HORSE DISTURBER

-likes/follows from @serpentface (main art blog)

-I like wildlife biology and ancient history

Domesticated animals have a huge place in this as ANOTHER power dynamic in the bedrock of modern civilization, and I think even more starkly in industrial capitalist conditions which most people are living at considerable distance from non-companion domestic animals, cattle and chickens and pigs are mostly interacted with as consumer goods. The power differential is even starker when their role in your subsistence is very distant, the cow and chicken are no longer animals depended on very intimately and personally for a person's survival, they’re distant blips that produce goods for your gratification. Milk you buy at the grocery store is the singular artifact of the Cow that is discrete to the Cow that most people are interacting with, it is a live animal product so it may come with imagery of cattle on it without disturbing the detached consumer (while beef is more decontextualized, ambiguous slabs of meat in unmarked packaging), and so the default cow fetish is about hyper lactation and milk production, rarely meat and basically never labor. The egg is the main consumer artifact of the Chicken in a similar sense, so it’s the egg laying that gets picked up on, and the human body-adjacent breeding for giant breasts(/"breasts"). Pigs are the only livestock animal whose meat is the main subject of their petplay (though rarely in comparison to The Pig existing in the fetish world as a dirty, lowly, gluttonous animal that loves dirty, lowly things) because pork is their only pig product most of us engage with. I bet there were neolithic subsistence farmers who got off on the idea of sexually reenacting the livestock/human relationship but probably looked a lot different than standard livestock animal fetishes of the 21st century, your cowgirls and cowboys chained up and milked 24/7.

Of course the observation that domestication has parallels to body fetishism has a lot of ground to it, it is an organism who has been selected (passively or very very actively) for its body to benefit human needs most specifically. It often looks drastically different than its vanilla form. The udders of a holstein dairy cow, a modern breed suited to capitalist modes of industrial farming, looks ABSURD next to the udders of an aurochs (or even a fully domesticated landrace cattle type used in subsistence dairy production) in a similar way a macro breast fetish image looks absurd next to the breast sizes found in real humans. A domesticated strawberry looks bimbofied next to a wild one. The fetishized body's fetishized traits are exaggerated while the traits inconvenient to gratification are ignored.