Eva Meijer

Eva Meijer

by | Dec 13, 2022 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“There is a huge amount of information about the ways in which animals express themselves, speak to each other, mourn losses, fall in love, do all of these things that we tend to think of as solely human…”

Eva Meijer is at work in her living room. She researches, writes, paints, photographs and makes music around the themes of animal and human language, politics and communication. Her PhD thesis in philosophy, titled 'Political Animal Voices' (University of Amsterdam) was awarded the Praemium Erasmianum Dissertation Prize in 2018. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. North Holland, Netherlands. 2022. Sabina Diethelm / #unboundproject / We Animals

A philosopher, prolific writer, artist, and singer-songwriter, Eva Meijer seems to have her fingers in every pie imaginable. When I catch her, she has just returned home to the Netherlands from Poland where, she tells me with surprisingly little fanfare, she may have become the first person on Polish television to advocate for better care for animals.

She is both forthright and self-effacing, describing her role simply as “to say what needs to be said” to promote a different way of thinking about and relating to non-human animals. “I’m not afraid to use words like ‘language’ or ‘culture’ [in relation to animals],” she explains.

Growing up with animals, Meijer felt a special connection with them early on, becoming vegetarian when she was eleven. She began writing songs and poems at fourteen and studied singing and art at the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of the Arts, before pursuing philosophy.

Whether academic or artistic, for Meijer each form is simply a new language through which she can give meaning to different experiences. “I’m lucky that I have many ways of ‘singing the world,’” she muses, reciting French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

“Philosophy is a lot about being critical of existing hierarchies and violence, but also about showing the world differently,” she explains, “so in that sense I think it’s not so different from art because you can make people look at things that they take for granted and reconsider it.”

Her PhD thesis and resulting books Dierentalen (Animal Languages) and When Animals Speak explore the use of language in animal groups and between human and non-human animals, making the case that animal language is, in fact, political.

“Bird Cottage”, one of 14 books written by Eva Meijer. She researches, writes, paints, photographs and makes music around the themes of animal and human language, politics and communication. She has written 14 books which have been translated into over 20 languages. North Holland, Netherlands. 2022. Sabina Diethelm / #unboundproject / We Animals

“There is a huge amount of information about the ways in which animals express themselves, speak to each other, mourn losses, fall in love, do all of these things that we tend to think of as solely human,” Meijer explains.

“It changes everything, because our societies are built around the idea that humans are the only rational animals, the only creators of meaning, the only cultural animals, social animals . . . [and] the other animals have been excluded from so much of that.”

Her post-doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam takes these ideas a step further. Since many animals have clear ideas about how they want to live, Meijer argues that their capacity to make decisions about that life and to maintain it should be respected and protected.

“If you have a perspective on life and it matters to you, then it should matter democratically too,” she argues.

Humans, for our part, need to engage in conversation with other animals as active participants in their own existence. This means listening to what they have to tell us about their own experience, about the kind of future they want, and what relationship—if any—they want to have with us. The recognition of animal agency, believes Meijer, “is one of the most important tasks of humanity and justice.”

Whilst this might sound idealistic or outright strange to some, Meijer emphasizes that there are already places where this co-creation is happening, particularly outside of Western social constructs.

“There are indigenous communities that have different relations with non-human animals and see themselves positioned differently with regard to them, and already accept a lot more of their agency,” she explains.

She gives the example of a community in Indonesia that hunts together with crocodiles, representing a kind of understanding around co-existence and resource sharing. In an urban environment, this might look like decolonizing landscapes, reducing the number of roads and infrastructural developments, and relinquishing land back to other species.

In developing different stories about humans and animals and how we can live together, says Meijer, “the presence of actual animals is something that matters a lot.” She currently shares her home with two dogs, Romanian strays Olli and Doris, mischievous ex-laboratory mice, and three rescued guinea pigs.

Olli in particular, she tells me, is “great to think with about these questions, because he’s been living on the streets for five years . . . It was never a question of me dominating him, he’s his own person. Even if I would want to possess him in some sense, it’s simply impossible.”

Meijer gives frequent public talks, where she meets many people who are hungry for a different relationship with animals.

“People feel that there’s something wrong with the way we treat animals, but at the same time they’re very accustomed to it, and when you speak to them about it, then it helps them to articulate that it’s not normal,” explains Meijer. “This is why I like speaking about language, because it always has this element of wonder in it.”

Despite the violence our societies enact on animals, she also holds a lot of hope in the power of activism.

“We can participate in a struggle for change, and this will make a difference,” she insists. “Even living differently is a form of activism, so my whole existence feels very activist.”

When she moved a few years ago to a rural part of the Netherlands, Meijer noticed that many frogs and toads undertaking a centuries-old migration to food sources were being hit by cars while attempting to cross busy roads. In response, she began a “frog and toad group” through which locals assist the frogs and toads to travel safely from gardens to larger ponds.

This kind of localized activism can be powerful. In the two years the group has existed the narrative in the town about frogs and toads has shifted from one of apathy to one of care.

“These are all small-scale experiments to become more attentive, more aware of the fact that we share this planet with other animals,” says Meijer.

“I honestly feel that we are not here for ourselves but that the whole meaning of life is to be a good person for others and to make a change in the world for them, and when you can do that, that’s a gift, and also humbling.”

Meijer’s most recent novel, Zee Nu, was published in March 2022 by Uitgeverij Cossee. 

Written by Anna Mackiewicz
Photography by Sabina Diethelm

Sunaura Taylor

Sunaura Taylor

by | Apr 3, 2022 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“…There is a lot of shame around needing help, being a burden on other people, on your family, on the economy, even. But we all go in and out of being dependent and live on a spectrum of dependency. We are all interdependent.”

Sunaura Taylor

Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, academic, and an activist for both disability rights and animal rights. Her artwork has been displayed internationally and she is currently an assistant professor at UC Berkeley where she teaches classes in animal studies and environmental justice.

Taylor utilises her lived experience as a disabled person to present new ways of thinking about disability and animals. Through each strand of her multifaceted work, she examines and challenges what it is to be human, what it is to be animal, and how the exploitation and oppression of both are entwined.

Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia with three siblings, all unschooled, a radical form of child-led home-schooling based around the idea that children are inherently curious and naturally want to learn. The freedom bestowed by this “unique and pretty wonderful childhood” allowed Taylor’s sister to make a discovery that changed all their lives: that meat is animals.

“That initial instinct that there was something strange or uncomfortable about eating animals really led to all of us, in various ways, investigating the eating of animals as a political issue,” she says.

Today, all four siblings are vegan.

While Taylor had recognised and rejected the oppression of animals at the age of six when she became vegetarian, it was another 17 years before she connected attitudes toward disabled people with attitudes toward animals. Once she had begun to recognise how the oppressions of ableism and speciesism are “entangled,” she set out to investigate them more fully through her art and in her extraordinary book, Beasts of Burden.

Beasts of Burden examines how and why we value or devalue beings based upon the capacities they do or do not possess, or the assumptions we make about whether they possess certain capacities. Those who are seen as lacking language, or rationality, or the ability to walk on two legs, or the ability to be physically independent, for example, are devalued and their marginalisation or exploitation is excused, sometimes even justified.

Taylor explains that ableism (a term that names the discrimination and prejudice disabled people face, and the privileging of able-bodied norms), does not only impact disabled people; it also shapes our perceptions of and interactions with nonhuman animals. This, she says, not only shows through the exploitation of those deemed to be lacking certain abilities, but also through concepts such as dependency, which is fraught with negative connotations, and is often associated with both disabled people and domesticated animals.

Disability gives Taylor a different perspective from the mainstream experience and offers a unique way of living creatively outside the patterns shaped by a predominantly able-bodied society.

“We live in a country that is proud of the independent, self-made person,” she says, “the person who pulls themselves up by the bootstraps, and there is a lot of shame around needing help, being a burden on other people, on your family, on the economy, even. But we all go in and out of being dependent and live on a spectrum of dependency. We are all interdependent.”

Perhaps this is the main message of Taylor’s book: that both human and nonhuman animals are vulnerable and dependent, and we need to learn to value care and interdependency.

Dependency is just one of the issues that Taylor has debated with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, and an influential voice for animal rights. Singer’s well-documented views on disability are not just offensive, but damaging, having driven a wedge between the animal liberation movement and disability activism. By guiding these social justice movements to embrace their commonalities and unite for liberation, Taylor’s work is helping to heal that rift.

“There is a lot more recognition that there are other ways of thinking about animal liberations,” she says, “ways that are entangled, in fact inseparable from human liberation, so that makes me really happy. And even if people don’t exactly know how to articulate that, or even if they don’t know exactly how they’re connected, there is a sense that they know that they are.”

Taylor’s influence on the animal rights and disability rights movements is profound, and yet it reaches much further. Through both her artwork and her teaching, she is challenging entrenched views right across society and offering a new perspective, an alternative future.

“I just taught a class called Thinking with Animals,” she says. “A lot of the students were science majors who did not take the class for any particular commitment to animal liberation, or even interest in animals, it just fit with their schedule. By the end they were so reflective on anthropocentrism and were critically thinking about how we think about other animals. I was blown away by the openness of the students and lack of defensiveness, and that was really beautiful and gave me a lot of hope for building thriving interspecies futures.”

Sunaura Taylor is currently writing her follow-up book Disabled Ecologies: Living with Impaired Landscapes. Her artwork can be seen at SunauraTaylor.com

Written by Kate Fowler
Photographs by Jo-Anne McArthur

Twyla Francois

Twyla Francois

by and | May 29, 2019 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“Painting allowed me to literally paint the images out, freeing my mind up to return to the field.”

Twyla Francois with Sully the dog

Like many activists, Twyla Francois can pinpoint the moments in her life that led her to animal rights.

One of the first was when she was 13. Growing up in a farming community in rural Canada, she joined 4H like most kids. She spent countless hours raising and getting to know her veal calf before enrolling him in the town fair, not understanding what would happen there. When she realized the man bidding on her beloved friend was the town butcher, she pleaded in tears to keep the calf, which 4H prohibits. She has no idea how she got a copy, but soon she was reading Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” and no longer eating meat.

Years later, as an adult, Francois was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery where doctors discovered stage IV tumors in her abdomen. She was an administrator at the University of Manitoba at the time. While working for the vice president of research, she’d seen documents detailing the university’s research on dogs, including where they’d come from – the city pound. Some arrived with name tags still on their collars. Francois spoke up to no avail, so she moved to another department at the university, but there her values were only challenged further.

Facing the possibility of death, she re-examined her life. While undergoing chemotherapy, she co-founded a small non-profit animal advocacy organization and threw herself into the world of animal rights, first as an investigator and then as an artist.

These two kinds of activism might seem like separate paths. But Francois says the first naturally led her directly to the second.

Twyla Francois – artist and activist
Dora the dog

Besides the research on dogs, what did you see during your time in academia that conflicted with your values?

Any efforts I made at challenging the university’s use of animals were quickly dismissed – the university relied on funding from the various granting bodies and wouldn’t do anything that would risk it. Eventually I felt I had to leave the job and moved over to work for the vice president of external relations, but things just got worse. The university accepted funds from all of the corporations no one else would touch, granting them the ability to rename faculties. (Monsanto’s – now Bayer’s – headquarters are still located at the University of Manitoba.) A large oil company happily accepted the offer and renamed the Faculty of Environment to the Faculty of Earth and Earth Resources, setting the tone that environmental protection would no longer be the primary mandate of the faculty.

A new Smart Park was built to commercialize research, including, of course, animal research, and special films were ordered for the buildings’ windows to prevent photos and videos from being taken, giving the impression of transparency without having to actually provide it. In Smart Park, researchers didn’t even have to release statistics on the number of animals they were using or what they were using them for because they were under private ownership. I cried on the way home from work every day. The cognitive dissonance became unbearable and my body forced onto me what my mind wouldn’t [when I got sick]. It ended up being a blessing in disguise.

Your 10-plus years as an investigator included top roles with Animals’ Angels, Canadians for Ethical Treatment of Farmed Animals, the Canadian Horse Defense Coalition and Mercy For Animals Canada, and your work led to facility closures, animal cruelty convictions, documentaries, government-commissioned research and animal rescues. Why did you stop doing investigations?

I started having more and more difficulty handling investigations as time passed. Part of it was learning the complexity of emotions farmed animals experience and understanding how much they must suffer in animal agriculture. Each time I would get to know a species through one I was able to remove and bring to my property to live out their life free from exploitation, investigations on that species would become more difficult. Eventually I got to know all of the species used in animal agriculture, making it nearly impossible to continue with investigations.

I also questioned whether what I was doing was having an effect. Initially, I had a strong belief that undercover investigations were the most effective way to bring about real change for animals. We put together complete evidentiary packages for law enforcement, and major media outlets provided extensive coverage. But while those releases caused a slight ripple in society, the response wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was devastating to find that the one thing I’d pinned all my hopes on failed. It was my answer to the doubts I’d always had about my previous investigations – that perhaps I hadn’t presented a full enough case or released it exactly the right way. With the undercover work, everything was right, at least according to what I felt was right, and yet it didn’t have much more effect than my earlier work had.

The argument that continued to hound us as well was the (false) claim that our findings were a one-off, and that all we did was expose one rotten apple in an otherwise unblemished industry. We couldn’t put out investigations fast enough to counter this argument and I realized undercover investigations weren’t the panacea I had believed them to be. What was needed were constant releases of evidence from multiple sources across the country, which is exactly what’s happening today and why we’re seeing such a massive shift in how Canadians view animals, along with a concordant increase in veg’ism.

Samantha the cat

What did you learn from being an investigator?

I learned from doing investigations in Canada that conditions for animals are much worse than any of us can imagine, and that while there definitely are some individuals who are sadistic and enjoy deliberately making animals suffer, the vast majority of those in animal agriculture aren’t intentionally cruel. They’ve absorbed the message that animals are less-than, or simply regard them as commodities. Others in the industry recognize that animals shouldn’t be made to suffer but fail to understand that standard practices such as separating calves from mothers immediately after birth are also forms of suffering.

I also learned that in Canada, government and law enforcement can’t be counted on to protect farmed animals. There are no governmental bodies that conduct inspections for compliance on farms and the animal welfare legislation that does exist exempts farmed animals, along with practices considered standard, such as castration without anesthetic or analgesics and the use of intensive confinement systems. So for the vast majority of a farmed animal’s life, they are completely without protection.

The two pieces of federal legislation that exist are for animal transport and slaughter at federal facilities, but as investigation after investigation has shown, these regulations are rarely enforced. Instead, the officials that are present are often involved in incidents of cruelty themselves or are so subservient to the workers that they are rendered ineffective. Inspections and enforcement are also becoming increasingly de-regulated. For example, in a recent access to information request, I saw that inspections of the unloading of trailers at a large “federally-inspected” pig slaughterhouse that used to be conducted by Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials are now done by plant employees, who, relying on their employer for a paycheck, are highly unlikely to find any issues of non-compliance.

Why did you turn to art?

I began painting shortly after becoming an investigator and did it as a means to cope with what I was seeing in the field. The imagery seared on one’s brain after an investigation can be haunting and difficult to shake. Painting allowed me to literally paint the images out and put them onto the canvas, freeing my mind up to return to the field.

Later, after many investigations and exposes that sadly didn’t lead to the widespread changes in consumer behaviour I was hoping for, I realized that we weren’t reaching a substantial portion of the population with our message. In particular, kind-hearted, sensitive animal lovers found the images too upsetting and turned away before absorbing the message. These were the very people most likely to make changes to their diet if they could connect with the message. I realized that art, with its ability to be less threatening, could be a way of reaching these people’s hearts. This is because of how subjective art is – we each see in it what speaks to us and feels personal to us. That leaves much of the interpretation up to the viewer who then feels a sense of discovery and ownership of making the connection. Psychological studies show that this sense of responsibility is a direct catalyst for changing behaviour.

And because humans are social beings and look to others to determine how to feel and react in ambiguous situations, which sadly is the case with farmed animals, my hope is that seeing someone lovingly providing water to a dehydrated sow or gently holding a piglet as one would a puppy changes how we view these animals. It reminds us that farmed animals are just as capable of suffering and just as deserving of our respect and sense of responsibility.

twylafrancois.com
Walter the dog

Discuss a painting of yours that is especially important to you.

“Free Me” is likely my most well-known piece. It features a pig in a dimly-lit concrete pen peering hopefully through a window out onto a clear, sunny day. As the viewer’s eye moves to the right to explore the darkness, the pig’s dead body, suspended for bleeding, comes into view. The painting came about after my first investigation at an assembly yard, where animals were temporarily housed while being marketed to slaughterhouses – in this case, thousands of miles away. The pigs were cull sows and boars used for breeding who had spent the majority of their adult lives confined to barren concrete and metal cages barely larger than their own bodies. When the pigs were loaded onto the large multi-deck trailers to be taken to slaughter, many pushed their snouts through the portholes of the trailer, trying to feel the sun on their faces. I realized it was likely the first and last time they would ever experience this simple sensation. In all of their suffering, they still had a desire to feel the sun on their skin. They had to strain for it, and many who were too sick, diseased or injured to reach the portholes weren’t even able to experience it. Their only certainty in life was their death which awaited them at the end of this journey as it had hung over them from the moment they were born. It was as inescapable as a shadow.

I never thought I’d release that painting because it was just too personal, but I eventually did and it became part of the Animal Activism Art collection in Stuttgart and is now on permanent display at Land der Tiere, the largest farmed animal sanctuary in Germany.

How do you think your art is making an impact?

I find that I’m reaching a completely different group of people than I did with investigations. It was only when I started releasing art that people from the small farming community I grew up in began contacting me, saying they’ve been following my work but didn’t feel comfortable contacting me until recently. That means a lot because I know where they come from and the difficulty in openly recognizing animals as anything other than commodities in an area that relies on that view. I’m always pleasantly surprised after exhibitions or when articles about my art have been published when people contact me to say they were inspired to make a change. The Recasting Series, which features women of all ages connecting with farmed animals in ways they would companion animals, seems to resonate with many people.

Twyla Francois – artist and activist

What is next for you?

There are a number of pieces I’m keen to do but have to wait until my technical skills are up to the challenge! I’d specifically like to continue adding to the Monkey Wrenching series, which features people of all ages actively liberating animals. I’d love to do a subseries of seniors liberating animals in particular, as I’ve found surprising support from this age group. No one is ever too young or too old to take action for animals.

 

Learn more about Twyla Francois and view her art at twylafrancois.com.

Photos by Jo-Anne McArthur. Interview and story by Corinne Benedict.