On April 18^th, hundreds of activists attempted to rescue beagles from Ridglan Farms, an animal research and breeding facility in Wisconsin. David Killoren wrote about his experience as one of those activists, and defended the use of open rescue to liberate animals^[i] from carceral settings. This includes Ridglan Farms, where beagles are confined in 2×4 cages for their entire shortened lives, never being allowed to feel grass, see the sun, or “touch anything as soft as a blanket or cushion” (Killoren), let alone experience the love, care, and community central to crip, decolonial, and ecofeminist theory. If this facility reminds you of the appalling Harry Harlow experiments of the 1970s, it should. The ongoing incarceration of animals en masse for purely human (more specifically, capitalist) purposes raises the question: what kind of monster would support such unfathomable injustices? Part of the answer is: academics, the researchers who experiment on animals, and the scholars who cite their work, thereby endorsing it and allowing it to continue circulating and attracting funding. As I argue elsewhere^[ii]: philosophers who uncritically cite animal experiments are endorsing the incarceration, isolation, and torture of millions of animals.  

But I digress. The purpose of this post is not (merely) to hold philosophers responsible for their role in animal torture, but rather to underscore that animal torture is rooted in the logic of ableism, and therefore is a form of ableism. In short, what beagles are experiencing at Ridglan Farms is ableist eugenics – the same type of oppression inflicted on disabled humans in eugenic regimes ranging from Nazi ghettos to modern-day prisons. According to philosophers and many laypeople, the justification for incarcerating animals in breeding facilities, science labs, factory farms, and other congregate settings is that they lack canonical human capacities – that is, capacities associated with nondisabled human adults.

Philosophers have argued that animals do not have the same moral standing as humans because they lack the capacity for higher-order thought (Carruthers 1992), rationality (Narveson 1986), and moral agency (Cohen 1986). In other words, animals are disabled relative to the ideal neoliberal subject: a nondisabled human adult. Because animals are disabled, it is legal and culturally acceptable to traffic them, confine them, and physically abuse them. Consequently, animals experience the same kinds of eugenic violence as oppressed humans, but on a larger scale and magnitude: tens of millions of animals are killed every day for capitalistic purposes – namely, to enrich the prison profiteers who control the carceral continuum, a global system of eugenic institutions encompassing prisons, jails, mental hospitals, factory farms, science labs, and more (Ben-Moshe 2020).  

The same eugenic logic that motivates animal experimentation also explains why children experience and witness more violence than adults, are highly susceptible to trafficking and abuse, and can legally be subjected to corporate punishment in countries where hitting adults is illegal. It also explains why disabled adultsexperience high rates of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, are confined to prisons and nursing homes en masse, and can be legally euthanized when nondisabled humans cannot. Animals, children, and disabled adults are all susceptible to the logic of eugenics, which marks certain bodies as “impaired” and targets those bodies for trafficking, confinement, and exploitation. This ideology manufactures the notion of “impairment” as a neutral, scientific category and then mobilizes that notion to justify the global system of nondisabled-adult-human-supremacist-capitalism.

Some of my disabled friends do not agree that animals are our disabled comrades, or that consuming and experimenting on animals is a form of ableist eugenics – the same ableist eugenics that we experience as disabled humans, but to a lesser extent due to “human rights” legislation (which was introduced as part of a “liberal, rights-based” paradigm, viz., Chapman 2023). I believe that this dualistic thinking is a mistake, and a mistake that harms the disability justice movement. Despite what many liberals and intersectionality theorists believe, ableism and speciesism are not two distinct oppressions, but rather one mutually imbricated system of eugenics. In addition to colonial and capitalist logics, part of the explanation for ableism is that disabled people are marked as animals – as impaired, uncivilized, irrational, wild, and unruly – compared to the ideal neoliberal subject. Since ableism implicates and relies on speciesism, a “disability-first” approach to ableism is doomed to fail, as it ignores the social construction of disability as animality, and the co-constitution of ableism and speciesism through the application of eugenic-carceral violence. 

As such, disability activists and animal activists should not be organized into distinct camps, much less competing camps, as competition undermines disabled/animal liberation and decarceration (viz., Jenkins 2020). As long as there are animals in factory farms and science labs, there will be disabled humans in prisons and long-term “care homes”: our fates hang together. Disability activism without animal liberation is a form of respectability politics that elevates an elite few while leaving the most animalized subjects open to disabling violence. 

In Racism as Zoological Witchcraft, Aph Ko explains why racism and speciesism are not different oppressions, but rather mutually-constituting aspects of the same “zoological” oppression. She cites Tiffany Haddish’s statement, “I will continue to wear fur every single day until police stop killing Black people,” as an example of a “conversational roadblock” to racial justice. Haddish’s statement misconstrues racial oppression as distinct from animal oppression, rather than the same oppression under a different name. Ko also cites the popular understanding of intersectionality theory as an obstacle to racial justice because it depicts racism and speciesism as distinct oppressions rather than two faces of the same oppression, grounded in the same eugenic/colonial logic. In contrast to the notion of distinct intersections, Ko argues that “animality (a construct that oppresses anyone who deviates from what our culture considers to be an ideal human) is an integral part of all of the oppression you are already experiencing each day” (as an oppressed human). Black people are subjected to mass incarceration and commodification because they are treated like animals, and animals are subjected to these forms of violence. Therefore, racial justice – as well disability justice – is not in competitionwith animal liberation, but rather depends on it.   

Note that the state’s response to the open rescue at Ridglan Farms was a mass disabling event (viz., Chapman 2023). The beagles had already been disabled by incarceration, isolation, and emotional torture. When the activists arrived on the scene, they were immediately subjected to the same disabling injuries when the cops attacked them, poisoned them with tear gas, and shot them with rubber bullets (Killoren). In other words, agents of the state treated human activists as if they were laboratory animals, with no legal rights or protections. Activists suffered bruises, punctured lungs, and pneumonia. Some were also arrested and subjected to further eugenic violence, including being confined to cells, deprived of social contact, and subjected to emotional abuse – just like the Ridglan beagles. When people show solidarity with zoological others, they are treated just like them. 

This reveals that the logic of eugenics is not confined to a specific, definable social groups, but instead, as Shelley Tremain puts it, “typifies the polymorphism of (neo)liberal governmentality,” shifting and adapting to encompass anyone associated or affiliated with the zoological. Consequently, all our fates hang on animal liberation, as we are all susceptible to animalization. Yet eugenic ideology mobilizes the specter of zoological inferiority to discipline privileged people into alignment with eugenics, against their own interests as human animals. Animal liberation is a cause in which every human has a stake. 

Notably, Peter Singer disapproved of the Ridglan Farms open rescue, arguing that the lives of “a few thousand dogs” are worth less than the lives of the “billions of chickens and millions of cows and pigs being slaughtered in worse conditions” – other animals that could hypothetically be saved. (As crip theorists know, Singer has also argued that “severely disabled babies” should be euthanized because their lives produce negative utility). This is the argument of an ideal theorist who trades in abstractions, misrepresents structural problems as financial ones (Singer supports the “effective altruism” movement, which transfers money to corporate non-profits), and ignores the continuity between factory farming, animal experimentation, and human incarceration. The open rescue at Ridglan Farms was not in competition with animal liberation at factory farms, but rather contributed to animal liberation everywhere, since it undermined the eugenic logic that prefigures and reproduces the global carceral continuum (including the prison-industrial complex). As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from jail, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Participating in direct action in Birmingham supported Black liberation across the world. Likewise, liberating a handful of beagles contributes to the global anti-eugenic movement. Seeing activism as a zero-sum proposition – as a competition between farmed animals and lab animals, or between animals and humans – is a gross misunderstanding of structural injustice.     

Setting aside Singer’s misleading comments, philosophers in general do not seem especially concerned about eugenics. In fact, many disabled philosophers refuse to recognize confined animals as members of the disabled community, who are just as deserving of disability justice as we (humans) are. This lack of solidarity is compounded by common professional practices. For example, philosophers actively contribute to eugenics when they uncritically cite animal experiments, thereby tacitly endorsing them; or when they serve animal products at conferences and talks, despite high rates of lactose intolerance amongst disabled, elderly, and racialized individuals, as well as the objections of their (largely disabled) vegan colleagues. Participating in these practices is not an apolitical, personal choice, but a form of eugenic activism that signals to disabled/animal activists that we are not welcome in the profession. These mundane political choices gatekeep the profession, ensuring that disabled/animal activists are never “at ease” in this “world” (Lugones 1987). 

If philosophers genuinely want to create an accessible professional culture, they should reject eugenic violence in all its forms – not only against disabled humans, but also against animals. As critical disability theorists have shown, the profession is far from achieving either goal. 

Thank you. 

^[i] I use the term “animals” as shorthand for nonhuman animals, and “human” as shorthand for human animals. 

^[ii] I am a co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Animal Liberation at the End of Usefulness, to which I contribute a chapter expanding on the argument that ableism is speciesism and vice versa.