Analisi testi per esame Lingua Inglese III, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Analisi testi per esame Lingua Inglese III e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! JEREMY CLARKSON: MY HAM-FISTED ATTEMPT AT PIG BREEDING I’ve always loved pigs, so now I’m a pig farmer. Cheerful Charlie Ireland, my land agent, says this is the stupidest idea I’ve had yet and wants no part of it. And Kaleb was so unpleased that he got into his pick-up truck and went to Cornwall for a week. My logic, though, is sound. Pigs are much cheaper to buy than cows or sheeps, and unlike most other farmyard animals they don’t produce one or two babies. They hose them out like machinegun bullets. So you buy ten pigs for a few quid and three months later you have ten million. That’s profit, right there. Pure, naked profit. To make the financials look even better I decided to keep the pigs in a field that was full of potatoes that had been rendered unharvestable by the summer drought. I was going to let them rot but now, thanks to my brilliant new plan, they’d be used as pig food. Charlie responded to this argument by rolling his eyes and going home, which meant that Lisa and I had to spend a week or two learning an all-new language: pig. You might think it’s easy. You’ve got piglets and sows and boars, and that’s it. But you’re wrong. In the same way that cow and sheep farmers use words that would cause arguments in a game of Scrabble, I’ve learnt that in “pig” you have weaners and gilts and that when you have a sow that isn’t pregnant you describe her as “empty”. And then we had to get into the business of what breed to buy. The choice is endless but, in the end, we went for something called the Oxford Shandy and Black. Partly because they have comedic ears that grow over their eyes, so they literally cannot see where they’re going, and partly because “shandy and black” sounds like the sort of thing a northern girl would order in a Zante nitespot. But mostly because it’s a breed that is thought to have been created in Wychwood Forest, which I can see from my kitchen window. And because a few years ago there were only a handful of boars left in the entire world. This, then, is a breed that gives the panda hope. Analysis The text talks about the experience that Jeremy Clarkson had in attempting to breed pigs for the first time. He explains the reasons that brought him to make this decision and the challenges he faced. From a Deep Ecology’s perspective this discourse can be evaluated as destructive because it promotes extrinsic values and a harmful exploitation of animals (in this case, pigs) for the sake of economical profit. As regards the framing used in this text, it consists of a target domain represented by pigs and a source frame, that is the one of Economics. Therefore, the pigs are framed as a source of profit. This association is suggested by trigger words such as ‘naked profit’, ‘financials’, ‘cheaper’ and ‘to buy’ (referred to the pigs). Moreover, the use of the expression ‘the choice is endless’ evokes the semantic field of consumerism and frames buying pigs as going shopping. The main metaphorical expression in this text is ‘they hose them out like machinegun bullets’ to talk about the quantity of piglets that pigs give birth to. This metaphor metonymically frames pigs as producers or as machines, neglecting their essence of living beings. Therefore, another element of this text is the erasure of pigs’ identity. The type of erasure used is the mask, a type of erasure in which an identity is replaced by its distorted version. They are foregrounded by using barely a few direct pronouns to talk about them and by framing them metonymically as producers of resources (piglets). Moreover, their objectification is represented by the oxymoron ‘empty sows’ to refer to the sows that are not pregnant. Furthermore, there is an appraisal pattern conveyed using quantifiers such as ‘few’ referred to the term quid and ‘ten million’ referred to the piglets produced in three months. The sentence created extrinsically appraise pig-breeding as something convenient because it is a profitable production. Therefore, the story that underlies this text is a destructive one that explicitly considers mankind’s needs and benefits as more important than animals’ condition. The risks of this materialistic ideology are countless; therefore it should be resisted by choosing a more sustainable diet and be aware of the consequences of consumers’ choices. LOBBY GROUPS FOUGHT ‘HARD AND DIRTY’ AGAINST EU BAN ON CAGED FARM ANIMALS Legislation now appears to be on hold after ferocious pushback from powerful farming lobbies -Arthur Neslen Meat lobby groups fought a “hard and dirty” war against a planned EU ban on caged hens and pigs that has now been shelved, the Guardian can reveal. In 2021 EU politicians took the radical step of agreeing to phase out the use of cages for rearing farmed animals, including hens, broilers, pigs, calves, rabbits and quails, after receiving a petition signed by more than a million people. The measures, which were supposed to go through by the end of 2023, have the support of 89% of European citizens, according to an EU survey released last week. But a ferocious pushback from powerful farming lobbies, details of which have been seen by an investigation by the Guardian and a media consortium led by Lighthouse Reports, means that the legislation now appears to be on hold. Industry groups levelled backstage accusations of bias against the EU’s food safety watchdog, and pushed for a corporate expert to be brought in to rewrite the ban, according to an EU official. Anja Hazekamp, the vice-chair of the European parliament’s environment committee, said: “Industry fought really hard and dirty on this file. They tried everything they could think of because they know we desperately need animal welfare legislation to make our food system more sustainable and humane, and this was their last chance. They don’t want to change, but see that change is inevitable so they’re getting desperate. They will do anything to save their skins.” One EU official close to the issue told the Guardian that agribusiness lobbying had put “really aggressive pressure” on the commission that “enabled” the delay. “There was a strong presence of the industry on this file at different levels,” the official said. “There was a stream of negativity [from them]. All the dissuading arguments at a political level were built step-by-step by a set of very negative letters and positions and information that [industry] produced.” Lobbyists “targeted senior levels in the commission” at strategic moments in the legislative process “using privileged channels”, the insider said. After this, high-level attitudes towards the legislation became “extremely negative”, the official added. The lobbyists may have been pushing at an open door, according to a second EU official, who said that the EU’s agriculture directorate viewed environmental and welfare laws as “things to be resisted. That is just the psychology of the directorate. It’s like: ‘Fortress Agri must defend itself from all the people who want to change things.’” At one point a number of groups submitted a 60-page analysis arguing that a positive European Food Safety Authority (Efsa) assessment of the planned package was not “impartial” and contained “serious scientific errors”. “This type of pressure on Efsa over a scientific outcome is always troubling,” the official said. The 60-page analysis was aimed at “discrediting the work of the commission – the scientific work in particular – and complaining about a lack of transparency in the work done on economics and competitiveness”, the official said. Lobbyists argued to EU officials that the ban would effectively destroy the EU’s farming sector, according to minutes of the meeting released under freedom of information laws: “If the [animal welfare] bar will be raised very high, production will disappear from Europe.” This gloomy line was reinforced by another letter to the commission from the muscular EU farm union Copa-Cogeca, which said that Efsa’s opinion would “lead to the loss of most of the European poultry sector, meat and eggs combined”. One group “even proposed an expert [to rewrite] the commission’s impact assessment who was actually a senior researcher from a top American [poultry] producer,” the first official said. “It was amazing.” One new lobby group – European Livestock Voice (ELV) – was notably active, two EU officials said. ELV was set up as an activist-style network, using tactics borrowed from NGOs such as flashmobs, Twitter campaigns and social media organising. Speaking at a conference in the US earlier this year ELV’s frontman in Brussels, Andrea Bertaglio, told the audience: “We are all focused in Brussels at least, on the revision of the animal welfare legislation.” Bertaglio told the Guardian that he wanted to avoid a polarised US-style culture war over meat-eating but “we are speaking about culture a lot when we speak about livestock”, he said. “Culture in terms of our behaviour, our habits, it’s a very cultural, sociological and philosophical subject in terms of our approach.” Bertaglio, who was formerly an environmental journalist – and still calls himself one – also spoke out against what he called a constant “propaganda which is connecting … meat consumption and climate and environment in a way that makes children feel constantly guilty and uncomfortable”. ELV is not listed in the EU’s transparency registry and the group declined to answer questions about its funding, how it was set up, or its lobbying on the animal welfare package. The 2023 deadline for the EU’s animal welfare legislation has now been missed and the law was dropped from the commission’s work programme for 2024. A commission spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said the commission was “reflecting on and carefully assessing important aspects, including the related costs and the appropriate length of the transition period” for its animal welfare legislation. “It is important to have the support of all involved to make these proposals a success,” the official added. --- Analysis This text talks about how lobby groups fought and eventually managed to put an EU ban on caged animals on hold. The frame of this text is the political one that is evoked using words like ‘commission’, ‘law’, ‘ban’, ‘spokesperson’. The attempt to put this ban on hold is metaphorically framed as a ‘hard and dirty’ war fought by lobbyists that are intrinsically (and a bit ironically) portrayed as fighters that could do anything for the sake of their own profit. Regarding their identity, this is evaluated negatively using appraising items (mainly adjectives) as ‘ferocious’ ‘aggressive’ ‘desperate’ to refer to their actions towards the government. From a Deep Ecologist perspective, we can say that their identity is a destructive one because it promotes a harmful exploitation of the natural resources. Nonetheless the identity of the animals exploited is partially erased. They get mentioned only in the first part of the text using hyponyms such as ‘hens, broilers, pigs, calves, rabbits and quails’ (that can potentially give salience to their identity) but there is no direct reference to their condition in factory farms. Therefore, we can say that the type of erasure used is the trace and that their identity is backgrounded. The facticity is built up mentioning lobbies and politicians involved in this debate such as Anja Hazekamp, the vice-chair of the European parliament’s environment committee, or European Livestock Voice (ELV). Moreover, the author quoted the results of a survey taken by EU government. To sum up we can say that the story that underlies this article is ambivalent. The ideology that underlies this story is a beneficial one that spreads awareness of the importance of animal welfare. Nonetheless, to resist the prevalence of the prosperity story conveyed by the lobbyists, the author should have focused more on describing the life of the animals involved in farming and create a more emotive discourse that would have had a bigger impact on readers’ food choices.