If Rembrandt Painted Farm Animals, They'd Look Like This
By Becky Harlan
By Becky Harlan
For a lot of us, "chicken" is a piece of white meat that's better for you than a piece of red meat. Because really, how often do we see a chicken if it’s not on our plates?
But there was a time when we were intimately connected with livestock and fowl, a relationship evident in our most important stories and our popular culture, from Chicken Little to the Biblical parable of the lost sheep to "Old Macdonald Had a Farm." We come from people who used to be able to tell two sheep apart.
"In modern times most of us have lost connections with the land and the livestock that sustain us," says New Zealand photographer Cally Whitham. "Instead of knowing animals individually, we're mostly just familiar with lamb, beef, chicken, or pork as a product." Reforming these lost connections is what motivated Whitham to create farm animal portraits that look like Dutch master paintings.
It sounds romantic, but there are real consequences to being so divorced from something we still rely on to survive. Our health, the health of animals, and the health of the planet are closely tied to how we farm, and how we farm is in some ways affected by how we view the animals we farm.
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