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.
1 Crisis / 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
