Alice Crary - Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory

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 Philosophers Dog

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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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.

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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 cafs and lunch places, trying to find space at little tables for both of our computers. We also met at each others 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 ones 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 dont 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.

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, Princetons 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.