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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.