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Critical Animal Studies

Critical animal studies is an academic field of study dedicated to the abolition of animal exploitation, oppression, and domination.

  • Best, Steven, and Anthony J. Nocella, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals. New York: Lantern Publishing & Media, 2004.

  • find literature and integrate properly

    The critical animal studies field exploded in the 2010s with a number of important new books, among them John Sanbonmatsu’s Critical theory and>animal liberation (2011); Dawn McCance’s Critical animal studies: an introduction>(2013); John Sorenson’s Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable>(2014); Anthony Nocella, John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka’s>Defining Critical Animal Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for>Liberation (2013); Nik Taylor and Richard Twine’s The Rise of Critical Animal>Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014); Richard Twine’s Animals as>Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies (2010); and>Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole, and Carrie Freeman’s Critical Animal and>Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy (2015).

Definitions

"There is a debate about what the term critical animal studies means. It is like the term “feminism”—there are some concepts we can all agree on that feminism means and does not mean; there is a great deal of disagreement as well. So, by analogy, if we can all agree that feminism is, at least, “the radical notion that women are people,” perhaps we can say that critical animal studies “is the radical notion that animals are people,” or, perhaps even more precisely, CAS represents “the radical notion that people are animals."

  • Stanescu, Vasile. ‘Defining Critical Animal Studies’. In Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, edited by Margo DeMello, 2nd ed., 499–501. 2012. Reprint, New York City: Columbia University Press, 2021. link

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” That is our goal in critical animal studies: we don’t want to just understand what is happening to animal (or the environment, or human animals). We are actually going to change it."

5 Ways

  1. Critical in the sense of understanding and employing ideas from critical theory. So, for example, Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a vegetarian, hopes to enact change to help animals. However, because he uses analytic and not critical theory, he might not be considered as doing critical animal studies. (The difference between “analytic” and “critical” theory is not arbitrary: Analytic theory—as the name would suggest—uniquely prizes rational thought. So, for Singer, animals “get in” to the moral community in part because of their level of rationality.)
  2. Critical in the sense of being critical of the rational (human) subject. Of course, we do not mean only that a writer only cites specific authors in their work who do critical animal studies; we also mean that they employ some basic ideas that most critical theorists believe in. Perhaps the most important one is the idea that rationality should not be the litmus test for inclusion in the moral community. So, for example, we might view something like the Great Ape Project as humanistic: it claims that certain animals “get in” because of how similar they are to humans. We might be critical of those ideas and argue that animals should matter—not because they are similar to humans—but on their own, and for their own reasons.
  3. Critical in the sense of critical of some examples of animal studies. So, for example, Donna Haraway, American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, certainly understands critical theory and writes about animals. However, because we do not see her as working to prevent the death of actual nonhuman animals, we would see her as doing “animal studies” or, even more precisely, “posthumanism.” I think she would agree with that distinction. In particular, we might criticize her for not dealing with what we believe is an ethical imperative in addressing the suffering and death of animals. So, critical in the sense of being critical of animal studies that do not include a kind of ethical or activist core that we believe is important for this kind of work.
  4. Critical in the sense of self-critical or reflective; in other words, critical in the sense of (what has been termed) “intersectionality.” Consider: how do the ideas of animal studies intersect with other issues of social justice: gender, class, race, colonialism, ableism, and so on? (I do not care for the word “intersectionality” applied to animal studies; it was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain the unique occurrence of African American women as having an experience both different from and related to the experience of white women and black men. So, CAS seems to use the term incorrectly and unrelated to its historically connection to black women, which troubles me. In contrast, I prefer the term “solidarity”; for example, how can the field of animal studies be in solidarity with other social justice movements, such as the movements around race, gender, class, and the environment?)
  5. Critical in the sense of vital. As in, animal studies is critical—critical, as in needing to happen now. For me, perhaps the most important part of critical animal studies is its inherently activist orientation. In Upton Sinclair’s text The Jungle, the owner of the factory farm comments on how efficient the farm is by stating, “They use everything about the hog except the squeal.” However, I worry that if we as scholars know and use the suffering of animals for our academic careers without a shared commitment to stopping what is happening, we have figured out how to use even the animal’s “squeal” (i.e., animals’ expressions of pain). Expressed differently, the world is burning down around us. How can we just theorize when humans are killing billions and the environment is rapidly passing the point of no return? We have to become scholar-activists in solidarity with those in other social justice movements who are seeking actual change. To do so, we have to develop new ways of writing and communicating: we must become not only scholars who are activists as well, or scholars who write about activists; we must become people who use our scholarship as itself a force for activism. We must write and speak and teach not only to understand but also to change.
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