Ece Tan
Happy Cow
Speculative bovine sex toys. Can we give cows under our care the dignity of pleasure?
Happy Cow proposes speculative sex toys for cows in order to make standard industrial farming practices more pleasurable for them. It is a design investigation into the arbitrariness of human empathy and the power imbalance between human and non-human species through the lens of commodified farm animals.
86% of the public support passing a law on animal sentience in the UK, recognising the capacity of animals to experience positive and negative feelings such as pleasure, joy, pain, and distress. However, when there is a clash with human interests and desires, we tend to disconnect from our impact on other species and the issues we create for them.
These sex toys make a commentary on known industrial farm practices that we regard as an unavoidable part of farming. By recontextualising these experiences and some of the common tools used in a dairy farm setting, the proposed toys aim to make farming procedures more pleasurable for cows whilst bringing their experiences to a level of human understanding.
The project uses design as a critical and provocative tool that questions our current anthropocentric practices and challenges the future of interspecies relations. It seeks to create catalysts for debate and empathy by offering the viewer a new perspective on ethical issues.