A “useful uselessness”: vegan geographies of bearing witness at the slaughterhouse gates
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Founded in Toronto in 2010, the SAVE Movement is a growing grassroots vegan activist network of nearly two hundred autonomous groups in over twenty countries. Central to its activism is bearing witness to nonhuman animals as they are transported into slaughterhouses; attempts to relieve suffering momentarily (with water); and bringing awareness to the plight of nonhuman exploitation and commodification through video footage, imagery, and testimony, with the goal of convincing others to practice veganism. Critics have suggested such activism is “useless” in that it does not “save” the unique animals in the trucks. This chapter responds by drawing attention to the effects of the heightened encounters and embodied contacts that take place in the charged spaces outside the slaughterhouse gates. While critiques of activism are necessary to understand its contribution to the goal of ending nonhuman exploitation, this chapter argues these acts of bearing witness are, rather, “useful” practices in troubling the power relations that the particular spatial orientation of the slaughterhouse sets in place. The vigils politicize the logic of human domination of nonhuman others on the verges (often literally) between everyday life and the industrial locations of nonhuman bodily appropriation. Employing autoethnography and participation with SAVE activists at vigils, this chapter interrogates concepts of ethical responsibility to propose the idea of a “useful uselessness” in relation to animal activism, noting how it opens out the otherwise highly-controlled and overlooked spaces of material entanglement between human and nonhuman at the intersection of slaughterhouse and public way.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it