This paper looks at some ways that animals and animal practices are represented in new media online. I will examine how these representations work to reinscribe race and white privilege in a supposedly disembodied environment. The slaughterhouse is an example of a racially-calibrated system where human and non-human bodies and labour are exploited for maximum profit. These economic practices are legitimized and reproduced online. Animal rights activism that rests on human/animal binaries or uses racism as a metaphor for speciesism fails to account for the ways that racism is reconfigured now. In so miscalculating the common embodied experiences of humans and non-humans in global capitalism, some animal activist campaigns risk opening rifts with allied oppositional practices that focus on the specifics of racism, globalization and economic inequities.

Animal practices reveal features of human cultures; specifically, how we position and discuss proximal animals such as domestic pets, urban wildlife, and livestock expose human geographies, power relations and processes of othering and ordering human as well as non-human bodies.

Wolch, Elder and Emil contend that in the colonial epoch, race was constructed according to regimes of animal classification and physiology and that now, in a postmodern context of global technologies, race is spoken through stories of animal practices. They write,

"The dominant uses of human-animal distinctions during the colonial epoch relied upon representations of similarity to animals to dehumanize and thus racialize particular cultural groups. The postcolonial moment is one that continues to use… human-animal boundaries to inscribe totems of difference)… animal bodies have become one site of political struggle over the construction of cultural difference and maintenance of American white supremacy. By scrutinizing and interpreting subaltern practices on animal bodies…through their own lenses, dominant groups in the US simultaneously construct others as uncivilized, irrational, or beastly, and their own actions as civilized, rational and humane." (Elder, Wolch, Emil, 81)

Since animal practices are culturally specific and carried by populations into transnational cities, these practices become focal points for reconfiguring racial and cultural exclusion in urban space, while simultaneously disguising the way these stories ratify white privilege, since the discourse is played out on supposedly 'neutral' animal bodies. At issue is not how coronaviruses jumped the species barrier, but how this narrative re-writes racism via animal practices, while simultaneously masking the cruelty and biohazards of animal farming and slaughter methods that are dominant in our culture.

In "At The Slaughterhouse Some Things Never Die", Charlie LeDuff describes the backbreaking, "stonehearted" work of killing, eviscerating and packing hogs. This article was written as part of the New York Times series "How Race is Lived In America" and it is widely-republished online. The grueling and dangerous tasks on the kill floor are divided amongst illegal Mexican immigrants, impoverished blacks and a few white prisoners according to a strict racial hierarchy. LeDuff reports on a massive slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in a desolate area where many illegal Mexican immigrants work to pay off those who smuggled them into the US. Even in desperate circumstances, most workers cannot last a year at these jobs. Human and non-human bodies are fused in a regime of brutal commodification, where exhausted workers claim that every bit of human and animal energy, even "the hogs' squeals", are extracted and sold.

(SLIDE : 19^th CENTURY TORONTO MEAT PACKING PLANT)

The 19th-century meat-packing plants of Cincinnati and Chicago were the prototypes for assembly-lines (this example is from Toronto). Overhead trolleys were employed to move carcasses from worker to worker, using chains and power to establish a steady rate of "disassembly" of the animals' bodies.

The regime of the assembly-line on the kill floor, the rate of the conveyor belts and hoists on the kill line - these are set to push bodies to brutal extremes of efficiency; bodies are calibrated by the technology of surveillance and production within a racially-determined framework.Isolation, high security measures and restrictions around entering, photographing or even referencing what occurs at these sites conceal their operations. However, the concealment effort also electrifies such images with voyeuristic potency, making them highly-charged currency in activist counter-narratives.

Authors including Burt, Alexander Wilson and notably John Berger have written about the emergence of motion pictures and how this has impacted on how we see (and don't see) animals. Berger asserted an inverse relation between animals and their images - as animals disappear from our everyday lives, animal movies proliferate. This "history of disappearance" as Burt calls it is rooted in 19^th century Britain, when legislation was introduced requiring that slaughterhouses be kept away from the public gaze, relocated outside of cities, secured and equipped with increasingly sophisticated surveillance regimes and technology. At the same time in the mid to late 1800's, animal bodies figured as key subjects of the burgeoning use of photography in science experimentation. Burt writes,

"the seeing of the animal becomes, in certain circumstances, a complex act that combines a preoccupation with the humane alongside codes that sanction animal killing or experimentation in areas outside the field of public vision." (Burt)

The internet is a key repository for explicit images of animal bodies in trauma and death. Although the intent is to spur activism, on the internet the pictures circulate in an unpredictable context of reception.

contains a warning that could easily be found on a porn site, reinforcing Burt's observations of the "voyeuristic" impact of viewing taboo images. The animalsvoice.com archive of "extremely graphic pictures" is presented without direct commentary except for its organization into categories, some of which are configured by race such as "Asian Pet Stores", "Dogs in China" and "Fiesta Rituals". The web site's agenda is stated in a poem that begins, "I am the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak." But who is speaking, and what exactly is "speaking" on the internet? Counter to the prevailing view of the internet as an "interactive" media, the database of images of animal suffering is posted and accessed without any interaction whatsoever. The internet is indiscriminate about who uses these materials and for what. Though there is a 'what you can do' page of hypertext links, there is no interaction between animal advocates and viewers during the viewing process, nor possibility for assessing the impacts or use of these potent images. Zizek has called this feature of the internet its "interpassivity" that may well deplete rather enable direct interaction with other activists and with animals.

The project's online version ramps up the controversy. The US Holocaust Museum asserts the photographs were obtained by PETA under false pretenses.

"The Holocaust on Your Plate" was condemned by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League; its director, A.H. Foxman wrote in a press release, "Abusive treatment of animals should be opposed, but cannot and must not be compared to the Holocaust. The uniqueness of human life is the moral underpinning for those who resisted the hatred of Nazis and others ready to commit genocide even today". While PETA might reject this reasoning as speciesism, the campaign's gloss over the uniqueness of the human suffering of the holocaust is a strategy shared by Neo-Nazi's and anti-abortionists; it trivializes race hatred.

Internet technology, specifically how we search for information on the internet, has ramifications for how we encounter racism and speciesism there. Lisa Nakamura describes how hate speech comes delivered in the deceiving guise of 'legitimate' home pages : "…when I recently plugged the search term Holocaust into a popular search engine, I was directed to a neo-Nazi website (and a)… memorial to the holocaust of abortion and its correlations with the Nazi holocaust." "The Holocaust on Your Plate" project's home page - MassKilling.com - no doubt will appear on the same Google search amongst the same ambiguous company.

In alleging that "all people are Nazis", PETA's campaign fuels stereotypes of animal rights activists as misanthropic and extremist, fears that have been mined in pop culture including the recent film "28 Days Later" (director : Danny Boyle), where animal activists/terrorists are responsible for unleashing madness-inducing bio-viral plagues. Clearly, PETA has exploited what has become familiar iconography for an agenda that, in drawing analogies, elides differences.

MassKilling.com's graphics evoke holocaust documentaries and books, with a black and red colour scheme and SS-style heading font face. The graphical interface and search ambiguities beg the question, how do PETA's web team construct the race of its users? A letter of support PETA features on the project web site is revealing. The author writes, "Hate that leads to violence, and even genocide, is more common than any of us would like to admit–in all parts of the world. But the Holocaust in Europe is the one that hurts the Western world more. Why? Because it happened "here," Not in Africa, not in Southeast Asia." The "here" the author speaks of is in fact the "here" of the web site - a "western, civilized" world, as juxtaposed with the "other world" of Africa and Southeast Asia. The western, industrial, efficient online geography is coded white.

By way of contrast with the PETA campaign, the work of US artist Sue Coe in the 'Porkopolis' series of drawings on her web site, depicts the co-suffering of animals and people in slaughterhouses. She quotes Adorno in the online caption for her drawing of pigs being dragged into the abattoir : "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." Coe toured slaughterhouses in Canada, the US and Latin America for several years. Photographs were not permitted in these places, however her sketchbook was perceived as innocuous; drawing, then, was instrumental in depicting a situation that could not be photographed.

As Claire Malloy writes, "The nonhuman animal body has become a contested site"; the genetic manipulation, lives and slaughter of livestock animals, for example, trouble the boundaries between bodies and technologies. This trouble has been taken up by a number of contemporary artists recently.

Canadian artist Jana Sterbak has used meat and more recently, a dog wired with a camera, perhaps to infer links between the instrumentalization of women's bodies and meat in the first case, and in the second, processes of animal experimentation and labour in the entertainment industries.

Damien Hirst has deployed animal bodies, and more recently, the wings of forty thousand butterflies, as components in his sculpture. Both artists rest on discourses of animal rights to ramp up tension in the work. As with the PETA example, the artworks evoke trauma and animal instrumentalization and beg the question - is the exposure of suffering a means to provoke controversy and media play, at the expense of more nuanced and compassionate engagement with non-human experience?

Animal bodies are invoked, claimed, represented and anthromorphically inhabited on the internet in such a cacophonous myriad of ways, some authors view "cyberspace" as a new wilderness, teeming with spectral non-human life in disembodied conditions that unravel the differences between speaking about, for or as animals. Such visions both suppress and rework the embodied experience of living creatures, both human and non-human. Perhaps anthropomorphic storytelling that fuses animal and human bodies can advance counter-narratives that challenge racism and race exploitation as it is reconfigured online.

Analysis of animal practice stories online must consider human and animal bodies in terms of labour. Animals and humans labour under shared conditions.The technologies of factory-farm animal life and death, like the technologies of end of life (EOL) care, operate in a racialized context, attached both to animal bodies and to workers including illegal and provisional immigrants on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. On the internet, as in the everyday world, communication with workers and animals is socially undervalued or declared impossible, rendering invisible the languages of touch, scent, glance, wakefulness, erotics and other embodied non-verbal non-textual languages. Online, images of graphic human and non-human suffering appear in an uncertain and impersonal context of reception, and may contribute to desensitization and passivity rather than activism. Animal rights activism must be alert to the ways that race is reconfigured online to shore up existing power formations, rather than regarding race hatred and its devaluation of life as a metaphor for anthropocentricism.