Donna Rich - 2024

Artist's Statement

For this final project I did a printmaking project. In the image you can see a calf's ear with an ear tag in it. I chose to have the number 23 on the ear tag as that is the number one of the calves had on its ear tag when I visited a farm a few months ago. In my Unveiling the Anthropocene class, we watched a documentary on big corporation food production. In the documentary it showed the very poor conditions that the animals were raised in before they were butchered. With is art piece, I want to show the innocence of a calf, and bring awareness to this topic of animal cruelty in large scale corporations, in hopes that people will start supporting small local ranches and farms, and not those large corporations that just care about the money. In small local ranches, the animals are loved and treated with care, they live a beautiful life before being butchered in a human way. We need to treat animals, even animals we are going to eat, with care and love, and that is the message I hope to share with this final project.