Many critics have pointed to the Cartesian dichotomy between soul and body as the moment when our mechanistic view of animals emerged. Berger writes that Descartes “bequeathed the body to the laws of physics and mechanics, and since animals were soulless, the animal was reduced to the model of a machine” (Berger 11). While Berger effectively views the human and nonhuman relation as on a linear downward spiral, Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation depicted a history of human and nonhuman relations that was more versatile. Like Berger, however, Singer isolates the Cartesian mechanistic view of animals as an indelible moment. Descartes’ study of physics led him to determine that everything consisted of matter and was governed by mechanistic principles, operating like a clock. The exception, he argued, were humans, who contained souls and consciousness—features that are not reducible to material nature. Without souls, Descartes argued, animals were automata, which, like clocks, respond stimuli of pleasure and pain mechanistically (Singer 24). Singer points to this moment as pivotal in the distance humans feel towards animal suffering. He describes the process in which Descartes nailed live dogs to boards and performed vivisection to examine their blood flow (Singer 27). Singer argues that this mechanistic view of animals was eventually overcome by the very systematic procedures it enabled. That is, through rigorous close examination of animal and human bodies, physiologists discovered how similar these bodies actually were.
Although the Cartesian view of animals has been dismissed by science, its ideological imprints leave indelible traces on many animal populations. In his article “Picture Book Animals: How Natural a History,” Leonard S. Marcus draws on Berger to attribute Descartes’ creation of the human-machine dualism as the moment when animals were pushed into the machine category and thereafter excluded from the human domain. This division from machines created nostalgia for the paradisal pre-industrial world (Marcus 129-130). Marcus writes, “As the innocence of childhood was asserted by Rousseau and others, childhood came to be sentimentalized. Adults, especially of the middle class, began to regard their own childhoods with nostalgic longing. Thus increasingly animals and children seemed natural companions for each other” (Marcus 129-130). Berger fittingly describes how both animals and children were used as machines in the first stages of the industrial revolution (Berger 13).
This mechanistic view of animals still resonates most profoundly with regards to dairy cows. The cow operates as a machine. Unlike meat animals, dairy cows are not raised for slaughter and consumption. Dairy cows are raised to perpetually pump milk. Instead of functioning as products in themselves, dairy cows have the mechanisms necessary to manufacture products. Each dairy mother is a self-contained bodily factory. This mechanistic view of cows develops itself in the slow-moving, expressionless depiction of cows in children’s literature.
