As actual #love is a form of elation in the freedom of another or others, I often wonder about people whose avowed love for animals is actually a statement of their misanthropy in which they can only have relationships with what they can control through cultivated dependency.
For those curious about where this reflectio is coming from, I just spent time watching 4 episodes of #TigerKingNetflix. What is striking is that the owners of these private zoos treat their lovers as they do their exotic animals. Their "love" is ultimately abusive.
So much good stuff to analyze in the #TigerKingNetflix documentary, but I'll hold back on intellectualizing it. It is, thus far, GREAT television--not "art," but just, as the saying goes, a guilty pleasure.
For those curious about a little more, my position of actually loving animals involves an elation in their living their lives in the wild or their world instead of the narcissistic fantasies of people's homes or, as we see in #TigerKingNetflix, cages.
Where, in the end, can most animals go? Bénédicte Boisseron's observation of animals having to move through the human world as creolized creatures is already here.
cup.columbia.edu/book/afro-dog/…
cup.columbia.edu/book/afro-dog/…
Zoophilism is not accidental in a world that massacres Black and Indigenous peoples; the narcissism of white supremacy is the belief in a special alliance between nature and whites; thus the only real wild become those who resist them; hence the obsession with guns & policing.
The crazy stocking up of guns among many white Americans when Obama was in the white house and now with the COVID-19 pandemic along with the growing instances of in effect racial lynch mobs reflect this mentality. Psychoanalytically there is a connection from gun to tiger, etc.
The (heterosexual) polygyny, (homosexual) polyandry, and more in #TigerKingNetflix unveils psychoanalytical connections, rich with totemism, between hoplophilic zoophilism and misanthropy zoophilia steeped in a mire of malignant narcissism. In short, must-see television.
What a time to be watching such desperate efforts to control nature with rationalizations of "love" when we are dealing with a pandemic reminding us that nature--whether in the form of exotic pets; the climate; or microscopic viruses--doesn't give a damn about us.
