Around my neighborhood in Brooklyn this time of year, the lost-pet posters appear. Lost cat, or, more often, lost dog. It's usually photo, description, advice ("he's shy, won't approach strangers"). It's sad to picture someone who took the trouble to put copies of that poster up on lamppost after lamppost, baking in the heat with a pile of papers flapping in the wind. Fighting their despair and fear.
I feel bad for them. I had a dog go missing for a few days when I was a kid, and it's awful. Knowing your beloved animal is scared and desperate. The clock ticks the moments of your loving routine — breakfast, belly rub, walk, ball — and adds each to the crushing list of things that failed to happen.
These things can end happily. As a kid, I got my dog back, when some kind people brought her to our door and she panic-slunk back into her home. For a few months last year, my son and I wondered about the fate of Pickles, a lost dog from our neighborhood who kept getting new posters and seemed never to be found. Pickles did get found, though, miles away.
But people's concern for animals is a curious thing. As Hal Herzog writes in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, it's not consistent — not even for a single species. Some dogs get MRIs and cancer meds. Others get tossed out onto the highway. Maybe people in some later era will puzzle over our incoherence, our incompatible understandings of what animals are and what we owe them.
Those understandings are so incompatible that it's a shock to see them conflated. A shock that makes you think — about this particular inconsistency and about what others might exist in your allocations of care and indifference.
Some artist in my part of Brooklyn came up with this ingenious way of making two common and inconsistent understandings collide.
This is their work:
As you can see, this person has cleverly taken the lost-beloved-animal form and applied to the animals no one loves — the ones people eat. Despite my having separate categories, when I saw this I was forced to consider that there is no difference between animals I love (furry, cute, helpless) and those I eat (ditto, ditto, ditto).
This is not a vegan screed. I eat animals. My reasoning is that once we've accepted to exploit them for our own lives, there is no point in making fine distinctions. Having a pet cat — confined, discouraged from natural behaviors, neutered — is kinder in the moment than eating it. But it's still taking over the beast's life and doing with it what I please. And as I am not prepared to give up pets, animal research and agriculture (where even growing a field of plants to eat involves killing animals), I am not prepared to give up meat. I don't think. I am not at ease with my thoughts on this one, so, comment please if you don't agree.
The point of this post, though, isn't to get into that debate (though you can if you like in the comments). It is just to note why I think this bit of art works: It makes plain an allocation of indifference that I normally I leave hidden in some fold of my mind. I'm indifferent to a lot of things, and I am also indifferent about that indifference — I don't care that I don't care about certain matters. Until an artist or an agitator or an artist agitator comes along to point out the stupidity of this indifference.