Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

If animal and disability oppression are entangled, might not that mean their paths of liberation are entangled as well?

Although the moments in which I recognized my physical limitations (like my Madonna moment) were poignant and challenging experiences, the suffering I experienced in these moments was minor compared to the ineffable suffering I began to experience due to ableism.

Disabled people are supposed to find the courage to overcome their own personal limitations through strength of character rather than by overcoming discrimination and oppression.

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.

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 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.

Twenty percent of the world’s poorest people are disabled, and 80 percent of the world’s disabled population live in developing countries.21

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

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.”39

In many ways a similar thing could be said of animality: that there has been an urgent need among dehumanized populations (including disabled people) to challenge animalization and claim humanity. As urgent and understandable as these challenges are, it is important to ask how we can reconcile the brutal reality of human animalization with the concurrent need to challenge the devaluing of animals and even acknowledge our own animality.

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.

Masson reports that “nearly a quarter of all commercially reared birds are lame and experience excruciating chronic pain.”16 To satisfy the increasing demand for cheap meat and eggs, chickens have been bred to grow twice as fast as they usually would, leaving them with bones and joints that cannot bear the weight of their massive forms. A battery hen, whose sole role is to lay eggs, produces around 250 eggs a year, far more than the sixty or so her body is meant to handle.17

At least 60 percent of dairy cows experience lameness, and 35 percent experience udder mastitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the udder tissue.19

“On average, a U.S. dairy cow produced 9,193 kg (20,267 lb) of milk in 2007, more than double the per-cow milk yield in 1967 and 47% more than the per-cow milk yield in 1987. . . . Even though the number of cows in the dairy industry declined from 1987 to 2007, the total production of milk increased by 30%.”20

Most upsetting to the pork industry is porcine stress syndrome, which costs the industry an estimated $90 million a year.22

In Iowa alone the avian flu cost $1.2 billion.29

The Belgian Blue is a breed of beef cattle bred for “double muscling” for more and leaner meat. They are so huge that they have a hard time walking, and the females must have caesarians, as vaginal births are impossible.38

Even so-called heritage breeds are often bred for characteristics that in human beings would no doubt be labeled disabilities or abnormalities; consider the Tennessee fainting goat, which “keels over when startled” and which Slow Food USA says “sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.”39

the animals who are subjected to lives in fur farms (foxes, minks, chinchillas, and numerous other species) “are inbred for specific colors . . . causing severe abnormalities—deafness, crippling of limbs, deformed sex organs, screw necks, anemia, sterility, and nervous system disorders.”40

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.

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

People rallied to get these prized human abilities such as language and rationality out from behind bars. Ally and Nim simply went along with them.

Where gesture was discouraged in human beings, it would eventually be recognized to be a “special faculty” that nonhuman apes used to express themselves.22

As one ASL speaker told me, “To some people these studies seemed to say that where spoken language is too complex for other animals to learn, sign language is so simple that even a monkey can learn it.”

With these tensions in mind, perhaps we can begin to reframe the comparison of animal and disability issues, acknowledging the violence caused by such histories of dehumanization, while also taking seriously the need to challenge the role the animal has been forced to play within dehumanizing systems and rhetoric.

In early research into the linguistic abilities of chimps, researchers spent years trying to teach them to use spoken language. As great apes lack the necessary anatomical structures for vocalization, the studies were largely unsuccessful, with the chimps only managing a few basic words such as “mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up.” These studies were considered failures, and many people thought the question of chimp language was closed.25 The ableist assumption was that if a chimpanzee were able to use language, it would be in the same way that nondisabled hearing humans do: through sound.

What we need to be asking is why an animal’s language or communication abilities alter the way we feel he should be treated.

What was special about Booee’s ASL acquisition was not that his use of words suddenly made him an intelligent being with feelings but rather that it confronted us, as human beings, with the fact of his intelligence, his emotional life.

Arundhati Roy, who poignantly writes, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”8

the idea of helping beings who cannot help themselves tends to be more attractive to many people than acknowledging that those who are dependent and vulnerable can also have agency and opinions.

“Nothing about us without us.”

Drake and Pollan are also wrong to suggest that animals are not telling us what they want. Roy’s phrase “the preferably unheard” is far more apt. Animals consistently voice preferences and ask for freedom. They speak to us every day when they cry out in pain or try to move away from our prods, electrodes, knives, and stun guns. Animals tell us constantly that they want out of their cages, that they want to be reunited with their families, or that they don’t want to walk down the kill chute. Animals express themselves all the time, and many of us know it. If we didn’t, factory farms and slaughterhouses would not be designed to constrain any choices an animal might have. We deliberately have to choose not to hear when the lobster bangs on the walls from inside a pot of boiling water or when the hen who is past her egg-laying prime struggles against the human hands that enclose her legs and neck. We have to choose not to recognize the preference expressed when the fish spasms and gasps for oxygen in her last few minutes alive. Considering animals voiceless betrays an ableist assumption of what counts as having a voice—an assumption that many disabled and nondisabled people alike often make about animals.

Many of these escapes are extremely complex: monkeys and great apes scale impossibly high walls, build bridges and even catapults to bypass large bodies of water, ground electric fences to avoid shock, pick locks, and work together to pull off elaborate escape plans that deceive their human captors.

When animal advocates describe animals as voiceless, even when it is meant simply as a metaphor, it gives power to those who want to view animals as “mindless objects.” In the long run, activists will help animals more if we treat them as active participants in their own liberation—as the expressive subjects animal advocates know them to be—remembering that resistance takes many forms, some of which may be hard to recognize from an able-bodied human perspective.

The argument suggests that there is no “morally relevant ability” that all animals don’t have but all humans do.

Nonetheless, the danger of the argument is evident in the very act of deciding which abilities are morally relevant.

For animals, who are nearly always written out of the debate altogether, this move has some benefits (at least they are being considered), but for intellectually disabled people, it offers little except risk.

Instead we must argue against the very notion that beings with neurotypical human capacities are inherently more valuable than those without.

Bailey writes, “It bears emphasizing that the rise of reason was not incidentally associated with the oppression of women and nonwhite men; rather, that oppression itself was part of what legitimized reason. Reason did not first come into existence and then look for a venue to exhibit itself, rather, what much of philosophy came to define as reason only came into being as result of denying and quashing those attributes regarded as feminine or bodily.”26

The failure to make sense, as measured against and by those with normal minds, means a loss of personhood.”28

As Bailey makes clear, the problem is not reason itself but rather the ways in which reason has been held up as separate from and more valuable than emotion, feeling, and other ways of knowing and being. This definition of reason stems from a history of patriarchy, imperialism, racism, classism, ableism, and anthropocentrism, and too often carries these oppressions within it.

As Michael Bérubé, whose son has Down syndrome, writes, “I note that in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning how to read. OK, so now the rationale for seeing these people as somewhat less than human is their likely comprehension of Woody Allen films. Twenty years from now we’ll be hearing ‘sure, they get Woody Allen, but only his early comedies—they completely fail to appreciate the breakthrough of Interiors.’ Surely you understand my sense that the goalposts are being moved around here in a rather arbitrary fashion.”31

According to a Washington Post article about the case, transplant forms often include a box for “mentally retarded” to indicate which cases can be denied.35

In just the past decade we’ve learned that magpies grieve,41 prairie dogs can describe through their calls what a predator looks like and whether it has a gun,42 sheep can remember dozens of faces,43 and dogs can categorize photographs.44

Despite these complexities, many species of animals have passed the test, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants, and magpies. Some species were more difficult to test than others because of their species-specific cultures, though. For example, gorillas were thought unable to pass the mirror test until scientists realized that gorillas have a strong aversion to eye contact and are easily embarrassed. Gorillas would often leave the mirror, go hide, and then try to remove the mark in private. Joshua Plotnik, the head of elephant research at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand, commented, “The mark test can be difficult to apply across species because it assumes that a particular animal will be interested in something weird on their body. Primates are interested in such things—we’re groomers. But elephants are different. They’re huge and they’re used to putting things on, not taking things off of their bodies, like mud and dirt.” The test also privileges vision—we really can’t tell much about the fact that dogs, for example, fail the mirror test, because we know vision is not their prominent sense.56

As Bérubé aptly put it, “There hasn’t been a discovery at any point in the last five hundred years after which we said to ourselves, ‘My goodness, animals are stupider than we thought.’ Every single discovery has gone in the opposite direction.”57

Western science has tried to be objective and avoid anthropomorphizing animals, but it has been unable to avoid measuring animals with human yardsticks. This is a catch-22 for the animals, who are deemed intelligent only when they remind us of ourselves, and yet, if they do remind us of ourselves, we often dismiss the evidence with accusations of anthropomorphism. When animals finally do pass our tests and quizzes and exhibit traits that we value as intelligent, the traits are then minimized and new goalposts are erected.

What kinds of experiences and understandings of the world develop for a creature who perceives it through smell or who communicates through bioluminescence? What sort of intelligence is needed to accomplish extremely complex migrations or to survive in the depths of the oceans?

Justice looks different for different kinds of beings.