Chapter 13 Putting Back the Animals: Woman-Animal Meme in Contemporary Taiwanese Ecofeminist Imagination Animals are indeed a blank paper which can be inscribed with any message, and the symbolic meaning, that the social wishes. —Tester 1991:46 The invisibility of nonhuman animals (except pets) in our post-industrial society and our indifference to animal suffering reveals much about humanity as a species in relation to the current environmental crisis. i Our stubborn negligence is a powerful defense mechanism facing daily life encounters with animals either at the dinner table or the department store where their body parts are killed for food, clothing or entertainment. We shy away from talking about animal suffering, in part due to the extent to which human civilization is built on the use of their bodies. The ingrained speciesist and utilitarian views towards them should be held responsible for the mass disappearance of animals from the face of our planet. One article from the online Endangered Species Handbook tells us that the “current extinction rate is estimated to be up to a thousand times higher than prehistory rates.” Human activity such as killing for food or sport, and habitat destruction “lies at the root of this potentially catastrophic phenomenon” (Animal Welfare Institute 2005). If we want to save the planet and to redress the root problem of animal extinction, we need to extend the analysis of