*Article* **'All Fishing Is Wildlife Poaching:' Nonhuman Animal Imagery and Mutual Avowal in Racing Extinction and Seaspiracy**

**David Rooney**

Moody College of Communication Studies, The University of Texas-Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA; David\_Rooney@utexas.edu

**Abstract:** Images of nonhuman animals may be effective tools in producing climate concern and empathy for animals, particularly if animals are shown in natural habitats. Visual and narrative analysis of the documentary *Racing Extinction* identifies a practice of selectively recognizing the individuality of certain animals. Despite emphasizing the intrinsic worth of often-marginalized animals, *Racing Extinction* reproduces the marginalization of domesticated animals raised for consumption and less charismatic marine life. A close reading of the film's animal imagery also reveals a spatialized bias—visualizing violence against marine life overwhelmingly in China and Indonesia and by comparison associating the U.S. with indirect climate harm rather than the direct killing of animals. Intertwining a decolonial ethic with a critical animal studies perspective, this paper reveals how disjointed imagery of nonhuman animal suffering facilitates racial scapegoating, masks the exploitation of marine life by the U.S. and partitions uneven ethical responsibilities towards nonhuman animals. This is contrasted to the documentary *Seaspiracy*, which advances a universal, non-speciesist ethic of "mutual avowal", contextualizing images of violence against marine life in a global frame.

**Keywords:** *Racing Extinction*; *Seaspiracy*; manta rays; animal imagery; colonialism; fishing; shark fin trade

#### **1. Introduction**

*Racing Extinction* (Psihoyos 2015) is a 2015 Oscar-winning animal advocacy documentary, named "Best Green Film of the Decade" by the Green Film Network, which examines mass species die-off from climate change, overfishing and the illegal wildlife trade—particularly in manta gills and shark fins. *Seaspiracy* (Tabrizi 2021) is a 2021 documentary that also heavily focuses on nonhuman animal protection (hereafter, "animal" will be used to refer to nonhuman animals, not human animals or animals generally) and environmentalism, rocketing to the top ten list of the most watched on *Netflix* only a week after release (Korban 2021). Controversially, *Seaspiracy* parted from celebrated animal advocacy documentaries in the last decade that focused on particularly notorious marine industries: the Taiji dolphin hunt (*The Cove*), marine park captivity (*A Fall from Freedom, Blackfish*), shark-finning (*Sharkwater*, *Sharkwater Extinction*, *Fin*) or plastic dumping (*A Plastic Ocean*). *Seaspiracy*'s criticism that places routine fish consumption alongside the Taiji dolphin hunt and plastic pollution has "bitterly divided the environmental community" between those who think that some form of fishing is ethical or sustainable, and those who do not (Steadman 2021). *Seaspiracy* and *Racing Extinction* are both somewhat distinct from the traditional wildlife/nature documentary, emphasizing both environmental protection and the moral worth of animals—a perspective still somewhat rare in environmental documentaries (Freeman 2012). Indeed, for those who long for films centered on animal justice alongside environmental harm without *Seaspiracy'*s radical rejection of all animal consumption, some have recommended *Racing Extinction* in its place (Narula 2021).

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**Citation:** Rooney, David. 2022. 'All Fishing Is Wildlife Poaching:' Nonhuman Animal Imagery and Mutual Avowal in Racing Extinction and Seaspiracy. *Journalism and Media* 3: 257–275. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/journalmedia3020020

Academic Editors: Carrie P. Freeman and Núria Almiron

Received: 2 February 2022 Accepted: 29 March 2022 Published: 31 March 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

*Racing Extinction* and *Seaspiracy* thus serve as useful comparisons to outline the intersections and tensions between an anti-speciesist approach opposing both use and consumption of animals as inherently unethical and an ecological approach that values animals primarily for their role in an ecosystem. Communication and media scholars have already noted that images of animals in visual climate communication are powerful motivators that can have vastly different results: an extension of anthropocentric principles applied to the environment or an environmental perspective unconcerned with animal suffering (Almiron 2019; Cole 2015; Freeman 2014). This paper contributes to these emerging conversations by turning a critical eye not only to which animals are featured more favorably in climate communication (as others have criticized the dominance of megafauna, see: Born 2019), but who is predominantly depicted as doing violence to animals. As graphic images of violence against animals may be uniquely powerful in shaping empathic response (Freeman and Tulloch 2013), I argue that it is particularly important for environmental communication scholarship to examine how animal imagery may highlight a selective concern for certain wildlife, mask other forms of environmental exploitation and reproduce colonial hierarchies of cruelty to animals.

This perspective is rooted in Critical Animal and Media Studies (CAMS), which advances an intersectional framework of "total liberation" (Nocella et al. 2015) that highlights the need for interspecies justice for both humans and nonhuman animals. CAMS argues that the human–animal binary informs and empowers colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism and more by discursively slotting certain populations closer to an "animal" nature that may freely face violence without regulation and others closer to a valorized "human" subject held in higher esteem. A CAMS perspective argues that environmental exploitation and animal suffering are inherently co-constitutive, noting that human/animal dualism empowers a larger human/nature dualism, producing a sense that humanity is "outside" and "above" the environment—facilitating environmental damage (Plumwood 1993). As the globe is careening towards disastrous climate change without sufficient response, there is an urgent need to foundationally rethink our relationship to nonhuman animals, the environment and ecological sustainability (IPCC 2021).

First outlining the relevant literature on animal imagery, this paper briefly summarizes *Racing Extinction* before examining its visual and narrative elements, identifying a spatialized hierarchy of responsibility for species extinction—primarily locating graphic images of animal killing in China or Indonesia and associating the West with indirect climate violence in the form of localized pollution or fossil fuel emissions. This distinction in emphasis locates violence against animals as inherently far off or distant (Born 2019; Whitley and Kalof 2014), replicating racial or national bias and mystifying the role the West plays in species extinction. I propose instead that visual climate communication should incorporate an "ethic of mutual avowal" (Kim 2015) that situates ecological harm within a universalist, non-speciesist framework that challenges the easy conflation of animal exploitation with particular locales and peoples. This is read through the example of *Seaspiracy*, which reveals a number of practical and theoretical insights for how to depict threats to animals in a more ethical manner.

#### **2. Literature Review**

Animal imagery may be a uniquely powerful tool to generate empathy for nonhuman animals and motivation for environmental action. As fear-inducing representations of climate change can encourage the impression that climate change is a distant temporal and spatial problem, there is a need to partner non-threatening imagery "with those that enable a person to establish a sense of connection with the causes and consequences of climate change in a positive manner" (O'Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009, p. 376). Animal images may offer this sense of connection to personalize the abstract issue of climate change (Manzo 2010), connecting its effects to the fate of individuals in specific places (Born 2019, 2021; O'Neill 2020). In films, animal imagery functions as "a key component in the structure of human responses towards animals generally, particularly emotional responses" (Burt

2002, p. 11). Animal portraiture has been found to heighten feelings of empathy and kinship through selective anthropomorphism (Amiot and Bastian 2017; Kalof et al. 2011, 2016) while images of wildlife<sup>1</sup> in their natural habitat heighten a sense of sadness or concern (Whitley et al. 2021). For some respondents, images of human or animal suffering in wildfires were comparatively more motivating of climate concern than the destruction of property or smokescapes were (Duan et al. 2021), although other studies have found animal imagery without an empathic perspective failed to produce significant climate concern (Swim and Bloodhart 2015). Measurements of neural responses indicate that images of suffering animals (in this study: dogs) activated parts of the brain connected to empathic responses to human suffering (Franklin et al. 2013).

However, this empathic response may be limited in animal images that are disconnected from specific instances of human harm or in a remote location (Whitley and Kalof 2014). Environmental films risk portraying animals as "surrogate humans" in isolated and human-free environments (Huggan 2016, p. 16). Born (2019) noted that *National Geographic* portrayed polar bears as "anthropomorphized subjects of identification" and a "stand-in for humanity's problems", facilitating an abstract conception of a universal humanity reflected in the polar bear (p. 659). A focus on charismatic animals may reduce empathy for less charismatic species, obscure broader societal relationships that produce environmental catastrophe (Hansen and Machin 2008) and hide marginalized humans from the representations of climate change, such as Indigenous peoples in the Arctic (Tam et al. 2021). Although films may open up the ability for the viewer to empathize with nonhuman animals, empathic responses may also be limited by focusing on minor aspects of animal welfare, overlooking broader systems of violence (Aaltola 2014; Henry 2014).

Animals featured in climate visuals tend to be charismatic megafauna—penguins, polar bears, elephants, etc. (Lousley 2016), perhaps due to greater available information (Tisdell et al. 2004), similarity to humans (Gunnthorsdottir 2001), a sense of mammalian familiarity (Born 2019), facial signals and eye gazing reminiscent of human infants (Borgi and Cirulli 2016) or overall body mass (Gunnthorsdottir 2001). In particular, marine life such as hawksbill turtles and sharks tend not to be framed as charismatic animals (Tisdell and Wilson 2006, p. 154), although this may be changing due to the rise of ecotourism centered around particularly large elasmobranch species (Mazzoldi et al. 2019). For example, media coverage of species being considered for CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) listing tends to describe terrestrial species in more anthropomorphic or emotive terms (e.g., "cute", "intelligent") than were marine species (e.g., "critical ecologically") (Shiffman et al. 2021, p. 5). As pre-existing beliefs or values shape audience reactions to visual imagery (Domke et al. 2002), differing contexts or motivational cues might shape attitudes towards imagery of certain animals, although more research is needed (Thomas-Walters et al. 2020). For example, the shift away from ritualistic culls and extractive industries targeting dolphins and whales for oil and meat in some Western societies coincided with a greater value placed on dolphin and whale preservation (Mazzoldi et al. 2019).

This tie between extractive industries and changes in the ability of an animal to capture the public imagination may be explained by Berger's (1980) account of animal disappearance. Industrialized areas, disproportionately centralized in the West, encounter wildlife and domesticated animals less frequently as hunting and urbanization forcibly remove wildlife from previous habitats and animals killed for consumption are hidden from sight (Broad 2016). Adams (2015a) refers to nonhuman animals raised for consumption as "absent referents", an absence that disconnects the "thing" of a hamburger from the "someone" that was killed to create meat (pp. 59–61). The absent referent prevents the visibility of violence, shrouding animal killing behind "Ag-gag" laws and a discursive regime of objectification that divorces "meat" from the violence necessary to produce it (Adams 2015b). As contemporary Western culture most commonly encounters animals as images, the "discursive regime of wildlife photography" instead marks wildlife as a spectacle that is "more real (more animal) than the animals encountered in daily life" (Brower 2011, pp. xvii–xix, 196). Mitman (2012) reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that nature films make animals into "spectacle, rather than beings we engage with in work and play" (p. 206), revealing a voyeuristic desire to be close yet removed from nature (Bousé 2011).

Eco-film analysis has argued that ecologically minded cinema has an important role in advancing environmental justice, as a "tremendous amount of moral thinking and development of ethical feeling" happens while watching films (Brereton 2015, p. 2). As von Mossner (2012) notes, films concerning environmental catastrophe transform "abstract scientific scenarios" into relatable ethical stories about particular beings (p. 98). However, there is a risk that eco-films might result in fatalism on the part of the viewer, if they understand environmental destruction to be "outside human agency or responsibility" (Kakoudaki 2002, p. 121). Campbell (2014) offers a clear differentiation between passive experience films such as *The Day After Tomorrow* (which Mossner takes up) and the "call to action" of environmental advocacy or justice films, such as *An Inconvenient Truth* (p. 64). *Racing Extinction* and *Seaspiracy* might be more accurately grouped in the latter camp: both films call upon the audience to make significant changes they can enact—a new diet, sustainable consumption patterns, a call for political and local activism, etc. rather than passively awaiting environmental devastation.

As a result, documentaries featuring wildlife not only shape our understanding of animals or the environment, they also "frame the conception of the human", by forcing the viewer to consider life, death and ecological interconnectedness (Brower 2011, p. 197). As Chris (2006) argues, the wildlife film "is a prism through which we can examine investments in dominant ideologies of humanity and animality, nature and culture, sex, and race" (p. xiv). For example, the "empathic distress" from viewing animals suffer in wildlife documentaries (von Mossner 2018) might lead to empathic bias against ethnic groups seen as a common enemy (Hoffman 2001, p. 215). Likewise, the ability for an animal to capture the public imagination in media may be dependent on cultural and social particularities. Meta-analysis of the existing literature indicates that attitudes towards animal imagery may vary across cultural and demographic factors, particularly between Western countries and the rest of the world (Thomas-Walters et al. 2020). Sharks (particularly great whites) tend not to be considered charismatic animals but are often subsumed under a pseudoscientific "*Jaws*" narrative as aggressive killers (Cermak 2021; Le Busque and Litchfield 2021; Lerberg 2016). Despite the overwhelming dominance of this frame, sharks are increasingly becoming objects of concern, especially for Western subjects unaware of the connections between shark fishing and fishing for flounder, tuna or swordfish (Mazzoldi et al. 2019). Bloody images of sharks without their fins inspire a "visceral response" in Western countries that rarely encounter shark-based goods, heightening a focus on the fin-trade and displacing less visible forms of shark mortality, such as incidental catch (often referred to as bycatch) from other fishing industries and habitat destruction (Wilcox 2015).

Campaigns such as the WildAid shark-fin soup commercial have been criticized for generating concern for sharks by advancing an Asian Super Consumer stereotype (Margulies et al. 2019), which has been amplified by anti-Chinese backlash during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bergin et al. 2020). The Asian Super Consumer stereotype describes ecological campaigns that disproportionately focus on the wildlife trade in Asian countries (and China in particular), downplaying or ignoring the substantial role played by North America and Europe. Collard (2020) argues that the conflation of the wildlife trade with Chinese and Indonesian production displaces analysis of "colonial trade flows" from biodiverse countries towards wealthier nations—focusing on particular industries rather than the "top spots" of overall wildlife importations held by the U.S., followed by the European Union (pp. 12–13). Although it is true that there are many ways that regions can be destructive beyond wildlife imports (for example, local hunting, overfishing, or wildlife exports), the U.S.' outsized role in wildlife imports (as the biggest consumer of wildlife internationally) often means that wildlife products from Taiwan, Thailand or China are exported for US consumption (Olsen et al. 2021). It is also estimated that the U.S. is the largest importer of *illegal* wildlife products, although exact details of that industry are difficult to discern (Smart et al. 2021). In any case, my intention is not to argue that there are not intensively destructive fishing practices to be found outside of North America or Europe—but that the role of the West in marine destruction has been relatively sidelined in comparison to "notorious industries" in Asia. Instead, I believe that it is necessary to widen the scope of what marine practices are understood as destructive or "sustainable" as the poaching of wildlife from the ocean in the form of commercial fishing is always an act of tremendous violence and inherently ecologically unsustainable, even assuming an ideal state of best practices and regulations (McClanahan et al. 2021).

The recent focus on animal suffering in wet markets has made salient the interlocking and reinforcing nature of white supremacy and speciesism; selectively concerned with certain animals, China was depicted by some Western media outlets as both "the sole culprit" of the COVID-19 pandemic and uniquely brutal in the treatment of animals (Alonso-Recarte 2022, pp. 108–9; Chang and Corman 2021). Kim (2015) has documented a similar response to live animal markets in San Francisco, highlighting the disparate response to Chinese markets compared to Fisherman's Wharf, an upscale animal market that avoided controversy. Inspiring "a media firestorm in which the tropes of Chinese cruelty, transgressiveness, backwardness, and recklessness were given full play" (Kim 2015, p. 104), the interlocking nature of speciesism and racism reveals itself in depictions of the Chinese as "cruel and transgressive *like* animals and *with* animals" (p. 102). As Western violence against animals is hidden by transforming animals killed for food into absent referents and masking the effects of climate change on free-roaming animals (Almiron and Faria 2019; Whitley and Kalof 2014), a disproportionate focus on outside transgressors may have the effect of locating animal exploitation as primarily belonging elsewhere. In this vein, Muller (2021) has argued that colonial speciesism disparages non-Western populations as inhumanly cruel or unclean for actions that are routine but hidden in the West. As a result of this spectacle, non-Western populations may be placed generally lower on the "sliding scale" of humanity for their transgressive relations with certain animals (Muller 2020, p. xvii; Deckha 2008; Ko and Ko 2017; Ko 2019).
