By Bianca Rati
When I was 10 years old, I received a partial scholarship to study in a private school for rich kids. As my name (Bianca) prophesied, I was a very white girl, almost albino, with short hair at the nape of my neck, gaping and crooked teeth, glasses (at a time when it was ugly to wear them), and an extroverted innocence. I experienced hostility from my classmates from the day I arrived, with my beautiful Hello Kitty backpack of which I was very proud; but I thought it was just a matter of needing to make friends.
The most popular girl in the class had her birthday one month after the start of school. Her family had a farm in a more rural town in the countryside, where my mother was born and where I still had family members. The plans for the party included a bus that would take all the kids to the town where they would spend the night. Because my parents didn't know anyone, they didn't let me go, but I had shared with some classmates that I had family members in the town. On the Monday after returning from the party, my classmates approached me saying, “Bianca, we had the chance to meet your relatives on the way to the farm!” Confused, I replied, "How so?" One of them, already looking at the others and laughing, replied, “Didn't you say you had family in town? We saw your relatives, the white cows, on the road. What is it like being related to cows?” I didn't quite understand why being called a cow was humiliating, but I felt humiliated. That nickname haunted me during the four years I studied at that school. Just when I thought they had forgotten, it returned.
In my last school year I met my relatives, the cows, in another form because my family moved to a rural area due to a job opportunity for my parents. The rural colony where we were living was known for the production of milk and dairy products, especially cheese. Immediately beside our house was a pasture inhabited by a herd of dairy cows. My room was strategically next to my new neighbors. I saw them move, I heard them talk and moo as they carried on a routine of their own. Studying madly to get into college, I spent hours in my room, and my studymates were those cows. Even then, I never went to the fence to say thank you for their company. I still didn't want to be associated with the cows.
It was in a therapy session four years later that my psychologist highlighted the link of this childhood story with cows and made me think about what this word and what this animal meant to me. From that moment, I began a journey to reconnect with cows. But it was only after two more years that I started to really get involved with the issue of farmed animal welfare. Although, I can genuinely say that living with my cow neighbors shaped and transformed me. Noticing their routine, observing their way of life and behavior, and perceiving their presence tore the veil of separation between my human experience and the farmed animal experience. Are we really that different? Or as the Bible accounts, are we fellow creatures created by and worshiping the same God?
When I was becoming vegan, struggling to give up milk and dairy products, I discovered that cows are amazing, beyond what they produce. I found that dairy cows, like other mammals, only begin to produce milk while pregnant and are able to give milk only after they give birth. This means that heifers are constantly subjected to being impregnated outside of their will via artificial insemination. In this endless cycle, they are exploited to exhaustion. They are separated from their babies as soon as the calves are born so that the milk can be consumed by humans rather than the babies they birth. Heifer and calf, mother and child, cry and scream in despair as they are separated. At the time, I had no idea that this was the reality of my neighbors. Because my house was just next to the pasture and not the farm operations, I didn't hear the screams and cries, I didn't see the rape that was likely occurring on the property right crossing the street. But I also never asked myself what happened to them when they weren’t in the pasture. What they go through is hidden in plain sight.
Today, I think that the veil between my neighbors and me that was eventually torn was part of a dissociation that I was taught for years — an abstraction of the animal as a beloved living being, an abstraction of the animal as Creation like me. Many animal activists point to this phenomenon: we fail to connect the products we buy in markets and stores with their origin through a process of dissonance orchestrated and perpetuated by capitalism. The dissonance is so great that sometimes the food industry places images of seemingly happy animals on their packaging, causing consumers not to think about the animals’ lives or make a connection to their death. Such disconnection is required in order to produce such deceitful packages. Think about it. Incidentally, this is true of the suffering and exploitation of human and non-human animals, as well as the entire earth.
One of the typical dishes of Brazil, especially in the Southern region where I live, is “churrasco,” a type of barbecue. In this meal, various types of animal organs and body parts are prepared in stone ovens over charcoal. One of the typical body parts included in the churrasco is the chicken heart. Whenever they were served in my family, I remember someone making the morbid joke: “And to think that each heart comes from a whole chicken!” That is, each heart means the death of a chicken. The joke was met with the slightly embarrassed laughter of the group, and it has always made me uncomfortable. I could never eat chicken hearts. Since I was very young, I refused, saying they looked like small human hearts. But today I see this familiar joke differently. Like it or not, this joke also breaks the dissonance and dissociation because for a few seconds we were all led to think about the chickens and their lives. Even if the joke didn’t lead any of my relatives to stop eating the hearts, somehow, it led us to the recognition that the chicken too had a life.
Vaca (heifer) and galinha (hen) are also words used in Brazil in a derogatory way to offend people in femme bodies. They have a sex-shaming connotation, which I don't believe my classmate knew at age ten, but he already knew that word would mark me negatively. A mark of shame, a mark of a femme body that, similarly to the bodies of cows and chickens, experiences commodification. There are heavier words in the Portuguese language, swearing and profanity, but it is quite revealing that the way the culture sees these animals also aligns with the way women and girls are perceived.3
The image of a hen-God changes everything. That day when I was editing the podcast, this image helped me free myself from a heavy anguish related to the idea that God was male and possibly a reflection of patriarchal domination. This image helped me understand a God who has warm and safe wings, with a fierce look of determination when she sees danger heading toward her chicks. The image of God as a mother hen changed the way I see God, beyond any one gender and transcending human form, yet tenderly feminine and mothering.
But in the last few months, participating in the CreatureKind fellowship and having the opportunity to promote many conversations with Christians about farmed animal welfare, I have realized that there is something even deeper in the image of God as a chicken because that image is provocative and even uncomfortable. It introduces us to a God we lock in small cages at the service of our whims. Such an image makes us realize that we are the image and likeness of God who also projects herself as a chicken. This image reminds us of that lost connection, the connection that we are all Creation, and we’re all beloved creatures.
The abstraction of the human with the rest of nature is a product, mainly, of colonization and white supremacy, which stole and killed to suppress everything that was different from itself to be able to own everything. When I think about how humans today can reestablish a meaningful connection to Creation, I think of those who never lost it. When I think about what it means to understand oneself as part of Creation and fellow creatures, I remember the speeches of the Krenak indigenous people who spoke about Watu, the Rio Doce, which is a river in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that was poisoned by the sludge of ore tailings from the Samarco company in 2016:
If God is a hen, I am a heifer. This connection demonstrates a missing link of harmony,5 a missing link of coexistence, a link that needs to be reconciled. I present this reflection to summarize some of the many expressions being shared throughout ministries, like CreatureKind, that focus on the welfare of farmed animals. This ministry area does not exist without a call to reconcile the lost connection with the rest of Creation and the natural world. And to start the process of reconnecting, maybe we can start by asking ourselves: how would we treat animals, farmed and other, if we saw God in them and them in God?
2. It is important to note that there are proposals for neutral language in Portuguese, discussions that are led especially by the non-binary trans community. This community has proposed several formats of neutral pronouns, and some parts of society (especially the LGBTQIA+ community and allies) have increasingly tried to adopt these solutions.↩
3. Carrie Hamilton, “Sex, Work, Meat: The Feminist Politics of Veganism,” Fem Rev 114, 112–129 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-016-0011-1. Carrie Hamilton highlights that, although commodification is something experienced by femme bodies, especially BIPOC femme bodies, we must be careful with this comparison, particularly when it comes to comparisons with sex work. As she puts it, "What marks the commonality between animal labor and human sex work is not any fundamental similarity in the category of work performed, but rather the frequent denial of the labor itself” (Hamilton, 14).↩
4. Amynoare, “Krenak - Vivos na Natureza Morta,” directed by Andrea Pilar Marranquiel, November 22, 2017, documentary, 13:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ng52AN3bmI.↩
5. Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012).↩