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Brett Mills
ANIMALS ON
TELEVISION
THE CULTURAL MAKING OF THE NON-HUMAN
Animals on Television
Brett Mills
Animals
on Television
The Cultural Making of the Non-Human
Brett Mills
School of Art, Media and American Studies
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Two things kickstarted the ideas that led to this book. First, teaching
about documentary on the master’s-level module ‘television and reality’
at the University of East Anglia led to discovering that my students had
completely different views about wildlife documentary from all other
genres, and that intrigued me. It was finding material that we could
subsequently discuss in that class that made me realise how little is
written in my field about animals and animal representations. So thanks
to the many students who took that class as they constituted the first
place I could try out some of these ideas.
The other thing was the mauling I suffered on various media outlets
in 2010 when my article on the ethics of animal documentaries was
picked up as a news story. I spent two days fielding ceaseless media
requests, and not sleeping much. The nadir was when Gabby Logan,
on BBC Radio 5Live, asked me if I got embarrassed watching mice
having sex. My media training hadn’t, unsurprisingly, prepared me for
such a query. That interviewers could simultaneously be so angry and
so flippant in their questioning made me realise how troubling thinking
about animals is, and that this was therefore worth pursuing. So, in a
roundabout way, thanks to Gabby Logan and all the other people who
asked me lots of really stupid questions during that time.
For the great Facebook Peppa Pig debate of May 2016, I thank
Ciara Conlon, Jayne Dinnin, Anna Fry, Cerian Hutchings, Inger-Lise
Kalviknes Bore, James Leggott, Cerian Price, Helen Wheatley, Ceri
v
vi Acknowledgements
Wilcock and Jeremy Wilcock. Their advice and input meant I didn’t have
to watch all 249 episodes of that darned programme.
Thanks to Michael, Sarah, Spencer and Tanner for lending me their
house (to get some writing done) and trampoline (for avoiding writing)
in the summer of 2016. And thanks to Milo the Labrador for looking
after us while we were there.
Thanks to the library at the University of East Anglia, and those who
work in it. A safe haven from the tribulations of other aspects of my
occupation, it also has gorgeous, calming views from the third floor and
reminds me why I do this job.
Thanks to Su Holmes for discussions about children’s TV; Rayna
Denison for help with literature on animation; Alison Winch and Ben
Little for even more conversations about Peppa Pig; and Eylem Atakav
for welcome support throughout.
Thanks to Butch, Wilson, Aesop, Tim, Lucy, Mark and Julia for days
of Sunday pints and dog rambles.
Many animals have been a part of my family, ever since I was
a child. My earliest memory is of being in the alleyway at the side of
my childhood home, standing next to Flash the German Shepherd,
at that time so much taller than me. So, thanks to him, and to Dolly
Mixture, Jack of Diamonds, Jinty, Trudy, Terri, Chilli, Max, Ted, Tash,
Eric, Meg and Emmy. And a dog helped me write this book: Bailey, the
large-headed Labrador, forever a calming presence.
My companion on these animal adventures—and who spends far too
much time being traumatised by The Supervet—is Sanna, who has had
to put up for years with my ruining every television programme with
an animal in it. Thanks to her for enduring that, and for e nduring the
UK’s bewildering and enraging decision to tell her she’s not welcome:
Beschissenen Brexit Befürworter.
Contents
1 Introduction: Dumb 1
Out and In 1
Four Dogs 2
Noticing Animals 7
The Animal Turn 11
Dumb 19
Television and the Public 26
Unseen/Unheard/Unsmelled… 32
References 34
2 Human 45
Alien/Human 45
The Species Problem 48
The Dominance of Science 52
The Humanities and Humanism 56
Posthumanism 61
Case Study: Peppa Pig 66
References 72
3 Wild 79
The Best Television Series Ever 79
Documentary 81
The Social Construction of Nature 87
The Anthropocene 91
vii
viii Contents
The Anthroposcene 95
Case Study: The Hunt 98
References 106
4 Zoo 113
Standard Practice 113
An Unnatural History 115
To Be Seen 120
For Their Own Good 128
Case Study: Our Zoo 134
References 141
5 Pet 147
In the Home 147
Animal Ownership 149
Animal Labour 155
Dominance and Affection 160
Case Study: Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan 166
References 173
6 Meat 179
A Chilling Artefact 179
Making Meat 182
Cooking Meat 188
Case Study: Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast 195
References 203
Index 269
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Dumb
Out and In
They’re out there. Snuffling and shuffling, growling and howling, feeding
and breeding, fighting and biting, the planet teems with non-human beings.
And they’re in here too; from the pets humans share their homes
with, to the insects and spiders they might do so less willingly, to the
organisms on and within the body that humans couldn’t live without.
The state of being human involves being enmeshed within the existences
of thousands of other living things.
But they’re in here in other ways too, playing their lives out on-screen as
television’s domestic locale brings a host of animal representations into the
home. They’re being troublesome pets on Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan
(National Geographic Channel/Nat Geo Wild 2004–12) and It’s Me or the
Dog (Channel 4 2005–8), and comedy sidekicks such as Salem the cat in
Sabrina the Teenage Witch (ABC/The WB 1996–2003) and Patrick the
starfish in SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon 1999–). They’re crea-
tures of wonder in natural history documentaries such as Planet Earth
(BBC1 2006) and Deadly 60 (CBBC 2009–12), creatures to be feared
in drama series, including Beasts (ITV 1976) and Zoo (CBS 2015–), and
creatures to compete with in Man vs Fly (Tele5 2015–) and Man vs Beast
(Fox 2003–4). They’re on-screen in animated form in I Am Not an
Animal (BBC2 2004) and Animals (HBO 2016–), or in puppet form in
The Muppets (ABC 2015–) and Mongrels (BBC3 2010–11). They’re teach-
ing children how to count on Sesame Street (NET/PBS/HBO 1969–)
Four Dogs
To begin, consider four dogs:
part of the process because ‘The Civil Aviation Authority was ada-
mant that we minimise changes to the plane’ (quoted in Cookman
2016). Despite Shadow’s success, Stanley Coren, an emeritus pro-
fessor of canine psychology at the University of British Columbia
in Vancouver, said he thought it was unlikely that dogs would ever
fully replace humans in aeroplane cockpits. (Sherwin 2015)
Isis, Matisse, Brian and Shadow. Four dogs whose television appearances
spilled out of their respective programmes and became discussion points.
But why might this be? How come these representations became worthy
of debate when so much television slips by unexamined? Is there any-
thing particular to debates about representation when what is being rep-
resented is an animal, as opposed to a human? And what frameworks can
we use to think about animal representation? Do we straightforwardly
use those already in place for the study of media, or does the animal’s
non-human status require new methods, new approaches? To begin
thinking about these questions, here are some initial responses to the
stories of Isis, Matisse, Brian and Shadow.
First, the stories of Matisse and Shadow show the extent to which
animal training functions as a form of entertainment for humans.
Furthermore, that training is something whose outcomes are assessed,
with Shadow successfully completing the aviation task set for him, and
Matisse (or, as it turned out, Chase) deemed comparatively more tal-
ented than the other entrants in that year’s series of Britain’s Got Talent,
including the human competitors he triumphed over.
Second, these are animal representations that foreground the speci-
ficity of the individual. That is, while it is common for genres such as
wildlife documentaries to represent an individual animal as an exem-
plar of a species as a whole, here the specificity of an individualised liv-
ing being is vital for the representation on offer to make sense. Chase
standing in for Matisse demonstrates Jules’s ability to train dogs just as
much as if it had been Matisse walking on the ropes, but the upheld
audience complaints show that it was Matisse specifically who was being
voted for. The deaths of Brian and Isis are the demises of specific animal
characters, and their emotional resonance relies on their individualised
nature. And Shadow competes against other dogs to become the one
tasked with flying the plane; the programme’s jeopardy is about whether
he manages this as much as it is about the trainers’ abilities in getting
him to do it.
1 INTRODUCTION: DUMB 5
circulate within, and are given meaning by, sociocultural discourses that
make certain kinds of reading more likely, more inevitable and more
powerful than others. Paramount among these is the marker ‘animal’
itself, and the ways in which it sits in relationship to the dominant cat-
egory, ‘human’. The examples above show that while animals may ful-
fil a range of representational purposes their function is typically to say
something about humans; it is particular human cultures that have a
concept of witchcraft, or luxury and privilege, or national identity. While
the autobiographical work referred to above represents concerted efforts
to build alternative representational strategies which place the animal and
the human in equivalence (or, in some cases, abolish these distinctions
all together), it remains the case that, for the most part, ‘the animal is
always present as a marker of human status’ (Fudge 2000: 31).
Isis, Matisse, Brian and Shadow are, therefore, enmeshed within, and
the result of, human representational strategies. The public discussions that
ensued from these representations occurred because, in their own different
ways, they troubled the purposes to which animals on television are typically
put. In doing so, these representations became highly visible, motivating
discussion and debate, until their problematic implications were resolved.
For the most part, however, animals on television remain largely unnoticed,
despite their abundance across programmes, channels and genres.
Noticing Animals
The aims of this book, then, are to demonstrate the necessity to notice
animals; to offer frameworks for doing so; and to examine the implica-
tions of having done so. The argument here is not simply that examin-
ing the representation of animals might be an interesting, provocative
or nice thing to do, enabling the production of another academic book
discussing television. Furthermore, the aim is not to suggest that exam-
ining animal representations is one more thing that the study of televi-
sion could engage in, adding to the list of analytical topics, such as the
study of gender, genre or narrative. It is instead to argue that none of
the things that existing studies of television do can be done unless animal
representations are accounted for. The study of animals is inextricably
intertwined with what the analysis of media representations already does,
and the purposes to which media analysis is put cannot be achieved if the
frameworks employed focus solely on the human. Indeed, by ignoring
animals, such frameworks have rendered their goals impossible.
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