Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusive Excellence: Transdisciplinary and Global Perspectives

13: The Faces of Animal Oppression

CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Faces of Animal Oppression LORI GRUEN About 15 years ago, I wrote an article analyzing the connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. I argued that nonhuman animals are oppressed in a myriad of ways and that examining the mutually reinforcing structures that support the oppression of nonhuman animals and the oppression of other groups is an important liberatory project (Gruen, 1993). These claims were, and continue to be, met with some skepticism. In response to one critic, I turned to Iris Young’s “The Five Faces of Oppression” for intellectual support. Although Young never explicitly addressed the plight of other animals, her insights are instructive. Here I will return to the question of oppression beyond the species boundary, drawing on those insights to explore how it can be claimed meaningfully that nonhuman animals, like so many human groups that differ from those in positions of power and privilege, suffer from exploitation , marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence and thus can be considered oppressed. When we understand the situation that individuals and groups are in as oppressive ones, then greater attention can be paid to rectifying the particular wrongs caused by oppression. Animal Oppression Humans have always interacted with nonhuman animals, and while contexts and relationships have changed, the structure of the relations have, arguably, stayed much the same. Humans dictate how nonhuman animals in human environments will fare. Given that human environments are continuously expanding, that human 281 282 Lori Gruen behaviors—that is, emitting green house gases and polluting water and air—cannot be contained in one geographical region, and that we are encroaching on even the most remote places on earth, it is not unreasonable to claim that virtually all nonhuman animals are living in human-impacted environments. Most of our actions affect them. Humans dominate and control the lives of nonhuman animals. Humans oppress nonhuman animals. While some individual relationships may not look or feel like dominating and oppressive ones, the structure of the relations are characterized by the forces of oppression . When we look at Young’s categories of oppression we can see how this is the case. Young suggests that “the central insight expressed in the concept of exploitation” (Young 1990, p. 49) is that this type of oppression occurs when one group systematically extracts the labor of another to benefit themselves and not the laborer. Although the concept of exploitation in traditional Marxist and more recent socialist-feminist theory has been reserved for human laborers, it is not at all difficult to expand the concept to include nonhumans. Consider the plight of dairy cows, battery hens, and sows in factory farms. Intensively reared dairy cows are so overworked that they begin to metabolize their own muscle in order to continue to produce milk, a process referred to in the industry as “milking off their backs.” The cows are milked by machine and often suffer from painful inflammation of the mammary glands, or mastitis. Sows are confined for their entire lives and repeatedly artificially inseminated so as to produce piglets who are removed three weeks after birth, fattened up, and sold for consumption . In factory farms, sows spend most of their lives in crates that are 7 feet long and 2 feet wide—they literally have no room to move. Hens are kept in battery cages stacked tier on tier in huge warehouses. Confined seven or eight to a cage, they too cannot move or even spread one wing. Conveyor belts bring in food and water and carry eggs away. The lives and bodies of female animals on factory farms are completely controlled to produce the maximum amount of product at the smallest cost to the producer. Factory farming, a process in which over 5 billion animals annually in the U.S. alone are intensively confined, manipulated, and ultimately slaughtered to produce the greatest profit for the few agribusinesses that control the market, not only exploits female animals’ biological and reproductive labor, but also denies all factory farmed animals their lives so that some humans can profit. The animals are exploited and when their labor is thoroughly extracted, they are killed. Young’s second category, marginalization, involves, in part, separating one group and viewing them as dependent on the domi- 283 The Faces of Animal Oppression nant group. The conceptual structure of the human/animal divide, in mythology, in religion, in history, in art, and...