Beasts of Burden Quotes

“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.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Denying someone [else] justice just because you do not yet have your own is never a good idea. I am also convinced we cannot have disability liberation without animal liberation--they are intimately tied together. What if, rather than dismissing or disassociating for the struggle of animals, we embraced what political theorist Claire Jean Kim calls an 'ethics of avowal,' a recognition that oppressions are linked, and that we can be 'open in meaningful and sustained way to the suffering and claims of other subordinated groups, even or perhaps especially in the course of political battle'? Compassion is not a limited resource.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“It's not that there are no challenges to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but in the media, including authors of popular books on food and food politics, contribute to the 'enfreakment' of what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian 'lifestyle.' But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that 'several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable for of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced these misguided souls suffered from "zoophilpsychosis."' As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be 'particularly susceptible to the malady.' As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Fearnley-Whittingstall and Pollan argue that on some evolutionary level the animals have agreed to be slaughtered, because animals tend to stay around human encampments even when there are no physical fences; thus, despite the inevitability of being killed, a relationship with humans must be worthwhile to them—worth even their own deaths. But not all fences are physical, as we humans know too well. One need only look at the history of male domination over women to see various psychological and economic fences at work in the rampant and insidious nature of patriarchy. One cannot argue that the domesticated animal chose slaughter any more than one could argue that generations of women chose patriarchy. Human domination is the system domesticated animals live under because there is no other system available to them.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“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.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“I am unwilling to return to the framework of human exceptionalism that says all human life has value while the lives of nonhuman animals do not. Does this mean instead that the lives of all sentient beings are equal? Are we to say that the killing of a human and a chicken are equally wrong? I would rather leave these uncomfortable questions unanswered than embrace theories of personhood that demean the value of intellectually disabled people and nonhuman animals. It is better to acknowledge such uncomfortable spaces...than to limit our moral understanding simply in order to satisfy some need for hierarchies of values. If our theories lead us to such conclusions, then they are not good enough or complete enough.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Crip time asks us to think about time as variable and changing with our embodiments.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Ableist values are central to animal industries, where the dependency, vulnerability, and presumed lack of emotional awareness or intellectual capacity of animals creates the groundwork for a system that makes billions of dollars in profit off of animal lives.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Countless investigative reports and studies have shown just how cruel, toxic, and terrible these industries are, not just for animals, but for the environment, workers, and human health overall.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“It is difficult to ascertain what role these articles play in marginalizing the vegetarian experience when there are so many more pressing issues that confront individuals who might otherwise choose to try to become vegetarian or vegan, such as the lack of healthy affordable food in low-income neighborhoods, often largely inhabited by people of color, and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal and sugar-heavy diets over ones with vegetables and fruits. yet rather than focus on these series structural barriers, many articles on vegetarianism and veganism often present the challenge of avoiding meat and animal products as challenge to one's very own normalcy and acceptability.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“For the first time in human history our planet has reached a concentration of four hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide, an amount that scientists have long held to be a tipping point into environmental catastrophe. It is widely accepted that one of the leading causes of this disaster is industrialized animal agriculture. As temperatures rise, global food shortages increase, and natural disasters take countless lives around the world, we must ask ourselves whether a taste for animal flesh is worth the increasing environmental devastation it has helped create.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“My innocuous presence, as I quietly sat downstairs in my wheelchair, made me feel as if I were condoning the discrimination that was built into the physical space of the art center, as if my presence were saying, “It’s OK, I don’t need to be accommodated—after all, being disabled is my own personal struggle.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Booee acted intelligent enough to impress, and emotional enough to inspire empathy, but he remained nonthreatening, “a sweet boy,” who was “guileless” and “forgiving”—the kind of being who would inspire sympathy in humans. What if, like Red Peter, imitating human beings was not something that pleased Booee? What if he did it because he was looking for a way out and for no other reason?”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Some species of fish have been shown to have long-lasting memories, complex social lives, and personalities. Yet our biases against them allow us to withhold even the most minimal of legal protections. Fish die stressful, painful, and drawnout deaths by such things as asphyxiation, stab wounds, or evisceration (disembowelment). 50 Writer Jonathan Safran Foer points out in his book Eating Animals that there is no such thing as a humane death for a fish: “No fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“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.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Histories of racism, colonialism and patriarchy have conveniently been erased from this idealized fantasy of preindustrial agriculture, while ableism and speciesism have simply gone unquestioned.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“I am confronted with a barrage of technologies, advertisements, and movie plotlines that suggest sitting in a wheelchair or not being able to walk means an end to a full life.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“The issue of breeding itself raises all sorts of complex questions about normalcy, naturalness, and the boundaries between disability and enhancement.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Many invisible or less visible disabilities go unnoticed by people in their daily interactions because most people presume abledness in others.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation