Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

the scaly rat seek to disturb the reader, reminding
of the many liminal spaces and creatures that
are part of home and in doing so generating a
sense of insecurity and disgust. This is a visual and
very catching reminder of the unhomey spaces
and creatures that are part of home. Similar
advertisements focused on cockroaches,
alluding to their: seemingly endless number of
‘friends’ lurking in cracks and crevices, behind the
fridge, underneath the cupboards etc. (Mortein
and Australian Home Beautiful promotion, AHB,
Jan 2001, p131), and offering products that “get
rid of insects you can see and those you can’t.”
(Mortein DIY control bomb, Feb 2005, p106). In
these types of advertisements, visual evidence of
pests is connected to home’s liminal places, the
ceiling and wall cavities and sub-floor spaces that
house electrical, water and waste infrastructure
and threaten to remind the homemaker of
home’s connection and dependence upon sites
of nature and waste outside home. The hidden
parts of home are foregrounded to play on the
uncanny sense that these spaces and unhomey
pests evoke (see Kaika 2004 and ; Power 2009a
for a broader discussion of these spaces as the
domestic uncanny).
A scientised death: Speed, time and
clinical precision
A third set of representations focus on the
practice of killing. Interestingly although terms like
killing and death are widely utilised within
advertisements, and illustrations of dead insect
pests are provided, the practice and process of
the death itself is absent. Further, the techniques
suggest a killing that is largely hands off: they do
not require that people come into contact (and
hence conversation) with the insect pests. These
are purified accounts of the killing process that
make the moment of contact invisible. This is in
contrast to the often very embodied and sensory
experience of an actual killing: the bloody residue
of a mosquito’s last victim, or the cockroach: it’s
popping crunch when squashed, or its body
slowed after walking over a barrier poison, or in an
animated frenzy after being misted with a
contact spray.
Advertisements create a sense of urgency
around pest removal practices through the
evocative descriptions of pest’s otherness, their
sneakiness and threat to home, as outlined in the
previous sections of this paper. The sense of fear
and insecurity ideally generated in the
homemaker are designed to precipitate into the
purchase of pest removal products and their
deployment within home. Marvin (2006) provides
146
a useful frame for understanding these killing
practices, counterposing what he terms ‘cold’
and ‘hot’ killings. The former are practices
associated with industrial agriculture and medical
laboratories where animals are removed from
their living space to the highly ordered killing
spaces of the industrial slaughterhouse or
laboratory. These places “are governed by rules,
routines, repetition and predictability related to
minimizing suffering but more importantly related
to efficiency and hygiene.” (Marvin 2006: 16).
‘Hot’ killings by contrast are associated with the
killing of pests and are argued to be driven by
“emotional reactions ranging from annoyance or
anger to repulsion and disgust.” (Marvin 2006: 17).
Marvin couches these ‘hot’ killings in a language
of violence, noting that the killing is “usually
expressed in terms of destruction, removal,
eradication, extermination, annihilation, or
cleansing” and uses “a variety of weapons, traps,
poisons, and other chemicals, and they may
even use other animals for this purpose” (Marvin
2006: 17). These ‘hot’ killings are characterised by
passion, aggression and pursuit and stand in
clear distinction to the “unemotional, clinical
killing” that characterise the former set of
practices.
Representations of pest killing in
homemaker magazines are of a third, or
intermediate type that combine Marvin’s
categories. The motivation for the killing is
represented as being underpinned and
necessitated by a sense of fear, insecurity and
disgust, a hot killing that pits homemaker against
a destructive and polluting pest. However, the
practice and moment of death is framed as one
of clinical, scientific coldness: a very modern
process in which animal and human are held
apart by safe, scientific and modern products.
Advertisements across each period employ this
idea though it is framed differently. Adverts in the
1950s emphasised products as new, scientific
and modern. These terms were used widely
throughout advertisements and the specific
chemicals employed in products were identified
to the reader. By contrast, more recent
advertisements focused on the clinical and tidy
nature of the process of killing, while connections
with science such as through the chemical
make-up of products is a notable absence. This
perhaps reflects the growing public distrust of
chemical use within home. Instead, the
intelligence of products is foregrounded, with
emphasis on the capacity of poisons and baits to
attract pests.
Building on contrasts between motivation
and practice advertisements across each period