I just finished the first season of Fargo and really enjoyed it.The story centers around an out-of-luck insurance salesman, Lester, who is forever being taken advantage of. The antagonist of the show is Lorne Malvo, a hit man, who seeds discord and destruction wherever he goes. Malvo’s modus operandi is based upon his belief that that man is still an animal. Thus, the norms that govern civil society do not apply to him. For him, the laws created by and for humans lack acknowledgment of the animal nature that exists within us. As Malvo sees it, even though humans have evolved from apes over thousands of years, the internal wiring which made us predators still exists today. Society tends to suppress that drive but, by so doing, actually cripples the spirit. Malvo is charming and very different from Lester which leads Lester to fall under his sway. Its a path that leads to eventual ruin. As the show progresses, Malvo kills, maims and terrorizes anyone who gets in his way until his own demise. In many ways, he is the ultimate evil character.
Malvo’s predatory nature, and what it represents, is meant to be a caricature of the evil that exists in each of us. The more I thought about the show, the more I thought about the many malicious and cruel ways we humans are capable of acting. In some ways we are not much better than him. Perhaps its particularly evident in the way we treat industrial farm animals raised for our consumption. I use to visit pig farms when I traded commodities and witnessed the conditions firsthand.
Pig farms are structured in such a way that the animals are raised in a clean and sanitary environment; but, only from a superficial perspective. They are housed in tight quarters with no ability to roam. They are fed solely to grow fat. They get little exercise and spend endless hours jammed together in pens. Expectant female pigs have it the worst. They are continually inseminated and bred to have more pigs. After birth, within weeks, piglets are separated from their mothers to begin their fattening process. The piglets cry for the mother as the mother mourns the loss of her children; yet, the cycle begins again and she is inseminated to start the process anew. Many of the pens are too small for an expectant mother to sleep on her side and so she spends months in constant pain with no relief. All the while, she endures this painful pregnancy only to have her offspring torn away from her within weeks.
Anybody who has had pets or been around animals can tell you that animals have feelings and emotions. Pigs, like humans, are mammals. They have family structures and protect their young. They evolved, like all other mammals, to live in groups and have a sense of structure. . Pigs, for that matter, are considered highly intelligent creatures. I can only surmise that many of these female pigs likely experience severe depression, even going mad, over the pain and loss they are forced to endure. Yet, this is how we humans breed and raise pigs. They are viewed as commodities without any regard for their emotional well being. To raise and care for them in any other way is not “economically” viable.
According to Charles Darwin, all species evolved over thousands of years. The result of what we see today is the strongest and most viable offspring of thousands of years of evolution. Yet the evolution of pigs (and most farm animals) has ceased. No longer free to roam, pigs are bred with one end: to feed humans. Similarly, chickens are bred and fed such a point they are barely able to move. For cows who produce milk, their udders can be so large they burst. For these animals their evolutionary journey has ceased. They exist solely for human consumption.
Which leads me back to Malvo.
The way we treat most factory farm animals suggests behavior more in line with Malvo’s rationale. We pride ourselves on not acting like him, but in many ways we are just as inhumane. In the movie The Cove, filmmakers exposed how a segment of Japanese fisherman kill thousands of dolphins each year in hopes of selling a hand-full to amusement parks for profit. The dolphins are trapped into a tiny area and then clubbed to death with bats. Like pigs, dolphins are treated as a commodity with no value given to their lives beyond the profit motive. Like pigs, dolphins have been shown to be highly advanced mammals with an intricate communication system and seem to be lacking and significant aggressive behavior.
While we tend to scoff at the characters portrayed on TV as “caricatures,” Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of Malvo as a corrupted individual is much closer to reality than most of us would be comfortable admitting. Look at the pornography industry. It is known to have predators much worse than anything writers can create. In the documentary called Hot Girls Wanted, filmmakers follow aspiring young porn stars in Miami and document the tragedies that befall them. These young girls are exploited and abused to such an extent that the majority of them are finished in the industry in under six months and left with lifelong emotional scars.
There’s a saying that fact is stranger than fiction. If we are honest about who we are and of what we are capable, we’d have to admit that its also crueler. Instead of carrying on about statues of Founding Fathers that “offend us” because they allegedly had slaves, perhaps we should use that same energy to look at how we enslave…whether pigs, chickens, cows or or aspiring porn stars.
It doesn’t take a village or a President to stop the behavior. It takes each of us, every day, standing for what we know is right and making certain we are not part of the problem.
Steve