Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and nineteenth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Lori Gruen. Lori is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she is also the founding coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies. Lori was also one of the Wesleyan faculty founders of the Center for Prison Education, a program that allows people incarcerated in Cheshire Correctional Institution (a maximum-security men’s prison) and York Correctional Institution (a women’s prison)ꟷat both of which prisons she has now taught many courses and workshopsꟷto pursue university degrees. She is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of thirteen books, the most recent of which are Animal Crisis:  A New Critical Theory (co-authored with Alice Crary) and Carceral Logics: Human Incarceration and Animal Captivity (co-edited with Justin Marceau). Lori serves as the Senior Advisor at Freedom Reads, the only organization in the United States that brings beautiful, handcrafted Freedom Libraries into cellblock in prisons to create joy, inspire hope, spark generosity, and otherwise help people inside transform their experiences through books.

[Description of photo below: Lori lies on a carpeted floor close to her beloved recently-deceased Taz. Taz’s front legs and paws are outstretched on the carpet and Lori is holding the right paw in her hands. Their heads are nestled against each other’s.]

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Lori! I conducted an interview with you in September 2018. Please bring us up to date on what has happened in your working life since our last conversation.

Thanks so much for having me back! I know that I have said this before, but it bears repeating: the work that you have done with Dialogues on Disability is so crucial, even more so in the current political environment. It is such an honor to be interviewed in the series again.

I cannot believe that it was back in 2018 that I was previously here. Since then, my academic and political work in animal ethics and animal studies has continued, of course, and I’ve dug deeper into the connections between animal studies and disability studies that I discussed back then, as I will say more about later in this interview. I have also been thinking and doing a lot more with respect to captivity and the carceral state. In addition to continuing to teach and advise in prisons, I have been working with a wonderful non-profit, Freedom Reads and have travelled with the Freedom Reads team to numerous prisons to talk with incarcerated folks about books. I have also combined my interest in animals and my concerns about the criminal legal system in work that I have done with some of my animal law colleagues, arguing against carceral responses to animal cruelty.

Many animal activists and those who work in animal law believe that in order to elevate the status of animals, animal cruelty must be criminally punished. This punitive turn is sometimes captured in the slogan “Harm an animal, go to jail.” A group of us are working against this turn. We are not suggesting that animal cruelty is not a serious issue. Rather we are looking for alternative ways to address it, ways that do not include harsher prison sentences and fines. This work has proven tricky because some people in the animal protection community don’t think that we really care about harm to animals. Many people fighting against racist and ableist carceral conditions think that the animal issue is a distraction, at best. Others think that there is a false comparison being made between the value of animals and the value of incarcerated people. As I said, tricky!

But there is a way to be mindful of the racism of the prison system, particularly in terms of sentence lengths, and a desire not to put people in prison for a longer time, or any time, while also protecting animals from cruelty and violence. I really think that those of us who are struggling against injustice in the prison system, injustice against Black people, injustice against disabled people, and injustice against animals can be mutually supportive. Philosophically, thinking about these structures of power together can help us imagine a more just world by critically engaging with the white “humanist” assumptions at the heart of hierarchies of worth. Indeed, a group of animal studies scholars and group of Black studies scholars has been engaging in deep analyses of the accepted concept of the human as really about the white human, that is, as placing the nonhuman and Blackness outside of the concept of the human. Interrogating the concept of the human and the humanism that springs from it has been a centrally important new path for thinking about animal studies and critical philosophy of race and work on antiblack racism. So, I have been thinking, writing, and organizing around these issues.

As your remarks in this interview thus far indicate and your body of work makes clear, Lori, you have spent most of your career thinking about human relationships with nonhuman animals. For the past several years, you have focused especially on thinking about how human relationships with nonhuman animals are disabling. Please outline this thinking for our readers and listeners.

I have been thinking a lot about some basic conceptual issues that serve as a grounding in animal ethics, issues around the implicit or overt naturalization of “species” and “species typicality,” for example.  I have long argued that the binary division between “human” and “animal” is as normatively loaded as many other social binaries and also seems close to what philosophers call a “category mistake”. The number and variety of beings in the category “animal” share one thing only, namely, that they are not “human”ꟷwhich, itself, is not a fixed categoryꟷand the category of “non-human” is wider than the category “animal”. 

“Species” raises similar problems. “Species” is a category that records divisions in populations made based on certain scientific questions. Species categorizations are constructed to help us map out parts of the natural world. Since species is a relatively arbitrary unit in biological terms, it doesn’t make sense to suggest that there is a “typical” way to describe the function of bodies or behaviors of beings currently classified as members of some species. Of course, I think that we can learn from certain kinds of generalizations. Nevertheless, I have been thinking more and more about the ableism implicit in animal ethicists’ and animal activists’ overreliance on notions of species-typical functions.

Since the last time you interviewed me, I have gotten involved with people who are resisting the devastating crises that parrots face across the world, both in captivity and in the wild. The situation for parrotsꟷwho tend to live very long lives, with larger parrots living 50-60 yearsꟷis like so many injustices insofar as it also causes much suffering for humans. Here, too, there are complications not unlike using carceral tools to stop people involved in complex global animal trafficking networks. Global criminal responses are often open to corruption. In addition, there is sometimes so much money involved in parrot trafficking that local protectors and their families have been harmed and even killed by poachers. Furthermore, there is the sad captive problem with parrots, all too common when people who “love” their parrot that they purchased from a breeder die before the parrot dies. What happens to the parrot? Usually, the very few, overworked, full to the brim sanctuaries, get a call and are again put in the devastating position of having to turn another parrot away.

It was through thinking about parrots that I began to confront the ableism of using species-typical thinking and also confronted the complexity of disabled animals.  Much of the literature on the well-being of parrots, for example, talks about them as beings who suffer when they are denied the opportunity to fly. Of course they do. Parrots, like the majority of flighted birds, enjoy flying. One of the most egregious things about holding parrots and other birds in captivity is that they are denied the opportunity to fly. In the United States alone, an estimated 40 million parrots suffer in captivity. In part because parrots are denied the freedom to fly, they can become self-injurious and quite difficult to live with. Some parrots who were smuggled into the country from the wild families must endure the terror of transport. Some parrots may adjust to captivity, may form strong bonds with their humans and other animals who live with them, but they don’t all lose their desire to fly. Many parrots born in captivity never have had the pleasure of flight, and many, I was initially surprised to learn, do not know how to use their wings to fly. When a wild flighted bird, who did fly, can no longer fly, it seems reasonable to think that something about their very being is lost. 

How can we talk about the loss that many parrots experience without essentializing their “species-typical function” and thus engage in a type of ableism?  I have been thinking hard about this question, deeply inspired by your writing, Shelley.

I am circling around the idea that we can talk about the disabling and debilitating conditions that create loss without normalizing certain ways that bodies function as the only or proper way that they function. Too many lives are shattered by cruelty, violence, and institutionalized deprivation and harm; one would be remiss not to recognize and protest the loss that occurs. Protesting these conditions is not equivalent to making judgements about “abnormalities” or “malfunctions” that follow. I am interested in thinking more about ways to resist or alter debilitating social conditions, particularly systemic conditions, that cause so much injury, harm, and loss. Focusing on the conditions rather than their consequences, that is, focusing on institutions and structures, rather than simply on the suffering that they cause, allows us to see the unjust workings of social hierarchies. 

Lori, one of the courses that you regularly teach is entitled “Human-Animals-Nature,” which includes a unit on disability. What do you teach in this unit (and the course more generally), and how do students react to the course material?

Immediately before I teach the unit on disability and animals, I present on how the ways that animal bodies are believed to work is essentialist, including how they are believed to have “typical functions”. I teach a bit of Martha Nussbaum’s work that generalizes over all animals in a particular population and makes the case that a just society must provide opportunities for their capabilities to be realized. She holds an essentialist view of function that I think furthers the ableism of the field of animal ethics as it has developed so far (though she does talk about how predators should be prevented from killing or injuring their prey).

After we examine essentialism about animals, we turn directly to discussion of disability and ableism. I begin with a great short film of Judith Butler on a walk with Sunaura Taylorꟷmade by Sunaura’s sister, author and organizer Astra Taylor. It’s a beautiful introduction for the students as they read Sunny’s ground-breaking book Beasts of Burden. That book, more than any other reading in the course, always captures my students’ imaginations. I am so moved by the way that our class discussions go; almost without exception, students who do not ordinarily say much in the class have a lot to say about this topic, as they themselves or their family members or close friends are disabled. They find it very important to be able to be in conversation about disability. 

The topic of disabled animals also really engages them. Working with Sunny’s text, I introduce them to the conditions of life and death in factory farms, where, in the United States alone, billions of animals are created, raised, and ultimately slaughtered every year. These sites are prime examples of what we might call “captive disability.”

Broiler hens, for example, are genetically engineered to quickly grow extremely large breasts. Their small legs often cannot hold them up, they are terribly unbalanced, and many chickens fall over onto the floor soaked with burning ammonia from their waste. Their hearts and lungs often fail, due to their disabled bodies and their extreme living conditions. Hundreds of thousands of birds at a time spend their shortened lives in windowless warehouses packed wing-to-wing and those that suffer heart attacks or cannot get up due to the weight of their bodies are trampled to death by other birds. As Sunny asks, “What does it mean to speak of a ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ chicken…when they all live in environments that are profoundly disabling?” Their bodily disfigurations, their suffering, and their early deaths are impacted by both human supremacism and ableism.

There are other animals who are disabled too. In my book, Ethics and Animals, I write about a dear, now deceased, chimpanzee Knuckles who lived at the Center for Great Apes, a sanctuary in Florida. Knuckles, who had cerebral palsy and was treated so well by other chimpanzees and through diligent care from sanctuary staff, lived a wonderful life. I also often teach about the disabled founder of a sanctuary for formerly farmed animals and the disabled animals who live at this sanctuary, as well as many disabled companion animals. When I bump into former students around campus, many of them distinctly recall this section of the course, even though some of them took the course years ago.

Lori, you were awarded the Distinguished Philosopher of the Year Award at the Eastern APA last month. Tell us about the APA session in which this distinction was awarded.

I confess, I was really humbled by the award and the award session in ways that I did not think that I would be. It was such an incredible honor to have my work recognized at this level. Honestly, it was really moving. My co-author Alice Crary made very generous comments about my work and my colleague Robin Dembroff gave a powerful analysis of the ways that my ecofeminist work, in particular, deepens and expands feminist philosophy. Sally Haslanger read excerpts from letters in support of my nomination that some of my incarcerated students had written. 

In the session, I spoke about the ways that I have worked hard over my career to re-attach philosophical work to the world.  So many philosophers are trained to detach from real world problems. And the detachment takes multiple forms: detachment from the very different affective stances and subjectivities that are crucial to solving actual problems rather than imagined or hypothetical problems; detachment from acknowledging the ways in which our philosophical frameworks do not simply provide methods for interpreting problems but often shape the problems themselves. I spoke of how often this detachment ends up becoming an obstacle to the liberatory power of philosophy, a liberatory power that I see almost every semester that I teach in prisons. I also suggested that in order to reattach, we must make various lived experiences of oppression and exclusionꟷthat is, experiences of incarceration, anti-black racism, gender oppression, and ableism—front and center, particularly in ethics and political philosophy, but also in other areas of philosophy.

At the APA session in my honor, I also told everyone in attendance that I will be taking early retirement at the end of this calendar year!

Given your retirement plans, Lori, will you continue to conduct research and teach parttime? If so, what directions of research and teaching do you wish to pursue henceforth?

While I will not be doing the typical research and teaching after my retirement, I will continue to teach and advise in the Connecticut prisons where I have taught for so long. I will also continue to write, but I hope to write more accessible trade books. My own disability has taught me, among other things, that when we can manage it, we should do the things that make our days, weeks, months, and years as joyous and as meaningful as possible. That is what I am going to try to do.

Writing, though frustrating and challenging at times, is also something that brings me joy. So, I am working on two books at present, one of which focuses on my next version of entangled empathy, the version of an ethics of care that I started developing more than a decade ago. I think that I have a lot more to say about entangled empathy, since my book of that name was published in 2015. The other book that I am writing is about zoos and is tentatively titled Looking at Zoos.

Here is a sneak-peak at my thinking about Looking at Zoos. I plan to bring the topic of how we look at captive animals into focus. Most people seem to like the idea of zoos, but few people are aware of the troubling elements of their history and of maintaining them. Not many people know, for example, that some humans were once kept in zoos. As recently as 2005, a controversy erupted when a German zoo was going to display what they called an “African Village.” In European zoos, animals are routinely killed to make room for newer “more genetically diverse” animals. In zoos in the United States, reproduction is managed differently; birth control is used and then animals are shipped off to different zoos to mate. The eugenic and colonial histories of zoos are often overlooked in most discussions of zoos.

Looking at Zoos will explore these and other controversial topics through stories told from the perspective of the animals that live in the zoos, as much as I can manage that. I am excited to try to work on a different form of writing that will help to bring their points of view about these odd institutions to the center of discussion and debate about them. I will focus on a number of high profile cases, like the killing of the young giraffe Marius at the Copenhagen Zoo, the stone-throwing chimpanzee Santino at the Swedish Furuvik Zoo, the killing of Harambe the alpha male gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, and the tragic end to the escaped lions and other animals from the Bagdad Zoo during the U.S. invasion.

I also want to explore the shifting justifications that are provided for the existence of these institutions; the contradictions inherent in zoos that are allegedly teaching children about other animals by showing them captive, traumatized creatures; some of the spectacular violence that occurs in zoos; and some of the useful things that zoos do and can do more of, but that might not be as exciting to average zoo-goers. In addition, I plan to explore the detrimental impacts of captivityꟷand, as you know, I am not only interested in animals in captivity and thus will very cautiously discuss prisons, “prison tours,” and other forms of surveillance; how a particular type of “gaze” impacts those without power, which will include a discussion of visible disabilities. The book will also discuss topics such as dignity and an ethics of sight, which I have written about previously, as well as concerns about disposability. 

Lori, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

I will provide some links for things that I discussed throughout the interview in case any of your readers want to dig in deeper.

Here is a video of me and my co-editor Justin Marceau, my formerly incarcerated student Michael Braham, and my collaborator and CEO of Freedom Reads, Reginald Dwayne Betts, at a panel at Yale Law School on “Challenging Carceral Logics”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXZx9jANt8E

About Freedom Reads:  https://freedomreads.org/

About parrot work (and a sanctuary I support):  https://www.fosterparrots.com/

About an important organization working to end the parrot crisis: https://www.allianceforparrots.org/parrot-crisis

Examined Life:  Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE&list=PLteHOq15B4eJejKDwB4QczmT0XpAO6LKc&index=1https://blog.oup.com/2014/04/disposable-captives-zoo-animals-philosophy/

Finally, here are a couple of older short pieces I have written on zoos:

https://humansandnature.org/shifting-toward-an-ethics-of-sanctuary/

https://blog.oup.com/2014/04/disposable-captives-zoo-animals-philosophy/

Lori, thank you so much for this fascinating and inspiring interview. Your work on animals and disability in particular is deeply moving and offers lessons to all of us.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Lori Gruen’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, for the 120th installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.