BLOG: Fans tuning into Katie Price’s new show Mucky Mansion expressed outrage on social media when the celebrity mum sliced up and mounted her son’s stuffed animals for macabre bedroom décor. From indignant hypocrisy to bizarre admiration, the reactions revealed the full spectrum of the public’s attitudes towards non-human animals.

They may not have been real animals, but when I saw the scenes from Katie Price’s new television show Mucky Mansion, showing the mounted heads of her son Jett’s beloved stuffed toys, it sent shivers down my spine. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone.

As part of the jungle-themed makeover of eight-year-old Jett’s bedroom, celebrity mum Price set upon his stuffed lion, tiger and dinosaurs with a knife as shown in the show’s debut episode this week. Upset viewers quickly took to social media to express their horror, with one writing: “Everybody watching the teddies being slaughtered #MuckyMansion". Needless to say, Twitter being what it is, the trolls were out in full force to lay into Price and with ample ammo:

Shameless cyberbullying and character assassinations aside, this may all seem like harmless prime-time nonsense - after all, they’re only stuffed animals and not real ones - but let’s take a moment to unpack what lurks beneath the surface. Price mounted her son’s toys like hunting trophies, harking back to an era of Western colonialism that we really shouldn’t be invoking, no less. The hunting of big cats in the forests of Asia and the African savannahs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is still to this day vividly associated with Europe’s experience in those regions, and as Rudyard Kipling put it, the colonial powers’ need to “rule the wild” (both humans and non-humans).

Rarely if ever does one invoke Kipling in a discussion about Katie Price, but it’s not really about her. She wasn’t thinking about colonial insensitivity, nor was she thinking much about the abhorrent symbolism of mounting her kid’s stuffed animals. She probably wasn’t thinking much at all about the message any of this imparts in her son’s impressionable young mind, but then again, how many people would?

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For all the critics of Price’s simulated slaughter, there were plenty of others on social media who admired her “creativity”. Whatever your opinion of Price’s character, the fact others said they wanted to replicate the décor for their own children was disturbing enough. Children across the country could soon have the image of animals on wooden plaques burned into their subconscious by their parents, as if they weren’t subjected to enough speciecist conditioning already.

Children are taught from pretty much the moment they’re born that non-human animals are ours to own, use and abuse as we see fit. A child’s inherent compassion for animals - the way they relate to Peppa Pig, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, Peter Rabbit, and so on - is encouraged but only until it interferes with their eating habits. Kids are given chicken flesh in dinosaur-shaped breaded nuggets, yet they aren’t told what exactly they’re eating. And by the time they are told, or they come to realise it themselves, they’re already too far gone and only a precious minority ever address it before they themselves become parents - the acceptance of eating animals therefore is a self-perpetuating cycle of the most vicious sense. Even for the staunchest rights-based born-again vegans, it takes a lot of self-awareness and constant re-education just to become aware of our inherent speciesism, let alone change it, so strong is our culturally-conditioned anthropocentrism.

As a parent to a four-year-old child myself, I’m all too aware of the lies other parents tell their children when it comes to the food on their plates. What Jett is now being exposed to whenever he’s in his room - the glassy black eyes of his dismembered and mounted toys as they look down on him when he lies awake in bed - is just more desensitisation. Unintentional, perhaps, but originating somewhere in Price’s adult subconscious to then imprint on that of the next generation.

If readers are in any doubt about how powerful the use of fictional animals is in brainwashing children into accepting animal exploitation, why then did M&S produce a book last year specifically targeting children called Farm to Foodhall, in which a young girl and her grandfather visit grass-fed herds and happy chickens? Clearly, it was advertising designed to infect impressionable young minds and implant forever the idea that farm animals aren’t treated cruelly.

M&S like so many other players in the food industry know that today’s children are tomorrow’s consumers, but that they also have the potential to affect their parents’ buying decisions even before they have their own money to spend on dead animals - anyone hungry for a McDonald’s Happy Meal? And for all Price’s critics on Twitter, the ones who got upset about her mounting Jett’s stuffed animals to his wall, how many of them have the body parts of cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, fish and other animals in their fridges and freezers?

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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