| Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Gimme The Wire Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Ted's fervent veganism is informative of this song's bombastic and direct style. 'Temple' Grandin is an animal sciences professor at Colorado State University and became known for her work relating to cattle slaughter. In her essay 'Animals are not Things', she outlined methods to make food from cattle less stressful and more humane. Temple designed sweeping corrals so that cattle could not see 'round the bend' to their ultimate fate. This, she argues, makes the cattle less nervous and provides calm in their last moments in life. Ted is taking the perspective of these ill fated cattle, albiet a cynical, omniscient and masochistic one; although these last moments may appear to pacify cattle, it does not avoid their eventual murder, when their 'dirty death awaits in the bridal suite.' At the end of these twisting chutes, a cattle's head is restrained by a metal 'box' and is given 'the wire', perhaps a metaphor or real term for the process of shooting a pneumatic rod through the brains of a cow to begin the slaughter process. In other words: by changing the process, did we actually attempt to calm ourselves the gory aspect of animal slaughter? If this is true, then we are just as oblivious as cattle in Temple's chutes, to avoid the inevitable point that slaughter still involves killing, no matter how it is conceived? |
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