Session: 6c
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.16
Chair:
Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt), “Between Resistance and Resilience: Nonhuman Agency and Sentience in Farm Sanctuary Documentaries”
Abstract: Like many forms of vegan advocacy, documentaries focusing on the lives of farmed animals often foreground victimization and suffering. Films like Earthlings (2005), Dominion (2008), Eating Animals (2017), and Milked (2021) rely on graphic images from feeding lots and slaughterhouses to shock viewers into an understanding of the moral implications of torturing and killing animals for human consumption. Andrea Arnold’s portrayal of a dairy cow in Cow (2021) is no less disturbing because the objectified lives of farmed animals are marked by an absence of agency and dominated by pain. As important as these films are in revealing the realities of the meat and dairy industry, their ability to cue not only empathy, compassion and pity in viewers but also strong negative emotions such as empathetic pain, horror, and disgust, along with guilt and shame, makes them difficult to watch and easily evaded.
My paper considers two films that offer a different kind of emotional engagement with farmed animals: Marc Pierschel’s Butenland (Germany, 2020) chronicles the transformation of an organic dairy farm into a “cow retirement home” and portrays formerly farmed animals with their personality quirks and predilections. Shot on sixteen sanctuaries throughout the US, Loghan Call and Naomi Sophia Call’s Called to Rescue (2016) presents “a compassionate, non-violent story” about rescued farm animals who are changing human lives and beliefs. Building on research in vegan studies, affective ecocriticism, and empirical ecocriticism, the paper combines readings of the films with the presentation of empirical reception data from a screening in Germany. It will show that both films foreground notions of peace, solidarity, and agency as they cue viewers to viscerally share the complex emotional lives of their human and nonhuman protagonists, arguing that the engagement with such films can help decolonize our relationships with farmed animals and promote multispecies justice and resilience.
Bio: Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt and currently directs the transdisciplinary “Visions of Sustainability” project at the University of Freiburg. Her research explores the intersections of econarratology, empirical ecocriticism, and environmental literature and film. She is the author of Growing Hope (Cambridge UP 2025), Cosmopolitan Minds (U of Texas P, 2014) and Affective Ecologies (Ohio State UP, 2017) as well as the (co-)editor of several books and journal issues.
Claudia Alonso-Recarte (University of Valencia), “The Contingencies of ‘If’ in Animal Advocacy Documentary Film”
Abstract: The so-called “renaissance” of documentary film at the start of the twenty-first century also kicked off the production of nonfiction films with an animal rights agenda. Heir to the films that animal activists began to showcase and distribute in the 1980s, this new body of documentaries (arguably launched by Shaun Monson’s Earthlings [2005]), reframed animal ethics in the digital sphere of the post 9/11 era, absorbing discourses of urgency associated with the fear of the Anthropocene, extinction, extermination and capitalism. The vast number of films produced by activists, organizations or concerned individuals in the last twenty-five years are dire proof of the extent to which filmmakers have explored the plasticity of nonfiction to address the multiple forms in which nonhuman animal sentience, language and consciousness can be audio-visually represented, exploring rhetorics and narratives that engage with their embodied experience of the world and that foreground their subjectivity as reason enough to inspire empathy and compassion. This presentation addresses how the subgenre of animal advocacy documentary formalistically, structurally and narratively engages with the representation of alternative modes of interspecies co-existence as models of resistance to the noxious speciesism that fuels the Anthropocene. My aim is to examine techniques employed by filmmakers that stretch beyond the anthropocentrism proper of documentary modes (as described by Bill Nichols) and that offer viewers glimpses of “what could be” by representing instances of rescues, interventions and sanctuary spaces where the encounter with nonhuman animal otherness implodes capitalist ideology. In particular, I examine portions of the “observational mode” in Jusep Moreno’s When Pigs Escape (2022) and consider how duration and length of shot impact the representation of nonhuman animal subjectivity, enabling exegeses of resistance and defiance. These approaches stand as alternatives to the more “expository”-oriented modes that operate in string-of-interview documentaries revolving around biographies of nonhuman individuals that retaliate and “bite back” (as for instance in Gabriella Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish [2013] or James Marsh’s Project Nim [2011]).
Bio: Claudia Alonso-Recarte is Associate Professor in English at the Universitat de València. She specializes in (Critical) Animal Studies and is the founder and director of the research group “Animals in Literary and Visual Cultures” (CULIVIAN). She is the principal investigator of a research project titled “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Animal Advocacy Documentary Film in the Twenty-first Century” (CIAICO/2023/046). She recently edited a collection of essays titled Género y sexualidad en el documental animalista y de naturaleza (2025), published by Tirant lo Blanch.
Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University), “The Robin, the Bullfinch, the Starling, and the Chough: Eighteenth-Century Cagebirds and the Origins of the English Anticruelty Movement”
Abstract: “A robin redbreast in a cage”, wrote William Blake in 1803 ,“Puts all Heaven in a rage”. If Heaven was raging, Earth was not. Caged birds were widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and could be found in all the nation’s homes, from the richest to the poorest. Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” presents the caged robin (Erithacus rubecula) as the first in a series of captured or hunted animals whose treatment disturbs, in his view, the natural order ordained by God. Blake’s robin can be seen in the context of the early anticruelty movement. From the mid-eighteenth century, it was increasingly asserted that animals had both sentience and rights that could be protected. In England, the first animal protection bills were presented to Parliament in 1800 and 1802, the immediate context to Blake’s poem. But discussion of caged birds in English literature was widespread. In addition to Blake’s robin, this paper examines three literary caged birds: William Borlase’s tame Cornish chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), which formed the subject of scientific observations in his 1758 Natural History of Cornwall; Laurence Sterne’s caged starling (Sturnus vulgaris) which, by speaking the words “I can’t get out”, becomes a metaphor for imprisonment in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768); and William Cowper’s poem “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch” (1789) in which the poet uses a mock-heroic register to satirically dramatize the death of a caged bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) at the paws of the family cat. Between them, I argue, these texts attest to the closeness of human-avian relations in the eighteenth century but also show how, through acts both of companionship and of resistance, birds drew attention to their own sentience and suffering and were thereby active participants in the origins of the British anticruelty movement.
Bio: Brycchan Carey is Professor of Literature, Culture, and History at Northumbria University. He has written or edited nine books and more than 50 articles on topics including literature and empire, natural history, and the cultural history of animal rights. His most recent books are Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (Palgrave, 2020) and The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (Yale, 2024). Carey was previously the president and is now treasurer of ASLE-UKI.
Laura Brown (Northumbria University), “Challenging the ‘Voiceless Animal’: Talking Dogs and Animal Spirituality in Early-Twentieth-Century Anti-Vivisection Campaigns”
Abstract: ‘Gifted’ animals – such as the Elberfeld Horses – became a popular phenomenon in early twentieth century Europe, both in the field of experimental psychology but also in the public imagination. It did not take long for some animal protection campaigners to see the potential for the inclusion of such case studies in their anti-cruelty arguments. This paper explores how anti-vivisectionists leveraged well-known cases of animal communication and intelligence to argue for the compassionate treatment of nonhuman animals, on the basis that they demonstrated a level of consciousness akin to that of human beings.
To trace these claims about the spiritual status of nonhuman animals, the paper utilises books and periodicals published between 1920 and 1940 by those who promoted such beliefs. The French Spiritualist Carita Borderieux, who wrote about the moral consequences of the intelligence displayed by her dog, Zou, serves as one case study. So too do Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby and Nina Douglas-Hamilton (founders of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society and vocal Spiritualists) whose interest in Kuno von Schwertberg – a talking dachshund from Weimar – was widely documented.
The paper considers how – despite being rooted in an earnest belief in their latent spiritual, emotional and intellectual potential of all animals – anti-vivisection arguments which showcased talking dogs were labelled ‘anthropomorphic’ and ‘sentimental’. Despite these disparaging responses, the paper argues that the belief in inter-species communication during the first half of the twentieth century represents an early attempt to disrupt the rhetoric which presents animals as ‘helpless’ and ‘voiceless’ in animal protection campaigns.
Bio: I am an RDF funded PhD student in History at Northumbria University, studying Spiritualism’s influence on early 20th century animal advocacy. I received my BA in Photography from the Arts University Bournemouth, and later was awarded my MRes in History at Northumbria University. My wider research interests include the place of emotion and sentimentality in animal advocacy (particularly expressions of grief in response to animal death and suffering), and stereotypes of eccentricity and crankery.