Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Fig. 3 TBWA/Chiat/Day New York
Sad Stretch of Road, two stills from tv advert, 2009 TBWA/Chiat/Day New York
“capacities”, due in part to the philosophical
difficulties with ascribing them rationality or
powers of conceptual thinking. But possessing a
“concept of freedom” or no, it is not hard to see
that animals, when constrained, strive to be free
(Ingold 2000a; Jones, 2003). As Ingold notes, our
relations with animals have produced a whole
range of “tools of coercion, such as the whip or
the spur, designed to inflict physical force and
very often acute pain” (2000a, 307). The
presence of this need to coerce clearly reveals
the countering by the human of some otherwise
free movement of the animal. Williams adds the
point that such coercive practices often do, in
fact, recognise the sentience of the animal, a
recognition which can boost the success of
coercion (Williams, 2004). Successful coercion, of
course, benefits production, but as Carr states:
“coercion, it is all but universally agreed, is
antithetical to freedom. To be coerced to do (not
do) something is to have one’s freedom
abridged” (Carr 1988, 59). What this highlights is
the tenuous nature of the links between
our valuing of animals and the matter of their
capacity to be “free.”
Interestingly, so-called “human” capacities
have, in turn, informed the very concept of
“freedom” itself. Kant, for example, and very
influentially, argued that it is only in the rational
actions of a moral agent that true freedom can
exist (Kant, 1959). Philo and Wilbert point to this
“long-standing human belief in a basic distinction
between” the rational human and “base passions
and instincts,” which, they observe, “allegedly
obliterate a being’s potential for agency” (2007,
14-15). This provides a curious situation, in which
what we may actually desire animals to be free
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from is the very idea itself that they cannot be
free.
The next two adverts provide a means to
consider the “free-agency” of animals that
lie outside our direct containment or control:
Michelin’s “Sad Stretch of the Road” and LG’s
“Clever Elephant”.
Overview 3: this rather gruesome advert
features a “sad stretch of road” littered with “roadkill”
casualties. As a pink rabbit begins to cross the
road one dark night, the headlights of a blue car
rapidly approach. Will the rabbit be killed? No –
because the Michelin Man throws out a set of
tyres for the blue car, enabling it to screech to a
halt and leaving the pink rabbit unharmed.
Comment 3: What is striking about this
advert is that the agency of the animal manifests
at the point where the car responds to it by
screeching to a halt. When learning to drive, we
are taught, in relation to the UK’s Road Traffic
Act, [ii] not to swerve or stop for animals such as
badgers, foxes, rabbits etc. for fear of
endangering “persons.” If in swerving for an
animal we harm a “person,” we have driven
“dangerously,” which amounts to a criminal
offence. This advert therefore appears to suggest
that animals might be “persons” too.
Overview 4: Here, an elephant steps
gracefully through an Amazonian forest
landscape. We watch as he or she reaches a tall
tree and proceeds to climb up it, step by step,
branch by branch. Reaching the top, he or she
emerges from the canopy to encounter a vast
and beautiful vista of the landscape at large – a
view from on high.
Comment 4: In climbing a tree, the
elephant breaks out from his or her own