English Language and Literature Commons^™

Economies Of Extinction: Animals, Labour, And Inheritance In The Longleaf Pine Forests Of The Us South, Nathaniel Otjen

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct …

Mutual Rescue: Disabled Animals And Their Caretakers, Lynda Birke, Lori Gruen

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals.

Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – …

The Contagion Of Slow Violence: The Slaughterhouse And Covid-19, Kelly Struthers Montford, Tessa Wotherspoon

Animal Studies Journal

COVID-19 has brought to the fore the violence faced by slaughterhouse workers and those they are charged with slaughtering. This article argues that COVID-19 has wrought an acceleration of the slow violence of state organized race crime (Nixon, Ward), in spreading rapidly through the slaughterhouse and to surrounding racialized communities. We show that zoonotic pandemics are the result of state organized race crime, and that abattoirs are locations of inseparable animal and racial violence. We then analyse how the law and state institutions have positioned slaughterhouse work as essential, contra workers’ claims and general knowledge that meat is an inessential …