Philip Armstrong
Philip Armstrong (left) with Limbo, a rehabilitated ex-
battery hen
Associate Professor, School of Humanities
As the first of its kind in Australasia, the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury is contributing to the environmentally critical debate about our relationship with animals. One of the Co-Directors is Associate Professor Philip Armstrong, who first became concerned about the plight of animals whilst studying in Cardiff during the early 1990’s.
“I became interested intellectually, and ethically it started with environmental concerns”, he says. “I was reading a lot about the environmental crisis and at the same time there was a big issue going on about the veal crates – milk veal – and how it was being exported to the Continent. That type of veal production was not allowed in Britain but farmers were exporting their calves to the Continent so that it could be done there, and people were protesting.
“So I was reading about that and reading about the effects of meat consumption on the environment, and those two things kind of came together and I became vegetarian. I also became interested in human-animal relationships, but it wasn’t for quite a few years that I started writing about that academically or teaching.”
Philip’s field of research is about the role of animals in literature. If you have ever wondered why the rabbits in Beatrix Potter wear waistcoats, or imagined the moth-eaten pelt that is Barrabás in Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, then you have responded in some way to what animals in fiction reveal about humans. And in Human-Animal Studies, there is the opportunity to become an expert in what is still a relatively new field.
“What we’re now calling Human-Animal Studies is quite a recent thing”, says Philip. “In English, environmental politics is a longer standing influence – it’s sometimes called eco-criticism. But when it comes to thinking about animals, Donna Haraway was my first exposure to the idea that there was a critical theory being developed for that.
“Historically, this development has been very, very important, because in the English speaking world, literature was one of the main centres of gravity for critique of, challenge to, and resistance to the industrial revolution. Any kind of politics of care towards the non-human world tends to be reflected in literature in a really strong and quite fundamental way – particularly in the literature of the nineteenth century.
“In America you have people like Thoreau, who is quite fundamental to our environmentalist writing. Way back then, when the scale of environmental problems was obviously much less, but also much less talked about, you still have this perception that we pay for everything. Everything we consume, everything we create, we pay for it in quite a large sense – and bigger than just monetary cost. One of Thoreau’s insights is that the true cost of something is the amount of what he calls life that is exchanged for it.
“And that tradition continues into the twentieth century and beyond, and there’s a lot of literature registering in quite a deep and worried way our impact on the environment. Literature is quite sensitive to that.”
Philip notes that in the past some of this literature has been read too metaphorically, and that perhaps when “a poet talks about a storm – when they talk about disruption to nature – maybe that’s what they actually mean”.
While Philip is speaking, a poem about the clearing of the native bush (“A Bush Section”) by New Zealand poet Blanche Baughan comes to mind, and I mention it to him.
“In New Zealand colonisation, poets and writers, sometimes the same people who were responsible for the cutting of the forest, were also marking its loss and grieving it in their writing, so you get this weird attitude in the late nineteenth century of – ‘it’s inevitable, but isn’t it sad?’ – which is very closely related to the attitude towards Māori at the time”, he says.
As a member of SAFE, Philip has been following Mike King’s exposure of intensive pork farming closely. He believes that there isn’t strong support for such inhumane farming in New Zealand, yet “people will ignore it and buy it because it’s cheap”. Thus, exposure by a celebrity who once endorsed the product is more difficult to ignore than ongoing campaigns by organizations such as SAFE, or The Body Shop.
As all animal products have a very high food chain consumption and require vast amounts of water, fuel, plant material, and fertiliser (that’s before they are wrapped in plastic and transported to supermarkets), Philip’s vegan lifestyle is also an excellent way of living more sustainably. The farming of animals is “just an expensive way to consume”, he notes. “It’s a small mouthful for a very large foot print.”
With the application behind his convictions, that Philip is committed to sustainable living is evident in the candid way he notes one of his challenges.
“The thing that I struggle with is driving a car, and, you know, I take the bus sometimes. It takes an hour and I have to change at the station but I read on it, and I actually really like public transport – but I don’t do it very often because usually I’m rushing, and I’ve got to get something on the way home, or I’ve got to be home by a certain time and I haven’t got an hour to spare. Sustainability is quite tied up with time and doing things more slowly.”
If there is one thing that will slow you down however, it is reading a good book (especially on a bus), and it can also be life changing. As Philip says, “Literature should be the place where you can imagine doing things an alternative way.”
Profile by Sharon McIver