Sacrifice a fly, but never a monkey

As a continuation from my last blog about the work of Catherine Chalmers I've found a fascinating account of a 1970s study held with students, which relates well to the Food Chain series by Chalmers. The study is documented in the book I'm currently reading: 'Shooting in the Wild' by veteran wildlife film-maker, Chris Palmer. In my last blog I documented Chalmers' ideas for 'Food Chain' and highlighted important parts of related interviews with the artist, so all that remains is the account of the study from Palmer's book: "In the 1970s, Jeffery Boswall gave lectures in which he would ask audiences to vote on a graded series of...moral problems. He invited people to imagine, first, that they were making an important conservation film and needed a shot of a spider eating a fly. How many of them would be willing to artificially introduce a fly to a spider, rather than wait days, maybe even weeks, for it to happen naturally? Most audience members typically thought that staging a spider eating a fly was perfectly acceptable. Then Boswall asked them if they would be willing to introduce a worm to a frog... a snake to a bird, and the votes continued to decline. How about a monkey to a boa constrictor? ... monkeys are routine prey for boa constrictors, but by this time very few hands, if any, were left in the air." Chalmers' desire to explore our hypocrisy over the food chain and its hierarchies is well validated here. We are all surely guilty of hypocrisy and favouritism where killing is concerned.

Cockroach executions and Catherine Chalmers

Catherine Chalmers' work is quite exceptional in my eyes. You may recognise her best for her 'Food Chain' series - a stunning collection of imagery showing just that - starting with the humble tomato and a caterpillar; finished by a frog eating a praying mantis. In an interview with the artist, Chalmers said "At first I was horrified by the idea of raising an animal to feed to another animal. It disturbed me that I was going to be governing life in that way. But when you think of how central food chains are to all systems in life, it makes a certain amount of sense. Western society has become divorced from the act of killing the animals we eat. I wanted to see why". She also talks at length about her Cockroaches series, which includes video of both burning and hung cockroaches as well as 'imposter' imagery in which they are painted to look 'beautiful' and enchanting as other, more popular insects, might look. I won't spoil the detail behind the work, since this can be found in her words, but you may be interested to consider your own reaction to the works in light of the popular hatred and disgust for the species.

When did food stop becoming important?

I haven't read David Kirby's book, Animal Factory, but the Washington Post recently published an interview with the author and he makes an exceptionally good point: why do we spend hours trawling the internet for deals on phones, cameras and cars; trying to find the best products as well as services, and yet many people will happily go to their local supermarket and buy the cheapest meat they can find to put in their own bodies and feed their children? Distant ancestors of ours had to hunt for their food and not-so-distant ancestors were rationed. Do we appreciate how lucky and spoiled we are to live in a time when food is available so easily and in abundance in the western world? I'm not sure we do. Since when did fuel prices for your car produce more of a reaction than the price of fuel for your body? More importantly, why do we not complain more about the quality of the food we buy? My guess is because we simply don't know what some food manufacturers are up to. According to the BBC programme 'Britain's Really Disgusting Food' our Food Standards Agency states that "beef burgers" need only contain 62% beef. If you market your burgers as "economy", you can get away with only 47% beef - so what's the other 53% of your 'beef' burger made up of? "Economy" doesn't inspire me to think it's something appetising. In fact, "disgusting" sounds just about right to me, not only in terms of taste, but also ethics.

The Bell Jar - animal rights and privacy

You'd have to have been in another country not to hear the furore about 'animal privacy' that kicked off last week with the Guardian article: Wildlife documentaries infringe animals' privacy, says report. I'm not so interested in the article itself; what I find most fascinating is the response. The last time I saw such a flurry of re-tweets on Twitter in response to an animal story was the SeaWorld incident back in February when whale trainer, Dawn Brancheau, was killed. The reason I'm fairly dismissive of the media report is because a) it's the media and b) comments underneath the online report come mostly from people who won't have read the original article by Brett Mills that was published in the journal, Continuum. It saddens me the research is instantly dismissed and/or joked away by many because it's about animals and not humans, but - and it's a big 'but' - there is one fact that can't be dismissed: privacy is a human construction that protects us from one another. Animals do not know the word 'privacy'. However - and it's just as big a 'however' - privacy is also a concept around protection and surely all animals deserve protection? We share our world with other species and we're curious about one another, but maybe this and the SeaWorld story has hit a nerve. In our desire to understand, protect and - let's be honest - enjoy the natural world, do we suffocate it at the same time? I was recently researching bell jars when I came across this beautiful image of a glass bell jar used as a cloche. Bell jars were used in the Victorian era to protect plants in the garden, but at the same time, they have no air vent. This particular image struck me as a direct representation of our relationship with the animal world - there are both pros and cons. When an event like SeaWorld happens or someone like Mills comes along, it confronts our sense of enjoyment and we don't like it - we're used to doing what we want. Animals won't benefit from privacy laws, but surely they deserve a deeper consideration than instant dismissal when it comes to their rights? What l do know is that all professional wildlife film-makers and photographers go to great lengths never to disturb or harm their animal subjects (see Loving animals to death). If we tackle animal rights, the fight doesn't start here.

Never see a fish finger in the same way again

Of all people, Banksy has been pivotal to my photography in relation to human-animal studies. I had no idea the graffiti artist had so much to say about animals until I came across a video of his Pet Store exhibition on Ecotube and I was then lucky enough to see it live at his Bristol exhibition last year. Photographically, it's incredibly difficult to be succinct in your message - a lot of research, both literary and image-based precedes your first shoot. After this comes the sometimes agonising quest to fit your message into a smaller and tighter bottle until finally, a whole book is whittled down to one sentence on one piece of paper. Banksy's creative journey in Pet Store goes down to one word in my view: Genius. It needs little introduction, just watch it.