The Internet Loves These “Gay Sheep.” The Real Story Is Much Darker.
The internet is going gaga for gay sheep of
late. Or, more precisely, the wool from gay sheep.
On November 13, the LGBTQ dating and sex app
Grindr put on “I
Wool Survive,” a runway fashion show in New York City that
leaned all the way in. There was a swimmer wearing stars-and-stripes Speedos, a
mechanic in black overalls unzipped south of his bellybutton, a football player
in only a jockstrap and a crop-top jersey (number 69, of course), and an
afterparty at The Eagle. All the pieces in
this celebration of camp were hand-knitted by designer-to-the-stars Michael
Schmidt out of wool sourced from Rainbow Wool, a German nonprofit that rescues
from slaughter male rams who prefer the company of other male rams.
The message was simple: Homosexuality exists
throughout the animal kingdom and should be protected and celebrated there too. “It’s an animal rights story. And it’s a human rights story,” Schmidt told The New York Times. This feel-good
narrative has gone viral, garnering glowing coverage from mainstream
publications like the Times, The Washington Post, and Esquire; fashion and art
outlets like Hyperallergic and Paper; and gay mainstays Out and Pink News, and blowing up
across social media.
But the tale of the rescued gay rams is not actually
a feel-good story. It only looks that way because the public is largely unaware
of how the sheep industry operates. Gay rams, who refuse to breed with ewes,
aren’t the only animals the industry deems unprofitable to keep alive. It
passes that same judgment on breeding ewes worn out from too many pregnancies
and older sheep who don’t produce enough high-quality wool. Eventually, they
all get sent for slaughter, just like most male sheep, the overwhelming majority
of whom are castrated as lambs and slaughtered before their first birthday. If
anything, the gay wool fashion show should make us think not about the good
fortune of the few rescued rams but about how animal farming systematically,
routinely, and often violently exploits the reproduction of all the animals it
encounters.
Sheep farming is among the smallest and least
industrialized of major livestock industries, in part due to comparatively low
demand for wool and mutton. Sheep, which need to graze for their entire lives,
are also a bad fit for the factory farm and industrial feedlot system that
dominates modern animal agriculture. There are about five million sheep in the United States and just over a million and half in Germany, where Rainbow Wool is based. Compare that to, respectively, 1.5 billion and 160 million chickens
in the two countries at any given time. But this doesn’t make the basic logic
of commercial sheep farming all that different from other forms of animal
agriculture.
In the U.S. and Europe, sheep are
raised primarily for their meat, called “lamb” when it comes from animals
slaughtered under 12 months. Farmers usually shear meat lambs prior to slaughter,
while sheep from wool breeds are culled for “mutton” when
their hair begins to turn brittle at around the age of 6.
But animal agriculture doesn’t just require
animal bodies and substances to be turned into consumer products, such as meat, wool, leather, and milk. Farmers must also exploit the animals’
reproductive processes to maintain and grow their flocks. Every ewe is a living
factory for future generations of sheep, while ram sex work is more
selective: Farmers only need one ram per flock, and can reliably mate a single
ram with as many as four or five ewes every day.
The other rams become what are called wethers.
They are typically castrated a few weeks after birth to prevent unlicensed
pregnancies, because they tend to be more docile than intact rams, and because
of the alleged superiority of their meat. Regardless, castration, not
breeding, is the typical ram destiny.
This is what one of us—Gabriel, a professor of
gender, sexuality, and feminist studies—has previously dubbed the “brutal, violent heteronormativity”
of animal farming: It’s not that farmers are intentionally hostile to gay
animals, but rather that all breeding livestock are ruled by the imperative to
breed or die, reducing them to their reproductive potential. This is even more the case in the factory farming that dominates meat production and makes
meat cheap. This model depends upon minutely controlling animal sex. Or, as the feminist
philosopher Carol Adams argues more forcefully, meat and other animal products require sexual exploitation.
Public discussions of agriculture mostly ignore
the details of breeding. Most people, and certainly those who traffic in
nostalgic celebrations of old-time farming, tend to present farming as a
business in which humans merely harvest what natural reproduction gives us. But
in industrial production systems, mating has to match the market’s schedule and
standards. Nearly all dairy cattle, swine, and turkeys are bred through
artificial insemination.
The details may ruin your next pork chop. In
most factory pig farms—as anthropologist Alex Blanchette’s work shows in uncomfortable
detail—mostly male human breeding technicians sit on the backs of sows, pound
their flanks, stroke their teats, and otherwise simulate the activities of
boars during mating to prepare them for artificial insemination with semen from
boars housed tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles away. Boar semen, in turn,
is harvested using mechanical vaginas, but human technicians typically must
stroke the boar to induce an erection before inserting his penis into the
contraption.
Such interventions in the sex lives of animals
are so intrusive and ubiquitous that the laws criminalizing animal cruelty and
human sexual abuse of animals—“bestiality” laws—had to be rewritten to include explicit exceptions for farmers.
But even outside the cruel industrial system,
most agricultural animals find their sexuality almost completely subordinated
to the dictates of the market. Rams that do breed with ewes do so under close
observation. Farmers carefully apply distinctly colored paints to each ram’s
undercarriage so that they can track which rams are breeding which ewes. Rams
that don’t spread their paint have no future. It is inapt to apply human
identity categories like “gay,” founded on ideals of sexual autonomy and desire,
to this system.
One in 12 rams are gay, coverage of the Grindr
and Rainbow Wool show has repeatedly
asserted. But where does this
estimate come from?
Scholarly literature,
cited in the New York Times article, purports to reveal “sexual partner
preference” among farmed rams. In those studies, tested rams were prevented from mating for around a week, and then they
were given the choice of two ewes and two rams restrained in a stanchion.
Scientists recorded the results.
It’s hard to know what, if anything, this
experiment shows. Even for humans, the word gay is slippery. It is used
interchangeably to describe three distinct things: behavior (sex acts), orientation
(sexual desires), and identity (the “kind” of person one is, where
sexuality is given special significance).
You can’t ask rams about their identities, and
we have no evidence that sheep ascribe any special significance to sex in the
way humans often do. Calling rams gay risks either imputing human thoughts and
feelings to sheep—what scholars call anthropomorphism—or distorting what people
mean by gay. Gay usually doesn’t just describe sex acts; it also encompasses
how gay people relate to institutions like marriage and kinship, and linked
resources and rights.
If we cannot sensibly talk about gay sheep
identity, perhaps we can think about gay sheep behavior, which is what the
cited studies examine. Same-sex sexual behavior is common among animals in the
wild, including among wild sheep. It is also visible on farms, as observant
farmers have been chronicling for ages.
In the most influential study
of the subject, “stimulus animals” (what they call the bottoms and a phrase that admittedly would look great on a cropped tee) were either those previously
observed to be engaged in receptive sex with other rams, and therefore deemed
suitable mounts, or those “test rams” that had already exhibited a
preference to top other rams. The study designers assumed that once a ram had
topped another ram it was suitable as a “stimulus animal.”
But this is a big logical leap. Defining sexual
preference exclusively in terms of “topping,” and not necessarily on willing
partners, is taking phallocentrism to the extreme. That’s how farmers think
about sheep sex, since they need to exploit it, but is that how researchers
should think about it? What if no rams like being topped? Perhaps some rams who
like to top ewes also like to be topped by other rams. Perhaps some rams would
simply prefer not to top or be topped by anyone. We cannot know from the cited
studies. If these rams are gay in the way most people mean it, we would need
evidence of both topping and bottoming, and other things besides, options the
studies fail to anticipate because they’re not actually designed to study sheep
sexuality. They’re designed to exploit it. This is what the Rainbow Wool
sweater hype ignores: Most of what we know about the sexual behavior and
preferences of farmed animals comes from research distorted by questions about
how to more efficiently extract profit from the loins and labors of livestock.
If the idea of “gay” rams is so confused, are
people wrong to want to save them? No. But that doesn’t mean Schmidt or Rainbow
Wool are a very good vehicle for this work, either.
Garnering support for farmed animals is
difficult and expensive, particularly if one wants to do something more than
just convince people to abstain from ordering lamb. As evidenced by the work of scholars like Elan
Abrell, sanctuary farms—those that save animals from grim fates in farming and
let them live out their lives as naturally as possible—take land, money, and
hard work and have almost no conceivable way of turning a profit. In this sense,
Rainbow Wool, in selling wool from the rescued animals so they pay their
way—and, yes, helping support queer charities in Germany—is a way of
commodifying animals as gently as possibly while saving them from the butcher’s
blade. And selling products means advertising, like having high-visibility
runway shows of gay fashions knitted from the wool of gay rams.
Anthropomorphizing animals as “gay” may be a
worthwhile first step in getting people to recognize the sexual exploitation that nearly all farmed animals endure. And in its own limited way, Rainbow
Wool does this. Buying some fancy wool is hardly enough to address the harms of
animal farming, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. When it comes to the
politics of meat, people often pit individual action against transformative
“systemic” change. In our forthcoming book,
we argue that it’s wrong to treat individual and collective actions as
either/or; we need both. Sometimes small incremental changes by individuals can
help create new norms that lead to policy changes and eventual structural
transformation.
Schmidt may indeed be doing some good, but
it’s not nearly good enough. In fact, the farm on which Rainbow Wool’s
gay rams are housed is also a commercial sheep farm,
where other sheep are sent to slaughter. “It is a great capitalist story
framed about being about gayness,” Carol Adams explained to us over email, of the Grindr fashion show. But “it doesn’t challenge animal agriculture in terms
of assumptions about the requirement that animals be productive; nor about
making females pregnant, nor about wearing wool.” Neither Rainbow Wool nor
Grindr responded by publication time to a request for comment for this piece.
Consumers moved by the Grindr show could buy
some Rainbow Wool wares, but they would do even better to send their money to a
sanctuary farm with a broader perspective on animals and the industry that
exploits them. And they would do better to educate themselves about how and why
animal farming operates as it does, and what actions we can take, alone and
together, to make it less harmful to the billions of animals it propels into
lives of suffering and exploitation.
