Animal Crisis. Alice Crary
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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
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4969-6
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952119
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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