The Ethics of Captivity ed. by Lori Gruen (review)

While political and ethical philosophers today are familiar with critiques of confinement in both critical prison studies and critical animal studies, The Ethics of Captivity is unusual in that it brings these critiques of incarceration together, bridging human and nonhuman animal liberation movements. While Lisa Guenther’s recent book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (2013), also critiques the mass incarceration of both human and nonhuman animals, it is far more common to see human and animal liberation movements opposed on this issue, as when the incarceration of humans is deplored for treating those individuals like animals. As Guenther argues, however, this humanistic language is misguided since incarceration is not so much dehumanizing in its effects as it is de-animalizing, undermining not a prisoner’s humanity but, more fundamentally, their animality. Moreover, as Guenther shows, nonhuman animals are harmed by intensive conditions of captivity in the same ways that humans are (see also Struthers Montford 2016). In this sense The Ethics of Captivity—like Guenther’s monograph—is expansive, and multiple chapters as well as the volume as a whole provide insights into what is wrong with captivity per se, rather than what is wrong with a particular institutional set of practices. [End Page E-43]

While in this sense The Ethics of Captivity is broad and extends our moral vision across multiple species boundaries, including the human-nonhuman animal boundary, it is also unusual and important in its attention to species specificity. While Lori Gruen’s own chapter offers an inter-species analysis, and chapter 10, Alasdair Cochrane’s “Born in Chains? The Ethics of Animal Domestication,” provides an ethical evaluation of the context in which the vast majority of nonhuman animals are kept captive—domestication—each of the other chapters attends to the effects of captivity on a particular species of animal, and ethically evaluates these practices at a species-specific level. In this manner the volume avoids the human exceptionalist move of assuming that all nonhuman species of animals are the same, primarily characterized by the fact that they are not human. Attention to particular species suggests that non-exploitative confinement may be essential to the flourishing of dogs, whereas it is never justifiable to confine dolphins, whales, and elephants, who are inevitably damaged by conditions of captivity. Individual chapters of the volume are devoted to dogs (chapter 1: Alexandra Horowitz’s “Canis Familiaris: Companion and Captive”), dolphins and whales (chapter 2: Lori Marino’s “Cetacean Captivity”), elephants (chapter 3: Catherine Doyle’s “Captive Elephants”), chimpanzees (chapter 4: Stephen Ross’s “Captive Chimpanzees”), rabbits (chapter 5: Margo DeMello’s “Rabbits in Captivity”), humans (chapter 7: John Byrant et al.’s “Life Behind Bars”; chapter 8: Lauren Gazzola’s “Political Captivity”; and chapter 15: Lisa Rivera’s “Coercion and Captivity”), and cats (chapter 9: Clare Palmer and Peter Sandøe’s “For Their Own Good: Captive Cats and Routine Confinement”). Other chapters consider particular contexts and ends of captivity, such as captivity in the form of sanctuary for rescued agricultural and laboratory animals (chapter 6: Miriam Jones’s “Captivity in the Context of a Sanctuary for Formerly Farmed Animals,” and chapter 13: Karen S. Emmerman’s “Sanctuary, Not Remedy: The Problem of Captivity and the Need for Moral Repair”), captivity for the purpose of laboratory research (chapter 11: Robert Streiffer’s “The Confinement of Animals Used in Laboratory Research: Conceptual and Ethical Issues”), and captivity for the purpose of conservationist breeding (chapter 12: Irus Braverman’s “Captive for Life: Conserving Extinct in the Wild Species through Ex Situ Breeding”).

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, “Conditions of Captivity,” includes eight chapters which provide species-specific overviews of captivity in our homes, entertainment, research, fashion and meat [End Page E-44] industries, sanctuaries, and human prisons. Each chapter pertaining to nonhuman animals broadly covers the history of that particular form of captivity, the effects of this, and the ethical questions specific forms of captivity raise. Reflections on the future of captivity are also offered. The strength of...