C.J. Valasek

Review of Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017)

Like Sunaura Taylor, and many others, I was introduced to animal ethics by reading Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, before I was introduced to disability theory. Also, like Taylor, I was engaged in a wide variety of activism (org meetings, protests, vandalism, Theatre of the Oppressed, etc.) when I first got involved with the animal liberation movement. At the time, I didn’t think much about disability or disability activism. Unfortunately, this had to do with the limited framing and engagement with disability in “radical” groups in which I was active. It was not until I became chronically ill and disabled that I began to understand accessibility as an intersectional issue, seeing how accessibility differed depending on one’s race and gender as well as disability. Thinking through these issues with animal liberation philosophy, I started to understand how it was not just marginalized folks who were subject to power structures, but nonhuman animals were as well. As I began researching for my dissertation and started venturing into the archives in the history of science, the documentation brought out more and more instances of disabled human and animal comparisons like deaf people being compared to primates in early evolutionary/anthropology research. And while I continue to research and write about these cases of intersecting identities in the oppressive structures of power/knowledge, I was delighted to read and review a book devoted not only to the history of ableism and speciesism, but also a complex interrogation of what a philosophy that takes disability and animal liberation together might look like. 

There have been a few texts around this topic before Taylor’s (i.e., Janet Duncan’s Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-ability Movement), but none quite so enriching and intimate. To be clear, it is not Taylor’s personal stories alone that make this book such an intriguing read; rather, Taylor writes in an engaging, informative, and passionate way. Beasts of Burden does not read like a typical animal rights book (such as Singer’s), or an average academic text. Taylor does not assume much of any background of these issues and rarely engages in disciplinary jargon, so as to be more accessible to those who may not be so familiar with related and parallel scholarly debates. Though Taylor is witty and well-read, she is not interested in telling us the entire history of these issues, nor is the book tackling these issues in a strictly chronological fashion. Instead, Taylor gives us stories—stories with different topics and affects, ranging from sideshows and human zoos to medical experiments to art to the so-called slow food movement to Taylor’s disabled dog. Taylor’s storytelling becomes most poignant when she blends together the politics of disability and animal liberation, leading to a call for new, broader ethics of care that “views animals and humans as entangled in interdependent relationships, recognizing that animals are often vulnerable and dependent but that they are not here for our own benefit or pleasure.” 

The beginning of the book, after one reads about Taylor’s upbringing as a disabled child, at times seems like an introduction to ableism and models of disability, including the medical model and social model. It is through Taylor’s hermeneutic exploration of what constitutes disability and how ableism works that Taylor eventually concludes that it is not only humans who are disabled and must face ableism, but nonhuman animals as well. Taylor goes on to remind us how disability is often framed as an overcoming, whether we are talking about “a hyper-sentimentalized version of the familiar capitalist narrative of the poor man lifting himself by his bootstraps,” as in a “supercrip” narrative, or whether we are talking about disabled animals receiving likes on social media or simply animals that “overcome their animality” as in apes who learn to sign. In addition, Taylor reminds us throughout her book that the comparison between animals and disabled people has almost always been a negative one: likening disabled folks to animals was, and still is to an extent, a way to keep the disabled from being considered fully human and allowed both disabled people and animals to be subject to detainment, experimentation, torture, public shaming, and eradication. 

However, Taylor believes there is another way of reading these comparisons. Seeing animals as a similarly oppressed group under ableism, as well as by embracing her own disability (arthrogryposis) as a kind of animal embodiment, she embodies these connections across species as she uses her mouth to grasp brushes while she paints, and to “eat like a dog,” as she says. In other words, Taylor sees much potential in solidarity between disability activism and animal activism in opposition to ableist social and material constructions. As she writes later in the book, “Disability studies and activism calls for recognizing new ways of valuing life that aren’t limited by specific physical or mental capabilities. Implicit in disability theory is the idea that it is not specifically our intelligence, rationality, agility, physical independence, or bipedal nature that give us dignity and value.” Against the medical model of disability is the social model of disability, which states that disability is the result of the way society is organized. While Taylor does not go into all of the current discussions of this model, she does point out that access is key to this model, and access is intersectional, whether we are dealing with ramps, or economic cost or medical cost or language, etc. Taylor wants to attend to access and intersectionality in an ecological and profoundly compassionate way beyond anthropocentric models that may include resistance to animals as food, entertainment or research subjects. As Taylor writes, “Compassion is not a limited resource.” Unfortunately, the notion of resource scarcity is at the heart of many issues of access, and points to the difficult balance that Taylor attempts between individual ethics and structural oppression. 

Another way of examining the intimate link between animals and disabled persons is the history of scientific and medical practice and philosophy. While the idea of disability tied to a lack of personhood goes as far back to at least Aristotle, as Taylor reminds us, it is not until the 19th century that social scientists and medical personnel began using race and disability interchangeably. Many of these scientifically-minded bigots were following evolutionary notions that suggested people of color and disabled whites were akin to pre-Homo sapiens ancestors, and hence shared physical features of animals. This was not just theory of course but was an ideological component of various eugenic policies and social practices, such as segregation, sterilization, immigration restrictions, pathologization in education (including the backlash against teaching sign language to deaf children as signing was seen as a “primitive” form of communication), as well as charities and welfare. Despite the wide renunciation of eugenics, for example, many of these ideas and practices persist today. Since ableism and speciesism are embedded in one another, as Taylor argues, it is not simply the negative effects of judging certain people as being human that we should worry about—we should also worry about how such judgements affect animals. For instance, due to fear of disabled farm animals “contaminating” others, they are often killed along with the rest of their stock. This sometimes leads to hundreds of thousands of animals being murdered, which reiterates the idea that the “weak” are a danger or tax on the “strong”. Furthermore, the very notion of a factory farm is disabling—the tight use of space, chemical exposure, etc. As Taylor asks us, “What does it mean to speak of a ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ chicken, pig, or cow when they all live in environments that are profoundly disabling?”

But what are disabled people to do about the exploitation and ableism that victimizes animals in such large numbers? Taylor argues that we should be “cripping animal ethics,” which is a way of acknowledging that some people may not have access to alternatives to animal products, or may rely on animal products in order to sustain themselves. In other words, from an accessibility standpoint, it does not appear realistic to Taylor that disabled humans are in a position to abstain completely from animal exploitation (though one could say that about anyone under capitalism). Suffice to say that it would require a great deal more discussion to unpack here the ways in which disability, due to dependence on the medical-industrial complex, may be complicit with neoliberal capitalism, and in turn, climate change. We, as disabled persons, should of course not be held responsible for worker and ecological exploitation, such a discussion would have to evolve to deliberations over new strategies for appropriating the means of production and care. 

The problem with examining and embracing politics that break the distinction of disability and animal liberation is of course envisioning what that might really look like. Taylor is certainly aware of this problem and the many consequential questions that it raises and tries to answer many of them throughout the text, as in the problem of figuring out when and what cause (animal or human?) to prioritize over the other. I would like to think of this book as one that at least pushes forward these questions and issues, but it will take much longer for people invested in unifying radical politics to go beyond the current status quo as Taylor provides little in terms of concrete answers and next steps beyond her notions of a “social model of veganism” and “ethics of care.”  

One issue that I thought that Taylor could have better dealt with was indigenous people and animal ethics—an issue that has often pitted indigenous communities against white animal activists, whether we are talking about indigenous food sovereignty, ecological destruction of indigenous lands for mass food production, or the erasure of indigenous animal ethics and indigenous vegans. Stolen land and non-Western views of animals should be serious considerations for any movement that wishes to take animal liberation seriously. Again, Taylor is not unaware of these issues, but does not engage with indigenous scholars and activists (for instance, Margaret Robinson, Kima Nieves, etc.) on the level that she does when it comes to mostly white disability and animal ethics scholars. This is an issue especially because Taylor is adamant about intersectional politics and is mindful of the links between race to disability and animality but does not seek a dialogue with indigenous points of view of (animal) ethics as she seems to desire with the animals she writes about. Perhaps this is material for another book, as important as dealing with indigenous erasure is, that further broadens the scope of Taylor’s debut book publication. For now, we must take seriously Taylor’s proposal that for animal liberation to be understood in today’s politics, it must be intersectional. 

CJ, a white man with a beard and short dark blonde hair, is inside against a blank white wall background and an accompanying shadow. CJ is wearing a collared buttoned shirt vertical stripes of different widths and various colors, including blue, green, red, yellow and white. 

CJ Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. His dissertation traces the construction of self-control problems in economics and psychology over the last century. CJ lives with several chronic illnesses, but often finds academic ableism to be more of a hindrance to his joy than his symptoms.