Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

According to a 2009 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 2.3 million people live more than a mile away from a grocery store and don’t own a car.24

Wealthy neighborhoods have three times as many supermarkets on average as poor ones do, while predominantly black neighborhoods have four times fewer grocery stores than white neighborhoods and a more limited selection of products.25

In 2015 the World Health Organization released a study that concluded that processed meat causes cancer and that red meat “probably” causes cancer. The report placed processed meat into its Group 1 category, placing it beside tobacco smoke, asbestos, and alcohol.27

Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse have exposed meatpacking as the most dangerous occupation in the United States. Schlosser writes, “The meatpacking industry not only has the highest injury rate, but also has by far the highest rate of serious injury—more than five times the national average, as measured in lost workdays.”31

Given how low-paying, dangerous, and grueling these jobs are, they have some of the highest rates of worker turnover—for meatpacking plants it’s 100 percent annually.32 The average plant hires an entirely new workforce every year.33 Eisnitz writes that “a worker’s chances of suffering an injury or an illness in a meat plant are six times greater than if that same person worked in a coal mine.”34

A Human Rights Watch report titled Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants concludes, “The single largest factor contributing to worker injuries is the speed at which the animals are killed and processed.”37 Facilities often operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, killing hundreds or even thousands of animals every hour. One worker said, “The line is so fast there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself.” It’s not unusual for a worker to make up to forty thousand repetitive cuts during a single shift. Employees experience chronic pain throughout their bodies, in their backs, shoulders, wrists, arms, and hands, but they are “scared silent,” because they know they will lose their jobs if they complain.38

These workers also are exposed to a number of harmful gases and regularly inhale particulate matter, which is an innocuous phrase for such things as “dry fecal matter, feed, animal dander and skin cells, feathers, fungi, dry soil and bacterial endotoxins.”39 In pig confinement operations, nearly 70 percent of workers experience “one or more symptoms of respiratory irritation or illness.”40

Butler worked at Tyson’s Grannis slaughter plant in Arkansas for many years. He was known as “the best chicken killer in the state.” In an interview with Satya magazine, he described his job, When I first started killing, it really bothered me. It bothered me because the chickens were hanging there in those shackles, helpless, and couldn’t run away. . . . And it really bothered me when I missed one and heard the poor bird go through the scalder alive, thrashing and bumping against the sides of it as it slowly died. I worked to become really good at killing so that I wouldn’t miss so many. I did become really good, but at a steep price. The more I did it, the less it bothered me. I became desensitized. The killing room really does something to your mind—all that blood, killing so many times, over and over again.43

Rather than regulate line speeds for the interest of worker safety, line speed is limited only by federal sanitation laws.”44 Both Schlosser and Eisnitz confirm this policy and culture of speed, repeatedly describing how simple things such as bathroom breaks or taking a pause because of a sudden injury or illness cause people to lose their jobs. Workers are fired for taking doctor-prescribed sick leave, reporting their injuries, and complaining about animal cruelty. A 2016 report from Oxfam found that some poultry workers in the United States are resorting to wearing diapers as they are denied bathroom breaks.45 These industries are also notoriously good at leaving injured workers without medical coverage, worker’s comp, or any sort of compensation or livelihood.46 After they are fired, these disabled and often undocumented workers find it difficult if not impossible to find new work or health care. Eisnitz writes, “Drained of their usefulness to the slaughterhouse, [disabled workers] are cast aside, reminders of a system that places nearly as little value on human life as it does on animal life.”47

But Erevelles also asks another question, reframing Robert McRuer’s sentiment: “Within what social conditions might we welcome the disability to come, to desire it?”49

After September 11, when war was first declared against Afghanistan and the Bush administration warned that anthrax and other chemical warfare was being used against innocent Americans, I began wearing a homemade badge on the back of my wheelchair that said, “The U.S. Military and Its Garbage Made Me Disabled.” I wore it as a way of protesting, a way of resisting the fear-mongering that enabled the United States to invade other countries, a way of saying, “Let’s look at how our own country is poisoning people.” Other people read it differently, telling me things like “I’m sorry to hear that” or “Well, you’re sure handling it well!” I took it off when I realized that even those who read it as a criticism of our military also read it as a criticism of my body. What the badge probably should have read is “The U.S. Military and Its Garbage Made Me Disabled, and I Love My Body”—but the underlying sentiment is a bit too complex for a badge.

As Eli Clare asks, “How do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of bodies—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, non-human and human—while not equating disability with injustice?”50

DIIAAR was formed in response to an issue that has often positioned disabled individuals at odds with animals: animal research. Spring, her partner Dennis Walton, and activist Polly Strand founded the group in the mid-1980s to show that “disabled people did not want animals experimented on and tortured on their behalf.”1

In response to this threat, the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest association of medical doctors and students in the United States, devised a plan to combat the animal advocacy movement by capitalizing on infighting within it, and by criminalizing animal activists. Many of their tactics attempted to spin the conversation, changing phrases such as “Animals in Research” to “Advancing Biomedical Research” and decrying animal activists for obstructing scientific and medical progress.5 The AMA’s plan was not supposed to be shared with the public, but in 1989 a document titled “Animal Research Action Plan” was leaked to animal advocacy groups.6 It stated, “To defeat the animal rights movement, one has to peel away the outermost layers of support and isolate the hardcore activists from the general public and shrink the size of the sympathizers.”7 One way to do that was to pit animals against disabled people.

One such poster shows a little white girl holding a teddy bear and a toy cat. The top reads: “It’s the animals you don’t see that really helped her recover”; at the bottom is: “We lost some animals. But look what we saved.”11

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 1.04 million animals are used for research every year in the United States. If this number seems surprisingly low it’s because it excludes all birds, reptiles, amphibians, and agricultural animals used in agricultural experiments, plus an estimated 100 million mice and rats.17 In addition, countless animals are bred for research but then “discarded” because they do not fit specific health, sex, or age requirements. Lawyer and animal advocate Gary Francione writes, “Federal estimates of animals that are discarded for these reasons are as high as 50 percent.”18 These discarded animals are not covered by anticruelty legislation.19

Figure 4: The logo of Disabled and Incurably Ill for Alternatives to Animal Research (DIIAAR). The image transforms the standard disability symbol into one that advocates for animals. Image Courtesy: Dennis Walton.

Cripping animal ethics means many things to me, including acknowledging that some people may be politically vegan in the way I have described but unable to sustain themselves on vegan food. This is true for people who have little to no control over their food choices, such as those in prisons and nursing homes, but also for those disabled people who rely on other people (sometimes people they were unable to choose) for their care and meal preparation. Or perhaps, as with Dona Spring, eating a vegan diet is too extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, due to extreme health issues. I see this as a social model of veganism, a recognition that usually the biggest challenges to being vegan are not simply personal but structural—social, political, and economic.

Those of us who can refuse to eat animals and animal products should do so. Critics of animal ethics and veganism too often justify meat eating by insisting that some people’s health or circumstances depends on it. This argument uses other people’s political and economic struggles and serious health concerns as an excuse to resist change.

But while feminist theory has devoted much attention to what it means to care, less has been said about what it means to be cared for.

As a disabled person I espouse a philosophy of interdependence, of which care is a vital component, while simultaneously resisting the narrative that care—especially in the form of goodwill or charity—will somehow allow me to live a more liberated life. Being cared for can be stifling, if not infantilizing and oppressive, as of course can be the role of the caregiver.

Historically disability rights advocates have declared that we do not want to be cared for; instead we want rights, services, and an accessible society that does not limit our involvement and contributions.

Within a feminist ethic-of-care framework, dependency does not justify oppression; it is rather an argument against it. Adams and Donovan explain, “Domestic animals, in particular, are for the most part dependent on humans for survival—a situation requiring an ethic that recognizes this inequality.”4

Disability studies scholar Michael Oliver, like many other disability theorists, argues that dependence is relative: “Professionals tend to define independence in terms of self-care activities such as washing, dressing, toileting, cooking and eating without assistance. Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”8

All of us exist along a spectrum of dependency. The challenge is to understand dependency not simply as negative, and certainly not as unnatural, but rather as an integral part of our world and our relationships. Because disabled people are seen as burdens, our contributions to our families, communities, and cultures are often overlooked or flat-out negated.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Charles B. Davenport—a leader in the American eugenics movement and a member of the American Breeders Association, a group devoted to furthering knowledge about genetics, heredity, and breeding—described eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”

In human eugenics, perfection meant getting rid of “unwanted” characteristics such as disabilities, while animal breeders have often pursued perfection by enhancing certain characteristics to the point where they easily could be classified as disabilities or deformities.

Donaldson and Kymlicka write, “Dependency doesn’t intrinsically involve a loss of dignity, but the way in which we respond to dependency certainly does,” offering the insightful example of a dog pawing at his bowl for dinner. “If we despise dependency as a kind of weakness then when a dog paws his dinner bowl . . . we will see ingratiation or servility. However, if we don’t view dependency as intrinsically undignified, we will see the dog as a capable individual who knows what he wants and how to communicate in order to get it—as someone who has the potential for agency, preferences and choice.”23 Does an animal’s dependence on human care have to be understood as inevitably negative or exploitative? Is it possible to have a relationship with domesticated animals in which humans recognize the value of these animals with whom we have evolved beyond a simple calculation of mutual advantage?

As Josephine Donovan writes, “It is not so much . . . a matter of caring for animals as mothers (human and nonhuman) care for their infants, but of listening to animals, paying emotional attention, taking seriously—caring about—what they are telling us.”24

According to the Humane Society of the United States, around 2.7 million purportedly healthy cats and dogs are killed in America annually—about one every eleven seconds (a statistic that says nothing of those who are ill or disabled).

Dog trainers are the first to remind people that dog training is actually human training—that most of the work involves learning how to express your needs and desires to your dog while also being able to correctly interpret theirs.

Although the opposite is certainly true, with service animals regularly being used as a justification to refuse disabled people access into public spaces, I have nonetheless heard similar sentiments from other disabled people: one of the most powerful services animals can provide is a certain kind of social ease, mediating between their human companions and an ableist world.

Shaun Heasley, “More Than 1 in 4 With Disabilities Living in Poverty,” Disability Scoop, September 14, 2011, accessed September 10, 2013, http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2011/09/14/more-1-in-4-poverty/13952.

Masson, Pig Who Sang to the Moon, 67–68. “Scientists, like the veterinary Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Medicine, who exposed this situation, have been accused of being speculative, or worse, anthropomorphic.” More recent studies have supported these scientists’ findings by showing that if offered a choice between regular feed and a feed that includes an anti-inflammatory and pain-reducing drug, that “lame” hens will choose the enhanced feed, leading researchers to conclude that “the lame broiler chickens are in pain and that this pain causes them distress from which they seek relief.” C.A. Weeks, et al. “The Behaviour of Broiler Chickens and Its Modification by Lameness,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 67 (2000): 111–125.

23. Margalit Fox, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 36.

For decades the USDA has promoted milk and dairy products by declaring that everyone should be getting two to three servings of dairy a day. Yet the Food Empowerment Project (FEP) reports, “While 95% of Asians, 60–80% of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews, 80–100% of American Indians, and 50–80% of Latinos are lactose intolerant, only a very small proportion of individuals of northern European descent experience any pain as a result of consuming lactose-filled milk products.” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Lactose Intolerance: Information for Health Care Providers,” NIH no. 05-5305B, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/Documents/NICHD_MM_Lactose_FS_rev.pdf.) As scholars such as A. Breeze Harper and John Robbins have shown, this bias in favor of dairy is a form of institutionalized nutritional racism, which leads many to become sick with symptoms such as nausea, abdominal pain, cramping, diarrhea, bloating, and flatulence, especially in communities that are least likely to have access to dairy-free alternatives. A study by the FEP reports that “dairy alternatives were only available in approximately 3% of market locations in lower-income areas, which have proportionally much larger populations of ethnic minorities. In comparison, dairy alternatives were available at 23% of locations in higher-income neighborhoods.” Food Empowerment Project, “Food Deserts,” accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.foodispower.org/food-deserts.