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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Leading philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen offer a searing and desperately needed response to systems of thought and action that are failing animals and, ultimately, humans too. In the wake of global pandemics, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, and catastrophic climate change, they issue a clarion call to address the intertwined problems we face, arguing that we must radically reimagine our relationships with other animals.
In stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, which abstract from social mechanisms harmful to human beings, Animal Crisis makes the case that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical theories such as ecofeminism, Crary and Gruen present a critical animal theory for understanding and combating the structural forces that enable the diminishment of so many to the advantage of a few. With seven case studies of complex human-animal relations, they make an urgent plea to dismantle the “human supremacism” that is devastating animal lives and hurtling us toward ecocide.
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Seitenzahl: 246
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright
About Writing This Book
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 Crisis / Orangutans
The Rapidly Expanding Problem
2 Ethics / Pigs
Considering Animals
The Reality of Animal Suffering
Animal Ideologies
3 Suffering / Cows
Equal Consideration
Moral Hierarchies
The Point of View of the Universe
Sensitivity to Others
4 Minds / Octopuses
How Animals Lost their Minds
Mirror, Mirror
From Mind to Morality
5 Dignity / Rats
Violations of Animal Dignity
New Discourses of Dignity
Hatred of Animals, Oppression of Human Beings
Rethinking Dignity
6 Seeing / Parrots
Animal Visibility
Looking at Zoos
Ethics and Politics of Sight
7 Politics / Ticks
The “Political Turn” in Animal Ethics
Ecofeminist Ethics and Politics
Untimely Resistance
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Orangutans in damaged forest in Indonesia. Photo courtesy of Ulet Ifansasti/Stri…
Chapter 2
Figure 2
Pigs inside a transport truck heading to slaughter. Photo courtesy of Jo-Anne Mc…
Chapter 3
Figure 3
Ebony with hours-old Cora – cows Napoleon and Magnolia looking on. Photo courtes…
Chapter 4
Figure 4
Octopus, Jervis Bay, Australia. Photo courtesy of Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Chapter 5
Figure 5
Rescued rat awaiting adoption. Photo courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Med…
Chapter 6
Figure 6
Woodstock and Volan at Foster Parrots Sanctuary in Rhode Island. Photo courtesy …
Chapter 7
Figure 7
Extinction Rebellion protest, London. Photo courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur/We Anim…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright
About Writing This Book
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Begin Reading
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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“Animal Crisis is the intellectual sum of two astute thinkers, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen, both powerful leading voices in animal ethics. By deftly weaving tenets and practices of critical social thought with the aims of animal ethics, Crary and Gruen create a new fabric with which to remake human relationships with non-human animals.
The authors do animals the great service of considering them for themselves, of seeing their desires and relationships and experiences, and working to forge a practice that honors that consideration. Animal Crisis is a lucid and urgent invitation to a new animal ethics.”
Alexandra Horowitz, author of Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond
“In this wonderfully thoughtful, elegant, and moving book, two leading philosophers illuminate the contemporary ‘animal crisis’ that is bringing life on earth to the brink. A vital contribution to the development of ‘critical animal theory’ as a tool for understanding intersections among different forms of domination, violence, and exploitation that affect humans and other animals alike.”
Claire Jean Kim, author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age
“In this powerful book Crary and Gruen insist that we confront the animal crisis that in many ways defines this age of environmental catastrophe. The animal crisis they point to is undoubtedly one of unfathomable loss and damage caused by extinction and climate chaos, but it is also a crisis of thought, solidarity, and political will. At once a foray into the wide-ranging experiences of particular animals attempting to live lives in this crisis, and a philosophical investigation into the need to reinvest animal liberation theory with its social justice roots. Animal Crisis offers a path, utilizing an explicitly anticapitalist and antiracist ecofeminism to help guide our way, not to hope, but to action.”
Sunaura Taylor, author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
“Animal Crisis presents the reader with the most thorough research into the ways in which animal lives are understood. The arguments are illustrated with stories of individual animals or groups of animals who have been cruelly treated. It is a must for all those who want to understand why we should treat animals ethically.”
Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace
“Animal Crisis is a deeply moving book that calls on us to reconsider our relationship to animals and to the other humans and ecosystems we depend on. It offers a paradigm shift, which reveals the ideological distortions that are embedded not only in ordinary life, but throughout philosophical inquiry. It should be read by anyone seeking a way to live and think more meaningfully through our current crises.”
Sally Haslanger, author of Resisting Reality
“Animal Crisis is philosophy as it should be: empirically, socially, and politically informed. This book is so radical, so morally unsettling, that you have to take your courage in both hands to read it. But read it you should. It is that important.”
Raimond Gaita, author of The Philosopher’s Dog
Animal Crisis
A new critical theory
Alice Crary and Lori Gruen
polity
Copyright © Alice Crary and Lori Gruen 2022
The right of Alice Crary and Lori Gruen to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4969-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952119
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
About Writing This Book
In the Spring of 2018, we were invited to write an essay reviewing the field of animal ethics. We were both in Princeton at the time, and we met at various cafés and lunch places, trying to find space at little tables for both of our computers. We also met at each other’s houses, navigating dogs and children, to make lists and draft strategies. Very quickly we realized it felt more meaningful to devote ourselves to a short, urgent plea to radically rethink animal ethics, both as it is understood in the field of philosophy and as it is taken up and developed within social protest movements. We had each written books and articles urging such a reconsideration in our distinctive ways, and we thought a collaboration would enliven our longstanding commitments to critically interrogate structures that enable the destruction of animals, marginalized humans, and the planet. These commitments were, we found, deepened and, in helpful and illuminating ways, reshaped by our co-writing process.
It is difficult on one’s own to write against the grain of received views. Having companionship in the face of intellectual and institutional resistance, as well as global environmental catastrophe, proved to be more than a personal benefit to us, it was also a scholarly and political one. One of the central concerns we each have, and is pivotal in the pages that follow, stems from the belief that attitudes about the world and those who populate it are distorted in devastating ways by ideologies and concomitant material practices that don’t aptly capture the value of human lives and relationships, or the value of the lives and relationships of other animals. These distortions permeate standard views in animal ethics, just as they structure many philosophical discussions of social justice. The resulting ideological traps – which appear, at best, as tolerance of, and, at worst, support for, disrespect, commodification, mass violence, and death – must be revealed and challenged if we are to arrive at ethical interventions capable of informing liberating political action. Writing together about the tragic state of the world, during a global pandemic, with a shared recognition of problems at the heart of our current crisis, and a shared desire to acknowledge the dire conditions we all differentially face, has proven to be sustaining. Of course, one cannot change the world alone, but thinking and finding words together is one way of practicing the change we want to see.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, we drew on a variety of sources – from academia, from news outlets, from activists, and from colleagues and friends. Many different animals and their human defenders have provided us with great inspiration. We are particularly thankful for the work of the people providing sanctuary for all sorts of animals, including VINE Sanctuary in Vermont; Foster Parrots/New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary in Rhode Island; and primate sanctuaries around the world, including those developed in Borneo and Sumatra for endangered orangutans. Not only do sanctuaries tend to the wellbeing of displaced and rescued animals, but they provide models for radical multispecies care. We want to thank Jo-Anne MacArthur and the We Animals Media team, Anna Boarini of VINE Sanctuary, and Peter Godfrey-Smith for permission to use their brilliant photographs. We owe thanks for support to the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, All Souls College, Oxford, the New School, and Wesleyan University. The Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy provided two opportunities for us to work together prior to the pandemic, and we are grateful for their support as well as for their work facilitating collaborations.
We are enormously grateful to friends and colleagues who directly and indirectly contributed to our thinking, including Elan Abrell, Carol Adams, Allison Argo, Jay Bernstein, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Chris Cuomo, Remy Debes, Cora Diamond, Ann Ferguson, Matthew Garrett, Sally Haslanger, Dale Jamieson, Axelle Karera, Claire Jean Kim, pattrice jones, Justin Marceau, Stephen Mulhall, Timothy Pachirat, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Christopher Schlottmann, Amia Srinivasan, Dinesh Wadiwel, and Margot Weiss.
Elan Abrell, Carol Adams, Jay Bernstein, Cora Diamond, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Stephen Mulhall, and Dinesh Wadiwel provided detailed comments on full drafts of the manuscript, as did anonymous readers for Polity, and we are indebted to all of our readers for their astute and gracious engagements with the book. We took all of their comments seriously. Mark Rowlands, who reviewed our proposal for the press, as well as anonymous referees, provided encouraging feedback early on. We presented part of this work at the inaugural meeting of the Harvard–Yale Animal Ethics Faculty Seminar. We thank Lisa Moses for convening the seminar and the participants for thoughtful comments.
Pascal Porcheron has been a wonderful editor, and we are also thankful to Polity’s Stephanie Homer and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer for their gracious assistance as well as to Sarah Dancy for her tactful copy-editing. We greatly appreciate Aaron Neber’s thoughtfulness in creating an index. We also want to express our gratitude to Gretchen Crary at February Media for her incredible patience, flexibility, and resourcefulness in helping get the word out about this project that means so much to us.
Our families, human and non, have been so patient and accommodating as we wrote. Big thanks to Eli, Louise, Nathaniel, Shepard, Taz, and Zinnia. Our gratitude to them is beyond measure.
Prologue
Human–animal relations are in a crisis of catastrophic proportions. Today it is undeniable that the human use and destruction of animals and their habitats, including practices that result in mass animal deaths, have existential implications not only for nonhuman animals but also for human beings and the planet. This book is written for those who are committed to bringing the crisis clearly into view, with an eye toward envisioning new forms of life that will allow us to build better, life-sustaining relations and act to create a less violent, more caring future.
The academic discipline of animal ethics, which is now roughly 50 years old, has been a key site for discussing ethical interventions into the crisis. We acknowledge the role standard formulations of animal ethics have played in heightening awareness of the predicaments that nonhuman animals confront. These standard views have been informative both in academic contexts and in the larger animal protection movement. But our discussion here has a significant critical dimension.
One prominent strand of animal ethics is preoccupied with animal suffering – suffering that occurs in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other sites of animal confinement, as well as the suffering that animals experience in the wild. Another prominent strand counters this focus on eliminating suffering, urging that we instead emphasize respect for the rights and dignity of animals. While these strands of animal ethics certainly contribute to increased recognition of nonhuman animals’ plights, much of this work obscures, and sometimes even promotes, elements of the crisis we want to resist. The following pages illuminate various ways in which conceptual tools employed within these ethical projects are ill-suited for achieving the goals of genuine liberation.
If we are to address crucial ethical questions about improving our relationships with animals and the existence of all those who live precariously in late capitalism, we need to rethink grounding assumptions of animal ethics as it is currently pursued. Many violent practices are embedded in larger institutions that not only harm animals but serve to disproportionately burden and often subjugate socially vulnerable groups of human beings. Yet the discipline of animal ethics has, to a significant extent, grown up in isolation from traditions of critical social thought that are dedicated to uncovering oppressive structures that impact humans and the more-than-human world. Dominant trends in animal ethics emphasize individual action and overlook damaging social structures and mechanisms of state power, resulting in prescriptions that can serve to sustain these structures and institutions, reproducing the very wrongs they aim to rectify.
Recent attention to political issues that bear on human–animal relations is promising. But even attempts to establish new systems of political rights for animals run the risk of being counterproductive if they don’t identify and contest human superiority over animals – human supremacism – that organizes existing political systems. The need for more fundamental interventions into these destructive systems is a theme of some longstanding social and political traditions, including the tradition of ecofeminism.
Ecofeminism, as a theoretical frame and political project, is – like animal ethics – roughly 50 years old. Its assessment of practices that harm and wrong animals is grounded in a multifaceted critique of capitalist modernity. This includes intellectual histories, reaching back to the early modern period, that describe how getting the world in view comes to be understood as requiring dispassionate abstraction. The emergence of this conception of thought coincides both with new forms of devastation of the natural world and with new forms of exploitation of people – primarily women and members of racialized and colonized groups – who do the work of social reproduction. The resulting historical vision, combined with analyses of early capitalist societies, shows how growth and progress are taken to require treating living and nonliving nature as free resources and denying the value of women’s and racialized and colonized peoples’ care and reproductive labor. This framework enables us to see practices that destroy nature, animals, and marginalized human groups as structurally interrelated, and we are invited to recognize that, in addition to being thus tied together, hierarchical oppositions between human and animal, white and nonwhite, men and women, and primitive and civilized are built into the fabric of capitalist modes of social organization.
A crucial lesson of these analyses is that meaningful steps toward better and more respectful relations with animals must address social mechanisms that also hurt members of human outgroups. When we recognize that distinctions between those deemed human and those considered animals enforce normative rankings constructed partly in tandem with the similarly normatively ordered distinctions among human beings, we can see the urgency of resisting taxonomies that value some in order to disvalue others, and thus relegate so many humans and animals to powerless margins. This recognition positions us to appreciate not only that the categories “human” and “animal” are constructed to pick out, respectively, elites and outgroups, but also that a liberating response will question the legitimacy of the categories that overtly and covertly support violent exclusions. At the same time, it shows us that the reluctance of some contributors to traditional animal ethics to register and resist ways that value-hierarchies animate their thinking ultimately fails animals.
In this book, designed to overcome the social and political isolation of traditional animal ethics, we urge a rethinking of what counts as an ethical intervention. We bring resources from ecofeminism and related critical social theories to bear on the animal crisis, and in so doing we present a new critical animal theory. As we develop this new approach, we seek to bring the ideologies and structures of oppression more clearly into view. We also seek to make the lives, experiences, and relationships of other animals visible.
Too often in discussions in animal ethics and politics, animals remain abstractions. We push back against this trend, starting each chapter with a story highlighting animals’ experiences, both to show how those experiences matter and to draw connections between the plight of particular animals in particular contexts with the marginalization of humans in those same contexts.
We explore problems of economic inequality and habitat destruction in Indonesia by examining a violent encounter experienced by a mother orangutan in a palm oil plantation. We examine the disposability of both workers and pigs in meat-packing plants and the dangers that they faced during the global pandemic. Through a story of cows and their young who escape their pending demise on small-scale dairies, we illuminate the deep relationships that cows form, while also exploring ways in which some work in animal ethics prevents us from seeing them clearly, or at all. By reflecting on the life and experiences of an octopus, we examine the ways that unfamiliarity and differences in bodies, minds, and evolutionary histories can obscure our understanding of others. One of the most maligned animals, rats, helps us grapple with complexities of thinking through conflicts between human beings and animals, and ways we might develop respect for a very different, perhaps bothersome, other’s dignity. A study of captured, traded, caged birds, like parrots, collected for their beauty, reveals how our view of other animals can be distorted in a host of ways, and how such distortions lead to serious harms. Our final case study involves ticks and mosquitos, who are not only in conflict with humans, but whose lives and experiences are particularly challenging to bring into focus. This challenge in many ways parallels the challenge of imagining how to carry on in the midst of the crisis. Thinking simultaneously of the ways that insects are crucial for the sustainability of ecosystems, and of the ways in which some insects also harm humans, is a good route to capturing the role that sensitivity to ecological complexity, and the various conditions of earthly life, must play in envisioning meaningful and timely political resistance.
Throughout the book we work to give animal ethics greater political relevance and traction, in part by highlighting the predicaments of actual animals in crisis. We provide tools for developing a critical political approach to animal ethics that makes it possible to see, and also to act to interrupt, the complex catastrophe currently engulfing all of us, humans and animals.
1Crisis / Orangutans
When members of the Human and Orangutan Conflict Response Unit found a 30-year-old female orangutan in a palm oil plantation near Aceh, in Sumatra, Indonesia, they saw she was in very bad shape. Even those who are accustomed to rescuing endangered orangutans were shocked by what they saw. This lactating mother had been shot with air pellets more than 74 times, both of her eyes were badly damaged, she had multiple broken bones, and she had lacerations from sharp tools or spears all over her body. Her baby was later found in a basket in the nearby village, severely dehydrated and traumatized. As rescuers rushed her and her infant to a veterinary clinic, her baby died. Hope, as the mother is now called, is blind due to her injuries, so she will spend the rest of her life at a sanctuary run by the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme.
Figure 1 Orangutans in damaged forest in Indonesia. Photo courtesy of Ulet Ifansasti/Stringer/Getty Images.
The Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, and similar organizations on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, primarily work to relocate or reintroduce the great apes to protected habitats when they are captured or injured by humans. Direct human conflicts with orangutans have increased over the past several decades as their forest homes have been decimated to create room for palm oil plantations. When the orangutans swing into the plantations, they are shot; when they look for food in villages, they are met with violence; and, when a mother is with her baby, people will try to kill her to capture the infant who can be sold on the black market for upward of $20,000.
Wild orangutans live only on these two islands, where they are now critically endangered. The Wildlife Conservation Society describes them as “the rarest of the rare.” One species of orangutan in Sumatra, the Tapanuli orangutan, is the most endangered great ape species in the world, with only 800 individuals existing. There are only an estimated 13,800 individual Sumatran orangutans remaining. Both of these populations are in steep decline. On Borneo, it is estimated that the population will be down to 47,000 individuals by 2025. Because a mother orangutan stays with her child for six to nine years, steep population decline is particularly difficult to reverse.
The lush rainforests, home to tens of thousands of species, including the largest carnivorous plants, the largest moths, sun bears, clouded leopards, tigers, gibbons, elephants, and orangutans, are being destroyed at an alarming rate. As Mel White wrote for National Geographic in 2008, “considering the island’s unsurpassed biodiversity – from orangutans and rhinoceroses to tiny mosses and beetles not yet discovered – and the rate at which its forests are being lost, Borneo’s future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet.” By 2015, the Borneo rhinoceros was considered extinct in the wild. The orangutans on both Borneo and Sumatra may not be far behind.
Three acres of native forests are cut every minute to make room for palm oil monocrop plantations. Forests the size of Connecticut are converted every two years to keep up with the world’s insatiable demand for palm oil products. Palm oil is in almost everything, from breakfast items to vegan fare, soaps, cosmetics, shampoo, candies, and snack food. If you look at the ingredients in your cookies, or crackers, or margarine, or peanut butter in your pantry or refrigerator, you will find it listed as palm oil or palm kernel, and most glycerin is from palm oil. Borneo and Sumatra provide 86 percent of the world’s supply. In 2019, global consumption was almost 72 million tons, or roughly 20 pounds of palm oil per person. Even those actively seeking to avoid using palm oil find it challenging, as it is ubiquitous and often disguised (Orangutan Alliance).
In order to grow palm trees that produce the large fruits from which palm oil is extracted, native rainforests are bulldozed and then burned. From 2000 to 2015, 150,000 orangutans on Borneo died as their forest homes were destroyed and they became exposed to humans. And orangutans aren’t the only creatures to suffer from this massive destruction. In 2015, the fires used to clear the forests burned out of control releasing smoke and ash, severely impacting air quality. Researchers from Columbia and Harvard estimate that this led to 100,000 premature human deaths. The process of cutting down forests, burning what remains, and growing palm trees creates greenhouse gasses, which is ironic given that palm oil is used as a supposedly earth-friendly biofuel. One researcher noted that biofuel production wasn’t going to be better for the climate, “instead, it would create nearly double the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional fuels” (Lustgartner 2018).
With such destructive impact, why would the people of Borneo and Sumatra welcome palm oil plantations to their ecological diverse islands? This question can be partially answered by looking at the history of exploitation of the islands by outsiders. Extraction of wood, animals, and gold by Chinese and Portuguese traders, then British and Dutch colonists, and, more recently, oil drilling by US and European corporations created vast inequalities between native people and multinational corporations and their shareholders. The desire for more direct control and the promise of development has led many local people to join forces with the palm oil industries. But this hasn’t always worked out that well. As one report notes:
To create a legal basis for development, the Indonesian government established a commercial land-share system in the 1980s. In theory, the system let villages sign over development rights in return for some part of the profit. But in practice, many villagers said, companies often secured the permits they needed through some combination of intense lobbying, bribery and strong-arming, and the result was broken promises and missing payments. (Rosner 2018)
Many impoverished villagers view the large orange apes as frightening pests rather than as fellow creatures worth protecting or as indicators of impending environmental collapse. The parents of the young boy who almost killed Hope and caused her infant’s death, were resentful that people seemed to care more about the orangutan than their son’s future (Beech 2019). But the choice isn’t a binary one, nor is it an easy one.
A narrow focus on the desperate straits of orangutans on Sumatra and Borneo – a focus leaving out key features of the larger economic and political context – may very well lead to counterproductive responses and make it seem that consumer boycotts of palm oil are enough to solve the problem. But much more is needed, including a wider critical focus on the destructive logics behind extractive industries to fill out the particular tragedies that befall individuals in their profit-pursuing wake. Multinational corporations have already begun “green-washing” their extractive practices, producing allegedly “sustainable” palm oil, which hasn’t helped local people or native animals. We can, and should, care about the orangutans and the villagers who haven’t gotten what they envisioned from the corporations that are exploiting land, labor, and animals around them. Sadly, as long as palm oil plantations continue to wreak havoc on Borneo and Sumatra, furthering global inequality, the future of the boy who shot at Hope and her baby, the future of other native children, and the future of the orangutans and other species look bleak.
