As disability studies scholar Rachel Adams reminds us in her book Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, “In some cases, to live as a freak means to be accepted into a community unified on the basis of marginality. To be another kind of freak . . . however, means, by definition, exclusion from the community of civilized persons.”7 Perhaps something similar could be said of animal comparisons.
