The Sacrifice

What is a cow? When I go to the library to find out, I encounter two very different species of books. There are practical, scientific works with information for herdsmen and farmers on how to breed, care for, and slaughter cattle. And there are ethical books for thinkers, which consider good or evil by contemplating bovine existence. The former books consider how best to produce meat and milk via cattle rearing. The latter use the cow to ask how the human should engage with the world. Is it right to be vegan or carnivore? Should you cull a feral cow who is loose in city streets, or should you worship her? 1

Both conversations – the practical and the theoretical – make sense of cow life as a tributary to human life. Cows’ bodies are tributaries of human bodies, as food, drink, and clothing. Our species have been closely, uncomfortably involved with one another for millennia: the way we co-exist shows us how we live and what we are. The cow is a bellwether or lightning rod. Not a wild animal nor a pet; cows and humans are not independent of one another, yet we are not friends.

In this text, however, I am interested in what a cow is. Not what it means, or what it should be, or how to sustain the cow’s life or how to end it, but the cow’s presence. To a human – to me – cattle feel peaceful, and quiet, and imposing or mildly threatening because they are so big, up close. In the barn, the air that surrounds them is richer and darker (with earth, dung, composting, and last summer’s grass) than outdoor or household air. Steam rises from their breath and piss. From day to day, they chew and digest, on repeat. From season to season, they move outdoors and then back indoors. From year to year, they breed, bear, and raise generations of young. Their experience of time must be cyclical. Any sudden or erratic movement feels oddly explosive in their calm space.

This peaceful, imposing, steamy presence is hard to grasp through art or in words. In Anglophone culture, humans understand themselves to be the owners of the cattle they live with. The English term for ‘cattle’ originated as ‘chattel’ – a word that referred to any kind of material possession, not distinguishing the bovine species in particular. Only later did the term ‘cattle’ evolve to become a specialized word exclusive to this animal, the cow, that has come into human possession.2 This is a creature who has, historically, been considered goods in this world: a form of material wealth.3

Art historians have traditionally interpreted the cow paintings of Aelbert Cuyp in that respect. Cuyp, who lived in Holland through the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, is known for the gorgeousness of his paintings, in which small groups of cattle stand or rest in softened light. The paintings are set in edgelands, in landscapes that would have been familiar to Cuyp and his first viewers – pools, marshes, and riverbanks, with the spires and civic buildings of a particular town or city glimpsed in the distance. These cattle, painted on commission for wealthy landowners, are conventionally understood to represent the wealth that moved through the Netherlands at the time. Their enormous forms emit a strong sense of satisfaction – enjoyment, even – that should feel wrong: the fat cows are the literal embodiment of their owners’ profits. However, they also feel peculiarly real and intensely close. In that, they recall the bulky wild cows of ancient art – the painted or modelled oxen, bison, and horned cattle whose physical presence looms over cave walls and casts shadows in the rooms of the pyramids. Cuyp’s paintings share an apparent interest in the cow’s physical life, in and for itself. He paints the evening glow alighting on these extravagant bodies, touching every veined or muscular bulge.

These are uneasy images: the assuring presence of the cow’s body is also an index, almost kilo for kilo, of the wealth it stands for. This tension arises in other contexts, too – the reality of this animal’s life is not easily separable from the qualities that it is, traditionally or obviously, seen to represent. A dairy cow is a metaphor for a mother and also an animal who exists in a zone of perpetual maternity. Her days and nights, from birth to death, are arranged around the project of milking. Cows represent suffering, and they do suffer. Whether as a sacrificial calf, a beef cow, a toreador’s bull, the cow assumes the role of victim against the human will to food and clothing, to spectacle, to power, or to leisure.

This complexity is concentrated in many works of art that look at cows. Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox of 1655 shows a vast, meaty body that has been flayed and cut open, the legs and arms spread and roped to a wooden beam. It’s painted roughly, in oils, so the surface takes on an actual texture of meatiness. The painting is not done on a grand canvas – it’s small, the size of a modest object you might have in your home: a fishtank, perhaps or a freezer- and the central carsass, concomitantly reduced, seems to absorb space. Its flesh gives off a faint, live glow in the darkened room. In that, it is like Rembrandt’s paintings of human beings: a portrait rather than a still life. It’s viscerally literal. Marbled flesh hangs from a rack of ribs, tissues have been peeled back, and internal sacs are exposed. It’s also, at the same time, an index or metaphor – a reference to other bodies, elsewhere. The painting would have been legible to contemporaries as an image of sacrifice, belonging within a long line of images of fatted calves and crucified bodies. The sacrifice itself occupies the same metaphorical and literal space: it is a symbolic event whose power is founded on the reality of an act of renunciation and pain.

Like Rembrandt, American poet Ariana Reines pays close attention to the materiality of slaughter in her 2014 collection The Cow. Reines precisely describes the procedures of the twenty-first-century abattoir: “[…] she is hung up by her hind legs and her throat is sliced open. She is bled on a moving conveyor belt.”4 Reines’ cow, like Rembrandt’s ox, draws this literal attention into a vexed relationship with its own image. In The Cow, the bovine body is a feminised body: a representative of those bodies, including and perhaps predominantly human bodies, that can be subjected to violence. The slaughtered cow represents the body that humans have granted themselves permission to harm. In this, although the cattle themselves are not necessarily female, passages on industrial slaughter circle around an analogy with feminine embodiment that is not quite shared ground nor quite a metaphor. “Women: They can’t get over their bodies.”5

Within the book, and in conversations about the book, Reines has described the role of the cow as that of a witness. The cow is mute, yet aware. Her life takes place within the black box, or behind the curtain, of the industrial system that runs her world, and mine. Since I started writing this text, I have been noticing the many representations of beef in images all around my city and in my life. There are pictures of burgers on billboards and in junk email. Little cartoon burgers on food packaging; cute burgers with smiley faces on keyrings. There is a huge picture of a burger on the side of the bus, and an even bigger picture of a burger on the bus stop. The burgers can be differently flavoured (sometimes they are plant-based), but as an image, they are always the same: round, damp, capped with brioche buns and layered with dewy lettuce. I see these burgers everywhere, with melted cheese, hot sauce, and a thin slice of fresh tomato. But the places from which these burgers emerge – the industrial shed, the animals with shit on their legs – are nowhere made visible. I could not count the number of times in my life I have consumed or worn things that have come out of the abattoir. I’ve never been in an abattoir.

The cow sees inside the black box because that is where cows live: the zones in the system that are set apart from human witness. This is a matter of presence. Reines’s comments on the witness reminded me of an interview with Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, in which she refers to this figure and what it means in contemporary life: “It seems to me that the central character of literature today is the witness. It’s the witness who sees and experiences an event while it takes place.”6

Alexievich is writing about human witnesses. Her books are works of oral testimony, in which the author records her conversations with people who have been through war, the collapse of an empire, or nuclear catastrophe. She describes the witness as a kind of vessel or even a technology. A means of capturing something and holding it before the distinct qualities of its specific history vanish with time. “Later, red fades into pink. Something happens to our memory. It’s not as concentrated. We don’t experience that same shock anymore.”7 If we take seriously Reines’s suggestion that the farmed cow is a repository of a culture’s violence, this raises a question: what does the cow see from inside the black box?