Track 6B

Animals, ethics, and sustainable development

Track Chair

Dr Elizabeth Taylor, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne.

Background to the track
William Cronen (1991) writing of early 20th century Chicago's immense meat packing trade, suggested wryly that "forgetfulness was among the least noticed and more important of its by-products" (Nature's Metropolis, p256). More recently, Carolyn Steel (in Hungry City, 2008) argued that the freedom to not think about where food comes from is a key feature of modern food consumption. Another feature of modern food consumption is the strong demand for animal-based products. With increasing affluence, the world's population consumes high and increasing amounts of meat, poultry, milk, and eggs; and puts high and increasing amounts of food, land, water and other resources toward producing it. About 40% of global food crops are corn and soy fed to cattle, pigs and chickens - of which about 4% are converted into calories eaten by humans. Somewhat paradoxically, (other) animals increasingly live long lives as pets upon which humans confer rights, privileges and emotions.

Human relationships with animals vary in scale and form; and have tensions, incongruities, and possibilities. To consider these openly is, however, difficult to do without raising ethical questions that are often divisive or abortive. Humans entertain wide-ranging beliefs as to what constitutes violence or cruelty towards animals; and whether and which animals should be afforded intrinsic rights. Nonetheless modern economic and legal systems mean many choices in this area unfold efficiently, and out of sight - that it is less provocative to not go into the details. Visser suggested that "these are things we recognize only too well - when we think of them. And we prefer not to think of them for long" (Much Depends on Dinner, 1987, p145). Intensive animal production in particular exposes contradictions in global scales of production and the local concentration of its effects. In Australia as in North America intensive poultry and livestock operations regularly generate local conflicts with responses themed on horror and monstrosity, a dynamic belied by the ever-increasing demand for low priced meat.

Goals, themes and topics of the track
This track invites papers exploring the extent to which non-human animals feature in development patterns, and the role of human ethics and emotions in determining the sustainability of this future. The track seeks contributions that profile and critically examine the role of animals, including but not limited to:

• Animal-based agriculture and the local and global pressures placed on land, food, water, biodiversity, human health, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions
• Meat and other animal products in human diets and as part of supermarket and fast food distribution chains
• The place of animal feed and animal products in the local and global economy
• Community and consumer responses to animal-based production, particularly to intensive animal operations (battery and broiler farms, piggeries, feed lots) and to processing facilities (abattoirs, rendering plants)
• The ethics of human relationships to animals: concepts of justice or welfare, and how different positions are rationalised in public discourse
• The economic, social, moral and environmental aspects of animals as pets
• Hunting and fishing: debates and policies
• Tensions between sustainable, ethical, and socially comfortable practices (e.g. organic recycling, kangaroo culling)
• Examples of innovation in sustainable and/or ethical animal-based practices and policies
• Animals in cities and in urban history: the process of separation of animal production from consumption, farm animals from pets, rural from urban, human from animal, wild from domesticated, and how these distinctions may change.

Please contact: Dr Elizabeth Taylor taylor.e@unimelb.edu.au

You may submit your abstract by visiting the Ex Ordo abstract submission system (you will be required to setup an account first): http://isdrs2015.exordo.com/