Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

how does an animal become an object? How are we taught to view this objectification as normal? How can thinking about disability help us to see animals differently?

I was six when I first learned that animals are often mistreated and that there are people who protest this mistreatment because they believe it is wrong. I was able to articulate the ways in which animals are oppressed, and I wanted to help change the ways they are viewed and treated. It wasn’t until I was twenty-one that I realized the same thing about disabled people.

Even when disability impacts a community, as when a neighborhood has high rates of asthma or congenital disabilities due to pollution, it is still too often treated as an individual’s isolated medical problem. The sociopolitical challenges that disabled people face can thus often become individualized narratives of misfortune and strife.

As cultural critic Michael Bérubé writes, “Any of us who identify as ‘nondisabled’ must know that our self-designation is inevitably temporary, and that a car crash, a virus, a degenerative genetic disease, or a precedent-setting legal decision could change our status in ways over which we have no control whatsoever.”8

Disabled people also don’t seem to be out and about because many of us aren’t. We are often segregated into separate classrooms, separate buses, separate waiting lines, and separate entrances. We may stay home either by choice (because it is easier than facing discrimination outside our homes) or against our will (because that is where our parents, spouses, caretakers, doctors, or benefit counselors want us to be, or because our homes are not accessible to leave). We may leave our homes only to be stopped by the end of a sidewalk with no curb cut. We may try our best to avoid inaccessible environments and to stay away from stores with physical barriers, such as stairs, or psychological barriers, such as gawking strangers. We may have such deeply internalized ableism that we don’t leave our homes out of shame. Or we may be locked away in institutions.

Even at the best institutions, individuals are stripped of countless freedoms that people on the outside take for granted, such as choosing when and what to eat, when to sleep, and whether to engage in consensual sexual intimacy.15

This has been dubbed the “super crip” narrative by many disabled activists and scholars. Anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or remarkable, is seen as amazing and inspirational, from getting married, to going to school, to simply leaving the house or not wanting to kill themselves (or even the fact that they do want to kill themselves).

This narrative does not inspire other disabled people to participate in their communities and demand equal rights but instead motivates an able-bodied audience to work harder and be more grateful. Through this lens, disability becomes a hyper-sentimentalized version of the familiar capitalist narrative of the poor man lifting himself up by his bootstraps.

As I began my journey as a disability activist, I went from feeling like disability was my own isolated experience to seeing it everywhere. I realized that disability’s presence in U.S. culture is inescapable even on a rhetorical level. We say that “the economy is crippled,” or that someone who feels incapable or unable to do something is in a state of “paralysis.” We talk of blindness as i...

“Disabled” is used ubiquitously to describe things as bro...

“Crippled” is a particularly interesting example because of how the word “crip” (which comes from “cripple”) has been adopted by disability activists and scholars in a way that is similar to how LGBT activists and scholars have reclaimed the word “queer.” Many disabled people identify as crips, and to crip something does not mean to break it but to radically and creatively invest it with disability history, politics, and pride while simultaneously questioning paradigms of independence, normalcy, and medicalization.

Disability activists and scholars have countered medicalization with other models of disability, the most established being “the social model of disability,” which argues that disability is not caused by impairment, but by the way society is organized.18

Ableism encourages us to understand one technology as normal and another as specialized. We are so used to technologies and structures such as steps and staircases that they become almost natural to us. But curbs are no more natural than curb cuts, and blinking lights no more natural than beeping sounds.

Our cities and cultures have not organically manifested themselves to reward certain embodiments over others. They are human made, with human biases and prejudices built into them, so we must ask why certain bodies have been presented as the standard against which others are compared.

The unemployment rate for disabled people around the world is also staggeringly high. According to a UN report, “In developing countries, 80 percent to 90 percent of persons with disabilities of working age are unemployed, whereas in industrialized countries the figure is between 50 percent and 70 percent.”25 Even with disabled people in the workforce rising in recent years, only 37 percent of working-age persons with disabilities in the United States are employed.26 All of these numbers are worse for disabled women and disabled people of color. Senator Tom Harkin has written that things aren’t looking up: “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the disability workforce shrank by over 10 percent during the recession, five times faster than the non-disability workforce, which shrank by only about two percent.”27

Disabled people are more likely to be victims of violence than able-bodied people, and hate crimes against disabled people are notoriously underreported and under-prosecuted.29 For disabled individuals who are incarcerated, institutionalized, or unable to choose and hire their own attendants, violence and hate can be a daily occurrence.

Disability can be an identity one embraces, a condition one struggles with, a space one finds liberation in, or a concept that can be leveraged to marginalize and oppress. It can also be all of these things at once.

Such examples of the importance of disability in shaping our society abound. Perhaps most telling, though, is the role concepts of disability have historically played in reinforcing and defining categories of difference.34 Ideologies of disability have contributed to the pathologization of various populations by infantilizing them, declaring them weak, vulnerable, unintelligent, prone to disease, less advanced, in need of care, and so forth. This pathologization is intricately tied up with ableism, which asserts that markers of disability, such as vulnerability, weakness, physical and mental abnormality, and dependency are undesirable. Consequently, any physical or mental attributes that can then be associated (falsely or accurately) with these conditions are seen as biological, natural deficiencies that need to be regulated and controlled.

These ideologies of disability have helped define whole populations as disabled through claims of intellectual and physical inferiority, as can be seen in racist stereotypes that posit black people as physically robust but intellectually inferior to white people, indigenous communities as in need of management and prone to disease, and upper-class white women as too delicate for rigorous intellectual or physical work. The legacies of such histories are far from buried, as can be seen in the work of scholars such as Nirmala Erevelles, who has shown that in the United States children of color are disproportionately categorized as having disabilities, giving the school system a supposedly biological justification for segregating them into special (in other words separate) education classrooms.35

She writes, “Physicians and anthropologists of the time did not in fact distinguish between characteristics ascribed to race and those ascribed to physical and mental ability as we do today.” She explains that anthropologists of the day were not analogizing differences so much as actually “merging . . . [them] into a flexible category of mental immaturity and incapacity.”36

Though often overlooked, the category of animal is also crucial to understanding this history and the frameworks that define us. Who is human versus nonhuman may seem clear-cut and uncomplicated today, but as we know all too well, at different points in time various human populations have been identified as bestial, more animal than human, or as missing links of evolution—classifications that were inextricably entangled with definitions of inferiority, savagery, sexuality, dependency, ability/disability, physical and mental difference, and so forth.

My point here is not only to expose the importance of the figure of the animal to histories of categorization and dehumanization, it is also to make clear that the animal, and, consequently, the human, are complicated categories, socially determined rather than solely biologically.

In these constructs animals—a huge, unwieldy category that encompasses creatures as diverse as mosquitoes, jellyfish, dogs, and orcas—are understood to be unquestionably inferior creatures. In this anthropocentric view the world exists for “man” (that is, some men), with animals existing completely separate from and lesser than this pinnacle of creation.

As disability studies scholar Michelle Jarman writes, “The very real need to challenge fallacious biological attributes linked to race, gender, sexuality and poverty—such as physical anomaly, psychological instability, or intellectual inferiority—has often left stigma around disability unchallenged.”

Unless disability and animal justice are incorporated into our other movements for liberation, ableism and anthropocentrism will be left unchallenged, available for use by systems of domination and oppression.

In animal liberation movements, feminist and people of color framings of animal ethics have emerged to challenge traditional framings of animal rights by focusing on the interlocking oppression of humans and animals and by highlighting the concerns of communities that have largely been left out of animal rights discourse.

A FEW YEARS AGO I found a story about a fox with arthrogryposis, which is the disability I was born with. According to the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre, a wildlife conservation and management organization, the fox was shot by a resident of the area because “it had an abnormal gait and appeared sick.” The animal, whose disabilities were quite significant, had normal muscle mass, and his stomach contained a large amount of digested food, which suggested to researchers that “the limb deformity did not preclude successful hunting and foraging.”1

People shoot normal foxes too, of course, but for less purportedly altruistic reasons.

The concept of a mercy killing carries within it two of the most prominent responses to disability: destruction and pity. The fox was clearly affected by human ableism, shot dead by someone who equated disability only with suffering and fear of contagion.

Many of our ideas about animals are formed by our assumption that only the “fittest” animals survive, which negates the value and even the naturalness of such experiences as vulnerability, weakness, and interdependence.

As important (and radical) as it is to suggest that animals who are not directly related can care for each other in such a way, from a critical disability perspective it is also important to keep open the possibility that Babyl did offer something useful to the troop—something that may be hard for us to recognize if we understand disability only as a drawback or limitation.

The dog may learn that fetch can still be played, as her human companion may use his mouth or feet to throw the stick. Which being—the dog or the presumptuous human observer—understands disability more accurately?

In one instructional video I found on what to do with animals born with disabilities such as congenital blindness, “hermaphroditism,” or arthrogryposis (my own disability), there is no mincing of words: the advice is to “destroy” them before they contaminate your gene pool and damage your profits.

In the end they must be euthanized, a mercy killing that, like the shooting of the fox with arthrogryposis, allows human beings to continue to kill animals as we would anyway, upholding beliefs in human superiority over other species while also fulfilling two of the most prominent ableist responses to disability: pitying it and attempting to destroy it.

It seems impossible to consider the disability that farmed animals experience as separate from their environments. The mother pig is made utterly immobile not by physical difference or disease but by the metal bars of her gestation crate. The hen suffers from pain, but whether that pain is due to a broken leg, overcrowding, complete darkness, or the death of her cagemate is impossible to know. The dairy cow is euthanized not because she cannot walk but because she has become a symbol of contamination. Such animals’ environments clearly disable them even more than their physical and psychological disabilities do—a fact that supports the social model of disability.

These animals are simultaneously disabled and hyperabled—made disabled by the very enhancements that make them especially profitable to industries and desirable to consumers.

Autistic writer and primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes describes seeing her own symptoms of exclusion and marginalization in the animals she watched and studied at the zoo: “I would see this kind of behavior with gorillas in captivity. They had nervous tics similar, if not identical, to mine: hair plucking, picking at scabs, scratching, rocking, chewing on themselves, and other repetitive and self-stimulating behaviors. One gorilla spun in tight, fast circles. Another bobbed her head up and down.”42

In her book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves, science historian Laurel Braitman exposes the widespread use of pharmaceuticals to help animals cope with captivity in zoos, aquariums, and research labs. Not surprisingly, zoos try to keep this information secret, with zookeepers often required to sign nondisclosure agreements. After all, as Braitman writes, “finding out that the gorillas, badgers, giraffes, belugas, or wallabies on the other side of the glass are taking Valium, Prozac, or antipsychotics to deal with their lives as display animals is not exactly heartwarming news.”44 What we do know is that the animal pharmaceutical industry in the United States is booming (it brought in nearly $6 billion in 2010).45

What does disability mean for a hen in an environment where her every movement and desire is neglected? What does a physical limitation or difference mean when you are given no opportunity to move in your body, to explore it, because your environment is already limiting everything about you? Perhaps, as with many disabled human beings, these animals’ physical or mental impairments are the least of their worries.

Unlike with Mozu or the fox with arthrogryposis, there is no disability empowerment projected here, not in these environments. Because as soon as I imagine these animals embodying their disabilities in ways other than suffering or imagine them fostering new ways of interacting or perceiving, I have imagined them out of the factory farm or research lab. This shows the extent to which the suffering and marginalization of disability is social, built, and structural.

In the end, it is not only disabled animals who could be called crips. All animals—both those we human beings would call disabled and those we would not—are devalued and abused for many of the same basic reasons disabled people are. They are understood as incapable, as lacking in the various abilities and capacities that have long been held to make human lives uniquely valuable and meaningful. They are, in other words, oppressed by ableism.

The able body that ableism perpetuates and privileges is always not only able-bodied but human.