Staying With the Trauma: Animal Advocacy, Graphic Images, and a Multispecies Pedagogical Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

• In Event: 64.064 - Democratizing Social Media for Ecological, Environmental, and Social Justice in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The Western animal movements use graphic images on social media to expose egregious and hidden animal suffering. Here I consider intersections among trauma, animal activism, and social media from four imbricated vantages: The public, the activists, the human workers, and the nonhuman animals themselves. The troubling nature of graphic images suggests the need for nuanced discussion within environmental education and critical animal studies, in which pedagogues grapple with the emotional dimensions of teaching about destruction of the more-than-human world (e.g., Kelsey & Armstrong, 2012; Lloro-Bidart & Semenko, 2017; Martusewicz, 2015).

First, while showing graphic images can have a positive effect on the public’s comprehension of animals’ plight, in exposing trauma they can also traumatize. I build upon previous work on pedagogy and graphic animal imagery (Corman & Vandrovcová, 2014) to investigate how contextualizing animal practices, providing opportunities for dialogue and action, and presenting rich versions of animal subjectivities beyond suffering can help mitigate defensive and negative responses. Second, the challenge of using graphic images is further complicated by the trauma involved in documenting animal abuse. Indeed, post-traumatic stress symptoms are significantly more likely to develop in advocates when society fails to acknowledge the violence they expose (Bryant, 2006). Said differently, the traumatic consequences for advocates are exacerbated when society refuses to recognize violence done to animals as violence. Third, the difficulties associated with the production and distribution of graphic animal images are not limited to advocates or the public. Unfortunately, trauma is common for human workers within animal industries, such as slaughterhouses, where often racialized, working class, and poor people labour in quick-paced and dangerous environments (Pachirat, 2011). Research about the psychological impacts of their jobs is growing (see MacNair, 2015), such as studies on Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), “where the person suffering from PTSD has those symptoms because he [sic] was involved in creating the traumatic situation” (Dillard, 2008). Fourth, while animals are used in animal-assisted therapy to treat PTSD, their own psychological and emotional experiences of trauma are given scant attention. Further, disturbingly, numerous researchers actively harm animals to study PTSD (Whitaker et al., 2014). That is, animal models are designed to understand and treat PTSD in humans, while animals’ experiences of PTSD within industries are ignored despite the ethological evidence of animals’ complex subjectivities, including the immediate and chronic effects of violence (Bradshaw et al., 2005; Brooks Pribac, 2016).

Author

• Lauren Corman, Brock University