[Review] Jason Hannan, editor. Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020. 334 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Jason Hannan, editor. Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020. 334 pp.

[Review] Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring and Karen Lykke Syse, editors. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze. Lexington Books 2021. 242 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring and Karen Lykke Syse, editors. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze. Lexington Books 2021. 242 pp.

A Nude Horse Is A Rude Horse: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals

In 1959, Alan Abel began sending out a series of press releases to American media outlets credited to a new organization, The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Using the language of conservative moralists opposed to the changes in postwar society, he argued that ‘naked’ animals were scandalous and needed to be clothed. Pets, farm animals, and wildlife were all included, as the organization hued to slogans like ‘a nude horse is a rude horse’ and ‘decency today means morality tomorrow’. Abel employed comedian Buck Henry to play the organization’s president, G. Clifford Prout, who gave interviews and speeches covered widely by the mainstream press. Over the next four years, Prout and the group were featured on every major American newscast. The hoax was exposed in late 1962 after he gave an interview to Walter Cronkite. The following year, Time magazine officially debunked the existence of the group. It was an elaborate hoax, but it was also a satire, using animals to critique moralists attempting to ban books and music for indecency. In so doing, the group also unintentionally laid bare American contradictory thinking about animals, as clothing nonhuman animals and worrying about their ‘indecency’ assumed that they had some level of agency. The United States, for example, had always classified the killing of those wearing clothes as murder. Thus it was that while the satire of The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals was directed toward human moralists, the content of its crusade focused exclusively on nonhumans, raising clear questions about their role in human society.

Akbar, My Heart: Caregiving for a Dog During Covid-19

Covid-19 originates with humans’ instrumentalization of other animals, an “inconvenient truth” elided by scientists procuring a vaccine while refusing to contend with the captivity, slaughter and encroachment on wild animals’ habitats that brought the fatal disease upon us. The interlocking of homo sapiens’ and other species’ suffering is, of course, glaringly evidenced by disproportionate Black and brown death due to Covid-19 worldwide, itself intensifying the foundational pandemic of anti-Black violence. “Akbar, My Heart” contemplates transpecies loss in a relational frame, attending to the entanglement of white supremacy with anthropocentrism at the same time that I reflect on caregiving for my canine companion, Akbar, during his decline from neurological disease. My elderly friend’s worsening symptoms coincided with the pandemic’s spread, the Summer’s uproar against anti-Black violence and California’s wildfires. The vortex of these events is a point of departure for meditating about carceral logic, animalization and the seeming “end of days” together with another kind of ending, one centered on providing comfort and an honorable death. Mourning for Akbar through the preparation of this piece, I have called upon the wisdom of critical animal studies scholars as well as Sufi poets and even the texts of my dreams. Deciphering this bewildering time of transformation has been an invitation to imagine another world while abiding with Akbar in the threshold, attempting to see through the smoke, so to speak, to the other side of this scorched earth.

[Review] Penny Johnson. Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine. Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Penny Johnson. Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine. Melville House Publishing, 2019.

[Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation.

This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. Mackay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so Mackay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ of the text, reintroducing readers to their own animality. Mackay’s ‘perspectivism’ enables us to see from the point-of-view of non-human animals, forcing a reckoning with animal abuse and extractive lifeways. While her speculative fiction is bleak, it offers tools for attunement and thinking-with non-human others.

Greedy Bat Eaters versus Cruel Pig Killers: The Lose-Lose Battle of Divisive Discourse

Unsurprisingly, the circumstances and challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have generated strong reactions. Among the more notable, Canadian musician and animal activist Bryan Adams made headlines when he went on a tirade on social media denouncing ‘fucking bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards’ and advocating for veganism. This article uses this incident as a prism through which to examine the values and assumptions informing some of the central debates within the mainstream animal advocacy movement today. Certainly, there is an urgent need for a critical re-evaluation of the policies and practices that have created the conditions in which viral pathogens can spread, especially those relating to our treatment of nonhuman animals (and our relationship with nature more broadly). However, the roots of the problem are fundamentally structural, and not attributable to any one country or culture. The thoughtless use of terms that contribute to a politically charged and rancorous public debate readily descends into a lose-lose battle, which may hinder efforts to address complex and collective concerns in a mutually cooperative manner. If COVID-19 is to represent a turning point towards building a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient world for humans and nonhuman animals alike, the kind of fractioning that is currently being exacerbated by the use of divisive discourse must be eschewed in favour of a greater recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness, including through a more pluralistic understanding of law.

Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping affect in the works of Naeemah Naeemaei

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-national habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency.

The Covid Pandemic, ‘Pivotal’ Moments, and Persistent Anthropocentrism: Interrogating the (Il)legitimacy of Critical Animal Perspectives

Situated alongside, and intertwined with, climate change and the relentless destruction of ‘wild’ nature, the global Covid-19 pandemic should have instigated serious reflection on our profligate use and careless treatment of other animals. Widespread references to ‘pivotal moments’ and the need for a reset in human relations with ‘nature’ appeared promising. However, important questions surrounding the pandemic’s origins and its wider context continue to be ignored and, as a result, this moment has proved anything but pivotal for animals. To explore this disconnect, this paper undertakes an analysis of dominant Covid discourses across key knowledge sites comprising mainstream media, major organizations, academia, and including prominent animal advocacy organizations. Drawing on the core tenets of Critical Animal Studies, the concept of critical animal perspectives is advanced as a way to assess these discourses and explore the illegitimacy of alternative ways of thinking about animals. Broadly, it is found that dominant Covid discourses fail to engage with the mechanisms by which human uses of nature and other animals are justified – specifically binary thinking, the normalization and naturalization of hierarchical categories of use, and the commodification of their lives and bodies – or to specify the nature and scope of practices that need to change. These key sites of knowledge, and also prominent advocacy organizations, thus reflect the illegitimacy of critical animal perspectives while also contributing to their ongoing delegitimation. Exacerbating this situation is the illegitimacy of the animal advocacy movement itself, which is attributed in part to movement factionalism and a diversity of poorly articulated aims. Mainstreaming and normalizing critical perspectives on animals has never been more necessary. Extended beyond academia, critical animal perspectives offer a potentially productive and practical way of approaching this endeavour so that future moments may be truly pivotal for humans and nonhumans alike.