Giant Armadillo

TATUAÇU means "Big Armadillo". It refers to the Giant Armadillo Priodontes maximus. Threats include poaching, black market and groups which use it as a supply of meat. Animals such as those are nocturnal and act solo, at day they remain in underground tunnels, mostly inactive in the sunlight. This is a classic threatened species category, where the so-called autoctonous, traditional lifestyle is easily a factor which corroborate to the black market, for people in such condition aren't exactly set apart from the global capitalism, but rather peripherical. They're also not without intent of their own, and what is tradition and was considered "survival" becomes just a poor excuse for the continuation of traits which enhace the suffering of all the involved in this chain of production, or rather supply, as albeit widespread, the species isn't particularily endemic, but living to grasslands and smaller forests.


Animals are sentient (capable to feel and experience positive or negative events, having wills and personalities, self-conscious in some cases, sentient [1] in the case with all animals) individuals, and can't be treated differently of other ethical subjects in spite of that fact. For short, integrity and sustenance must be respected, sought after, and when seemingly impossible in our individual or collective effort, reduced, prevented. Absence of critical thinking or resources (anyone with political or economical awareness know that what it takes to do effective help requires gigantic effort, and to waste it all away is most easily) plus aggregating negligence from a generation to the next has hugely invisibilized most of interest in either understanding to evaluating their sentience (as the common factor to which we ourselves are regarded as subjects with rights) into oblivion, as matter of fringe movements kept so because of series of factors. Thus, the term "animal" not only become a language-related derogatory element, it becomes a collective term which concern such unmeasurable strata of sentient life as if evaluating for a sole "unit". Not unusual is it to have them compared as other forms of non-sentient life or elements as if pieces in a system. Couldn't be farther from truth.

My interest with the following art has been to show at least a facade to introduce the slightiest sense of reality we perceive to these individuals. That said, the focus has been mostly on the unity of "species", specifically, South American ones (given it was first released in a local event). That is at large far from desirable to consider them solely by the species classification factor, for we are tainted from the beginning with common sense of evaluating more one or another due cultural and traditional accumulative values, which can be easily put in critical thinking when exercising reason. That critical thinking effectively disrupts such sense, which is further repeated in most campaigns concerning them as another "element" category, the abstract notion of environment as a being, a "common good" larger than the interest of individuals which supposedly "compose" it. Abstracting and personifying a collective to bet on the rescue to care and evaluation of many unmeasurable beings doesn't necessarily affects them for the better, that's why most bio-centric lens fail the understanding of animal rights. For that, one should note the difference with environmental campaigns and animal rights.

Outside of that, the concurrent discussions between welfare, treatment, many measures on suffering and such in the management of animal as product, or as source of product evaluates mostly the product rather than the sentient individual. Individual this that becomes as 'abstract' in a perceived sense as in the "environment" facade. Able and full of it's own interests of self-preservation and seeking enjoyment in life, animals are no different on that (we're animals!). So instead of failing to see and ignoring them as mere abstractions (both quantified as exchangeable numbers, or as semi-mythical ephemeral elements of nature), the treatment which goes on par with the rational exercise in the animal rights movement is (or in my mild manner, should be) as follows, considering them individuals like our own, able to feel things positive and negative, learning by experience, wit self-consciousness, and sharing mutual interests or learning cultures of their own as well. That said, the many adversities and aforementioned factors which hinders this perception may become clear in all the shapes. So called"cultures" and "tradition" may represent but a single aspect of a much larger speciesist [2] structure we're eager to reproduce and recreate by mere common sense, in an unethical easy way out from responsibilities.