Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement

373 Pages·2017·1.99 MB·English

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
6-2016
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Elan L. Abrell
Graduate Center, City University of New York
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SAVING ANIMALS: EVERYDAY PRACTICES OF CARE AND RESCUE IN THE US
ANIMAL SANCTUARY MOVEMENT

by

ELAN LOUIS ABRELL

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2016
© 2016
ELAN LOUIS ABRELL
All Rights Reserved
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Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement

by

Elan Louis Abrell

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in
satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

_________________________ _________________________________________
Date Jeff Maskovsky

Chair of Examining Committee

_________________________ _________________________________________
Date Gerald Creed

Executive Officer

Supervisory Committee:

Katherine Verdery

Melissa Checker

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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ABSTRACT

Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement

by

Elan Louis Abrell

Advisor: Jeff Maskovsky

This multi-sited ethnography of the US animal sanctuary movement is based on 24
months of research at a range of animal rescue facilities, including a companion animal shelter in
Texas, exotic animal sanctuaries in Florida and Hawaii, and a farm animal sanctuary in New
York. In the last three decades, animal welfare activists have established hundreds of sanctuaries
across the United States in an attempt to save tens of thousands of animals from factory farms,
roadside zoos, and other sites of contested animal treatment. These facilities function as
laboratories where activists conceive and operationalize new models for ethical relationships
with animals, models they hope will influence broader public debates. Building on Giorgio
Agamben’s concept of homo sacer as a person who lacks all rights and legal protections (1998),
this dissertation argues that animals treated by humans as property or material resources can be
understood as bestia sacer. Comprising an alterity that defines and makes possible the human
liberal subject, bestia sacer is precisely what personhood is not. In an effort to disrupt this
category by leveling conventional species hierarchies, animal sanctuary activists strive to create
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spaces in which humans can interact with animals as autonomous subjects with their own
interests worthy of consideration and respect.
However, the realities of living with and caring for captive animals often require
compromises to this aspiration. Caregivers regularly contend with difficult decisions such as how
to best serve animals’ needs with limited resources and when to limit the exercise of animal
agency through such practices as sterilization to prevent overpopulation or the segregation of
animals deemed dangerous to humans and other animals. Remaining entangled in larger
political-economic contexts of animal capital circulation and still susceptible to physical control
and potentially harmful treatment by humans as a result of their legal status, animals in
sanctuaries are neither fully autonomous subjects nor property. Instead, they function in their
relationships with humans as improperty, living beings within a shifting spectrum between
property and subjecthood. To the extent that they are able to participate in the sanctuary
community as subjects with limited rights to life, sustenance, and freedom from harm, sanctuary
animals operate as members of a sort of multispecies polity composed of human and animal
citizens. Due to material constraints and the dilemmas of care, though, both animals and
caregivers must make sacrifices for the requirements of the larger sanctuary community. As a
result, human-animal interactions in sanctuaries constitute a variation of what Wendy Brown
describes as “sacrificial citizenship” (2015).
To understand how these animals transform from bestia sacer to sacrificial citizens, this
ethnography focuses on six main aspects of sanctuary dynamics. Chapter One, “Coming to
Sanctuary,” introduces the primary research sites and describes the different ways in which
animals arrive at sanctuaries and become improperty in the process. Chapter Two, “History of
US Animal Activism,” situates the sanctuary movement in relation to other forms of animal
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advocacy by tracing the philosophical genealogy and political and social history of the
contemporary animal protection movement, examining how conflicting ideologies of human-
animal difference and shifting patterns in human-animal relations shaped the landscape of
twentieth century animal activism. Chapter Three, "Creating and Operating Sanctuaries,"
examines the political economy of sanctuaries and explores how caregivers navigate the tensions
that arise from using rescued animals as fundraising mechanisms while simultaneously seeking
to challenge the commodification of these animals. Chapter Four, "Animal Care," analyzes
animal care practices, specifically focusing on the many post-rescue dilemmas caregivers face
and how their methods for addressing these dilemmas transform animals into sacrificial citizens.
Chapter Five, "Animal Death,” examines one of the most complicated dilemmas of care – the
fact that saving animal lives sometimes requires sacrificing animal lives – and explores the
different ways that sanctuaries navigate this dilemma through practices of “necro-care,” forms of
care that actively employ death in the service of fostering life, such as feeding animals that
consume other animals, protecting sanctuary animals from external predators, and euthanizing
ill, injured, or dangerous animals.
In conclusion, this ethnography considers the possible futures of animal sanctuaries and
examines the important role they currently play in furthering the greater animal advocacy
movement’s goals. The realization of sanctuaries’ visions for the future of human-animal
relations will remain limited without larger transformations in social and political-economic
systems of value that still treat animals as means for satisfying human needs. Despite these
current limits, sanctuaries are invaluable to the broader animal advocacy movement both for the
qualitative difference they make in the lives of individual animals and for the symbolic power
these experiments in alternative species relations have in illustrating that different ways of living
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with animals are possible. Beyond their symbolic value for inspiring struggle toward a better
future, sanctuaries perform the essential task of working through the difficulties and
contradictions of manifesting that future – the pragmatic labor that must be done in order to
achieve more radical transformations in human-animal relations.

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For Niko, Lauren, Owl, and Panza, with infinite love and gratitude.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Biology and law (among other fields) share the concepts of proximal and ultimate
causation; the proximal cause is the immediate catalyst that gives rise to an event, while the
ultimate cause is the greater contextual factors that made the event possible. If I am the proximal
cause of this dissertation, then the multispecies community of friends, family, colleagues, and
mentors that have nurtured my mind and heart over the last four decades are most certainly the
ultimate cause.
Foremost, none of my research would have been possible without the openness and
hospitality of all the dedicated caregivers and volunteers at my field sites who allowed me to
observe and participate in the incredibly important work they do by rescuing and caring for
animals. They are an integral part of the animal advocacy movement, and I have profound
appreciation for everything they accomplish.
I am deeply grateful for the many people who have encouraged, challenged, and guided
my interests in issues of social justice as it relates to all axes of oppression, but most especially
species. Twenty years ago, Delcianna Winders introduced me to the realities of factoring farming
and the philosophies of veganism and animal rights, steering me toward a path on which this
dissertation is hopefully just one of many milestones to come. Kaja Tretjak spent countless hours
over many evenings and glasses of wine helping me strategize all the preliminary elements of
this project from research design and theoretical frameworks to the wording of grant proposals.
Jordan Stein, Stephen Lee, Chris Elliott, Gilad Isaacs, Cody Hoesly, Dusty Hoesly, Irene
Linares, Sivan Rotholz Teitelman, Ben Dubin-Thaler, Lynn Biderman, Ashley Burczak, Sarah
Richardson, Jeff Senter, Sebastian Karcher, Mark Kroncke, Stephen Hicks, Jason Williams,
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