Disability and Animality

Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Stephanie Jenkins, Kelly Struthers Montford, Chloë Taylor, Stephanie Jenkins, Kelly Struthers Montford, Chloë Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032172705
• eBook ISBN: 9781000051605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The fields of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected.

Composed of thirteen chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes:

• Intersections of Ableism and Speciesism
• Thinking Animality and Disability together in Political and Moral Theory
• Neurodiversity and Critical Animals Studies
• Melancholy, Madness, and Misfits.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in Animal Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.

Part I

Intersections of ableism and speciesism

Chapter 1

Animal crips

Sunaura Taylor

A few years ago I found a story about a fox with arthrogryposis, which is the disability I was born with. According to the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre, a wildlife conservation and management organization, the fox was shot by a resident of the area because “it had an abnormal gait and appeared sick.” The animal, whose disabilities were quite significant, had normal muscle mass, and his stomach contained a large amount of digested food, which suggested to researchers that “the limb deformity did not preclude successful hunting and foraging.”¹

The resident seems to have shot the animal out of pity (a sort of mercy killing) and fear (perhaps assuming the fox was sick with a contagious disease). People shoot normal foxes too, of course, but for less purportedly altruistic reasons. However, this fox actually seemed to be doing very well. Did the resident assume the fox’s quality of life was unacceptable? Did the person view the animal’s disabilities as dangerous or as a fate worse than death? The concept of a mercy killing carries within it two of the most prominent responses to disability: destruction and pity. The fox was clearly affected by human ableism, shot dead by someone who equated disability only with suffering and fear of contagion.

The assumptions and prejudices we hold about disabled bodies run deep—so deep that we project this human ableism onto non-human animals. They are subjected to some of our most familiar ableist narratives. For instance, the “better off dead” narrative, which led to the shooting of the fox, is a common thread in discussions of pet euthanasia and animal farming. There is also the inspirational disabled animal who overcomes great odds, which is perhaps a more surprising narrative but one that seems to be gaining in popularity. Consider for example the 2011 movie Dolphin Tale, a true story of a dolphin who loses her tail and learns to swim with a prosthesis, or the animated fantasy film How to Train Your Dragon, which has a similar story line involving a dragon who gets a prosthetic tail. Then there are stories like that of Faith, a dog who was born with only her two hind legs and who has learned to walk bipedally. Faith has appeared on many television shows, including Oprah, and become an inspiration for viewers. “Cute” and “inspiring” disabled animal stories seem to be all the rage on social media these days, and various memes and websites tell the stories of disabled animals who “triumph” and “overcome” obstacles. Television shows are also beginning to catch on to this burgeoning market: a Nature episode titled “My Bionic Pet” aired on PBS in spring 2014, exploring animal prosthetics. Their promo declares, “Sometimes miracles do happen.”²

Clearly we project ableism onto non-human animals; do we also project the notion of disability itself? If the category of disability is a social construction, then what does it mean to say an animal is disabled? We have no idea how other animals comprehend physical or cognitive difference. Does a dog perceive that something is different about another dog if she has three legs? Can a monkey tell that she is different if she limps? Can animals know to help other disabled animals? Can animals recognize disability across species? The animal world is filled with such an incredible and seemingly infinite variety of difference that trying to assess the difference disability makes almost seems futile. And yet a lot of fascinating evidence suggests that some animals can and do recognize something akin to disability.³ Primatologist Frans de Waal tells the story of Yeroen, the oldest adult male chimpanzee in the Arnhem chimpanzee colony. Yeroen hurt his hand in a fight with a young rival. De Waal writes that Yeroen “limped for a week, even though his wound seemed superficial.” The scientists soon discovered that Yeroen was only limping if he could be seen by his rival. Did Yeroen think that faking a limp would make his attacker more sympathetic to him? Or does that interpretation too quickly read Yeroen’s actions through human assumptions about disability and the sort of response it should engender?

The meanings of the word “disability” are uniquely human, created and contextualized by human cultures over centuries. Despite this, I have chosen to use it here when discussing differences among non-human animals. I am drawn to the breadth of meaning the word has within disability movements, and I’m interested in what happens when we consider how disability as lived experience and as ideology impacts non-human animals. How do non-human animals relate to physical and cognitive difference themselves? How do human understandings of disability affect the ways we interpret what animals are experiencing?

That animal disability both inspires and horrifies people is clearly evident in discussions surrounding Internet sensation Chris P. Bacon. Chris is a pig who was born in January 2013 with very small hind legs that he cannot walk on. He “set the Internet on fire” when a video of him using a homemade wheelchair went viral. The tiny piglet, who was rescued by a veterinarian after a woman brought him in to be euthanized, has now gone through multiple wheelchairs and weighs more than seventy pounds.⁴

Many commenters on articles about Chris want him euthanized, saying it’s cruel to “make him live like that.” Others find him so heroic that he is invited to attend muscular dystrophy events for children. Chris is raising awareness—not about the plight of pigs, but about disability. After all, no matter how much Americans on the Internet love this pig, his name constantly reminds us what people think he really amounts to: bacon.

A telling example of the impulse to project human stereotypes of disability onto other animals can be found in the story of Mozu, a snow monkey (a Japanese macaque) who was born in Japan’s central highlands. Mozu was born with abnormalities of her hands and feet thought to have resulted from pesticide pollution. Snow monkeys spend much of their time moving through trees, which allows them to avoid wading through the thick snow that covers the ground in the winter months. Mozu’s disabilities meant she was mostly unable to move through the branches; instead she traveled the nearly two miles that her troop covered every day in search of food by alternately walking on her abnormal limbs and crawling and sliding on the forest floor. When Mozu was born, researchers who had been watching this troop feared she would not make it past infancy. To their surprise, Mozu lived for nearly three decades, rearing five children of her own and becoming a prominent troop member.

In an episode of the program Nature featuring Mozu’s story, she is again and again referred to as “inspiring,” “suffering,” and a “very special monkey.”⁵ The dramatic music and voice-overs that describe Mozu’s struggle in vivid detail make it nearly impossible to watch her move across the snowy forest floor, a baby clinging to her belly and other monkeys flying by above her, without thinking, “Poor Mozu!”

At the same time, I am aware that the piece was edited to elicit this reaction. There are few shots in which Mozu is not struggling, and I question the effect the videographers had on her and the troop. In one scene her desperation seems to stem from being chased by the cameraperson. The music and voice-overs of course also add a sense of struggle to Mozu’s story.

Yet I have no doubt that life was hard for Mozu, and I find myself desperate to know what she thought of her situation. Was her instinct to reach for the trees unquenchable? Was she always in pain, exhausted, or fearful as she moved slowly across the forest floor? Did she wonder why she was different from her companions? I cannot help but wonder, although I realize how similar these thoughts are to the tiresome questions I have been asked again and again about my own life, my own disability. My desire for Mozu’s life not to be seen as one of suffering and struggle is also a projection, one that wishes disability empowerment onto my fellow primate. Our human perspective shapes how we interpret Mozu’s experience.

Many of our ideas about animals are formed by our assumption that only the “fittest” animals survive, which negates the value and even the naturalness of such experiences as vulnerability, weakness, and interdependence. When disabilities occur, we assume that “nature will run her course,” that the natural process for a disabled animal is to die, rendering living disabled animals not only aberrant but unnatural.

How true is this? Mozu lived for 28 years, raising children and grandchildren. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of the bestselling book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, writes that “it is something of a cliché among animal behaviorists that wild animals do not tolerate disabilities, and that animals who are unfortunate enough to be born with a deformity or fall ill rarely last very long. I am dubious.”⁶ Recent research offers numerous examples of disabled animals surviving and sometimes thriving, as well as evidence that animals can recognize when another animal is different and needs support. There are countless stories of primates, elephants, dogs, pigs, whales, ducks, geese, and chickens helping their disabled companions. It is known, for example, that male silverback gorillas will slow down their troop so that elderly, ill, and disabled members can keep up. Other species, such as elephants and wolves, have been shown to do the same. What do we make of animals such as Babyl, an elephant who lived in the Samburu Reserve in northern Kenya? Ethologist Marc Bekoff writes that Babyl was “crippled” and “couldn’t travel as fast as the rest of the herd” and describes how the other elephants in Babyl’s group would wait for her instead of leaving her behind. The elephant expert Iain Douglas-Hamilton told Bekoff that the elephants had been doing this for years; that they “always waited for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Disability and animality: introduction
• Part I Intersections of ableism and speciesism
• Part II Thinking animality and disability together in political and moral theory
• Part III Neurodiversity and critical animal studies
• Part IV Melancholy, madness, and misfits
• Index