Beasts of Burden w/ Sunaura Taylor

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Enter the dig one word at checkout to get three issues delivered in the mail, plus access to 20 years of pay-walled writing. For less than $3 a month, that's nplus1mag.com/thedig. Enter the dig one word at checkout. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. I was just quoted in a guardian article about the dig describing our listeners as "overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people, committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the world. What do they need to know? I'm trying to map out the terrain. Today, we continue our mission to serve a territory that, at least for me, is mostly uncharted, addressing two subjects that you haven't heard much about before on this podcast, disability, and animal liberation. And it's not just the dig. Why is it that these subjects are not more integral to left-wing and Marxist politics in general? That is one of many good questions that my guest host, Astra Taylor asks Sonora Taylor, who is also Astra's sister. Every year, humans kill 80 billion land animals, and an even larger number of fish for food. But industrialized animal agriculture isn't just horrible for the creatures it commodifies. It also endangers humanity. Big meat emits an estimated 14-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, devours more than one-third of the planet's habitable land, fuels antibiotic resistance, and increases the risk of future pandemics, exploits vulnerable workers, and concentrates corporate profits. Animal rights activism then touches on many issues that the left cares about, but it's often regarded as a fringe issue rather than a potential cornerstone of a transformative socialist agenda. In her book Beasts of Burton, Animal and Disability Liberation, Sonora Taylor reframes the debate about animal exploitation and offers new ways of conceptualizing our relationships to animals that challenge standard assumptions and frameworks. From the speciesist faith in human superiority to Peter Singer's utilitarianism, she and Astra co-authored the essay Our Animals Ourselves for Lux Magazine, which makes the socialist feminist case for expanding our circle of concern to other species. And one last thing, I know these sorts of conversations can be touchy because they touch on diet. What we eat. I think of myself as a veggie forward omnivore, meaning I try to mostly eat a plant-based diet, but I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan. I hope that whatever you eat, you like me will find this analysis illuminating. Before we get started, please support the dig at patreon.com/thedig. I'm so grateful that listeners are so committed to this podcast. And one reason I know that you're so committed is because the show is overwhelmingly funded by listeners making voluntary contributions. I say voluntary because we don't pay while shows. You can just sit there listening to everything. Everything we've ever put out without donating anything at all. And the reason why we do that is because the dig is a political education project. We do need to raise funds to cover our operating expenses to keep the lights on, but but making money is not the purpose of this show. We are trying to give organizers the world over the analysis you need to help change everything. So please know that it is voluntary contributions from listeners like you that make it all possible. If you can't afford to contribute and you haven't done so yet, please make a donation now. Every contributor gets our excellent newsletter by email. Depending on where you live and how much you donate, we will send you books, tote bags, coffee mugs. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com/thedig. There is a link in the show notes. Click it. Thanks. And here's Astra Taylor, interviewing Sonora Taylor. Sonora Taylor is a writer, artist, activist, and academic. She's the author of Disabled Ecologies, Lessons from a Wounded Desert, and Beasts of Birdon, Animal and Disability Liberation, which received a 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets, and her artworks have been exhibited internationally. She's a professor in the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley, and the Director of Disabled Ecologies Lab, which aims to envision anti-ablest responses to the most pressing environmental issues of our time. Astra Taylor, alongside being a regular guest host here on the DIG, is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer. She's the Director of numerous documentaries, and her books include The Age of Insecurity, coming together as things fall apart. Democracy may not exist, but will miss it when it's gone, and the American Book Award winner, The People's Platform, taking back power and culture in the digital age. Her most recent book is Solidarity, the past, present, and future of a world-changing idea, co-written with Leah Hunt Hendrix. She was the 2023 CBC Massie Lecture, and, she co-founded The Dead Collective, A Union of Debtors. Sonora Taylor, welcome to the DIG. Astra Taylor, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. This is a bit of an unusual interview in that full disclosure. We're sisters, we're also collaborators. If there's anyone on this planet with whom my own thinking is most aligned and intertwined, it's probably yours. Our work has taken different directions, different forms, and yet I feel it fundamentally comes from a shared experience and also a shared ethical and political framework. We're going to begin this conversation by talking about your amazing book, Beasts of Burden, Animal, and Disability Liberation, which came out in 2017. I do want listeners to know that you actually have a new book out this year called Disabled Ecologies, Lessons from a Wounded Desert, and maybe we'll have you back on to discuss that. But for now, we're starting with Beasts of Burden. And then toward the end of this conversation, we're going to discuss an article that we actually co-wrote for Lux Magazine called Our Animals Ourselves, in which we make a socialist feminist case for animal rights. So that's a map of the conversation for our listeners, so they know where we're going. But let's begin with the subtitle of your book, Beasts of Burden, Animal and Disability Liberation. I think it might be helpful to explain to listeners why these two domains, animal and disability liberation, aren't often thought together before we get into your arguments about why they are actually deeply connected. So yeah, why are these, why are these issues seen as in conflict? You know, I began doing this research kind of looking at these issues together in around 2006. And I knew that there wasn't a lot of work that was connecting these fields or arenas. But what I was surprised by was the way in which, you know, it goes beyond that. They were actually really seen as in conflict, as in tension with each other. And for me, as a disabled person who, you know, grew up as a vegetarian, had always, you know, been interested in animal issues, this seems so strange. Because to me, it just seemed obvious that they should be in conversation with each other. So I kind of did, you know, started a peek my curiosity in a really like dove into these, the reasons for why this might be the case. And so the first and, you know, most, most obvious, but also on some level, most challenging is a history of dehumanization, right? People with disabilities, like so many other marginalized communities have historically been dehumanized, particularly disabled people of color and people with intellectual disabilities. There's been a long philosophical tradition of linking disability with animality, right? Which wasn't just rhetorical. There were material consequences of justifying the mistreatment, containment, and neglect of disabled people, you know, based on their, you know, quote, animal-like nature. So this history is very complicated, very hurtful, and has been, at times, you know, deadly for people. So I think the ways in which animality has been weaponized both materially and philosophically can make connecting to animal issues harder. And actually, maybe, you know, with that in mind, I'll just say up front that this book is not, you know, making the case that animals and disabled people are similar or that we share some sort of similar experience, right? What I'm looking at in this book is how the systems that a process are entangled. So how ableism and speciesism are entangled. But to get back to this question, you know, so I think dehumanization is part of it. But also the way in which, you know, animal rights and veganism have kind of been co-opted as a lifestyle choice, right, versus as a political or ethical stance. And that choice has often been framed most often as a choice to be fit or healthy or skinny, right? The sort of glamorous vegan that if you just eat the right vegan diet, you know, you won't be sick and to boot, you'll, you'll, you know, be attractive and have an attractive, you know, skinny body or whatever. And this is, of course, a very alienating message to many communities, but particularly to disabled communities. And in part because some of that has often included a kind of body shaming and health shaming. So, you know, there's other reasons. There's like tensions around animal research, the fact that some disabled people rely on on medications and stuff that have been tested on animals, you know. And also that the animal movement has not really done a lot to support or promote disability movements, right? Or even think about access, especially, you know, again, this is like 26 2006 when I'm when I'm looking at these things. So, but I would say that actually the main challenge really has been the association of animal rights with Peter Singer. I, you know, Singer is a philosopher who has long been both considered to be sort of the father of animal rights, but also has been very antagonistic towards disability community. So we'll talk more about this, you know, I'm sure, but maybe just to set the stage for why this is such a fraught issue, you know, Singer has advocated, you know, that disabled lives are less worth living than able-bodied lives, and has advocated that disabled people are not full persons. These are obviously hard arguments for disabled community to want to jump on. There's a lot of nuances, which we'll talk about later, but this is undoubtedly a major point of tension, you know, and you and I both read animal liberation as children. So I think, you know, I, you know, I think we also have an understanding of how impactful and important that work to was, but I also, yeah, it was pretty shocking to kind of realize just how much this had an effect on on how these two movements were perceived together. So I think that's kind of a general overview of why these movements have been at odds and, you know, what I really wanted to show in this book is that, you know, far from being at odds, these movements actually have an immense amount to offer each other and actually are really integral to each other. I should probably confess to the audience too that Peter Singer makes an appearance in my film Exam in Life, which came out in 2008, you're also in that film taking a walk alongside the philosopher Judith Butler. So yeah, we have a, I think it's kind of fair to say I love hate relationship with Peter Singer, at least that sort of describes my attitude. Yeah, it's, it's complicated, you know. So you begin Besit Burton by recounting two epiphanies that you had at a young age. One was actually at what was my seventh or eighth birthday party. And another was not long after that when we took a family trip to Washington DC. So why don't you begin with those moments since that's how you start the book and explain why they were so significant? I realized really early on in this research just how tricky and delicate these issues would be. You know, when I told people early on that I was writing a book about this, you know, people in disability community were often kind of like, oh, that sounds, you know, like a challenging thing to do, right? So, you know, I think I took it on very early that if I was going to write this book, I would have to take some, take personal risks and really root what I was saying and how I was getting to these ideas in my own experience and story and positionality. You know, this is not the easiest thing. It's challenging to tell personal narratives of, of disability that don't fall into a variety of, you know, stereotypes of narrative traps of the way in which disability is often talked about, right? These personal stories can be so often overly focused on which then can draw attention away from the political dynamics at play. At the same time, though, the experience of marginalization and difference, of course, offers a really important and profound vantage point from which to make connections and ask questions. And just as a reminder, right, that, that, you know, the personal is always political. So beasts, you know, beasts of burden really utilizes my story and lens as a method to kind of get to these broader theoretical questions. And in fact, that's really like a method that I utilize and, you know, across my body of work. So with that kind of, like, put out there, I will, I will tell these two stories that I start the book with. So the first one is, yes, at your like 7th or 8th birthday, it was the mid-80s. Maybe I guess like late 80s, actually, I should say. We were listening to Madonna. I think it, in my memory, it was Madonna's true blue. And I think that's right. And we were all dancing. We were just having a really good time. And I remember, you know, standing, you know, wiggling around, doing some dance, and then falling. And then getting up again, dancing again, and then falling again. I'm just thinking like, oh, I'm just like too excited. I really want to dance. And then, you know, by the third or fourth fall, I just had this like epiphany of like, oh, that is what disability or in the language of that era, like that's what handicapped means. Right. And it was just the first memory of viscerally kind of understanding that there was something different about my embodiment. So I share that story. And then I move ahead many, you know, a few years, probably to the early 90s or so. You might have a better timeline of this than I do, but we were on some sort of family vacation. In my memory, it was to DC. And we came across a, I don't know whether it was, you know, PETA, or some other animal rights organization that had a bunch of literature. And, you know, in my memory, it was you and our brother, Alex and I, and we, you know, came away from that table just transformed, like, what meat is animals? How could we, like, how could no one have told us this? This is like, you know, a complete alteration of how I made sense of the world, right? Like, I thought that I understood what categories things belonged to, right? Animals were in one category, food was in another category. How could these things be crossing over? And also just how could there be such cruelty that was just like accepted on a day-to-day level, right? And all of this kind of, you know, coming through the lens of like a six-year-old or whatever I was. So I tell these stories for a few reasons. One, because I know that from that very first realization of, you know, the animals, that meat as animals, that I also knew that there was a community of people fighting against animal exploitation, right? And I had no idea that there would, was such a thing as the disability movement for years and years, right? It was really this sort of visceral experience of difference that didn't give me any sense that there was a whole community of people out there, right? Or that there were other political ways of understanding disability. But I also tell it because, you know, that visceral sense of difference, that's not something that, you know, can linger with someone necessarily. Or at least it didn't with me. And so the sort of difficulty or suffering if you want to use that term in that moment of realization really was nothing compared to the experiences I began to feel because of ableism, right? Even in our radical household, you know, where, you know, I was certainly not treated badly, right? You know, but that ableism kind of creeped its way into our worlds, right? I understood that that society was not built for bodies in mind, it liked mine, that there were, you know, no other disabled people that I could see in positions of success or, you know, or power or happiness even, you know? I mean, it was just, right, that there were such low expectations, not again, not from our family, but from just the ableist atmosphere of society. I think these two epiphanies, right? One of what it means to be a body and a person who is marginalized and excluded. And then the other of like what it means to awaken to cruelty. These are the questions that, you know, I had when I was six, but that like just lingered. And ultimately, you know, that's what this book is sort of exploring. Yeah, hearing you say that, I mean, one, it makes me imagine a world where you came upon a booth that also had information about the history of disability rights organizing, right? So that you could have had that epiphany. Yeah, that could have been earlier. Yeah, yeah, a totally different reality, possibly, you know. But also, you know, when you say, when you reflect on these epiphanies from your early years, it makes me remember one of my favorite quotes from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who is not one of my favorite thinkers, but he said that philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. And I think we both have remained pretty loyal to these big questions that we asked his kids and we insist on still asking them today. And I think that your book is a real tribute to that. And I think all of our books and all of our projects actually are, but continue the story because you do, you know, obviously, that's just where you kick things off. Could you talk about coming into political awareness, finding disability community, finding disability politics, what happened? Yeah, you know, so I was a child of the 80s and 90s in Georgia. The ADA Americans with Disabilities Act for reference passed in 1990 when I was eight. You know, and so, of course, it wouldn't, it would take years for that legislation to really, you know, structurally begin altering reality, you know, as imperfect as it is, but which you just mean ramps. Yeah, ramp, basic forms of access. The fact that I can now go and use a bathroom, you know, there's, there's, there's accessible, there's accessible toilets. There's like accessible, you know, all these different kind of things that accessible rides at theme parks. Exactly. Like that would have, you know, that was unheard of in my, you know, as a, as a child. So, right, so there was no sign of, of disability community to me in our reality. And then, you know, and when I would sort of watch the, you know, television or hear the radio or something, there was, there was no sense of like, oh, there's a community of disabled people organizing. I also wasn't a part of a conversation of other activists arenas that we, you know, and our parents kind of circulated in. So thankfully, when I was around 18, I believe, I believe I was around 18, I was like, how do I do this? How do I live as a disabled person? Like, how do I make this transition from being a kid to also like moving, moving out or doing all the things that people do as an 18 year old, you know? And so I searched on the internet. I think I literally searched like, you know, how do people, you know, I don't know what I searched, but it was something like, you know, disability and like survival, disability and politics, something. And, and by some lucky, lucky series of events, I stumbled upon this article that was written in 2002 by Marta Russell and Robbie Mahaltra, called Capitalism and Disability. And I'm just going to like read a little brief section of this article because it was like, if I had to find one thing, this was like the universe being like here, this is, this is exactly the thing that you are, you know, are on some level unconsciously hoping exists. So they write, we take the view that disability is a socially created category derived from labor relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society, one which creates and then oppresses the so-called disabled body as one of the conditions that allows the capitalist class to accumulate wealth. Okay, so I was just like disability, a socially created category derived from labor relations and capitalism like this is, this is totally utterly transforming my world, you know, because I was, you know, again, like a young person trying to figure out how to live on my own, wondering if I would ever get a job, wondering whether I would, you know, ever not be on SSI or what my worth was, right, if I wasn't a productive, you know, quote unquote productive person. So this article just instantly transformed my way of thinking about so many issues, but my way of thinking about disability and then luckily from that, and again, I don't know how this, you know, kind of magically happened, but I found that there was a protest march by the group adapt, which at the time and today is still American disabled for attendant programs today, it originally was actually American disabled for public transit, for accessible public transit, excuse me. And so I had no idea who this group was, I was just like, I'm going to join this protest march, you know, I think it was 144 miles from, what was it, from Philadelphia to DC, took like two weeks, you know, I had never really hung out, it with disabled people let alone like being in disability community and so this was like a like, you know, sink or swim kind of thing, and it was again just very transformative. So I really, this group adapt actually, you know, again, I didn't really know honestly at the time, but it was one of, you know, for 40 years has been doing really powerful direct action, you know, they basically are responsible for making our bus is accessible. I think we just hit the anniversary of one of their early actions where people like, I think it was late, the very late 70s, where people got out of their chairs and and just, you know, and and slept in front of like the busiest bus intersection in in Denver, I think it was, all right. So they fought for accessible transit and then what they were fighting for while I was on this march with them was for deinstitutionalization, for disabled people to not be kind of funneled into nursing homes, but instead have the access and the means to live in their own communities with attendance. You know, so I learned this whole long history of disability organizing, right, that actually at that, you know, time when I was looking at the animal rights literature, when I was a kid, that there was amazing disability activism going on. I just didn't know about it, right? But I also learned all these various ways of being in disability community, right? These other kinds of values that I would say emerge from from spaces where disabled people are able to be together, you know, values of interdependence of not having a shame for asking for help of mutual care, a vulnerability, and also fundamentally that disability is a political issue. So those were like the things that I took away from that. But, you know, I'll say that one other thing that I took away was that, you know, the left actually, despite the fact that I, you know, the first article I found was on disability and capitalism, that the left wasn't really interested in disability. I was kind of disappointed and surprised to realize that actually there was no coverage of the march or what was happening in left media, not that there was very much in just general media in general, right? But so I actually wrote my first article with your encouragement for the monthly review. I think about two years later, which was called the right not to work, power, and disability. Yeah, and I actually wrote the one piece in left media about the march was actually my very first ever article in the nation because I came and saw you at the tail end of the march. I mean, we should recommend to listeners that they read Marta Russell. In fact, Hey market recently put out a collection of her essays called capitalism and disability. That's the name of the collection. And I mean, just an absolute legend and would have been an amazing guest on the day. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so what is disability? That's the next question. It's the title of an early chapter. And it's an important question because it's all good ones. It's not entirely self-evident what the answer is. So if you could talk about different ways of understanding disability, I'm going to quote you here briefly. You write that quote disability is not only a lived experience that shapes individual human lives. It is also an ideology that plays a central role in forming our histories, politics, and cultures. What do you mean by that? And what are some of the implications? Okay, I'm going to do my best here. This is a huge question. This is like why the field of disability studies exists and to partially explore what is this? What is disability? So, but, you know, maybe I'll start by saying that one of the misconceptions about disability is that it is only relevant, right, or of interest to those of us who have an obvious disability, like, you know, using a wheelchair or blindness. But disability is a life experience and political issue that impacts everyone. If we live long enough, we all age into disability, we all move in and out of disability and illness throughout our lives, right? So there is no simple binary between disability and able-bodiedness. These categories are extremely murky and also, you know, are redefined across all sorts of different legal definitions, you know, they vary across different wherever you're looking, right? So, disability, you know, is essentially, you know, like other categories of difference is not some biological state, just some personal medical problem, right? But it is a category that is shaped by historical, political, social, and relational dynamics. Like gender and class and race, disability is a social force that affects the world in a really pervasive manner, right? So, it's not just a lived experience, it is a concept. A concept that, again, is really a powerful. And so we can look, for example, you know, thinking about Marta Russell's work, you know, that ideologies of disability have been central to the development of the modern world. Scholars have exposed the role of disability in the creation of capitalism and labor relations, particularly in contributing to definitions of a work-based system versus a needs-based system of distribution, but also as well as in concepts and definitions of things like, you know, independence, efficiency, and productivity, right? And those are certainly concepts that affect able-bodied people, right? Absolutely, right? So, again, it's not, these are concepts that are not just sort of targeting, but, you know, particular bodies that are, you know, different or impaired or injured or whatever, they are, they shape able-bodied people's reality as well. So, you know, another example is just how disability has been really key to formulating US immigration policies, right? How disability has sort of been used to justify the exclusion of various racialized and class population through stereotypes of people, you know, as, you know, posing a public health threat or as, sort of, become likely to be a public charge and stuff. You know, and then also, it's, of course, really important to mention that disability is also inseparable from other, from the emergence of other categories or taxonomies of difference, right? Including the very concept of the human. The segmenting of beings and the natural world into novel categories, signifying varying degrees of exploitability was, in part, a project rooted in ranking and ordering different capacities and states of being. So, again, you know, disability and able-bodiedness shape our worlds, and what actually all of my work is really interested in examining is how these concepts, disability, able-bodiedness, ableism really shape not only the human world, right? But actually our understanding of non-human animals and nature more broadly, so sort of disability beyond the human or disability as a lens through which to understand multi-species worlds. You know, there's so much to say, but maybe, you know, as, you know, one last thing that I want to touch on is just that, you know, I think one of the really important things that critical disability perspectives have shown for decades is that disability and, again, these related concepts, you know, including health and illness are really powerful, malleable concepts that when left unmarked and depoliticized can be wielded and deployed in a variety of ways for a variety of ends, you know, some of which may be liberatory, but some of which may be like extremely exclusionary or eugenic. So, I think it becomes really important to be able to see where narratives of disability are being utilized and for what ends, right? As we saw, you know, just with the immigration example, right? Because these concepts are so naturalized that they're used as alibized to cover up inequality. And I think, you know, a really obvious example is just what we saw with COVID, right? A devaluing of disabled people, but also a sort of naturalizing of the deaths of those who, you know, had pre-existing conditions, you know, often in order specifically to evade the reality of exploitation and racism as the sort of actual real death traps, right? So, what beasts of burden, you know, tried to do, tries to do is analyze how the power structures and ideologies that shape and justify animal exploitation rely on ableist assumptions and ideas about disability. So, again, I'm trying to, or utilize all this amazing scholarship and work that has been done to really understand disability to think about how that actually shapes our understanding of animals and nature more broadly. Yeah. I mean, just to reiterate the point you just made, but your point is it's like a real devil's bargain for able-bodied people to be like, well, it's only sick people who are dying of COVID because ultimately you're reinforcing a system that doesn't care for any form of life. And what you're saying is this impacts animals as well. So, I promise we are going to get to animals because that is really the kind of heart and soul of your book, but just one question before, you know, one thing I really appreciate about both of your books is that they don't shy away from complexity towards the end of beasts of burden. You pose what I think is a really profound question and one that you grapple with in disabled ecologies. You write, quote, "How can we criticize the systems that lead to disability while simultaneously allowing disabled people to experience their bodies in empowered ways or at least in ways that are not defined by oppression, discrimination, and that able-bodied world?" So, you know, please say more on that and how, maybe reflect on how this question has reverberated through your life. And where do you see it reverberating today? Yeah, yeah. It is definitely the sort of question that I think my work is perpetually obsessed with. It is what I've kind of come to see as like the paradox of disability that it can be both of those things. Both of those things, meaning like that it can be something that emerges from profound exploitation and profound violence, right? The worst things, the war, and you know, and yet disability can also be community, be a site of creating these alternative values that I talked about earlier, right? It can be creative, it can be generative. And for me, this tension or you know, I think paradox really emerged from me, you know, to go back to, you know, again, my own personal story and narrative, right? You know, I was raised, you know, as you know, with the understanding that my disability was caused by defense industry pollution in Tucson, Arizona. It's actually the subject, the contamination, the defense industry contamination and the amazing movement that emerged from it are actually the subject of my new book, Disability Colleges. But this narrative, having that origin story, right, did give me a sense of disability as a political issue. It really framed my understanding of disability. So as much as I didn't have an understanding of disability as political in the way that it's talked about in disability studies or in activist circles, right? I didn't have a sense that there were people fighting for access or disability, you know, or a challenging ableism. But I had a sense from the, you know, earliest age that disability is political, is relational, right? That I wasn't, that it wasn't just me, that wasn't my personal problem, that it was a, that it was a political dynamic that impacted a whole community that disability emerges, again, from war, from environmental racism, from pollution. I think having that understanding, you know, has helped me kind of hold this, this dual understanding of what disability is, right? Because then, you know, you know, by the time I found discovered disability community, right, I already had a sense that disability was political, you know, but how to kind of really, really hold both of these realities at the same time, it's been something that I've had to really think through and work through and, you know, it's definitely, you know, a central aspect of, again, my new book, but also Visa burden. And maybe I'll just say, you know, that a scholar who's been really helpful to me in thinking through this question is one of my, one of my favorite scholars, Nermala Aravelas, whose book, I believe it came out in 2011, Disability and Difference in Global Context. And we really specifically addresses this question. So, Aravelas argues that in the context of colonialism and racial capitalism, that disability operates less as a identity, as a static category of identity, as a descriptor of what someone is and more as a process, an ongoing event that captures the materiality of racialized violence under the demands of capital. And Aravelas asks like a really important question that has really shaped my, my thinking she asks, under what conditions might we welcome disability, right? So, like, we have to think about the conditions from which disability is emerging from before and also in order to come to a different place of understanding with disability, where it might be able to also be something else. And she says that, you know, suggests that for disability perspectives to be generative, they must, you know, address the conditions that cause so much disabilment. So, maybe to just kind of touch on why or how these, these, these questions are really important to beast burden in this conversation, right? Is that on the one hand, we have this need to challenge ableist stereotypes, right? The negative valuations of what disability is. Because, in part, because they are utilized to justify exploitation of non-human animals. So, we have to challenge these, these negative valuations about disability. But then on the other hand, right, we have this extraordinary mass disabilment of non-human animals that emerges under the context of capitalism, right? And so, how, you know, a part of beast burden is kind of holding, holding those two dynamics as well. Okay, so let's get into this animal question. In your book, you explore the way ableism affects non-human animals on multiple levels, from the way that capitalism disables animal bodies. It's clear that capitalism disables human bodies, you know, whether repetitive stress injuries on the job or look at the situation happening in Gaza. I know that's something that you've thought a lot about the mass disabilment happening there. But you also look at this assignment of value, as you just said. And the point really is that we need to challenge the way things are valued. We need to revalue things. And you approach these interconnected ideas through a story, which is what you do over and over again. You tell the story of a disabled fox. Can you tell it here? It's sort of a portal into thinking about the way ableism affects wild creatures. And it's a prelude to talking about how ableism affects domesticated creatures. Yes, absolutely. Okay, the fall. So this book really is centrally, we're arguing that ableism is again a system of oppression that is entangled with species of them. You might need to define speciesism really quickly. Yeah, oh my god. How did it sign? I mean, I guess human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are somehow above and superior to all other creatures. And that that then gives us all sorts of justifications for whatever we want to do to them. That is how I would define a species of them in this moment. So I'm interested in how ableism shapes both how we perceive non-human animals, right? But also how we treat non-human animals. And so maybe as you've kind of pointed to, like a good way of getting into these conversations is to look at animals who are disabled themselves, right? And this this fox story is one of those. I'll say really quickly first before I go into the fox that I think this this all of this work actually that really began when I first realized that other animals can have my disability, arthrogryphosis. And I just found this fascinating, right? arthrogryphosis is found pretty regularly on factory farms in cow in cows. It's called curly calf, which is absurdly cute for then something that is, you know, destroyed because it's a risk to profit, you know. But so I was fascinated by the fact that other animals can can can have my have my disability as an aside. So I found this story of a fox with arthrogryphosis. It was in a Canadian newspaper. And it basically described that a local resident saw a fox who seemed to be walking abnormally, had an abnormal gate, and they thought maybe they were sick. And so this resident shot the fox. And on examination, they found that the newspaper detailed that this that on examination, they found that actually the the fox had really, you know, good muscle mass had, you know, many partially digested smaller mammals in their digestive system. So so the fox was essentially living, living their lives doing well, right? But there was this idea that this fox must be sick. And in fact, it was seen, right, kind of as a mercy killing, right? That this person was putting this, this injured creature out of out of its misery, right? You know, a mercy killing, but then also potential fear, right? That this person assumed the fox was sick and potentially, you know, how to contain just disease. So, you know, of course, this person obviously had a gun, so 100 would have shot a fox for all sorts of less altruistic reasons. But these were kind of the reasons that were that were that were presented here. And what I found really interesting about this story is is the way that two of the most sort of prominent narratives of disability, right, destruction and and pity were projected onto this fox that was just, you know, who was just kind of going about living his daily life, right? And who was obviously doing a pretty good job of living his life. So this story and many, many, many others that I nerded out finding really made me start thinking about the way that we just project all sorts of shit onto animals, right? All sorts of ideas about gender, about race, about sexuality, right? And about disability. You know, so there's this assumption that disabled animals don't belong in the wild, that nature will run her course, that animals, you know, are competitive and nasty and are just going to like, if there's a wounded creature or a disabled creature, that that creature won't have a chance because, you know, they're just going to be abandoned or eaten or whatever. But so I, you know, I just ask, you know, how true is this, right? Like what is, what is us projecting our perceptions and stereotypes of what we think disability is and what we think disability will lead to? And then what is, what is actually happening? So, you know, ask your kind of really delving into this. I'm, I love reading about animal behavior, about the study of animals and how they live, how they think, you know, it's clear to me that this isn't absolutely not always the case, right? Like, injury happens all the time. Disablement happens all the time. And so, animals of a variety of species have to figure out ways of living with it, of making it work, right? And there's countless examples of animals doing this. I tell this one story of this snow monkey, Mosu, who had limb disabilities and who everyone thought was, you know, not going to make it past infancy, but who, you know, lived for, I think, 30 years became a parent and a grandparent, right? So, but so there's all of these examples, actually. And to me, what's happening is that ableism stops us from actually being able to understand how nonhuman animals are experiencing disability and injury. And what kinds of relationships are developing around that? And so, in other words, you know, it produces bad science. Like, it stops us from asking questions that I think would be really important to ask. You know, I was kind of shocked by just this sort of ableist hoops that animal behaviorists will, will throw themselves through to explain why some disabled wild animals like still alive, you know, or why why other animals are being, you know, kind to kind to them. So, when we protect, protect human categories of difference when we project our own sort of stereotypes and prejudices about whether it's gender or, you know, against sexuality or race or disability onto animals, it stops us from actually being able to do good, to do good research. And I think that that's really changing. There's a lot of great work over the past few decades that are, you know, really challenging the way that we understand, you know, gender dynamics, or again, the multitude of of of of genders and sexualities and or within animal species, right? Like, there's all there's a lot of great work that's really like diving into this. And I think that disability is an area that is still quite under, understudied, and that I would love to see more work kind of being done in. Because, you know, I'll, I'll add to that I think when these, when these stories do are kind of taken up, they are, they're not taken up seriously, right? Like, it's stories of animals, of disabled animal surviving or of of animals helping another disabled animals. These are the things of memes, of viral stories on the internet, right? They're not the things that are taken seriously as like, what can this actually teach us or show us? What can we learn about the way that individual creatures adapt to change, the way that they learn new things, the way that they relate to each other, the way, what does it teach us about animal empathy, right? There's all these big questions that animal behaviorists love to ask that could be asked in these situations and they're not. So, I'm obviously very nerdy about this stuff. This is partially what I teach. So, I love thinking through, you know, the ways in which our own kind of assumptions and biases get in the way of us understanding animals, which is all the more strange when we think about just how much power the whole idea of like not being anthropomorphic has been, right? That is, that is like the, the number one rule for those who, you know, study animals, engage with animals, don't be anthropomorphic, right? But that I think has actually stopped us from actually seeing how we are constantly projecting our own power relations onto other creatures. Right. The whole myth of survival of the fittest, right? Which then of course is appropriated to justify all sorts of economic and social hierarchies and systems of exploitation. I think maybe the last thing that I'll say is that I find this really important because the experience of this ablement is, you know, again important and critical for asking all sorts of questions about non-human animals, right? But one of the reasons why is because scientists and philosophers really focus so much on animal behaviors on a species level, right? Animals always get kind of written down to the terms of what's what's what's the species norm? And disability is, or can be an individualizing experience, right? And so there's something that I think is important about that, that there that disability sort of interrupts this this this focus on on on species, on the species level. And you know, could kind of interrupt this really I think very damaging habit of only seeing animals at that level, instead of at a variety of other, you know, as community members, as friends, as members of, you know, society, as, you know, maybe citizens of their society, and also as individuals, right? And I think those are kinds of more the questions that we could get to if we looked at disability in a in a different kind of way. I want to say here that also like throughout this whole conversation, the word animal is just so kind of profoundly frustrating and inadequate, right? It's like we get to be human beings and then all other creatures as diverse as mosquitoes and orangutans and pigeons, right? They're all lumped into this one word. And so I just want to like bring that up here as like a major limitation of trying to talk about these things, and that's very purposeful, right? That's part of the hierarchy. We get to be humans. They're all animals, right? And this point you're making about, you know, bringing out the species and seeing animals as individuals, you know, again, it's like, is that anthropomorphizing? That's the thing we're not supposed to do, but we inherently do project, as you said, project our shit on the animals. And what seeing animals as individuals allows us to do is to see them as persons, which is a legal term, right? In our legal framework right now, animals are rightsless beings. They are things, they are objects, they are property. And part of changing our language is pushing back on that. I mean, because that is, you know, they're not, there's something more than animals in a lot of cases, right? They're possessions, things that have no legal rights, you know, legal beings that have no legal rights in our framework, right? And in fact, if I can't, you know, that it's also like that is partially why being compared to an animal is so scary, right? That's right, because an animal isn't a being that is a person. An animal isn't a being that has legal, any sort of legal rights, an animal as a possession is an object. And so when, so I think that also is part of the violence of dehumanization and animalization, right? Or to be called human animals as Palestinians were recently called, right? I mean, the right animalization is dehumanization. And I think that you're right to highlight. That's part of why disabled people, I mean, what you're getting at is that's part of why disabled people have been reluctant to embrace a kind of identification with animal liberation as you're arguing they should do in this book. I'm Naomi Klein and you're listening to the dig. My go-to podcast for the most thoughtful in-depth conversation on the left. It's an incredible place to be exposed to new ideas and new writing. And if you can, please become a sustaining supporter at Patreon. This episode of the dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by Haymarket Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you. One that you might like is Unite and Win, the Workplace Organizers Handbook from Ewok, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Since its founding in March 2020 as a joint project of DSA and UE, Ewok has trained and supported thousands of workers who want better working conditions. This brief and accessible organizing guide based on the collective experience of organizers and workers in non-unionized workplaces, covers the core elements of organizing at work, and provides a critical tool to help you and your co-workers organize for justice in your workplace. Find Unite and Win at haymarketbooks.org. If you're interested in placing a ball quarter of the handout at a special discount, please write two orders at haymarketbooks.org for more info. [Music] Okay, so we just went over examples of disabled animals in the wild now, to disabled domesticated creatures. These really are the creatures that are commodities. And this is, I think, one of the most original parts of your book. You know, we're talking here about animals that are bred and slaughtered for profit. A lot of people have probably heard about factory farms, but you do put, I think, a really novel lens onto these industries. So how did you come to understand factory farming in this different way by looking at it through the framework of disability, what happens when we take up that perspective, and how did this create a new sense of kinship for you with commodified creatures? You know, I mentioned earlier that I discovered that other animals can have my own disability and that my own, like, that Arthur Garpus is something that happens on factory farms or just in general in the animals that we can utilize for food. So I was interested in that. I was interested in what happens to animals that the industry kind of considers disabled or identifies as ill or sick. But what I realized really early on is that when I was reading, whether I was reading animal literature, or whether I was reading literature from animal industries themselves, sort of describing the lives of these animals, right, where they live, how they're treated, what their lifespan is, that I was realizing that I was reading about disabled creatures, that all of these creatures, all of these animals in these industries become disabled. And more than that, that these systems actually profit off of the disablement that they manufacture for these animals to, you know, be essentially, you know, profitable, official, efficient products. Yeah, so give us some examples. What do you mean there? You know, animals are literally manufactured to be disabled, and it is, you know, again, fundamentally what drives profit. So they are systematically bred for certain traits, right? We know that they are bred to their biological limits to produce more meat, more eggs, more milk, right? This breeding, this attempt at turning animals into, you know, efficient machines, efficient producers of these items has inevitably and invariably consequences for the rest of their bodies. So the industry often refers to a general kind of sense of lameness that animals become lame, and this can mean that they can't lift their own weight, that their bones are broken, but they use this language of lame. But so these animals are, literally can't hold up their bodies because their bodies are so heavy from producing, you know, so much meat, or they are made to produce so much milk, right? That they have arthritis, they have osteoporosis, they, you know, not to mention just all of the, like, the infections, the other infections, right? Other animals, pigs, for example, are, because of the selective breeding, our experience are extremely prone to stress-induced heart attacks, right? And these environments are profoundly stressful. So of course, you know, a large number of them end up experiencing that. Other animals are purposely mutilated, right? Birds are debiked because they're put into such crowded situations. It's easier for industries to debik them so that they won't pack at each other, you know, but which makes it harder for them to eat, right? So there's, you know, and this doesn't, again, say anything of the reproductive issues, of vaginal infections, let alone of their psychological health, right? So when I say that animals are manufactured to be disabled, what I'm saying is that these animals, the selective breeding for particular kinds of traits that are the traits that make animals profitable, are always going to be coming with, or with impacts on these animal and animal bodies in other ways, right? That these environments on top of these conditions that are, you know, are bred into their bodies, essentially, that these animals are also kept in with little room to move around. With no access to like exercise, they're kept in cramped, filthy, and dark, toxic, essentially toxic environments, you know, often immobile, often they can't really move around. And so this, of course, also is going to be a space of disease and injury. You know, and again, many animals won't even survive their, their, their short lives, but that's already kind of built into the profit margin. So we have this whole industry that produces animals for particular ends and, you know, there's consequences on their bodies, is essentially what I'm, what I'm saying. You know, and there are, of course, certain kinds of conditions that the animal, animal industries want to avoid, right? Certain birth abnormalities such as, again, curly calves are, you know, they're destroyed, right? Or killed. The thing that I should say is sort of the most worrisome to these industries are contagious diseases, right? So even if one animal has some sort of maybe foot and mouth or something, that then that can lead to the, the culling, the killing of, you know, just millions and millions of animals. And there is also, you know, in another arena, there's, it's kind of understood that one of the reasons why you shouldn't be abusive to animals, why they, you know, why employees are, are sort of directed to not abuse animals is, right? Because it can damage the profits because no one wants to eat bruised meat, right? So there's all these different ways in which disability and illness are emerging in these, in these environments. But when you take all of them together, these are essentially disabled animals that are, you know, again, being kind of purposefully bred in manufacture to, to, to be this way. But I also really want to point out that disabling in these environments does not only impact animals, right? The people who work in these environments, right? Often low income people of color, immigrants, these are people who are put into the, who, who have to take these jobs. And they are profoundly dangerous jobs. It is well known that meat packing and slaughterhouses are some of the most dangerous and disabling jobs. There's a huge incidence of, of traumatic injury, but also just sort of the labor intensive repetitive motions that are involved in these factories. And then again, these are, you know, often very people who are in vulnerable situations. And so when they do become disabled or injured, right? They are just quickly replaced and abandoned, right? Just essentially discarded too. So disabling, and there's also a very high incidence of human trauma working in these environments. So, disabling is not something that, you know, that, that I'm only concerned about in terms of, of, of the animals, right? But we can also follow these trails even farther, right? The, these trails of disability, you know, that the extraordinary amount of waste and pollution that emerged from factory farms, you know, from giant lagoons of shit that contaminate our waterways. And, and then also the health impacts of a food system, right? That, that promotes and subsidizes the product, you know, and then I know this is getting, you know, very depressing and graphic, but I do just really want to point out too that it's not actually only the animals that we use for me, right? We can look at animals used for, you know, virtually any other industry and see that disabling is sort of part of the process of what kind of allows them to be, to be transformed into, into objects, right, into products. So, we can look at fur farms, right? Who are bred, you know, these animals who are bred for specific, maybe coat patterns or colors that can be associated with a huge range of disabilities. It's also animals and entertainment industries and zoos. There's actually like a multi-million dollar industry that, of animal pharmaceuticals, basically new animals on antidepressants and antipsychotic, right? Because so many animals in these closures experience mental illness and captivity, right? So, you know, my point throughout this whole part of the book is that these industries profit off of the creation of multi-species human and non-human disablement. This is part of what they do, you know? And so, I see this as a side of kinship. It's a place where we should be able to connect the dots and follow the paths of injury to recognize just how awful, you know, not only big meat is, but also countless other industries that, that again, deal in this kind of disabling. For listeners, I do want to underscore how massive the industry you're talking about is, though, I think it's really important to just say that we, as human beings, raise and kill tens of billions of animals for food every year, right? I mean, it's, I think, important to name the scale. Livestock now make up 62% of mammalian biomass. So, you know, this is not a, a, a, a friend's issue. Something I think that you're getting at, and I just want us to spell it out with more care, is the connection between ableism as a system of oppression and speciesism, right? I feel like, before we go further, I'd like us to just linger on that a bit. Abelism functions on many different levels, but one thing that it does is it privileges and normalizes certain capacities over others, creates a hierarchy of value, and assigns some capacities with moral worth. These are capacities that one needs to be seen as, as having to be considered a person within certain philosophical and legal traditions. You know, and I want to make sure that it's, that it's understood that these narratives of, of, of personhood and, and of the human, too, were forged in areas of profound white supremacy, misogyny, colonialism, and ableism, and still really also, you know, reek of these power relations. So what are these capacities? What am I, what am I talking about? So these are capacities that are viewed as prerequisites for, you know, for personhood, language, rationality, autonomy, self-awareness. But these capacities, of course, not all of us have, right? These are ableist capacities. These are neurotypical capacities, right? They privilege certain kinds of capacities that are associated with neurotypical people and, and, and, and able-bodied people. But they are also fundamentally speciesist. They only privilege capacities that are said to be uniquely human. It's another whole other area of conversation that it is definitely up for a debate whether these capacities actually are uniquely human, right? All sorts of other non-human animals have these have these capacities as well. But, but for our purposes, that it is, that historically in philosophical and scientific traditions, that it's these capacities that have made us uniquely human, right? So they are both at once ableist and they are speciesist. These capacities that make us human, you know, are seen or that are, are, are, are, are, that tell us that, that we are superior, are, are, are, are, are exceptional. This idea requires then that there are those who are outside of that, right? Who do not have these capacities? Who it's okay to subjugate, which is, you know, what we were talking about earlier. So, so this opens up all sorts of questions, right? What other kinds of capacities and ways of being are we unable to value because of this kind of ableist and speciesist obsession with these capacities? To some extent, I think in this era, it might be thought by a lot of people of like, Oh, well, no, we, you know, we no longer, you know, think that animals are, you know, just, you know, machine like automotons who don't have any of these capacities. We know that animals have, you know, might have language or emotional beings and stuff like that, but it's important to, to realize that, that are, or, or, or consider that are relationships with animals as they are now, we're fundamentally forged with these, this understanding that animals don't have these capacities and that's what justifies in part our domination over them, right? And so, you know, I don't think our relationship to animals has not changed as we've, as we've kind of have new science that says, like, Oh, these, this species does, you know, have, you know, uses tools or has some sort of language or something like that, right? But that doesn't change the, the reality that these, that this system of value fundamentally is still what upholds and justifies our hierarchical sort of structures and visions, right? That, that, that, that human beings are over here superior and exceptional and thus can, can use all these other creatures, right? Yeah, and this is, and, you know, I have a few thoughts. I mean, one is we're always moving the bar. So it's like animals have to prove they can use tools and then multiple species do. Oh, no, they have to prove something else, clear some other hurdle and it's always meeting some human criteria as opposed to, I don't know, humans meeting the criteria of echolocation or something like that, right? I mean, we're, we're in the center. And, I mean, just to underscore what you said, there are these, they're overlapping. They're able to listen to species. This, this, this fetish for this, you know, kind of very cliché idea of reason of logic and that these are the traits that we have to possess in order to meet this idealized standard of the human that, of course, is also raised, is classed, is gendered, all of these things, right? And this is important because it kind of sets up for the next question, which is going back to this fact that, you know, disabled people are reluctant to, or not all disabled people obviously, but some disabled people are reluctant to embrace the idea of kinship with animals. And that's a loaded position. In part, as you've already mentioned, because of the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who also upholds this, I don't know what else to call it, this kind of reason fetish, right? As we've acknowledged his book Animal Liberation, which was published in 1975, is really key. It's obviously, it's echoed in your book subtitle. So talk about Singer a little bit more. We threatened to do this at the top. Okay, I will do my best. So, no, you know, just firstly, I'll say that Singer is a utilitarian philosopher. Again, he's kind of often kind of referred to as the father of animal rights for the work that he did particularly with animal liberation. I think, yeah, 1975, 1975 book, but it's kind of funny because Singer actually didn't use the language of rights, right? What he is interested in as a utilitarian is minimizing suffering and creating the greatest good for the greatest, the greatest number of people, right? Essentially. Which hints immediately at why there's tension between disability, because if you understand disability as, you know, nothing more than suffering, nothing more than, you know, a bad experience that should be, you know, like, that it's just bad, then you're going to kind of lead to some eugenic ends, and that's kind of where Singer has gone. So I will say also that, you know, so animal liberation, the vast majority of it actually was was so powerful because what it did was it exposed what behind what happens behind the closed doors of various animal industries. So there's sections of factory farms, there's sections on, on for industries, right? But it was also this sort of philosophical exploration with why some beings are presumed to have moral value and some beings are not. Why we care about the suffering of some beings, right? And why we don't care about the suffering of other beings. And so what I appreciate about Singer, right? And I'll say this right off the bat is that he doesn't see the category of the human as somehow just innately exceptional, you know, or self-evident that only human beings have value and should be protected from harm. This is what we like about him, right? And so Singer makes the case that there is not a single capacity that all humans have that all non-humans don't have, right? Whether we're like all of these capacities that we've just I love this like rationality fetish, right? All of these capacities we've just been talking about, right? There's not a single one that you're like, oh well, all human beings have this. So this is why this is what justifies our superiority, whereas all non-human animals don't have this. You know, but most often the folks who don't had the human beings who don't have these capacities are are disabled people, you know, people with intellectual disabilities maybe infants, right? Elderly people experiencing dementia, right? So there's so there's always going to be some people who don't have these particular capacities. And so again, he says, you know, that we can't create a system of value based on those capacities that instead if we're trying to create some system, a system of value or a system of equality, what he, you know, what he calls equal consideration, then we can't base it on any particular traits if we want to include all human beings. So ultimately the only capacity that ends up really mattering for singer is the capacity to suffer. That if a being has the capacity to suffer, then we should avoid causing suffering to that being. So if singer had left his argument here, it would have actually been really remarkably anti-ablest, you know, there's no capacities that are inherently what makes someone worthy, you know, again, except, you know, the capacity to suffer. But but singer didn't do this because singer actually, like most people was troubled by the fact that he still had this nagging feeling that it was, you know, worse to kill a human being than worse to kill a chicken than than to kill a chicken. One of these philosopher questions, it's like, well, what if I had to kill the human or the chicken, you know, so he wanted to come up with a system that would make sense of the reasoning behind that, the justifications behind that. So then singer returns to the capacities that he had earlier left behind, you know, against rationality, self perception, language, you know, etc. And he uses these capacities to come up with two categories of beings, not human animals, but persons and non-persons. So non-persons do not have the capacity, do not have these capacities, or maybe they don't have some of them. And so while we have a moral obligation to not cause them suffering, we do not necessarily have a moral obligation to not kill them, because they do not necessarily have the capacities that would make it wrong for them to be killed, right? They might, they don't have a sense of self, maybe. They don't have a sense of themselves through time. So killing them with done painlessly might not matter. Persons on the other hand, so that's non-persons. Persons on the other hand are rational beings. They have a sense of themselves through time. You know, all these capacities that would make in this estimation killing wrong. You know, here I actually think that a lot of people, you know, are probably to kind of agreeing with a singer's logic, right? Like, but the problem is is that as singer points out, you know, and I say that many people might be agreeing with singer because that they, this is a common justification, for example, you know, humane meat, right? That if it's done, if it's done humanely, right, then maybe it's not wrong to kill animals, right? So, but which is something I think we'll get into later. So, but as singer points out, not all human beings have these capacities and the populations that he, again, most often points to are disabled, intellectually disabled folks and infants and so instead of kind of throwing out this system, you know, and thinking, okay, that, you know, this puts a whole population of historically very oppressed and dehumanized people at risk, you know, maybe I need to come up with a new system. Instead of doing that, he just kind of doubles down on this and argues really over the next half century, you know, he's been doing this, that some disabled people are not persons and that killing them under certain circumstances, potentially okay. And it's very subtle and very nuanced, but obviously it's pissed off a lot of disabled people for a lot of good reasons. And so, again, this argument may be extreme sounding, but it's actually just like this fetish for these capacities, it's actually embedded in all sorts of arguments for continuing to eat animals by like, you know, those who again promote kind of like human meat. And so, it does actually have effects, right? And of course, it lives on in arguments for animal rights, because on one level, he is saying, oh, being human isn't what matters. It's being a person. But to me, my response to all of this in this book is that rather than disability communities seeing this as proof that animal rights is at odds with disability movements, instead, you know, we need to look at this and realize that this is actually like profoundly speciesist. This is a profoundly speciesist argument. It does not protect animals either. Otherwise, you know, it wouldn't be an argument that could be utilized by people like Michael Pollan or something, right? So, it's both an ableist and a speciesist argument, right? Disabled human beings and non-human animals both lose out and have their lives and value gambled with. And, you know, ultimately, all this does is it rethrones rationality and all these other ridiculous capacities as, you know, the arbiter of moral worth, right? You know, so, ultimately, I just kind of say to hell with it and I refuse to play this game where I'm pitting different populations against each other, you know, in order to create a hierarchy of value. And in the book, I instead turned to other ways of thinking through animal and disability oppression, you know, a lot of which we've talked about kind of, you know, we've touched on already, right? A politics of solidarity based on our shared exploitation, a feminist politics of care, a disability politics of interdependence, you know, I'm reminded of one of my favorite sentences that we wrote together, right? Other species deserve not only our sympathy because they suffer, right? But our solidarity because they too are exploited and dispossessed. Yeah, I think that that nicely captures it. I mean, right? It's the shift and suffering does matter. I mean, I think this is why there's a certain distance we go with Peter Singer. But ultimately, I think, you know, a solidarity is a more interesting paradigm. You know, I'm assuming that our listeners are pretty familiar with the critiques of factory farming, right? Animal industries are a prime driver of climate change of mass extinction. You know, we have 150 species vanishing daily. We're replacing wild creatures with billions of genetically similar beings, right? So you have these animal feedlots where you literally have sometimes hundreds of thousands of animals, which means that we are increasing the risk of future pandemics. We're seeing that right now with the headlines about avian flu. Of course, these animals are also fed tons of antibiotics, which creates risks of future antibiotic resistant bacteria. I think people know a lot about this. But your book digs into humane meat and I think has some interesting practical and philosophical critiques that I think it's worth spending some time on. And in a way, Peter Singer is implicated here, right? Because his emphasis on animal suffering has actually been an influence on this movement. I mean, it's important to distinguish animal welfare from animal rights. And we like animal welfare. We'd rather have animal welfare than nothing. But animal welfare is about mitigating suffering, right? Not about giving rights to creatures or shifting their status from property to persons. So there's lots of problems. The humane label on the product you buy at Whole Foods really doesn't live up to the standard in lots of ways. So again, philosophically, you look at how species speciesism and ableism are woven into both the industrial animal agricultural system, but also these smaller farms. There's a problem of scale that you talk about what's the problem with humane meat. And why was it important for you to tackle it? I think what you said, you know, that fundamentally, like these shifts don't actually do anything to alter the status of animals from property to beings we should respect and live with, right? So I think I automatically have a have a have a hard time with them in that, right? So there's all sorts of, you know, factors that I point to in the sections on on humane meat that I won't get into too much here, but I think, you know, there's the question of, you know, scalability, for example, that often even on these the best, you know, the most humanly small farm that as they kind of grow become more successful, the pressures to end up, you know, scaling up in these other ways end up reproducing the same kinds of systems of farm. There's also the fact that a lot of the same kinds of dynamics of, you know, for example, reproductive exploitation are still, you know, our present in these, these, these farms. And, but, you know, but so, so I take them to task in many ways, but, you know, fundamentally, what I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in is this shift, this shift of, of animals from, from not no longer being seen as our property, right? As, as beings that we can just do what, with what we will, what happens, right? When we recognize that the cow is an emotional being or if we recognize that animals are intelligent or have emotional lives, right? Like how, you know, how are we then to justify their continued use in slaughter? This was a question that I was really interested in because at this point, you're less likely to hear, I think, oh, well, we can use animals because they're, they're dumb. That's not quite, you know, the, that's not the, the argument that is used as much, right? Even though, again, I would say that that argument actually does infiltrate all these other arguments still, right? That we have not sort of metabolized the new thing, so we've learned about non-human animals and had that alter our, our relations with them. So, you know, as it has become sort of increasingly undeniable that animals are not just, you know, automotons, right? I do think that arguments justifying, you know, human hierarchy have had to become sort of more complicated or more sophisticated. And so, one of the things that I wanted to do is I really wanted to look at literature, writing arguments by the people who, who, the people in the farms, who really do this as sort of well as one possibly can, right? So, I'm not just looking at the, the factory farms that just call themselves, you know, like small-scale factory farms or something. Like, I'm really interested in the people who are really doing small farming. What are they kind of understandings and a lot and arguments around this? So, these, so I would say that these arguments have become more sophisticated, but they are still really steeped in all sorts of power relations and hierarchy. And so, that's kind of what I'm wanting to turn to now. So, I look at arguments for, you know, for a humane meat to better understand, again, this case that farmers and philosophers are making. And, you know, so when they're not just falling back on this logic, that suffering is wrong, but killing is okay, right? Based on the sort of Peter Singer Utilitarian framework we just talked about, then typically what these arguments almost always center our ideas of symbiosis or mutualism between species. In other words, they focus on the evolution of domestication and the sort of justification for the relationship that, as it stands now, sort of being rooted in this evolution of domestication. So, the argument, essentially, without, again, getting too much in the weeds is that evolutionarily, we have a contract with domesticated animals where we care for them in exchange for their flesh. There's, you know, a sense that this was evolution, it's not coercion, right? That it wasn't just the humans fencing in animals and dominating them, that animals were active participants in this, right? So, there's also this sense that animals are being given some agency, they were active participants in this process of domestication, right? So, for me, what these arguments, you know, are doing, though, is that they're really imagining themselves as being outside of power relations. You know, again, it's not coercion, it's evolution, it's all about biology and evolutionary history, subjects that people making these arguments often reiterate are not tarnished by human power. So, but for me, these arguments also look uncannily like Western traditions of the social contract, right? The idea that people, people of Frank and the independence came together to support each other and create society and that that's mutually beneficial. The argument here is that these animals have, through mutual benefit, become dependent on us for their very survival. So, without us, they literally would not exist. So, we would not be upholding our end of the contract if we did not breed and kill them. That is essentially the mutualism that we, we breed and kill them and, but they exist. And so, that is what they're getting in, in return. As if being 62% of mammalian biomass is winning the evolutionary Olympics. No, absolutely. And that's actually one of the things that doesn't make sense. You know, often these arguments will be like, oh, but we're not talking about, you know, the, the billions of animals from factory farms, but you're also like, but that is what, like that, when people say the domesticated animals are, you know, are evolutionarily successful, like, you know, that is part of what they're, they're pointing to. So, it's kind of a contradiction. You know, there's just so much wrong here, you know, and from the fantasy, you know, first, just the fantasy that these relations are outside of human power structures, right? And to me, the place where, where we can see this, I think the strongest, and perhaps this is my own disability lens, but is in the way the concept of dependency is used, the role that the concept of dependency plays. So, right, again and again, you see this narrative that domesticated animals are dependent on us for their survival, for their very existence, and that it is in exchange us caring for them and return for their flesh. So, dependency makes us seem benevolent. We are taking care of them while also being the justification for their further exploitation. And of course, it should be noted here that dependency has been used to justify some really horrific systems of domination from, you know, slavery to patriarchy. So, you know, in addition, dependency within this frame is, you know, something solely negative, right? The fact that these animals are dependent then means that we have to get something in return, you know, we're not just going to care for these creatures out of the goodness of our hearts. We need to get, you know, this has to be in exchange. We have to get something in return. And so, but dependency, weirdly, it almost becomes this sort of like, it's almost this unnatural thing. And some of the literature here gets really strange, you know, that dependent, you know, dependent domesticated animals are framed as being unnatural, as kind of pathetic, as almost grotesque, right? That if we didn't have that if human beings abandon this role, that just, you know, this sort of unnaturalness of all of these animals would just be sort of too much to bear. And you can see this, especially in the difference between how wild animals are talking about as autonomous and independent in this kind of romantic way. And so, I think, you know, hopefully, you know, after us talking for, you know, through this interview, like listeners will be able to see that from a disability perspective, these are really ableist conceptions of disability, right? And also disability has perpetually been used against disabled communities. And so, to me, this whole schema is dripping with human power relations. It's anything but outside of human power relations. And various feminist and disability philosophers have long critiqued the social contract, right, for the ways in which it centers independence and autonomy, and leaves out whole life experiences where dependency and care are not necessarily kind of don't fit into this mutual, you know, sort of frame in this traditional way. And then scholars have long looked at the issue of disability scholars, excuse me, have long looked at the issue of dependency from the perspective of those being cared for, right? What is it to be if you are someone who is dependent and you can't necessarily have an equal exchange? My care is maybe going to, I can't offer you an equal amount of exchange. What is the system of justice for that dynamic, right? From the perspective of the cared. And so that, for the cared for, I mean, and so that is the perspective that I kind of bring to this conversation, right? That this whole sort of idea that since animals are dependent, then that's a justification to then exploit them, you know, and kill them. That that is really part of this kind of very troubling, ableist way of understanding dependency. As you're getting at, idea of dependencies is a ideologically loaded concept. I mean, it is also used to justify eroding the welfare state because things like food stamps or public housing create dependency. And, you know, if you are a conservative, you know, that's something you have framed as so atrocious that, you know, you'd rather starve people and leave them unhoused, then provide basic social support. So, you know, it's interesting how these concepts cross the species barrier. There's a really interesting article by the philosopher Nancy Frazier called the genealogy of dependency that I recommend people people read. Okay, so the time has come where we've reached the next stage of our interview so that we can build on some of what you're saying and connect it to our our Lux magazine piece, which certainly wouldn't have existed without your book. Be sub burden. And so in this piece, we make an explicitly socialist feminist case for animal liberation. And I mean, I will just say that I was really, you know, nervous publishing this piece because, you know, as we we actually begin the essay, reflecting on the fact that people think animal rights advocates and vegans are just fucking annoying. Like, I mean, this is in paranoia. I mean, there's literally, there's, you know, research to back this up that people really find they find us irritating. And so we wrote the essay with some trepidation. But I think it it also felt like an important thing for us to to discuss. You know, and it's sad to me that people in the left and right are united by the hatred of vegans. And, you know, one point we make is that if being annoying was the sort of litmus test, then, you know, we'd be like a very small cohort on the left, right? Sorry, a lot of us are annoying. That's just a fact. But so the essay is doing a kind of dance and it's saying, you know, hear us out fellow socialists because we think there's a robust anti-capitalist and also feminist case to be made for an animal rights position. We reflect on the fact that animal rights has been it's actually been called an orphan of the left, meaning that it is a progressive movement shunned by other progressive movements. There's kind of a lack of solidarity with the cause. And so what we want to do is kind of try to challenge that isolation and show how animal liberation is tied to other causes, other fights, just as you do for disability liberation and be sub burden. And I think, you know, this has been a sort of subtext of what you've been saying in this interview, but I think we're both really struck by the fact that socialists who are generally very quick to question private property and the whole framework of property relations rarely interrogate the ownership of animals. In fact, it's kind of naturalized. And, you know, are relatively silent on the destructive consequences of animal industries. And so we think that that's something that should be challenged or at least discussed, you know, because these industries are massive. They're behemoths. They concentrate wealth and power. They abuse their workers. They're hurling us off at an ecological cliff. They're slurping up government subsidies. And they're also exporting this meat-based diet to populations around the world, which is just going to intensify all the problems I just named. So, you know, our point is that nobody, and I think this is fair, this is a two trillion dollar industry globally. So nobody's eating meat in a vacuum in this situation. But to kick us off, why don't, you know, let's linger on this idea that animal rights is an orphan of the left. Basically, you know, my question is, what gives? Yeah, what does give? You know, I mentioned earlier that I noticed, you know, early on in my involvement in disability community that was not an issue that the left was really interested in taking up, right? You know, that disability wasn't, you mean? Yeah, that disability was not an issue that the left was interested in taking up. And I don't know why that was. Like, is it because the ADA was passed by a Republican president? Is it because the '90s was just filled with like really awful, sentimentalized stories of, you know, disability that often had, you know, religious overtones, or was it, you know, was it the left's internalized ableism? And I think whatever the reason, there has been quite a dramatic change in the past few, you know, past decade or so, as disability communities have really forced open a conversation of the ways in which disability is integral is, is like an integral aspect of social justice, right? And I think that there's a similar dynamic that is needed now in regards to animal issues, where we, as animal people, you know, need to say like enough is enough, you know, we, that's, you know, we published this article and we're like, you know, at risk of seeming like annoying vegans, you know, we know that you like to mock us, but here are the reasons why this can no longer be an issue that is ignored. The stakes are just too freaking high for this to be seen as only a, like, a fringe issue of interest to a few weirdos, right? And so I think we really need to make this case. And, you know, I, you know, part of part of part of why I wrote B.C. Be a burden, but, you know, definitely a certain, you know, a central thrust of our, our piece for luxe. But okay, so that's my pitch for why this is an important case to be making. But, you know, to answer your question, I think that unfortunately, you know, the mainstream animal rights movement has undoubtedly played a role in, you know, the isolation of animal rights from other social justice movements. And we write quite extensively about this, right? There are sadly real reasons why marginalized communities have sometimes perceived the animal rights movement with suspicion, right? I just laid them out in terms of why the disability community might, right? But there's also, like, a view articulated by many black vegans and black scholars and activists that white vegans care more about animal suffering than systemic racism, right? Then there's the, at times, you know, misogynistic, ableist racist campaigns produced by, you know, groups like PETA. There's been the misguided targeting of cultural and hunting practices of minority and especially indigenous communities of some animal animal groups, animal rights groups. You know, so there's all of these ways in which the animal rights movement has really like itself kind of failed at times to expand the circle of concern, right? To like, to reach out, to build, to bridge gaps to build solidarity. And essentially to show why, again, these issues are connected in my system, why, you know, speciesism or anthropocentrism, whatever you want to say is also entangled with all of these other dynamics that we care about, right? You know, I will also say that I think as suggested earlier, this, this focus on personal health has really been a political miscalculation. You know, I think it's brought in a lot of people to some extent, but it's also done a lot of damage, you know, you know, I think many animal activists have kind of chosen to emphasize the physical benefits of vegetarianism in hopes that, you know, targeting, targeting the stomach might offer some round about way to, you know, getting to the mind, but, you know, changing people's minds, right? And, you know, in one of the points that I really love in our piece is that we really, we say, we kind of, think about this as an ongoing problem for the movement, because looking back at socialist writer Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, right? He, he, which was a book that exposed the horrors of the meat-packing industry, he reflected, you know, that he aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach, which is essentially what just continuously keeps happening with the animal rights movement, right? You know, and so I think there's been a kind of, you know, absolutely of focusing in on this, and doubling down on this, you know, that like appealing to people's vanity, right? Appealing to people's also fear of this fear of sickness, fear of disability, right? This sort of, this idea that if only you go vegan, then somehow, you know, he'll be like live forever and be skinny, you know? I mean, but this, this tactic has also contributed to veganism's image as the domain of privileged white people, right? Who are not facing more urgent threats, which is, and it's of, enough itself kind of ridiculous, because the vast majority of the world's vegetarians are not white, and even within North America, white people actually are somewhat less likely to embrace vegetarianism than other groups, right? But the image that is promoted, and at least I would say, in, in sort of more traditional mainstream animal rights, you know, media, and also just by the broader media of what the animal rights movement is, is one that focuses on this kind of narrative of veganism as a lifestyle, right? Of health and fitness. And when I'm thinking about these issues, I always refer back to, you know, Breeze Harper's amazing books, sister vegan, black women speak on food, identity, health, and society, because, you know, Harper was really one of the first people that helped me kind of like pinpoint what it was that I found so troubling about this kind of representation, right? And so she writes about how, you know, these popular sort of mainstream vegan books, you know, sort of relentlessly present racist, heteronormative, and ableist representations of what like an ethical eater should look like, right? You know, I mean, I think it's, you know, quite, quite old now at this point, but this was sort of embodied by the book Skinny Bitch, which became a really popular bestselling book on veganism, you know, that specifically addressed itself to white affluent and thin women, you know, it was sold in airports and stuff like that, but it was also like a vegan manifesto, but it was through that, through that lens, right? Right. It was like, if you are vegan, YouTube can be a Skinny Bitch. You can be a Skin Bitch, right? So, you know, I think also, you know, veganism's association with beauty and wellness has also damaged its reputation by just reinforcing the idea that what we eat is merely a matter of personal preference, right? We, you know, going vegan is seen as yet another kind of lifestyle, as another just sort of offering on like, you know, the crowded list of offerings, right? A crowded marketplace. You know, so I think that all of that, like, you know, but at the same time, like, I also would say that, you know, the movement is not solely to blame, right? Also, the movement is represented in a particular way by the broader media and stuff, and this perception of what the movement is is perpetually sort of reproduced. And so I think, you know, we do a lot to, like, unpack other kinds of histories, other kinds of movements in our piece of, like, where animal movements have come from, you know, and I think that, you know, those don't get as much attention as, like, the Skinny Bitches and the Peter Singers, right? So, but I also wanted to say that I think, like, the left, you know, maybe you should take some responsibility here, too, that there's also, like, the left's own resistance to these issues, right? You know, which maybe aren't that different than the rest of society's resistance. There's an attachment to meat. There's an attachment to human exceptionalism. It's convenient to not have to figure out how to broaden, right, are already extremely strained idea of justice and, you know, circle of concern to include animals, you know, and there's a social, like, veganism, right, or animal movements association with the feminine, feminine, right? There's a tendency in our culture to pathologize a current concern for animals, which is directly, has been historically directly related to the fact that, that, you know, concern for animals is seen as weak and feminine. One of my favorite kind of little tidbits of historical information is that in the 1800s, there was even actually a diagnosis, zoo-filled psychosis, which was the affliction of being overly concerned for animals from which women were believed to disproportionately suffer and have prayed astray. We certainly suffer from it. You know, but, you know, I mean, I think that, right, there's, we also should be looking at the way in which concern for animals has been pathologized and why and by whom, you know, and then I know I'm going on, but I'll just say also that I think that, you know, we'd be really naive if we don't look and consider the fact that, you know, the whole sort of conservative strategy of divide and conquer is that play here. You know, I write in Beesa Burton about a plan outlined by the American Medical Association in the late 1980s to capitalize on infighting with animal rights and to make it unappealing to other social justice movement. And this was happening at a time where there were all of these successes of, you know, direct action, you know, animal activists, you know, really drawing attention to the cruelties that were happening in research labs and they actually had a lot of support from different constituencies. And so, right, at this moment where there was sort of a lot of coalition and a lot of successes within the animal rights movement, then, you know, the American Medical Association kind of comes back, you know, to, with a plan to fight this and it literally states, right, that to defeat animal rights movements, 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. And I won't get into it here, but it ends up being a really fascinating story because they actually, like, basically form a fake movement of disabled and ill people who want animal research to kind of, like, go around the media and be interviewed about how important animal research is, but then an amazing group of disabled activists organize and go in and debate all these people and have a movement of their own. So, but, you know, I'm sure there's many cases like this, right? You know, and the fact that animal issues are so isolated from the left is probably exactly what these big corporations want. That is such a wild story. I just want to sit with it for a minute. I mean, it also makes me think about how in the early arts, you know, taking advantage of the war on terror, it was animal rights activists and environmental activists as well, who were first deemed domestic terrorists, right? And sometimes convicted as such for literally doing nothing but engaging in free speech activities, but it was also this idea of sort of stigma, monetize, marginalize, you know, alienate that movement from other efforts. And so, I think, I think it's exactly right to see this as part of a broader dividing conquer, anti-solidarity strategy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know, and maybe I could actually just turn this question on you and ask why you think animals are an orphan of the left. And maybe even more importantly, like, why do you think it shouldn't be? I mean, I think you hit on a lot of the things that we've come up with together. I mean, you know, to underscore your point, you know, where our side has fallen short, even though we're on both sides of this issue. I mean, I think it has been framed as an individual lifestyle you can purchase in the marketplace and has not been attuned enough to larger questions of political economy. And, you know, I think some leftists, you know, what you often hear is, you know, it doesn't matter what I do personally or how I eat personally, right? The problem is big corporations, the problem is that we need policy change, we need to restructure the economy. And I'm sympathetic to that critique, but the fact, but also it's always struck me as a bit hollow because, you know, I know through my own personal actions that I can't abolish misogyny, but I still try to live as a feminist. I know that I can't abolish, I can't abolish racism, but I still try to act in an anti-racist way. And so I know my personal choices will not abolish the oppression of animals, but I still try to live my life in accordance with the values that I hold true and dear. So, you know, so, but I think there's something deep going on there. You know, here again, Peter Singer has played a role because utilitarianism and its emphasis on suffering doesn't talk about political economy, it doesn't talk about the profit motive. You know, but that reminds me actually of a conversation I actually had with Singer when we were filming exam and life because I pushed him on this issue, I pushed him on the lack of attention to political economy. You know, and his rebuttal was that actually existing socialist and communist systems have not exactly been havens, let alone utopias for animals. And, you know, he and that moment, you know, is maybe 27 years old. I was like, okay, you're not wrong. I have to think about that. And, you know, I think the position I've come to is that I actually really do believe we will not square a concern for animals within a capitalist paradigm that treats the world as, you know, mere resources, mere mere, mere product for, for exploit, you know, human exploitation, but that we have a chance of doing so in a socialist paradigm. And that's, that's sort of, you know, what we're getting at in this lux piece, which circles around a series of questions that I think would be good to just read. We ask what grounds are species right to commodify and dispossess other sentient beings? What gives our species the right to violently exploit another animal's sexual and reproductive capacities in the service of capital? And, I think these are really important questions. I mean, if you are, for example, a Christian, then you believe that we're justified because we have dominion over nature given to us by God. You know, if you're a capitalist, you believe that everything is fodder for the maximization of profit. You know, if you're one of these human farmers that you mentioned, then you might buy into some version of this social contract myth that you discussed, right, that this dependence is the justification. And so I, you know, one way of getting at what we're asking is, well, what's the story socialist or communists are telling themselves, right? Why is the commodification of other living beings okay? And I don't see, you know, I just don't see an obvious justification. So one thing we do in the pieces look a little bit at Karl Marks and, you know, we were at a conference years ago. We were both there presenting and we were really struck by something that the writer and editor Dylan Martindale said and it's really stuck with me. I have to admit, he pointed out that Mark's most famous description of what communism might look like is actually a kind of vegan hell, right? Mark said that you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, we're a cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner. No, right. And it's like, dude, what about like carpentry or like painting? We do some science, like, can we knit? Could we make soup? Like, no, we just have to kill animals and then argue with people. Oh my god. But as, you know, we note in the piece and other people have argued this at much greater, greater length, you know, Marks actually did have proto-etological insights. And he wrote, and I'm going to quote this. He wrote in 1843, "The view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature." In quote, so that implies that under socialism or communism, there would be a different attitude to different ethos, right? Something other than contempt and degradation. And he also quoted Thomas Muncer, who was this radical 16th century German minister who said that all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth, all living things must also become free, which is a sentiment that we like. And so, you know, I think there's sort of different histories to kind of drawn, right? As we've said, you know, animal, thoughts about animal liberation certainly did not begin with Peter Singer in the 1970s. There's actually much deeper traditions. A lot of early socialists were vegetarian, you know, movements for sort of early movements for animal welfare were part of larger ecosystems of organizing in the 19th century connected to abolition and the early women's suffrage movement. And so, you know, part of what we want to do is recover some of that history and that interconnectedness. So, yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of reasons why this shouldn't be an orphan of the left. I mean, a part of it is, I guess, you know, one thing with going into is just that it's because you actually can't entangle what philosophers call the question of the animal from the history of capitalism. And so, after we wrote this essay, one thing I realized, and I was kind of struck by the fact that I hadn't seen it anywhere else. And I included it in the age of insecurity, which is a book that came out last year, where I also write about these issues a bit, that actually livestock and animal exploitation are literally contained within the word capitalism itself, right? Like the root, the Latin root term capitalists literally means of the head. And that is a reference to heads of cattle. So, the etymology of the term capitalism literally implies the capital is made of animals, which is at least, you know, partly true when you go back and look at this history because the turn to the drive to turn animals into commodities and into profits was certainly central to the accumulation of North American wealth, right? Thinking about the beaver trade, for example, which literally built the first fortunes in what is, you know, now the United States and Canada. And so, you know, it's not a place to go into detail, but I just think that the hunger for animal products and the hunger for profits have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. I'm also here thinking about the history of the enclosure movement, right? And what was it that first drove enclosure in England? I mean, according to the 16th century philosopher Thomas Moore, it was sheep. And he's not the only one who says this, right? And this is what the historical record says is it was, you know, wealthy landowners wanting to expand what was then an incredibly profitable wool industry. And so that was a driving economic force behind enclosure was it was the wool industry. And so you know, Thomas Moore complained that sheep were devouring men and villages, like just that this industry was exploding and dispossessing people. You know, there's also research and work on the way that livestock was sort of conscripted into colonization in the new world, right? That when that the process of enclosure came to it as now the United States and how colonists sort of consciously used their animals to seize land to, you know, replace the buffalo with cattle and that they saw them as a kind of quote unquote, like civilizing force. So, you know, so this is something that is there in the historical record and I think is, you know, something that is left as we should be paying attention to. You know, and it's part of the this history sort of lives on, right? In our cultural assumptions and tropes, like this this process of colonization I just mentioned is part of why beef like red meat is seen as the American food, right? And why beef is an icon of sort of manhood and manifest destiny. And again, I just think that's something that we really really need to be attuned to. So, I think as people who are critical of capitalism, we need to have this kind of multi species perspective, but we do something else and I'll wrap up here, which is that it's not just thing about history capitalism, but specifically bringing a feminist lens to it. So, we draw on in the in the Luxepiece, we draw on the work of Sylvia Federici, who's been a guest on the dig before and her book Caliban on the Witch and look at the enclosure movements gender dimensions, right? And essentially what she talks about is how enclosure turned women into, she these are her words, a machines for the production of new workers, right? So, family relations are sort of restructured to serve the needs of capital. Men are elevated its wage earners, whereas women are relegated to the domestic sphere. They're subordinate, they're dependent to use a word we've been going back to. And so, the enclosure movement, which she brings to this analysis that's so key is that the enclosure movement wasn't just about controlling land, but also about controlling bodies, and specifically about controlling their regenerative capacities. And this is what we argue really extends to animals. And, you know, this is sort of the crux of this essay, which is, you know, we're still, it kind of attached, you know, even savvy folks are attached to this sort of false image of farms as bucolic places. This is really what the humane movement, the humane movement kind of plays into, right? But industrial animal agriculture is the antithesis of that. And I think we can actually only understand the horror of it when we put, when we view it through feminist lens. And doing so was actually, you know, writing this piece was actually really eye-opening for me. I felt like I learned things that I had, I sort of knew, but I hadn't totally come to terms with. And so, I ended back to you here, right? Like, why is this feminist lens so important? You know, I'll give a little bit away and just say that, you know, when we're talking about there being billions and billions of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens in the world today, the fact is like each of them came out of an egg or a vagina because that's just how life works. Yeah. And now, I mean, for me too, as someone who, you know, has long been studying these issues, thinking about them specifically through the lens of reproduction, as we did when we were writing this, was just horrifying, actually, you know. Yeah, your challenge is now explaining some of it without causing everyone to flee. Yeah, I know. I'm like, oh, I get, I'm now I'm going to be talking about these realities. But, but, you know, really, first, I just, I want to say, though, that it's like pretty amazing how, you know, disturbingly, Federico's analysis of the increased regulation of sexual and reproductive choices that emerged with capitalism fits with what happens to animals that we eat and exploit. You know, it really, it I'm really grateful for her for that work because it was actually such a profoundly insightful lens through which to understand what is happening, you know, in these, these, these, these food systems, you know, what is officially known as commodity animal production. So, okay, so, you know, as, as Astra, as you have kind of said, right, like these animals have to come out of an egg or vagina. They are not magically dropped by storks, you know. And so, to have animals, you have to have a whole complex system of sexual and reproductive exploitation. And this stuff is gross, you know, and we don't want listeners to turn this off, but, you know, just think about it, right? How do cows and pigs become pregnant, right? That is, that is maybe one place to start, right? Like, let's start with artificial insemination, right? Which was a breakthrough, you know, that became widespread after World War II in order to improve the productivity of dairy cattle. And this breakthrough really made industrial animal agriculture more efficient, right? So, today, thousands of low-age laborers literally spend their days, like, forcibly inserting objects into female animal genitals to impregnate them. That is their job. You know, for cattle, this process involves technicians, again, low-paid often immigrant workers, inserting an arm into a cow's anus to manually flatten, like, her, her cervix, prior to insertion of a, you know, of a so-called breeding gun. And, you know, and so there's that aspect of it. And so then there's like the experience, right? There's the experience of the workers, right? There's the experience of the animals who are forced into these, you know, these sexual, you know, exploitative dynamics. And then there's, you know, the fact that then they are forced into pregnancy over and over and over again until they die, right? I mean, and this, you know, again, can so easily be tied back into my own obsession of disablement. Like, what does that do to an animal's body to have to experience that over and over and over again? And it does a lot of damage, right? So, you know, labor, you know, once it is time for an animal to be born for, you know, a pig or a cow, a calf to be born, you know, labor is induced so that animals give birth, you know, during regular working hours, you know, so there's literally management up to the point of when animals are allowed to give birth, right? Everything is mechanized. Everything is, is sort of, you know, has to happen within these parameters, has to be maximum, maximum efficiency, right? So, you know, under the commodity system, the, you know, the ester cycles of entire barns of animals can be synced in a standardized process that yields, you know, standardized results. And the amount of, again, I just want to reiterate this, the amount of exploited human labor and the amount of like exploitation of non-human animals, you know, to make this standardization process happen is just kind of mind-boggling. And there's all sorts of things that we won't get into here, but just like the, you know, there's, there's different hormones that are needed for it, for these processes, right? We talk about, I don't, I'm trying to remember exactly the, the details, but we wrote about more. Yeah, there's like hormones that are actually taken from these blood mayors that are in South American forest, these sort of quasi-wild horses or semi-wild horses that, you know, are producing hormones that are essential to disciplining the biological clocks of pigs so that they can produce on the capitalist clock. But no, I mean, we're barely touching the surface here, but when she start looking, there's a lot of wild stuff happening. It's important to bring up like those kinds of dynamics because it's also like all of these other kinds of animals or communities are factored into this exploitation that you wouldn't even think of, right? You know, and, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, drag down or gross out listeners too much, but we haven't even gotten into like what happens when, right, when then there are, you know, you know, calves or piglets born, right, or, or, or, you know, at that point, there's this other kind of real psychological like what I, which is just private torture that begins for these creatures, right? The forest separation from their, from their young, you know, cages and gestation crates, you know, for South specifically that make it impossible for them to do anything, to nuzzle their, their piglets, who they might have, you know, for a few hours or to, to make a nest or to play with them, right? It is a complete immobilization of so that the South becomes simply just a reproducing machine, right? A reproduction machine. And then, you know, just all of this emotional suffering is again also like entangled with just all of this physical injury that emerges like vaginal infections, you know, increased susceptibility to disease and just the horrors for, for, for dairy cows of, of, of utter infections of mastitis, right? So these animals live in a sort of disabling, disabling dystopia of reproductive violence. Animals capacities to grow and nurture their young are just reduced to mechanical processes and, you know, for, what, what marks would call, what marks would call their species being? Yeah, their species being, you know, is, is, is, is utterly denied, right? And for, for chickens, it's the same, right? And, you know, factory farms, the, you know, food production is a particularly egregious example, you know, but the same dynamic of, of reproductive exploitation happens on the smallest of farms, right? Whether you're talking about a totally small, you mainly run farm, all of these, all of these dynamics fundamentally still have to happen, you know, you don't get milk without a baby being born. You don't have an animal to raise for me without a baby being born, right? So all of these same dynamics happen even, you know, on, on, on smaller farms. They also happen, right? Again, like in all of these other kinds of animal industries, right? Whether we're talking about fur farms or zoos, it's all of these places that exploit and can, and, and, you know, essentially, like, have animals for the production of some sort of profit, are exploiting the reproductive labor, particularly of female animals, right? You know, a lot of what struck me when writing this piece was the use of euphemisms and euphemisms are everywhere. So, and they're especially used by the industry. So the industry talks of courtship, imitative substitution of bore presence and behavior. So that's when a, you know, an underpaid worker is actually sort of rubbing the back of a female pig. They call it stimulation. Of course, there's the phrase animal husbandry, which, you know, my perception of that phrase really changed. And, and I think what I came to is this that this is, you know, industrial rape of animals, and that that's just an inherent component of these processes, because, as you said, you know, you don't have cows to raise for slaughter or without baby cows. And, you know, also cows do not spontaneously lactate. Babies have to be born. That's, that's just a fact. And so, you know, part of what we do in the pieces is focus on, on milk, you know, which gets less attention than meat in general. And I think it's actually sort of under, under thought about it was, you know, it's actually much more interesting just on that sort of ideological and industrial level than I knew going into this. You know, and, and even the phrase milk is really telling, right? Because it means both milk the substance, right? This fluid that is secreted by female mammals to nourish their young, but it also is a verb that means to exploit for profit, right? To milk something for all its worth. And we have genetically engineered cows so that they were worth a lot. So a cow, a dairy cow today is producing on average something like two and a half times more milk than she would have 50 years ago. And, and as you said, this is, you know, extremely damaging to her body. This is extremely hard on her body. I mean, this is as to use Federici's language, right? Turning bodies into machines. And why do we need so much of it? I mean, we don't have a, we don't have some inherent need to drink milk, human or bovine throughout our lives, but, but there are all of these industrial subsidies that are propping up milk as an industry. And here again, you know, this is a kind of post-World War II phenomenon. So industrial policies sort of encouraged farmers to produce a bunch of milk because it was, they could make it so it was shelf stable and they could use it to feed soldiers overseas. And then they had this glut of it and they were like, what are we going to do with it? And the answer was give it to school children. And so that has been the process ever since. And we've created a kind of whole mythology of milk, right? That it is necessary for strong bones. And when you go back and look at some of the propaganda, a lot of it was very ableist, very racist. This was propaganda during wartime. And at this point, you know, this, this train has left the station. There was just actually a really fascinating piece in Vox called Big Milk has taken over American schools about just how intense the grip is of the milk industry on the diets of school children who, you know, sometimes even have a hard time getting the information that they can have water as an alternative beverage. And so I think, you know, it's important to acknowledge all that and sort of denaturalize milk, right? Why it, its ubiquity is the product of these market forces and a kind of corporate capture. And that's part of what makes its status in the American imagination just so bizarre. And I mean, so one thing we write about is how milk has become a symbol for the far right in recent years, really, you know, since the sort of rise of Trumpism. You know, there's a period around 2016 where it was sort of a meme to bring milk to right-wing rallies, you know, the phrase, "so a boy kind of came into popularity with the far right, real men drink milk." I mean, we just sort of want to linger on the strangeness of this, right? Like, milk is for baby animals. Always a symbol of sort of macho, heteronormative masculinity. And the fact is that, you know, 65% of the world is estimated to be lactose intolerant. And in some countries, that number reaches 100%, right? Because most human beings stop, as you grow, you stop producing lactase, which is the enzyme that you need to digest milk. So after you're a weaned, your body is like, "I'm not going to be drinking milk anymore. I don't need lactase." So, you know, this bizarre irony that the alt-right has turned the fact that thanks to a genetic mutation, a bunch of white adults have this stomach chemistry of babies into a symbol of their racial superiority and their hypermasculinity. It's just absolutely bizarre. And it underscores things we've been saying, which is there is a whole sort of politics of meat, a politics of milk that is sort of in the ether of our culture. And, you know, that we think needs to be deconstructed. Because it's, as you said before, you know, it sort of reeks of these hierarchies that, you know, I don't think leftists should really want to uphold. That all said, I think it's really important we not get too much on our high horse, right? And to go back to the trope of the annoying vegan. I mean, there's no position of sort of purity within the system as it exists. I mean, you can eat a diet of plants, but your food is still going to be manufactured within, you know, extremely harmful processes, you know, processes that are damaging to the environment. They depend on exploited human labor. And so nobody is, nobody is pure and nobody is outside of capitalist relations. And I think that's, that's just important to say. And one thing I think we settled on and we we articulate in the pieces that for us veganism is actually an act of imagination. It's aspirational. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's a political position and not just a dietary one. It's aspiring to a world where there is, yes, less suffering, but also more solidarity and where that solidarity extends beyond the human. And, you know, we acknowledge, right, that there's all sorts of complexities. You know, we've taken issue, you took issue with, you know, vegans who attack people in other communities, other cultures, people have other life ways for their farming practices. I mean, you know, and, and I think you and I both object to that and think it's unstrategic. You know, I think, you know, some humility can go a long way too to building common cause with folks who might not be on our page 100% but might see that we have, you know, common adversaries. So, for example, there's some proposed legislation that would ban factory farming by I think it's 2040, you know, all politics are messy, right? And, and maybe this is where we can, can wrap it up and go back to piece of burden because over the course of that book, you actually talk about the process of becoming vegan. And, and how you came to that position once you began to recognize the intersections of speciesism and ableism, right? So, for you, that was really key, right? That, that epiphany. And, and for you, in addition to being aspirational, and, and now I agree with you. So, for me too, but veganism is an anti-apilist position. So, yeah, let's go back to piece of burden and, and close with that. What, what is that epiphany? And, and what does it mean in your life? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and, and just want to reiterate all the, all the things that you said, I think it's, it's so important to kind of push against this, this idea that vegans have, have a sense that they're, you know, that they are outside of, of, of capitalism, right? Or outside of exploitation, right? Like, all of these, all of the ways that we live are unfortunately so entangled with, with, with harm and just with messy histories, you know? So, I really, I, I just really want to, you know, reiterate and agree with you there. And, not really that there's anywhere I disagree with you, because, you know, we're, we're pretty much, we're just very much on the same page here. But, I have to, maybe I'll have like a confessional moment though, and, you know, it's always been, I joke that I had to write "Bisa Burden" out of, you know, out of a place of guilt, because that was the last one of our siblings become vegan. So, you became vegan, what, how old were you? I was 12, yeah, do you remember? When you were 12, and then our, our brother, Alex did a few years later, and then even our, our, our, our sister, Nye, who's much, much younger, 10 years younger than me became vegan many years before I did. And so, it took me a while to get to this place even after, you know, having all of the sort of epiphanies about, about animal cruelty and, and animal exploitation, exploitation and stuff like that. And in the book-- You were vegetarian. Oh, I was vegetarian. I became vegetarian at six, but I didn't quite, and I didn't quite, even though rationally I understood, I didn't quite have it sort of internalized just the extent to which, you know, milk and eggs are profoundly exploitative and, and, and, and, and damaging, and they, pretty much in the exact same ways as, as, as, as meat, right? In fact, now I think I would, I would say that the animals who are, you know, in many ways worst off are dairy cows and, and, egg laying hens, you know? They're like not only killed and used for meat, but, and right, you know, but then they're, they have these endless lives of, of production of, you know, that is just really horrendous. And so, but I was actually really, I had, I found it hard to become vegan, and I think that there were some issues of disability access in that, that, that, you know, it was hard for me to cook. It was hard for me to, you know, to feed myself already. And this was like just another, another step that I had to figure out, right? How was I going to do that? And this experience has made me profoundly empathetic to people who are like, you know, I, like, I, I can't do this. I don't have the means of doing this, whether it's like the, the health or the, or, or physical access, right? You know, because I understand what that, what that feeling is. But I went for lunch at some point with some disabled friends who I didn't know that well, who, who were vegan. And that was like this moment for me of, you know, of, through those conversations, I don't even remember specifically what we talked about, but it was a moment for me where I was like, okay, I need to figure out what actually are the barriers that I face, you know, and the challenges that I face. And then what are just my attachments to not, not wanting to change these things because I like these, I like these products essentially, you know? And so that in combination with really delving into the research of what actually happens to egg laying hands to dairy cows, right? And having this, this realization of the ways in which disability is implicated in it. Like for me, that really did, it's not that I didn't care about it before, but it was like, it made me, it made me just internalize it in a different way. I don't know how else to say it, right? Like it just suddenly clicked of like, no, this is like, it was like one bit of information, like, too much that I was like, okay, you know? And then it was like, then after that, it was just like, I, you know, I haven't looked back. It's not like I had a long struggling period of, you know, trying to be vegan, but not really being vegan. It was like that, for me, was what spoke to me essentially, you know? And it's kind of funny on one level that like my transition into veganism was so much about food as it is for everyone's, you know, be, but because for me, like veganism at this point, right, might be confusing to say, but it's, it's almost just inadvertently about food for me, right? Veganism is a political position as you've described, right? It's an anti-ablest, anti-anthropocentric, and anti-capitalist political and ethical position that I attempt to practice and, and, and embody in my daily life, right? I mean, so so veganism to me, I'm, I, is like, I care about animals. And as my sort of epiphany showed when I was like a little kid, right, animals to me are not in the same category as food, right? Yet I am forced, as all vegans are, right, to perpetually talk about what we eat, you know, about our diet. And this issue of diet then really becomes what people think that veganism is completely about. And, you know, of course, it is about that, like it's hard for me to even talk about this, because of course, it is about that, because of the profound power and influence of, you know, big meat and big dairy, you know, and, you know, not to mention, we haven't even talked about like the exploitation of fish and other nonland creatures, right? But, you know, we are forced to talk about food because that is what so many animals are commodified for within these industries, right? Billions and billions of animals, as you have said. But I think my point that, you know, I'm kind of trying to get at is that veganism is not just about food. It is about opposing a system that turns life into things that imagines all other living creatures as simply here for the benefit of human beings, because we think we have some special capacities that make us superior, right? So, veganism for me is an embodied practice that, you know, to remind myself essentially that I refuse to be okay with that vision of the world. And it's a political position that takes justice for animals as integral to justice for disabled people and for all of us. It is about a way of challenging the commodification of life. I think that's a really great note to Andon. Sonore Taylor, thanks for joining me on the dig. Astra, thank you so much for having me. It's always such a great pleasure to be able to talk through these questions about animals with you. That was Astra Taylor interviewing Sonora Taylor. The author of Disabled Ecologies, Lessons from a Wounded Desert, And Beasts of Burton, Animal and Disability Liberation. She's professor in the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Disabled Ecologies Lab. Astra Taylor is a regular guest host here on the dig, writer, filmmaker, and organizer, who co-founded the debt collective, a union of debtors. Democracy may not exist, but will miss it when it's gone, and the people's platform, taking back power and culture in the digital age. Thank you for listening to the dig from Jacobin Magazine. As Marks once said, after noting that the view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money, is an actual contempt for in practical degradation of nature. While other podcasts have only interpreted the world in various ways, our point is to change it. We're posting new episodes every week. The dig was produced by Alex Lewis. Our associate producer is Jackson Roach, Music by Jeffrey Brodsky. Our communications coordinator is Sylvia Atwood. Our senior advisors are Theorea Francois and Ben Maybe. Check out our vast archives and newsletters at TheDigRadio.com. Follow us on Twitter and also Instagram @TheDigRadio. 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