Are the hills of Iowa enmeshed with a vast network of death camps, comparable in moral terms to those of the Holocaust? This is one of the questions raised, indeed hurled, by Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999), a novella-of-ideas by the Afrikaner-Australian and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee.
In 1997, Coetzee was invited to deliver the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. With characteristic formal playfulness, the “lectures” Coetzee wound up delivering were in fact two fictional episodes depicting the visit of one Elizabeth Costello, a famous novelist, to a liberal arts college where she has been invited to deliver an annual lecture, seemingly much like the real-life Tanner Lectures. The finished book is an adaptation of Coetzee’s 1997 lectures.
Costello’s visit is contentious. When asked why she became a vegetarian, her habitual reply is to quote Plutarch: “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds.” When asked whether her vegetarianism stems from moral conviction, she replies: “No, I don’t think so. It comes out of a desire to save my soul.”
Costello is opposed to zoos (they kill in animals “the flow of joy” that comes from the body’s mobility), and to non-carnivorous forms of animal agriculture, like dairy farming (captive herds are “slave populations”: “[e]ven their sex becomes a form of labor”). Special ire, though, is reserved for industrial animal slaughter. Her persistent point of comparison, which she insists on despite knowing that it will offend some portion of her audience, is the Nazi Holocaust. She cites Chicago, the city christened “Hog Butcher for the World” by Carl Sandburg, in this regard: “it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.”
The analogy between industrial slaughter and the Holocaust has also been made by Alex Hershaft, a Holocaust survivor and Iowa State University alumnus. Hershaft has spent decades advocating for veganism and the rights of farm animals. While he has reservations about the rhetorical effectiveness of the comparison, Hershaft sees factory farming and the Holocaust as sharing not only infrastructural methods, but the use of prejudice to compartmentalize sympathy. He writes: “In Nazi Germany, they decreed that the Christian lived and the Jew died. In our society, they determine that the dog lives and the pig dies.”
In sheer scale, the slaughterhouses of Iowa function as the Chicago stockyards of yesteryear. Their ethical legitimacy stands or falls on the same basic grounds: not only those of animal welfare, but also the shared reliance on the labor of vulnerable immigrants, as chronicled by Iowa scholar Kristy Nabhan-Warren. The numbers for pigs alone are astonishing. A report on pork production authored by ISU economists finds that, as of 2013, Iowa farmers produced about 33 million “slaughter hogs” per year. In 2022, Iowa produced nearly a third of all U.S. pigs.
Periodically, a new scandal emerges involving cruel treatment of endangerment of Iowa pigs. In April, an Iowa pork producer was sued for allegedly engaging in a check-kiting scheme that placed 110,000 piglets in danger of imminent starvation, as reported by the Iowa Capital Dispatch. During COVID, reduced consumer demand for pork led Iowa Select Farms to exterminate vast pens of pigs through their slow suffocation, in a method known as “ventilation shutdown.” These killings were documented by a whistleblower with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, whose video and audio recordings were reported on by Glenn Greenwald. The state’s notorious “ag gag” laws, largely upheld in recent years after a lengthy appeals process, criminalize whistleblowing of this kind with the prospect of years in prison.
A figure with Elizabeth Costello’s convictions would see two ironies in the outrage such stories generate, both of them grounded in extreme selectivity of concern. On the face of things, it is strange to worry about the execution of surplus pigs amidst an industry completely based on their painful confinement and death. Costello observes that in societies which prefer prison to other forms of criminal punishment, “the freedom of the body to move in space is targeted as the point at which reason can most painfully and effectively harm the being of the other.” Forced immobility is a standard element of torture. Public acceptance of industrial confinement practices requires that the public not look too closely.
The other irony, also noted by Alex Hershaft, is the selectivity of concern across species. Dogs and cats are part of the family; pigs and cows of comparable cognitive and emotional complexity are meant to be hacked apart and swallowed. At one point in The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth’s son John touches on a feature of the “animal-rights business” that he finds “suspect”: namely, “that it has to ride on the back of pensive gorillas and sexy jaguars and huggable pandas because the real objects of its concern, chickens and pigs […] are not newsworthy.” Environmentalists have a name for those large, likable animals that galumph their way into the limelight: “charismatic megafauna.”
The arbitrary nature of the pet/plate divide, and environmentalist emphasis on loveable species, make the same point clear: too often, animals are valued not because of their intrinsic worth as sentient beings, but because of what they do for us, both physically (as food) and emotionally (as fuzz). I am not pretending to preach from a moral high ground. I am a lifelong pet-lover, and yet have only recently begun transitioning to a vegetarian diet. I consider it better late than never. Coetzee’s novella — and Plutarch’s old line in particular — has been formative in leading me to make the change.
The dissident U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky advocated for focusing your limited time and powers of political attention on the crimes of your own state and its closest allies: at My Lai, in Abu Ghraib, over the skies of Gaza. Elizabeth Costello echoes this on the issue of industrial agriculture: “I do think it is appropriate that those who pioneered the industrialization of animal lives and the commodification of animal flesh should be at the forefront of trying to atone for it.”
The geographic intimacy of this issue for Iowans is one reason why it is so wonderful to have groups like the Iowa Farm Sanctuary around, caring for rescued farm animals in the epicenter of the meat industry.
But all this argumentation has been written in mere prose. Coetzee’s Costello places her faith in other forces: poetry, and bodily exposure. She merits the last word:
“If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.”
