality of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) , which are prevalent on the Iowa landscape. CAFOs are windowless production facilities that contain literally thousands of hogs or chickens. Raised solely for their meat or egg products, industrially produced animals’ day-to-day existences are grim. Denied access to sunlight and natural behaviors such as rooting or nesting, these animals are forced to stand in their own manure, have their tails or beaks docked to prevent mutilation by self or others, and literally cannot turn around in breeding pens or cages (Kimbrell 2010). As geographer Alice Dawson (1999) observes, “Modern agricultural production of pigs [and other industrially raised animals] creates an environment based on human convenience and economic profitability that is quite different from the image of Old MacDonald’s farm” (p. 202). As a place-based teacher educator with a strong interest in ecojustice , it was humbling to learn, upon moving to Iowa, that my preconceptions of the state and the dominant human-animal relations in it were simply wrong. However, by attending more carefully to human-animal relations in central Iowa over the past several years—what Hal Herzog (2009) would call its anthrozoological landscape—my politics and pedagogy have changed.

5.1 Why Educators Should Attend to Human-Animal Relations

This chapter follows feminist geographer Jody Wolch’s (1998) call to “bring the animals back in” (p. 123) to any project with social justice ends. Given that classroom teaching can be a powerful and radically political act (Gruenewald 2002; hooks 2003), I argue that educators should pay much more attention to the anthrozoological landscape of the context(s) in which they teach. Doing so provides a deeper understanding of the politics of local place-making. Although place-based educators have long asserted that the “local” should play a key role in educational curricula, their arguments about the centrality of place to schooling have generally centered on the natural world and community economic development (e.g., Sobel 2005). The ways in which human-animal relations actually construct places and the social relations therein are much more rarely part of place-based or environmental education movements (see Kahn and Humes 2009 for a related critique). The low-wage, high-risk labor demanded by meat processing plants near CAFOs , for example, brings economically vulnerable, often undocumented, transmigrant families to U.S. rural towns. These demographic changes, in turn, place new demands on local schools and other social service providers (Hamann et al. 2015). They also can alter rural communities in creative and unforeseen ways (Grey et al. 2009).

Because places are constructed in part through the human-animal relations that occur in them, investigating these relations is also critical for helping students develop place-based identities. Rural theorists Alexander R. Thomas, Brian Lowe, Greg Fulkerson, and Polly Smith (2011), drawing upon Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed’s (1997) work, note that despite the “exploding” literature on identity politics, “there is a gross neglect of how place (rural and urban identities) intersects with the other dimensions of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender” (p. 7). Children who grow up downwind or downstream from a CAFO , for example, face unique forms of place-based marginalization. They are greater risk than other populations for developing antibiotic resistance (Horrigan et al. 2010), and their outdoor activities are restricted when CAFOs inject foul-smelling, antibiotic-laden sewage waste into nearby crop fields (Imhoff 2010). Ecojustice oriented, place-based education needs to attend to these forms of environmental placism .

Finally, supporting anthropologist Ivan Sandoval-Cervantes’ (2015) perspective, I suggest that “problematizing our ideas about non-human animals can help us better understand our place as humans” (p. 30). Interrogating the human-animal relations of particular locales provides insight into ourselves. When two Iowa teenagers recreationally shot a bald eagle in my county a few years ago, the event made regional news. Yet, literally thousands of hogs and chickens are killed weekly in the same county with nary a word from the media. Why does the death of one bald eagle promote public outrage while CAFOs receive public money through federal subsidies (Imhoff 2010)? Human geographers Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (2000), noting the deep inconsistencies within human-animal relations , observe that

Human-animal relations [are] filled with power, commonly the wielding of an oppressive, dominating power by humans over animals, and only in relatively small measure have animals been able to evade this domination or to become themselves dominant over local humans. Examples can be adduced of the latter, such as plagues of locusts, rampaging elephants, or perhaps the ramifications of BSE or ‘mad cow disease’ [or, I might add, the contemporary bald eagle conservation movement]. Yet, usually animals have been the relatively powerless and marginalized ‘other’ partner in human-animal relations. What surely cannot be denied is the historical and global significance of such human-animal relations for both parties to the relationship—to be sure, they commonly entail matters of life and death for both parties, the animals in particular—and any social science which fails to pay at least some attention to these relations, to their differential constitutions and implications, is arguably deficient. (pp. 3–4)

Politically engaged social science, then—and by extension, politically engaged classroom teaching—must pay heed to human-animal relations. Doing so not only provides insight on how power works in society, but also draws our attention to potential vectors for change.

This chapter proceeds as follows: first, I propose that more attention to the human-animal relations of particular locales provides a richer understanding of how places are socially constructed. Without explicit attention to the anthrozoological landscape(s) of a town or region, opportunities to name (let alone remedy!) particular problems are foreclosed.

Second, I suggest that attending to human-animal relations helps us to more clearly “place” ourselves (Urbanik 2012). The ways in which industrial meat production strips human-animal relations of any fellow-feeling, for example, mimics neoliberal modes of governance that privilege formal rationality across domains and discourage collective responsibility for vulnerable others (Squire 2009). Investigating human-animal relations sheds light on our complicity in these forms of governance and the ways in which they (re)produce inequality. To be unable to open one’s lace-curtained windows on the first, beautiful spring day in April (for a CAFO’s noxious fumes) may seem like a small inconvenience to some. Yet, rural Iowans must live this way as a matter of course, so that the rest of the U.S. can have cheap bacon and be protected from the “cold evils” (Kimbrell 2010) of factory farming .

Finally, I draw attention to the inconsistencies of human-animal relations, which point to potential openings for sociopolitical and personal change. As Chris Philo (1998) observes (following Tuan), whether “animals are conceptualized by humans on scales oscillating between reverence and revulsion, compassion and control, utilitarianism and disinterest … will obviously shape their socio-spatial practices toward these beings on an everyday basis” (p. 51). Examining the various, historically fluid, socio-spatial practices of human-animal relations reveals that these relations are temporally contingent and always subject to transformation. The popular “farm-to-table” dining movement , for example, has returned small-scale chicken farming to U.S. backyards in ways not seen in decades (Squire 2009). Similarly, recent concerns about the loss of monarch butterfly populations have more North Americans gardening with an eye to flight and food corridors (Monarch Joint Venture 2015). These changes offer hope for new kinds of human-animal relations and, with any luck, an altered Iowa.

5.2 Human-Animal Relations in the Making of Place

Environmental historians have long noted the ways in which human-animal relations construct place. Historian William Cronin (1995) points out that so-called “wild” places in the U.S. such as national parks , wildlife preservations , and game reserves—places in which neither people nor agricultural animals actually live—are “entirely cultural intervention[s]” (p. 70). These places were established in response to the closing of the American frontier and the rise of industrialization. In the decades following the Civil War, for example, big-game hunting in “wilderness” areas allowed new capitalists to temporarily enact the myth of pioneer individualism. Similarly, hiking and camping in “unspoiled” terrains allowed affluent city dwellers short-term escape from increasingly polluted urban centers (Cronin 1995).

Human geographer Alec Brownlow (2000) concurs that the designation of certain places as “wild” or “tame,” among other monikers, depends on the human-animal relations that are sanctioned in those places. When settler colonialists moved into upstate New York’s Adirondack region, for example, they viewed the land there as primarily agricultural and shaped the landscape’s meaning accordingly. Although grey wolves had long lived in the Adirondacks, they were rapidly eradicated in response to settler colonialists’ financial and other interests. Brownlow explains:

With the settling of New York, wolves and other ‘loathesome animals’ were quickly re-placed in the socio-physical landscape by animals more culturally suitable, more economically viable. The introduction of domestic livestock was among the first and most significant steps taken by early settlers to ‘tame’ the New York landscape. … Wolves, cougars, and other ‘vermin’ were constructed as fundamentally ‘out of place’ in this ‘new’ landscape, physically and symbolically displaced then re-placed by a regionally novel group of domesticated animals. … Livestock symbolized and signified a new ideological landscape within which wolves had no place. As such, they had to go. (p. 147)

Eliminating the grey wolf from the Adirondacks brought what was perceived as wild landscape under civilized control. Ironically, late twentieth-century efforts to recast the Adirondacks as a “natural” recreational site have again shifted the discourse on the place of wolves in the region. Although many local residents firmly oppose the reintroduction of wolves into the Adirondacks, contemporary, urban-based conservation ideology is highly inclusive of the animals. Consequently, wolf restoration projects in upstate New York have been gaining ground (Brownlow 2000).

Alongside environmental historians, animal geographers also “shed light on animals as central agents in the constitution of space and place” (Wolch and Emel 1998, p. xiii). As Philo and Wilbert (2000) explain, the nascent field of animal geography focuses “squarely on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment, and landscape … Spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play” (pp. 4–5). Animal geography is thus particularly useful for making sense of CAFOs in Iowa. Commonly dubbed “flyover country ,” the state of Iowa has little presence in the average U.S. resident’s consciousness. Its population has declined since the 1980s farm crisis , when hundreds of family farms collapsed and were replaced by corporate mono-cropping ventures (Iowa State University Extension and Outreach 2015). This shift in agricultural production from small , diverse family farm crops (sold locally or regionally) to federally subsidized commodities (sold internationally) relied on automation and thus decimated Iowa’s small towns. Rural schools have consolidated rapidly over the past thirty years, and main street, local businesses have mostly shuttered (Iowa State University Extension and Outreach 2015). Most young people now raised in rural Iowa leave their hometowns, if not the state, if they are college educated (Carr and Kefalas 2009).

Because so few people actually live in rural Iowa relative to U.S. population centers, the reality of what occurs in, around, and because of Iowa-based CAFOs also escapes the consideration of most people. This physical distancing of CAFOs from the majority of U.S. residents is buttressed by numerous, state-sponsored “Ag-Gag” laws , which prohibit journalistic exposure of CAFOs’ practices (The Humane Society of the United States 2016). As Dawson (1999) observes, “We are uncomfortable with these places where pigs are rendered into neatly packaged pork products from live creatures.… So pig farms and processing plants are located out of sight (and smell), actually hidden from the landscape” (p. 200). Strategic, place-based and ideological distancing, then, restrict widespread interrogation of CAFOs and (attempt to) absolve consumers of moral complicity in them. “How can so many blithely tolerate the unspeakable cruelties visited upon these countless sentient creatures [animals in CAFOs]?” Andrew Kimbrell (2010) asks. “Part of the answer lies in the physical distance between the buyer of these animal commodities and the factories that produce them” (p. 30).

The framing of Iowa as “flyover country ,” then, is more than a simple travel metaphor. It speaks directly to the ways in which the dominant human-animal relations of rural Iowa—CAFOs—are those that people would rather not see, smell, or confront . As geographer Owen Jones (2000, citing Weston) points out, “[T]here are no worked-out ethical defenses of factory farming ; it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is a practice sustained by silent collusion, by the wish to not know” (p. 269). Like the upstate New York’s Adirondack region, where the presence (or absence) of grey wolves has determined the landscape’s meaning over time, the presence of CAFOs in Iowa renders it a “flyover” region of the country: unworthy of broad consideration, cloaked in shame.

The power and durability of discourse framing Iowa as “flyover country ,” in fact, recently led to an interesting controversy on my own college campus. For a time, a popular T-shirt sold in the campus bookstore read “Where the hell is Grinnell?” on the front and “Who the hell cares ?” on the back. Protesting this lack of critical attention to place (and the ignorance it fosters), student members of the college’s Center for Prairie Studies Advisory Board created an alternative T-shirt. It read “Grinnell: Rooted in place, en route to everywhere” and featured an illustration of prairie plant root systems. This new, place-sensitive T-shirt was also a wry call to sociopolitical awareness, as many industrial livestock facilities are Chinese-owned (e.g., Smithfield Farms) and, in Iowa, the meat is processed by Latino transmigrants (Iowa State University Extension and Outreach 2015). Far from being “flyover country ,” rural Iowa is actually a significant node in the global economic grid.

Scientists have also linked rural Iowa to broad-scale environmental problems. CAFO sewage waste applied to industrial row-crop fields results in high concentrations of nitrates downstream by way of the Mississippi River. As a result, the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxic, or dead, zone is growing (Mutel 2008). In the summer of 2015, for example, the Gulf’s dead zone was measured at 6474 square miles—larger than predicted by scientists—and it was attributed to nutrients leached from the Mississippi River watershed (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration n.d.). Relatedly, the Des Moines [Iowa] Water Works—home of the largest water denitrification plant in the world—has initiated a federal lawsuit against the state for inadequately attending to public water quality (Eller 2016). The myth that Iowa is “flyover country ” thus belies the far-reaching, ethically questionable, practices that occur with regularity in the state. As Jones (2000) writes, “far from being spaces where nothing of concern is happening, [the locations of CAFOs ] are the spaces where the ethics of the encounter are not being told” (p. 281).

Oscillating between the Pastoral Ideal (Springwood 1996) and “flyover country,” then, popular, discursive constructions of Iowa obscure (and even make possible) human-animal relations like CAFOs. Among those who live in rural Iowa, however, CAFOs and the political economy in which they are embedded have clear, identity-related effects.

5.3 Human-Animal Relations in the Construction of Place-Based Identity

How little most U.S. residents know about or understand contemporary rurality and the human-animal relations that undergird it was eerily captured on a recent season of The Bachelor. A nationally televised show that features numerous young women competing for a single man’s affections, the fall 2015 “bachelor,” Chris Soules, identified as a rural Iowa farmer. Throughout the season’s episodes, misconceptions about modern-day rurality were routine. Many female contestants asked Chris, for example , about the animals’ names on “his farm” (a lá the children’s book, Charlotte’s Web), and they seemed genuinely surprised that he raised corn and soy alone. Some contestants asked Chris (a commodity crop farmer) whether he farmed organically. Then, when Chris took four female finalists home to meet his family, the women’s reactions to rural Iowa ranged from disappointment to shock. A young woman from California, for example, “started to crack after seeing Chris’ hometown, Arlington, which has a population of 416 and a main street that looks more like a collection of abandoned warehouses than a hub of economic activity” (Crowder 2015). Another finalist, Jade, “a twinge of fear creeping into her half-hearted smile,” expressed astonishment that “[T]here’s not an open bar, coffee shop, movie theater or restaurant” in downtown Arlington (Crowder 2015).

Watching the show from my living room in Grinnell, Iowa, which is within smelling distance of numerous CAFOs and also lacks a late-night coffee shop (save the 24-hour truck stop near Interstate 80), it was hard to empathize with The Bachelor’s dismayed finalists. Upon further reflection , however, the women’s astonishment at being confronted with rural Iowa (where they would potentially live, should they “win” Chris’ affections and thus the show), revealed an ignorance of contemporary rurality that was surprisingly familiar. My own preconceptions of Iowa had also been informed by the Pastoral Ideal : images of breezy lace curtains, charming farm animals on pastures, and checkered tablecloths. Like The Bachelor’s female contestants, I had also been blissfully unaware of the “hollowing out” (Carr and Kefalas 2009) of contemporary rural America.

The Pastoral Ideal’s remarkable durability, however—illustrated on The Bachelor as well as through my own, personal experience—raises numerous questions that merit exploration and analysis. Why, for example, in an age when “the global” is increasingly celebrated and anticipated in urban settings—in everything from fast fashion to K-12 school mission statements—are people surprised that globalization has changed the rural? Who benefits when the dominant perception of rurality remains tied to the Pastoral Ideal? Finally, who is marginalized, and how, by widespread ignorance of modern-day rurality? Thomas et al. (2011), engaging with similar lines of inquiry , note that

as with other forms of identity, the images and ideas attached to rurality are constantly in flux since the world is always changing. It is a mistake to equate rural identity with the agricultural past. This static conception neglects the way rural areas have been re-defined under the capitalist global economy. (p. 11)

Akin to how perceptions of Iowa as “flyover country ” mask the realities of CAFOs , the Pastoral Ideal is convenient cover for modern-day rural life. The capitalist global economy has dramatically altered what it means to be a “rural” person; in central Iowa, being rural now means living in proximity to CAFOs and accommodating their numerous effects.

CAFOs negatively impact the quality of life in rural places. Local economies benefit little from CAFOs, so the small towns in which they are embedded often lack people, family farms, and vitality (Poweshiek CARES 2012). Most industrial meat producers are contract workers rather than independent farmers; they are employed by large, vertically integrated corporations that set prices and “leak” profits elsewhere (Imhoff 2010). Additionally, those who work in processing plants near CAFOS are usually exploited and underpaid. They are often immigrant laborers who lack union protection despite doing dangerous work (Watts 2000). The rural communities that harbor CAFOs and related meat processors, then, are often economically and socially precarious. It is not surprising that Starbuck’s and other chic businesses are unmotivated to locate in such places.

CAFOs also decrease property values and create hardships for the local community. Contra Joel Salatin’s (2010) observation that “healing farms” (p. 356) “should be places where people like to congregate” (p. 357), CAFOs are repugnant to sight and smell and pose health risks to nearby residents . As human geographer Julie Urbanik (2012) notes,

[L]ife next to a hog CAFO is not pleasant. Hog waste is kept in open-air lagoons that not only smell unpleasant but can rupture, sending waster into local water systems. While this push to industrialized animal production has reduced the price of pig meat, it has come at a cost to local landscapes, local livelihoods, and animal quality of life. (p. 116)

Other unsavory effects of CAFOs include flies, increased risk of asthma due to poor air quality, and overexposure to antibiotics, because confined animals generally receive an abundance of medications (Poweshiek CARES 2012). Having numerous CAFOs and meat processors nearby also makes rural life loud. 18-wheel trucks are in motion constantly, shipping cheap meat outside of the region (e.g., the Swift fleet), and commercial grain dryers, which provide food for confined animals, can run 24-hours a day.

Equating contemporary rurality with the Pastoral Ideal , moreover, allows U.S residents to support the values that undergird CAFOs and their practices . Said differently, perceptions of rural Iowa as a place where cute farmers lean on pitchforks and address animal menageries by name disavows “[t]he modernist insistence on cool rationality … that makes factory farms … possible” in the first place (Emel and Wolch 1998, p. 22). According to Kimbrell (2010), “The exploitation of animals for profit is enabled by a cold, calculating Trinity of Science, Technology , and the Market that has stripped our public life of empathy” (p. 29), and studies reveal that employment in the CAFO industry fosters attitudes of self-interest and fragmentation. Susan Squire’s (2009) discussion of Linda Lord, a line worker at Penobscot Poultry in the rural U.S. Northeast town of Belfast, for example, demonstrates that industrial meat processing work encourages separation and efficiency over wholeness . One must accommodate oneself to rational systems to be successful as an industrial meat processor. Describing Linda Lord’s orientation toward work, Squire explains:

Linda Lord’s relations with chickens are instrumental rather than emotional, and focused not on their generative capacities (the eggs they lay or the companionship they offer), but on their destruction. She attributes her skill as a chicken-sticker to a lack of fellow-feeling for the birds themselves, a trait that seems to have been nurtured by her employer. (p. 188)

Rural communities dominated by industrial meat production, then, contain a large number of people whose job is to kill with efficiency. In that sense, CAFOs and the industries it supports deny both animals’ and humans’ full subjectivities (Coetze 1999). The calculating values of the industrial meat industry, in turn, can influence local communities. Squire writes:

Penobscot Poultry embodies the rationalization of life in the way it compartmentalizes its poultry production. … The industrialization, consolidation, and final deindustrialization of regional poultry production has not only reframed and narrowed the meaning of labor for agricultural workers, but has also arguably eviscerated the meaning of community to the town of Belfast. (p. 189).

Healthy, vibrant, democratic communities need people who are whole and spiritually developed. They need people who see the connections among issues and can empathize with others’ concerns (Thoreau cited in Gruenewald 2002). Akin to how models of education based on “control, skill development, remediation, and job preparation … seriously restrict the possibilities for self-development (Gruenewald 2002, p. 536), employment in CAFOs and related processing industries encourages fractured individuals and thus communities.

To be sure, contemporary rurality under globalization is shaped by industrial values. It is centered on formal rationality in which the ends (i.e., cheap meat) justify the means (i.e., cruelty or pollution) (Thomas et al. 2011). Kimbrell (2010) terms this value system “cold evil” and cautions that all people—rural and urban alike—are implicated in it. Although rural Iowans must physically shoulder the stink and pollution of CAFOs , all U.S. residents are participants in cold evil when industrial logic goes unchallenged. Kimbrell explains:

Quantitative science, efficiency , corruption and profit are the central dogmas underlying not just [CAFOs] but also the entire industrial enterprise. These dogmas have been the underpinning of the industrial system that has spawned much of the wealth and the stunning daily ‘miracles’ of modern technological society. The sufferings of billions in factory farms and other tragic results of applying these industrial ideologies to life have arisen not out of cruelty or passion, but rather from the impassive application of the ‘laws’ of science, efficiency, and the market to living beings. That is why factory farms and other evils of the system are ‘cold’ evils. They are not created by terrorists, religious fanatics, or psychopaths, persons acting out of uncontrolled ‘hot’ violence, anger, or lust. Rather it is the business people, scientists, policy makers, and consumers who are acting ‘rationally’ by comporting themselves with these ‘laws’ of science and economics on which our system is based. (p. 31)

Well-aware that McDonald’s farm is gone, rural residents in places like Iowa at least realize they are participants in cold evil . In my community , locals’ concerns have spawned activist groups such as Poweshiek CARES (Community Action to Restore Environmental Stewardship), a coalition of Poweshiek county, Iowa residents who work to oppose CAFOs and their expansion. By contrast, people whose ideas of contemporary rurality remain informed by the Pastoral Ideal —such as The Bachelor’s contestants—participate in and foster cold evil without their awareness or consent. In this way, urban-dwellers are also exploited, as industrial values thrive on peoples’ ignorance.

5.4 Inconsistencies in (Dominant) Human-Animal Relations as Potential Sites of Change

Despite the devastating effects of CAFOs on the land, animals, and social life, alternative models of human-animal relations exist—suggesting possibilities for change. For one, I am deeply inspired by Wolch’s (1998) notion of zoöpolis: a “renaturalized, re-enchanted city” (p. 124) that would “allow for the emergence of an ethic, practice , and politics of caring for animals and nature” (p. 124). Zoöpolis , as Wolch defines it, is an urban space in which people and animals are reintegrated. Rather than living in binary opposition (e.g., per the culture /nature divide), humans and animals would live side by side as kin in a broader ecology. In the zoöpolis, “an interspecific ethic of caring replaces dominionism to create urban regions where animals are not incarcerated, killed, or sent off to live in wildlife prisons, but instead are valued neighbors and partners in survival” (p. 125). Zoöpolis envisions a new partnership between humans and animals that would form the basis for political action. As humans came to appreciate animal subjectivity on its own terms—by and through sharing living space with animals, as equals—urban worlds and political agendas would change dramatically. Wolch writes:

The reintegration of people with animals and nature in zoöpolis can provide urban dwellers with the local, situated, everyday knowledge of animal life required to grasp animal standpoints or ways of being in the world, to interact with them accordingly in particular contexts , and to motivate political action necessary to protect their autonomy as subjects and their life spaces. Such knowledge would stimulate a thorough rethinking of a wide range of urban daily life practices : not only animal regulation and control practices , but landscaping, development rates and design, roadway and transportation decisions, use of energy, industrial toxics, and bioengineering—in short, all practices that impact animals and nature in its diverse forms (climate, plant life, landforms, and so on). (p. 124)

In other words, the zoöpolis model of urban life would honor animals’ subjectivities. As a result, riparian corridors would trump those of commercial strip malls; coyotes in subdivision backyards would be viewed as natural predators rather than nuisances; and trees would be planted with an eye to avian nutrition rather than simply aesthetics, among other outcomes. As Wolch argues, “Zoöpolis invites a critique of contemporary urbanization from the standpoints of animals but also from the perspective of people, who together with animals suffer from urban pollution and habitat degradation” (p. 135).

Although Wolch’s concept of zoöpolis focuses centrally on urban centers, zoöpolis is desperately needed, I argue, in places like rural Iowa. For one, the smelly, loud, depopulated, and unhealthy environment produced by industrial agriculture would be immediately and radically altered were animals’ subjectivities taken seriously. To wit: currently confined hogs and chickens—their numbers far greater than that of humans in Iowa—would repopulate the physical landscape and dramatically change its physical topography, undoubtedly raising important questions about carrying capacity, etc. (Imhoff 2010). Second, granting animals subjectivity poses deep challenges to the industrial mindset. Viewed as social subjects, hogs and chickens could no longer be profit “units” to be efficiently housed, measured, altered, and executed. As scientist Barbara Smuts (1999) observes, “when a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an autonomous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood” (p. 118). Zoöpolis in rural Iowa, then, could make people there more humane.

Thinking of animals as individuals also challenges human-relations like CAFOs —relations that are ethically questionable and marked by cruelty. The concept of animals as masses (e.g., “poultry”) disregards the individual subjectivity of each animal in the mass. Akin to how my own two companion dogs, Penny and Leroy, each have their own personalities, walking paces, and food preferences, individual hogs and chickens also have their own dispositions and quirks. These traits, however, go unnoticed and disregarded when animals are grouped as a whole. Jones (2000) explains:

The ethical invisibility of the individual non-human other has been and remains extremely useful and probably essential to modern societies. This has generally enabled humans to manipulate, exploit, displace, consume, waste, and torture non-human individuals with impunity. … Individual non-human others are often ethically and politically invisible … and they become lost in the crowds of their own and other kinds. (p. 279)

Recent outrage over the shooting of Harambe, a 17-year old western lowland gorilla in a Cincinatti zoo , illustrates how attention to individual animals alters human-relations with that animal. Although western lowland gorilla habitats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been severely compromised due to coltan mining, few Americans have given up new cell phones out of concern for the species as a whole (Stanford 2012). Yet, despite zoo officials’ insistence that Harambe might have killed the child who fell into his enclosure, emotions ran high after the shooting and many people protested that Harambe (one gorilla) deserved more protection (Grinberg 2016).

Suggested here is that individual animals are often granted personal subjectivity. A companion cat, the Kentucky Derby winner, and a visually-impaired person’s seeing-eye dog are all assumed to have preferences, needs, and rights . It is in these moments of seeing animals as individuals that humans extend their humanity to them; new, more ethical, human-animal relations occur when a single animal comes out of the group. Jones (2000) observes:

when animals do emerge into individual (ethical) focus in media reports of ‘animal incidents,’ this commonly results from some sort of spatial ‘disruption’ of usually unarticulated (un)ethical geographies. For example, consider whales being washed up on a beach, or trapped in ice, where incredible efforts are made to save them and to return them to the aquatic space where their fate again becomes unarticulated. (p. 282)

CAFOs in rural places like Iowa constitute an “unarticulated unethical geography.” Hidden behind windowless factory walls in a region mystified by nostalgia, confined animals produced for human consumption have few opportunities to ever surface as individual subjects. Yet, as more people around the U.S. engage in practices such as backyard fowl-keeping , new possibilities emerge for understanding individual animals’ subjectivities (Squire 2009). Akin to zoöpolis , here is where new kinds of human-animal relations might begin.

5.5 Human-Animal Relations , Situated Classrooms, and New Directions for Academic Inquiry

Philo and Wilbert (2000) note that “[h]umans are always, and always have been, enmeshed in social relations with animals to the extent that the latter, the animals, are undoubtedly constitutive of human societies in all sorts of ways” (p. 2). In this chapter, I have used the anthrozoological landscape of central Iowa to reveal some key facets of the present. Ethically unsettled by the human-animal relations that feed us—CAFOs—we enact these relations in rural places where few people actually live. Then, to comfort ourselves or excuse our complicity in rationalized, inhumane systems, we retain romantic, outdated images of rural farm life. These misunderstandings of contemporary rurality deny the ways in which globalization has changed the rural; moreover, they decrease the likelihood that activist alliances among all beings—people, urban and rural, and animals, as social subjects—can ever form.

Tracing a place’s anthrozoological landscape offers deep insight into that place: its problems, its people, and the political economy in which it is embedded, among other issues. Living in rural Iowa, it is hard to deny the impact of CAFOs on nearly every facet of social life there. Consequently, any class I teach at Grinnell College—from Educational Principles in a Pluralistic Society to the Cultural Politics of Language Teaching—includes attention to CAFOs and their far-reaching effects. The increase of English Learners (ELs) in rural schools , for example, is often tied to their parents’ employment in CAFOs or industrial meat processing (Hamann et al. 2015). I cannot prepare English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers without touching upon human-animal relations. Similarly, discussions of John Dewey in education courses also lead to CAFO-related lines of flight. It is difficult to talk about increasing one’s modes of associated living (Dewey 1916) without referencing CAFOs and their impact on people in our community. I have also been surprised when my students take for granted the days when it really “smells” outside; I have thought seriously about wearing a rubber pig nose to class to mark the aberration and promote important conversations. (Plus—apologies to pigs here—I like the “greed” the nose would symbolize.)

I urge all teachers to seriously consider the anthropological landscape(s) of their regions. How are invasive lampreys affecting the Great Lakes and its communities, for example, and what are the consequent implications for emergent writers and readers in Port Huron, Michigan? What does the expansion of metro Atlanta mean for coyote and deer populations there, and how might schoolchildren in Canton, Georgia learn science in new ways as a result? Grinnell College’s broader curriculum, for example, is drawing increasingly on local anthrozoology. The anthropology department offers a course called “Culture and Agriculture,” which features field trips to a multinational seed corporation as well as nearby organic farms. The college’s Policy Studies Concentration offers a course on food security; enrolled students analyze various iterations of the farm bill and the modes of food production it encourages. Students at Grinnell also have numerous opportunities to conduct CAFO-related research directly. In illustration, biology professor Shannon Hinsa-Leasure studies the microbial diversity and antibiotic resistance profiles of the soil and water near CAFOs (Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture n.d.). Her students collect and analyze these samples in biology courses as well as for advanced mentored projects.

The CAFO-dominated landscape of central Iowa has also inspired me to design a new course. A special-topic tutorial for incoming first-year students, “The Ethical Shopper” adopts a critical perspective on consumer-based citizenship , or the linking of political action to socially-conscious purchases. A primary response to CAFOs and their ills has been consumer-based citizenship. Widely regarded writers such as Barbara Kingsolver (2007) and Michael Pollan (2008), among others, have urged people to take a stand against industrially produced food (including meats) by shopping locally, researching where their food comes from, and connecting directly to farmers whenever possible. As a result, the number of farmer’s markets, community supported agriculture projects, and other alternative food sources in the U.S. have grown substantially in the last decade (Runyon 2015). Indeed, the consumer-based citizenship movement vis-à-vis CAFO-raised meat has incurred such momentum that the sketch comedy show, Portlandia, even spoofed it. On one episode, stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein query a waitress about a chicken’s origin to the extent that the waitress delivers them a dossier containing their about-to-be-dinner’s former name, previous diet, and personal picture (Seitz 2011).

While this consumer-driven social movement against CAFO-raised meat has had innumerable positive effects, it is insufficient as a comprehensive response to CAFOs (see Jakubiak and Mueller 2013 for an extended discussion of consumer-based citizenship’s limitations). For one, consumer-based citizenship restricts political participation to those who make individual purchasing choices . Free and reduced school lunch recipients, prison inmates, and government military personnel, among other groups, cannot chose between locally raised, grass-finished beef and industrially produced meat at mealtimes. Because institutions that purchase bulk quantities of food do their shopping with an eye primarily to price, there is little incentive for CAFOs to go away . Another limitation of consumer-based citizenship it that it restricts civic action to those who can afford to pay. For those on limited food budgets, the relatively high price of locally-grown, hormone-free, humanely-raised meats may prohibit their ability to “cast a vote” (Pollan 2008) against CAFOs and industrially produced food more generally.

“The Ethical Shopper” also interrogates a primary tenet of consumer-based citizenship : it uses the market as a way to address the very problems caused by (so-called) free, or re-regulated, markets (Lyon and Moberg 2010). CAFOs have flourished in an era of reduced environmental restrictions , the dismantling of unionized labor, and the convergence of corporate and state interests more generally through neoliberal policies (see Harvey 2005 for a thorough discussion of neoliberalism ). Federal subsidies to commodity crop growers (who are represented by the powerful corporate lobby, the Farm Bureau) provide an indirect subsidy to CAFOs by keeping grain feed prices artificially low. CAFOs are thus incentivized in the marketplace, as alternative means of livestock production (e.g., pasture-raised livestock outfits) do not receive comparable subsidies (Gurain-Sherman 2008).

Extensive, direct federal subsidies to CAFOs also come by way of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) , which originated in the 1985 farm bill as a way to support sound environmental practices among small farmers. CAFOs were specifically excluded from EQIP until a 2002 reauthorization of the farm bill, which declared that 60% of EQIP funding should go toward animal farming (Imhoff 2010). Because negotiating and arranging EQIP contracts requires the same amount of effort regardless of an animal producer’s size, preference for EQIP contracts for CAFOs has risen dramatically in the last decade and a half (Gurain-Sherman 2008). Moreover, because CAFOs pose greater overall environmental risk, say, than do pasture-raised livestock farms (due to large sewage lagoons that can leak, etc.), EQIP money invested in CAFOs is seen as having greater return potential than that invested in small-scale operations. Doug Gurain-Sherman (2008) explains:

The new EQIP regulation prioritizes activities that only CAFOs typically have the need to pursue, such as improvement of waste storage facilities, comprehensive nutrient management plans, and transportation of manure tied to environmentally and agronomically sound crop application rates. The explicit rationale provided for this ranking is that greater environmental improvement can be achieved by alleviating CAFO-related problems than pasture-related problems. (p. 38)

In other words, the logic of rational systems is clearly in operation vis-à-vis EQIP and CAFOs. Because CAFOs pose unique and potentially widespread risks to water , soil, and air systems, federal money flows toward them in the name of “environmental quality.” At the same time, many small-scale, alternative livestock producers struggle to stay in the black without subsidies (Salatin 2007) . The capitalist market’s so-called invisible hand—while perhaps invisible to most consumers—operates in favor of CAFO meat as well as CAFO expansion.

A primary goal of “The Ethical Shopper,” then, is to problematize consumer-based citizenship as a central response to CAFOs . I want my students to understand that addressing CAFOs’ ills will require more than individual shopping trips to the local Whole Foods Market. Rather, it will take organized, direct social action and collective pressure on elected representatives at all levels. Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors, Inc. of Fairfield, Iowa (2007) offers some insight on this point. The organization urges citizens living near existing or proposed CAFOs to engage in the following practices : (1) organize their communities and align with existing grassroots movements that oppose CAFOs; (2) hold frequent, visible community meetings to educate residents about CAFOs’ effects; (3) review local CAFOs’ manure management plans and discuss these with local CAFO operators; (4) assess how existent or proposed CAFOs will affect local and regional waterways; (5) ask nearby farmers not to accept “free” waste from CAFOs as manure fertilizer; and (6) send formal letters to CAFOs’ financial investors. Note that none of these actions relies on socially-conscious purchases; rather, they involve groups of people working together as neighbors, citizen scientists, community stakeholders, and environmental stewards. Democracy , John Dewey observed, “must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (cited in Orr 2004, p. 168). If my students learn only this in “The Ethical Shopper,” then I will have taught them well.

Attending to local anthrozoology in central Iowa has brought me, in a way, full circle. No longer beholden to romanticized, outmoded images of rural life, I now know my neighbors as best I can, try to engage in civic action outside of the shops, and use my political sensibilities to create new courses and enrich existing ones. What is the nature of human-animal relations in your teaching context, and how might a closer examination of these relations change your pedagogy and engage your students? Environmental studies scholar David Orr (2004) reminds us that “all knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world” (p. 13). As teachers and teacher educators , helping our students understand this fact may be the most important work we can do.