"Vegans,Freaks and Animals: Cripping Animal Ethics through Art and
Scholarship" [DRAFT.]
Sunaura Taylor
I wanted to begin by giving a brief explanation of disability studies for
those who may not know. Disability studies and disability rights and justice
movements challenge the idea that disability is a natural or biological site of
difference, instead we argue that it is a social and political issue that
deserves critical attention
The above image is a painting I made in 2007. This painting is where I
first began to see the relevance of disability to animal ethics. With a
disability analysis in hand, I was able to begin recognizing how useful a
disability frame is to animal issues.
The painting is 10-1/2 x 8 feet and is called Chicken Truck.
The painting is of cages filled with hundreds of chickens each painted
in a varying degree of realism. From the title we understand that the cages
are on a truck. Each bird is individual. They are in small cages that are
sections of larger cages, which sit on top each other held together with two
leather straps and large metal hooks. You can see the white metal base of
the truck below them. Some of the wiring of the cages is broken, gone, or
seems to disappear, as do some of the birds. Some are on the verge of
falling out, others seem to already be meat, while others are just a thin wash
of color. I have been told that the light in this painting seems to be coming
from some of the chickens themselves.
As I was researching for this painting I learned many things about
animal industries and specifically many things about Battery hens. I noticed
that references to the hens' bodily injuries and extreme bodily differences
were repeatedly made in both animal rights literature and the literature of
the meat industry. In short, I realized that these hens where all disabled.
Industrially farmed animals live in such cramped, filthy, and unnatural
conditions that disabilities have become common, if not inevitable. They are
often cramped into cages with cement, wire, or metal-grated floors covered
in their own feces and kept in virtually endless darkness. But the disabilities
that arise from these toxic environments are often secondary to the ones
they are made to have from birth. Farmed animals are bred to physical
extremes: udders produce too much milk for a cow’s body to hold, turkeys
and chickens cannot bear the weight of their own giant breasts, and pigs’
legs are too weak to support them. Chickens, turkeys, and ducks are also
physically harmed by processes like debeaking—done without anesthetic—
which can leave them prone to serious infection and make it very difficult for
the birds to eat or preen themselves. And then there are the bruises,
abscesses, sores, broken bones, vaginal and reproductive disorders,
chronic illness, and psychological issues that farmed animals are commonly
reported to endure. Of the tens of billions of animals killed every year for
human use, many are literally manufactured to be disabled
The ubiquity of disability in animal agriculture is made clear in a
bizarre, early but undated pamphlet by Swift & Co. The pamphlet, which is
really better described as a comic, is filled with anthropomorphized, Warner
Brothers-inspired drawings of smiling animals getting beaten by
slaughterhouse employees—slapped, thrown, prodded, and whipped. The
first page reads, ,"Directly or indirectly, every pound of meat lost because of
bruises and crippling costs you money." <67> The most fascinating page is
the last. A cartoon pig stands on two legs with a pair of crutches and his
head wrapped up as if he has a head wound. Next to him stands a cow with
a sling around her front leg (which resembles an arm, as she is also on two
legs). With her uninjured hoof the cow pushes an old-fashioned wheelchair
in which sits a young lamb. All three of them stare out at the viewer. No
longer smiling, they look distraught and exhausted—but it's hard to imagine
it's over the loss of profits.
There is much that could be analyzed here. The relationship between
disability and domestication, disability and profit, and what disability even
means to nonhuman animals, especially in the context of an environment
like a factory farm that is built to limit all choice and mobility their inhabitants
may have.
In this brief discussion I have focused on factory farms but one could
look to any other industry that exploits animals and see similar patterns. For
example the fur industry, circuses, animal research, zoos and so forth—all
create and profit off of disability. It is also essential to point out that when we
talk of disabilities being manufactured in these animal industries that the
human workers in these environments also face disproportionate rates of
disability, injury and sickness due to unsafe working conditions. Most of the
workers in animal food industries are poor people, people of color,
undocumented immigrants, and other populations that are vulnerable to
exploitative labor practices.
So far I have focused in this discussion on the material role disability
plays in Animal industries, but ideologies of disability are a vital component
in conversations for and against animal liberation as well, from assumptions
about what's natural, to questions of dependency and care, disability is
everywhere in animal debates once you start to look for it.
And yet disability and disabled people have largely been left out of
animal ethics conversations, and ableism has been rendered as normative
and naturalized. The disability community has had a challenging relationship
to the animal rights community, as epitomized by continued debates
involving philosophers like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, whose works
have denied personhood to certain groups of intellectually disabled
individuals. But even in less extreme ways, disabled individuals and the
various issues that affect us have largely been left out of the animal welfare
and sustainability movements, whether because of the movements’
obsession with health and physical fitness or a lack of attention to who has
access to different kinds of educational and activist events. For example
when an event is held in an inaccessible building.
Examining animal issues through a lens of disability is essential, as
nonhuman animals and disabled people (or perhaps more accurately) the
idea of disability, are oppressed by similar frameworks and ideologies—
specifically ableism. At its simplest, ableism is discrimination against those
who are disabled and against the notion of disability itself, but ableism also
encompasses more general historical and cultural discrimination against
and marginalization of certain bodies that are understood as different,
incapable, vulnerable, and dependent and the simultaneous privileging of
bodies understood as abled.
Animals are continually judged by ableist human traits and abilities. We
understand animals as inferior and not valuable for many of the same
reasons disabled people are viewed these ways—they are seen as
incapable, as lacking, and as different. Animals are clearly affected by the
privileging of the able-bodied human ideal, which is constantly put up as the
standard against which they are judged, justifying the cruelty we so often
inflict on them. The abled body that ableism perpetuates and privileges is
always not only nondisabled but also non-animal. Which means that to
really challenge ableism we must also challenge anthropocentrism.
The above painting, "Animals with Arthrogryposis," is about 8.5' x 6.' Four
figures stand or lie on a grey floor with an off white wall behind them. There
are large yellow medical arrows pointing to the abnormal parts of their
bodies. They are in a row: an adult pig stands, a black calf lies collapsed on
the floor, a human (a self-portrait) stands nude and bent staring out at the
viewer, a piglet lies curled on the floor looking out at the viewer as well. I
look angry, not only for myself but for my fellow disabled nonhumans. I am
claiming my relationship with these animals. We are all being marginalized
by ableism. We are seen as less valuable because of what we cannot do.
Our oppression is naturalized and normalized because we lack this or that
ability. We are connected, not only because we all are disabled, but
because we all live in an ableist world.
This is a self-portrait I made in 2011. Arthrogryposis is the disability I
was born with. I was extremely excited when I first realized various animals
have my disability. This condition is found often enough on factory farms to
have been the subject of Beef Magazine’s Dec 2008 issue. The cattle
industry has its own name for my disability, curly calf.
Disability studies offers new ways of valuing life that are not limited by
specific physical or mental capabilities. Disability studies scholars argue
that it is not specifically our intelligence, our rationality, our agility, our
physical independence, or our bipedal posture that gives us dignity and
value. We argue that life is, and should be presumed to be, worth living,
whether you are a person with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy,
quadriplegia, autism, or like me, arthrogryposis. If disability advocates
argue for the protection of the rights of those of us who are disabled, those
of us who are lacking certain highly valued abilities like rationality and
physical independence, then what are the consequences of these
arguments in regard to nonhuman animals?
The field of disability studies raises questions that are important to the
animal-ethics discussion. Questions about normalcy and nature, value and
efficiency, interdependence and vulnerability, as well as more specific
concerns about rights and autonomy, are central to the field. What are the
best ways to protect the rights of those who may not be physically
autonomous but are vulnerable and interdependent? How can the rights of
those who cannot protect their own, or those who cannot understand the
concept of a right, be protected?