Edit | Huang Yue
Two young people, Liu Suliang and Hu Yueqing, from quannan county, Ganzhou, Jiangxi, are mainly engaged in breeding bamboo rats. Their sideline business is to shoot and upload them to the Internet after work to share their experiences and lives in breeding. From about the second half of 2022, the two released their series on the Internet under the ID of "Huanong Brothers", and then they became popular.
According to friends, the popularity of Huanong Brothers is mainly due to their strange "reasons for eating bamboo rats 100". The scenes they publish in the park are usually simple, mostly concentrated in several fixed places such as farms, rivers and farmhouses. More commonly, bloggers come to their farms and seem to choose a bamboo mouse at random. After some health analysis, they announced their ultimate fate for various reasons: "This bamboo rat has heatstroke, so there is no way but to stew it for him"; "This bamboo rat is too fat to eat, so it is better to braise it in soy sauce"; This bamboo mouse is round and lovely. It must be delicious Let's go to the riverside to roast bar. Then the camera showed everything. The bamboo rat, which was alive and innocent a few seconds ago, has been slaughtered and depilated, or directly cut into a vague piece of meat, quietly placed in a bowl, seasoned and waiting for cooking. This series of similar forms and different contents have triggered a hot onlookers effect, and the popularity of Huanong Brothers has also soared. By the end of 65,438+10 in 2022, Tik Tok10.8 million fans, Weibo10.3 million fans, and over 2.44 million fans, with a total broadcast volume of10.90 billion.
Undoubtedly, the somewhat clumsy eloquence of the Huanong brothers, the cute appearance of the bamboo mouse, and the fierce narrative and visual conflict created by "one second is cute, the next is dead" are all "interesting". But I have to say, in addition to laughing, these also caused some very regrets. In that small farm, in a world separated by hundreds of cement grids, as a bamboo rat, no matter whether you are strong or weak, beautiful or ugly, you may be caught by a giant hand falling from the sky at any time and anywhere, and you may be carried to the river with your tail between your legs. The camera is switched, leaving only a pot of bones.
Why is the slaughter full?
In fact, apart from bamboo rats, Huanong Brothers' creations also include all kinds of real and interesting rural daily life, such as planting elephant grass, picking chestnuts, making Ciba, eating hibiscus flowers, playing with dogs and making wine with centipedes. It can be said that on the one hand, they reproduce the vivid landscape of rural daily life through new media, on the other hand, they also open the unknown inner world of aquaculture and the dominant logic of this world to the audience. It is interesting how this seemingly "anti-eugenics" random massacre is attractive. How was it mediated and copied by new media and finally presented as a funny landscape? What do their behaviors and representations mean to people and animals?
A simple explanation is that in the story of Huanong Brothers, the slaughtering process of bamboo rats from animals to food was deliberately cut off. According to them, this process often lasts for more than an hour. After careful editing, the images between the living and the dead are instantly stitched into a whole. The experience brought by this contrast is that one second the bamboo rat is regarded as a cute little creature, and the next second he enjoys a pot of delicious food with peace of mind. It seems that there is no cognitive break, and the bamboo rat has experienced some painless death. From this perspective, all this may be a matter of visual effects at first. Except for the skipping of the lens, the death of the bamboo mouse is folded in the compression of time. But the problem is that the viewer's sensibility, the imagination of death, and the question of whether the bamboo rat will feel pain in the process of being slaughtered are also folded up.
In the eyes of some animal rights activists, this problem is precisely the key point for human beings to put their own interests first and treat animal "species" cruelly. It is true that human beings have more rationality and self-awareness, but human beings and animals have the same moral significance in their perception of happiness and pain. When humans and animals feel the same pain, so does moral evil. In other words, although the Huanong brothers can breed bamboo rats and shoot them, there is no difference between humans and bamboo rats in their perception of sharp blades. Therefore, no matter who this knife falls on, the moral burden is similar. Therefore, it is very important to give animals "equal consideration"-this does not mean that bamboo rats must have regular physical examinations, take yoga classes and live in a 24-hour constant temperature room, but that human beings may need to pay equal attention to different species in their concepts and actions.
Although the bamboo mouse is cute, why is it difficult to love it?
If the reappearance of "short interconnection" effectively blurs the death process of the bamboo rat, thus dispelling the moral burden and related feelings that may be bred in the death process, then "why should we eat the bamboo rat?" has never been a problem for China people. As long as a little inspection, it will be found that the bamboo rat has been listed as "edible" in China tradition for quite a long time. Once viewed from this perspective, the record in Compendium of Materia Medica is almost a description of public comments: "Rats that eat bamboo roots are as big as rabbits, and their meat is sweet and tonic." Scholars are also obsessed with this species, Su Shi's bamboo? "wrote the poem," savage offer bamboo? As big as an angel. It is easy to get it from the roadside. "At that time, the proliferation of bamboo rats was evident; Su Zhe, on the other hand, used rats to compare his interests in Bamboo Rats with Two Rhymes. At that time, he felt sad: "Being a fool of Pepsi. Fat and thin are different ... once you are detained, you will be satisfied, stupid will be caught, and death will be caught. "
Why can't this stupid thing of "eating in my palm" arouse the sympathy of audiences like Su Zhe? Why are there no obstacles to distinguish the beauty of a bamboo rat from the delicacy of the same bamboo rat among the followers of Huanong Brothers? We can attribute all this to a consequence of the digital age: a flat landscape, a "simulation" that is more realistic than reality, or the disappearance of emotions in countless fragmented post-modernism. In the final analysis, the original sin of the bamboo rat is that as an animal, it is not a "companion animal" in the sense of Haravi. Different from dogs, bamboo rat is a species that evolved with human beings and profoundly shaped the identity of human beings. Therefore, the observation of the bamboo rat does not actually arouse the feelings of * * *, but separates the boundaries between people and the bamboo rat, between people and food, between people and non-people, and confirms the non-* * natural species relationship between people and the bamboo rat.
In this sense, even if the Huanong brothers don't deliberately cut down those scenes of slaughter, I'm afraid they won't get the cold shoulder and may be more popular. What's more worth thinking about is that if animal theorists start from Bentham's ideological logic, advocate taking sensory ability as the standard, and try to re-evaluate and then admit the main value of animals, then in the differences between people's view of bamboo rats and the death of others except people, people actually confirm their safety status, which makes animal classification effective again and frees themselves from the glare of animals, especially in the philosophical sense. This is an ironic situation: in a new interconnected space, in this era when it is announced from time to time that human identity is dying, subjectivity is dissolving, and human existence forms may become more diverse and rich, people are obsessed with staring at bamboo rats, confirming their identity from the life and death of a fool, and at the same time closing and retreating to face the increasingly blurred subject boundary of human beings and "opening" the subject.
Whether the online audience can't feel the pain of the bamboo rat, we can't jump to conclusions. Similarly, it seems that it is difficult for us to explain once and for all how people selectively ignore those deliberately concealed scenes of slaughter with lack of imagination. The crux of the problem is that people's ignorance of the animal breeding world shown by Huanong Brothers is their fear, rejection and re-embrace of the fact that "there are still species in this world".
It is obviously unrealistic to criticize why people who are not on the mobile phone screen can't have an affair with a bamboo rat in a corner of Ganzhou, because after all, not all bamboo rats will be taken to the kitchen by them-there are one or two white bamboo rats with good looks and outstanding fur, which have turned into new red and put on special clothes sent by merchants. Not only should rats and people recover their imagination of the fate of the weak except "me", but they should also accept the reality that "MengMeng's mortal affairs" is probably a safer and better answer between animals and food under the control of death.
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The above is about how serious the brother sheep and rats are, and it is about the sharing of bamboo rats. I have seen the similarities between mice and sheep, and I hope this will help everyone!