AGAINST CAGES & CARCERAL LOGICS
University of Denver Sturm College of Law November 21-22, 2019 This workshop is made possible with generous support from the Brooks Institute
The Brooks Institute is dedicated to producing and disseminating outstanding, independent, academic, and public policy research with real-world relevance focused on advancing law and public policy pertaining to animals. Table of Contents
Agenda ...... 1 Participant List ...... 6 Professional Bios ...... 8 Abstracts for Chapters ...... 26 Panel 1: Histories of Carceral Thinking in Animal Protection ...... 26 Panel 2: The Problem with Carceral Strategies ...... 29 Panel 3: Carceral Strategies Have not Worked ...... 33 Panel 4: Expanding the Critique of Carceral Logics ...... 36 Panel 5: Social Change ...... 39 Blank Pages for Notes ...... 42
Agenda
DAY ONE THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st - ROOM 212
1:45 pm – 2:00 pm Registration
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm Welcome and Opening Remarks Bruce Smith, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Justin Marceau, Professor of Law and Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
2:30 pm – 3:15 pm Panel 1: Histories of Carceral Thinking in Animal Protection – Justifications and Repudiations
Examining Anti-Cruelty Enhancements - Historical Context and Policy Considerations Pamela Frasch, Associate Dean, Center for Animal Law Studies, Lewis & Clark Law School Confinement, Animal Interests, and Criminal Justice Stephen Wells, CEO, Animal Legal Defense Fund David Rosengard, Senior Staff Attorney, Animal Legal Defense Fund Race and the Carceral Logics in the History of the American Animal Welfare Movement Paula Tarankow, Lecturer in History, Smith College Carceral Progressivism and Animal Victims Benjamin Levin, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School
3:15 pm – 3:45 pm Discussion and Reflections on Panel 1
3:45 pm – 4:00 pm Snack Break
1 Agenda
4:00 pm – 4:15 pm General Remarks Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado
4:15 pm – 5:20 pm Panel 2: The Problem with Carceral Strategies
Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago Karen Morin, Professor of Geography, Bucknell University On Solitary Confinement Laura Rovner, Professor of Law & Director of Civil Rights Clinic, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Caging and Immigration Enforcement Jennifer M. Chacón, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law The Animals’ Agenda: Give us our freedoms Jessica Pierce, Bioethicist and Faculty Affiliate, University of Colorado Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado The Prison as Multi-Species Carcerality Kelly Struthers Montford, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia Okanagan Geese or No Geese G. Carole Woodall, Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
5:20 pm – 5:50 pm Discussion and Reflections on Panel 2
6:30 pm Dinner at Somebody People 1165 S Broadway, Denver, CO 80210
2 Agenda
DAY TWO FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd - ROOM 212
8:30 am – 9:10 am Breakfast and Critical Reflections Gabrielle Chapman, Senior Analyst, Pets for Life Program, Humane Society of the United States Timothy Pachirat, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
9:10 am – 9:55 am Panel 3: Carceral Strategies Have not Worked
The Failure of the War on Drugs
Sam Kamin, Professor of Law, University of Denver, Sturm College of Law Lessons Learned from the Tough on Crime Approach to Intimate Partner Violence Tamara Kuennen, Professor of Law, University of Denver, Sturm College of Law Beyond Codifying the Contours of Confinement Delci Winders, Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School (Human) Children and Humane-Washing in Prisons, Detention Centres, and Zoos and Aquaria Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair, University of Victoria
3 Agenda
9:55 am – 10:30 am Panel 4: Expanding the Critique of Carceral Logics – Practical and Theoretical Considerations
The Problem of Animal Policing Even When Incarceration is Not Sought Amanda Arrington, Director, Pets for Life, Humane Society of the United States Justin Marceau, Professor of Law and Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy University of Denver Sturm College of Law American Autopsy Timothy Pachirat, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst Habeas Corpus for Non-Human Animals: Toward a Critical Approach Jessica Eisen, Assistant Professor, University of Alberta Faculty of Law
10:30 am – 11:05 am Discussion and Reflection on Panels 3 & 4
11:05 am – 11:15 pm Coffee Break
11:15 am – 12:25 pm Panel 5: Social Change
Cause Lawyering for the Caged: A Comparative Examination of Law Reform Approaches in the Prisoners’ Rights and Animal Rights Movements Vikram Amar, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Illinois School of Law Alan Chen, Professor of Law, University of Denver, Sturm College of Law “False” Imprisonment Doug Kysar, Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law, Yale Law School
4 Agenda
Imagining Animal Protection as a Civil Rights Movement Will Potter, Distinguished Lecturer, English, University of Michigan Rethinking the Link: Criminal Justice Response and Accuracy to Cruelty toward People and Animals Phil Tedeschi, Clinical Professor, Executive Director, Institute for Human-Animal Connection, University of Denver Shelby McDonald, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of Social Work Animal Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, and Adverse Childhood Experiences Frank Ascione, Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Utah State University, and Scholar-in-Residence, University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work Abolition: A World without Cages Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan University
12:25 pm – 1:00 pm Discussion and Reflections on Panel 5
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm Lunch and Reflections on the Workshop Alec Karakatsanis, Founder & Executive Director, Civil Rights Corps Aya Gruber, Professor of Law, University of Colorado College of Law
1:45 pm – 2:00 pm Concluding Remarks Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan University
5 Workshop Participants
Vikram David Amar, Dean and Aya Gruber, Professor of Law, Professor of Law, University of Illinois University of Colorado College of School of Law Law Amanda Arrington, Senior Director, Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Pets for Life, Humane Society of the Philosophy, Wesleyan University United States Sam Kamin, Professor of Law, Frank Ascione, Professor Emeritus, University of Denver, Sturm College Psychology, Utah State University, of Law and Scholar-in-Residence, University Alec Karakatsanis, Founder & of Denver Graduate School of Social Executive Director, Civil Rights Corps Work Tammy Kuennen, Professor of Law, Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus, University of Denver, Sturm College Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, of Law University of Colorado Doug Kysar, Joseph M. Field '55 Jennifer Chacón, Professor of Law, Professor of Law, Yale Law School UCLA School of Law Benjamin Levin, Associate Professor Gabrielle Chapman, Senior Analyst, of Law, University of Colorado Law Pets for Life Program, Humane School Society of the United States Justin Marceau, Professor of Law and Alan Chen, Professor of Law, Brooks Institute Faculty Research University of Denver Sturm College of Scholar of Animal Law and Policy, Law University of Denver Sturm College Maneesha Deckha, Professor and of Law Lansdowne Chair, University of Shelby McDonald, Assistant Victoria Professor, Virginia Commonwealth Jessica Eisen, Assistant Professor, University School of Social Work University of Alberta Faculty of Law Karen M. Morin, Professor of Pamela Frasch, Associate Dean, Geography, Bucknell University Center for Animal Law Studies, Lewis & Clark Law School
6 Timothy Pachirat, Associate Professor Kelly Struthers Montford, Assistant of Political Science, University of Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst British Columbia Okanagan Jessica Pierce, Bioethicist and Paula Tarankow, Lecturer in History, Faculty Affiliate, University of Smith College Colorado Philip Tedeschi, Clinical Professor, Will Potter, Distinguished Lecturer, Executive Director, Institute for English, University of Michigan Human-Animal Connection, University of Denver David Rosengard, Senior Staff Attorney, Animal Legal Defense Fund Stephen Wells, CEO, Animal Legal Defense Fund Laura Rovner, Professor of Law & Director of Civil Rights Clinic, Delci Winders, Professor of Law, Lewis University of Denver Sturm College of & Clark Law School Law G. Carole Woodall, Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
7 Professional Bios Vikram David Amar Dean and Professor of Law, University of Illinois School of Law Dean Amar joined the College of Law as its dean in 2015, after having been a professor of law for many years at law schools in the University of California System, most recently the UC Davis School of Law, where he served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Amar is one of the most eminent and frequently cited authorities in constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure. He has produced several books and over 60 articles in leading law reviews. He is a co-author (along with Akhil Reed Amar and Steven Calabresi) of the upcoming edition of the six-volume Treatise on Constitutional Law (West Publishing Co., 6th ed. 2021) pioneered by Ron Rotunda and John Nowak, as well as the hardbound and soft-cover one-volume hornbooks that derive from it. He is also a co-author (along with Jonathan Varat) of Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 15th ed. 2017), a co-author on multiple volumes of the Wright & Miller Federal Practice and Procedure Treatise (West Publishing Co. 2006), and a co-author (along with John Oakley) of a one-volume treatise on American Civil Procedure (Kluwer, 2008). He writes a biweekly column on constitutional matters for Justia.com and a monthly column on legal education for abovethelaw.com, is a frequent commentator on local and national radio and TV, and has penned dozens of op-ed pieces for major newspapers and magazines. A strong proponent of public and professional engagement, Amar is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has served as a consultant for, among others, the National Association of Attorneys General, the United States Department of Justice, the California Attorney General's Office, the ACLU of Southern California, and the Center for Civic Education. For one year he chaired the Civil Procedure Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Amar earned his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley and his juris doctor from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. He then clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court before joining Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he handled a variety of complex civil and white-collar criminal matters. It appears that dean Amar was the first person of South Asian heritage to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, and was the first American-born person of Indian descent to serve as a dean of a major American law school. Follow Dean Amar's bi-weekly column on Justia.com
8 and his monthly column on Above the Law, and read archived posts from his FindLaw.com column. Amanda Arrington Senior Director, Pets for Life, Humane Society of the United States Amanda Arrington is the Senior Director of the groundbreaking Pets for Life (PFL) program at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and previously served as a lobbyist and North Carolina State Director for HSUS. With PFL, Amanda guides a social justice- driven approach to create equity in and access to pet resources and information for people in underserved communities. Under her leadership the program has been implemented in over 50 markets across the country and is working to make companion animal welfare a more just and inclusive movement.
Amanda is also the founder and Executive Director of Beyond Fences, a non-profit based in Durham, NC. The organization builds trust and relationships in communities by providing no-fee pet services and support for people living in underserved areas.
Amanda currently serves as co-chair of The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement’s OnPOINT committee on increasing diversity in animal welfare, served three years as the chair of the Durham County Animal Control Advisory Committee and on the board of the Durham Interneighborhood Council. Amanda has received many awards for her community outreach work including the prestigious American Veterinary Medical Association Humane Award in 2018. Frank Ascione Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Utah State University, and Scholar-in- Residence, University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work Dr. Ascione is an internationally renowned researcher and author and has published numerous articles on the development of antisocial and prosocial behavior in children. He has co-edited two books [Cruelty to animals and interpersonal violence: Readings in research and application (1998), Child abuse, domestic violence, and animal abuse: Linking the circles of compassion for prevention and intervention (1998)], and authored Safe havens for pets: Guidelines for programs sheltering pets for women who are battered. Children and animals: Exploring the roots of kindness and cruelty was published in 2005 by Purdue University Press (the book has been translated into Japanese and Italian editions). The international handbook of animal abuse and cruelty: Theory, research, and application, edited by Dr. Ascione, was published in May 2008. In September 2010, he was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and
9 the Waltham Foundation to study children exposed to intimate partner violence and to animal abuse. Dr. Ascione was selected to receive the 2001 Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations and the International Society for Anthrozoology. Dr. Ascione served as the inaugural American Humane Endowed Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work (UD GSSW) from September 2009 until June 2012. He is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the DU GSSW. Marc Bekoff Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He has won many awards for his scientific research including the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009 he was presented with the St. Francis of Assisi Award by the New Zealand SPCA. In 1986 Marc became the first American to win his age-class at the Tour du Haut Var bicycle race (also called the Master's/age-graded Tour de France). Marc has published more than 1000 essays (popular, scientific, and book chapters), 31 books, and has edited three encyclopedias. His books include The Ten Trusts (with Jane Goodall), The Emotional Lives of Animals, Animals Matter, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (with Jessica Pierce), Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence, The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce), and Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do. Unleashing Your Dog: A Field Guide to Giving Your Canine Companion the Best Life Possible (with Jessica Pierce) was published in March 2019. His homepage is marcbekoff.com. Jennifer M. Chacón Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law Jennifer M. Chacón is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and formerly Chancellor’s Professor of Law and the Senior Associate Dean for Administration at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. She is the author of an immigration law textbook and of more than 60 law review articles, book chapters, expert commentaries and shorter articles and essays on immigration, criminal law, constitutional law and citizenship issues. Her research, which focuses on the intersection of criminal and immigration law enforcement, has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Professor Chacón is a member of the Executive Committee of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Immigration, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Committee,
10 the Advisory Committee of the American Bar Foundation’s “Future of Latinos in the U.S.” project, the University of Oxford Border Criminologies Advisory Group, and the New York City Bar Association. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF) and serves on the ABF Board of Directors, and was recently elected to membership in the American Law Institute. She was the Convenor of the Immigration Policy Advisory Committee to then- Senator Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and an outside advisor to the Immigration Transition Team of President-Elect Barack Obama.
Professor Chacón was an associate of the New York law firm of Davis Polk and Wardwell from 1999-2003, after clerking with the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit (1998-1999). She began her career in law teaching at the U.C. Davis School of Law, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009. She has also held appointments as a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School (2015-2016) and at Harvard Law School (2014-2015). She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University. Gabrielle Chapman Senior Analyst, Pets for Life Program, Humane Society of the United States Gabrielle Chapman is the former Executive Director of Call to Action for Racial Equality, West Virginia’s first professional statewide racial equity coalition. As the new Senior Analyst, Social Justice for HSUS’ Pets for Life program, Gabrielle will lend her skill set to facilitate complex conversations ranging from criminal justice reform to racial and economic justice in the animal welfare world. She is a current 2018–2019 Soros Justice Fellow with the Open Society Foundation and serves as a Board of Director for West Virginia’s Center on Budget and Policy and West Virginia Women's Health Center. Chapman holds a BS in Applied Biology from Russell Sage College. During her college years, she interned at the U.S. Department of Defense, was an assistant with Sage College’s Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program, and volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee. Gabrielle’s happy place is with her dog and horse, Gracie and Tex. Alan Chen Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Alan Chen is a leading national expert in free speech doctrine and theory, the law of federal courts, and public interest law. He is the co-author of two books, PUBLIC INTEREST LAWYERING: A CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business 2013) and the forthcoming FREE SPEECH BEYOND WORDS: THE SURPRISING REACH OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT (NYU Press 2017). He has also written numerous scholarly articles, and his work has been
11 published in many of the leading national law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Iowa Law Review. Since joining the Sturm College of Law faculty in 1992, Chen has received several awards for his teaching, contributions to the law review, and pro bono legal work. Although he is a full-time academic, Professor Chen continues to carry an active litigation docket and represents the plaintiffs in many high-profile civil rights cases in federal courts around the country, including constitutional challenges to police use of pepper spray on peaceful protestors in California, the State of Oklahoma’s botched lethal injection execution of Clayton Lockett, “Ag-Gag” laws in Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, and Utah that punish undercover investigators and journalists, and Colorado’s mandatory Pledge of Allegiance law. In 2018, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recognized Professor Chen with a Justice for Animals Award for his work on the Ag-Gag litigation. Before entering teaching, Chen was a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Chicago office, where he was a civil liberties litigator focusing primarily on cases concerning the First Amendment, police misconduct, and privacy rights. Before that, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Marvin E. Aspen, U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois. Maneesha Deckha Professor and Lansdowne Chair, University of Victoria Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include critical animal law, feminist animal care theory, postcolonial theory, vulnerability and precarity studies, health law, and reproductive law and policy. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is dedicated to an intersectional and critical animal studies analysis of law and legality and has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She also held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University and currently serves as Director of the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria as well as on the Editorial Boards of Politics and Animals and Hypatia. She is a fellow of the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and is currently completing a book project on feminism, postcolonialism and critical animal law. Jessica Eisen Assistant Professor, University of Alberta Faculty of Law Jessica Eisen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. Her research interests include comparative constitutional and equality law, feminist legal theory, animal law, law and social movements, and food law and policy. Her work has been published in the Journal of Law and Equality, the Animal Law Review, Transnational Legal Theory, the Canadian Journal of Poverty Law, Queen’s Law Journal, ICON: The
12 International Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, among other outlets. She is a member of the Ontario Bar, and has practiced in the areas of human rights, labour and employment, and constitutional law. Pamela Frasch Associate Dean, Center for Animal Law Studies, Lewis & Clark Law School Pamela Frasch is associate dean for the animal law program, and founder of the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School. In addition to teaching survey and advanced animal law courses for over 20 years, Pamela is co-author of Animal Law, Cases and Materials (Carolina Academic Press, 6th Edition 2019), Animal Law in a Nutshell (Thomson West, 2nd Edition 2016), and numerous articles and book chapters. Previously, Pamela served as general counsel for the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In 1996, Pamela created the ALDF Criminal Justice Program which assists law enforcement and animal advocates in investigating and prosecuting animal abuse and neglect cases nationwide. She is the inaugural recipient of the American Association of Law School’s Award: “Excellence in Animal Law: Scholarship-Teaching-Service.” Aya Gruber Professor, University of Colorado Law School Aya Gruber has been a professor at the University of Colorado Law School since 2010. Gruber received her law degree from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. She then served as a federal law clerk and a public defender in Miami and Washington, D.C. Prior to Colorado, Gruber was a professor of law at the University of Iowa and Florida International University. In 2017, she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Gruber currently teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, critical theory, feminism, and comparative/international law. She has written numerous articles on feminist efforts to strengthen criminal law responses to gender violence. Her forthcoming book, THE FEMINIST WAR ON CRIME (U.C. Press, May 2020), examines the unexpected contribution of women’s liberation to U.S. mass incarceration and sketches a path forward for activists to oppose gender violence without reinforcing the prison state. Gruber is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as an adviser to the ALI Model Penal Code sexual assault project. A frequent public speaker on criminal justice, Professor Gruber has appeared on PBS, Fox News, ABC, and is quoted in various news outlets, including the New Yorker, Slate, and the New York Times.
13 Lori Gruen William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan University Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. She is also Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science in Society. She is the author and editor of eleven books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011), The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), and Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015) and Critical Terms for Animal Studies (2018). She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics and a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy and was the first chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. Gruen has documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US and has an evolving website that documents the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs: The Last 1000.
Her research lies at the intersection of ethical theory, political philosophy, and social practice. She has written on a range of topics and her current projects include exploring ethical and political questions raised by captivity and carceral logics. Sam Kamin Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Sam Kamin has emerged as an expert voice on marijuana law reform in Colorado and throughout the country. He sat on Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper’s Amendment 64 Implementation Task Force, worked with the ACLU and then-Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom to formulate a set of best practices for marijuana regulation in California, and helped the City of Denver implement Social Consumption regulations. In addition, he has written more than a dozen scholarly articles on the subject of marijuana law reform and co-authored the series “Altered State: Inside Colorado’s Marijuana Economy” for Slate Magazine, chronicling the impact of Colorado’s marijuana regulations on lawmakers, businesses and consumers. He has also taught a number of drug policy courses including Representing the Marijuana Client, Marijuana Law and Policy, and Comparative Drug Policy. Alec Karakatsanis Founder & Executive Director, Civil Rights Corps Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. Alec graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and from Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review.
14 Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law. Alec was awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for his role in bringing constitutional civil rights cases to challenge the American money bail system and the 2016 Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. Alec’s work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system in California was recently honored with the 2018 Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. You can read a recent profile about Alec's work with Civil Rights Corps in Harvard Magazine here. Alec is interested in ending human caging, surveillance, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality. He also likes playing the piano, soccer, and making weird paintings. He is the author of The Human Lawyer, 34 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 563 (2010) and The Punishment Bureaucracy, Yale Law Journal Forum (2019). His first book, Usual Cruelty, is forthcoming in October 2019. Tammy Kuennen Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
Tamara Kuennen is a tenured professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and is currently the Ronald V. Yegge Clinical Co-Director. Before joining the faculty in 2004, Kuennen was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center where she taught the Domestic Violence Clinic. Prior to teaching, Kuennen practiced for five years at Legal Aid Services of Oregon, representing survivors of domestic and sexual violence in a variety of cases, including protection orders, domestic relations, public benefits, immigration and civil rights litigation. Her scholarship focuses on how the law and policy could more effectively redress the problem of intimate partner violence: Not All Violence in Relationships is “Domestic Violence,” __ BROOKLYN L. REV. __ (2020); Intimate Partner Violence & Men’s Professional Sports, 21 D.U. SPORTS & ENT. L.J. 27 (2018); Love Matters, 56 Az. L. Rev. 977 (2015); Recognizing the Right to Petition for Victims of Domestic Violence, 81 FORDHAM L. REV. 837 (2014); Private Relationships and Public Problems: Applying Principles of Relational Contract Theory to Domestic Violence, 2010 B.Y.U. L. REV. 101; Analyzing the Impact of Coercion on Domestic Violence Victims: How Much Is Too Much?, 22 BERKELEY J. GENDER L. & JUST. 2 (2007). “No-Drop” Civil Protection Orders: Exploring the Bounds of Judicial Intervention in the Lives of Domestic Violence Victims, 16 U.C.L.A. WOMEN’S LAW J. 39 (2007).
15 Doug Kysar Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law, Yale Law School Doug Kysar is Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he also serves as Faculty Co-Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program. He was born and raised in Indiana. Under his mother’s guidance, he developed a love of reading and a love of the more-than-human world. Kysar later studied at Indiana University, where his two loves developed further with guidance from the great nature writer and teacher Scott Russell Sanders. After law school, Kysar began teaching at Cornell Law School and moved to Yale in 2008. Kysar’s work studies the way society utilizes laws and regulations to prevent, manage, and respond to threats of harm to life. He has had a particular focus on climate change law and policy for several years now because climate change will bring harm to life on an almost unimaginable scale. Benjamin Levin Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School Benjamin Levin is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Advanced Criminal Justice. He studies and writes about criminal law and policy. His current research examines criminal justice reform movements and their relationship to other movements for social and economic change. Prior to joining the Colorado Law faculty, he served as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, he worked at the civil rights firm of Neufeld Scheck and Brustin, LLP, where he focused on cases involving police and prosecutorial misconduct. He also clerked for Judge Lawrence E. Kahn of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York and Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He earned his B.A., with distinction, from Yale University and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School. Justin Marceau Professor of Law and Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Justin Marceau is Professor of Law and Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy. He serves as the reporter for the pattern criminal jury instruction committee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and as an inaugural member of the animal welfare committee (PAW) formed by a proclamation of the Governor of Colorado to advise the First Gentleman on strategies for improving the protection of animals in Colorado. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Justice for Animals Award and the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar’s Gideon Award. Marceau grew up
16 in Montana and spent time as a child working on a family farm and ranch, and learning to be skeptical of big cities and lawyers, among other things. His parents would never have guessed that their lessons on empathy and distrust for authority would have led Marceau to work first as a federal public defender challenging through appeals death sentences, and now as an academic interested in animal protection. Marceau’s legal interests include criminal law, animal law, and constitutional law, especially freedom of speech. Shelby McDonald Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work Shelby Elaine McDonald, PhD, is a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and an affiliate researcher with the VCU School of Medicine’s Center for Human-Animal Interaction. She also is head of the Children, Families, and Animals Research (CFAR) group, located at VCU. CFAR is particularly interested in the intersections of human- and animal-directed violence, and the role that family pets may play in the resilience of children exposed to adversity. She is the author of numerous articles that have been published in professional journals, such as Child Abuse & Neglect, the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. She recently received an R21 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study relations between adverse childhood experiences, animal cruelty exposure, and child wellbeing. Karen M. Morin Professor of Geography, Bucknell University Karen M. Morin is Professor of Geography and Associate Provost at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Her books include Women, Religion, & Space: Global Perspectives on Gender and Faith, co-edited with Jeanne Kay Guelke (2007); Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West (2008); Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890 (2011); Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past, co-edited with Dominique Moran (2015); and Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (2018). Timothy Pachirat Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst My name is Timothy Pachirat, and I currently work as an associate professor of political science at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to UMass, I taught in the Politics Department at The New School, and prior to that, I completed my Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
17 I came to animals—or rather, animals came to me—indirectly. As a graduate student, I was interested in studying modern forms of violence that are both ubiquitous and (perhaps in part because of their ubiquity?) also banal—the kinds of violence that are omnipresent, have enormous destructive consequences, and yet rarely, if ever, make the headlines. This interest led me to conduct an undercover ethnography of an industrialized cattle slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska. There, over a period of nearly six months, I worked as a liver hanger in the cooler, a cattle driver in the chutes, and as a quality control worker, the last of which made me a mediator between different departments and levels of management in the slaughterhouse as well as between USDA meat inspectors and the slaughterhouse as a whole. This research resulted in the publication of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2013). In addition to providing a highly detailed ethnography of modern killing operations, Every Twelve Seconds also demonstrates how certain forms of modern violence in so-called civilized societies are compartmentalized all the way down, making a blind faith in an Enlightenment politics of sight, revelation, and exposé problematic and potentially counter- productive. In addition to Every Twelve Seconds, I have also published a seven-act play entitled, Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (Routledge, 2018), which uses the conceits of a talking wolfdog and an invisibility potion to explore the promises and pitfalls of deep participant-observation immersion as a method of research. Although not substantively about animals, Among Wolves does raise important questions about how we ever come to know (or feel, or understand) Others, and the ways that our methods of knowing (including science) are never separate from the unequal power relations in which those methods are formed. Additionally, I am also the author of Sanctuary, a chapter in Lori Gruen’s Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago, 2018) that explores the politics and practices of sanctuaries for human and nonhuman animals alike. I’m working on two large ongoing projects, both of which seek to critically examine dominant assumptions about the relationships between knowledge, transparency, and social change. One is interview-based and examines the problematic allure of scapegoating and punishment by closely following the life of a young man who worked on a pig factory farm and took his own life after a major animal advocacy group conducted an undercover investigation into his place of employment. The other combines interviews and participant-observation research to study a contemporary factory farm that has inverted the “ag-gag” approach taken by the majority of the animal agriculture industry and instead created a booming tourism business out of inviting the general public to closely experience their factory farm operations. I am very excited to meet all of you in Denver and greatly look forward to the cross- disciplinary conversations we’ll have together.
18 Jessica Pierce Bioethicist and Faculty Affiliate, University of Colorado Jessica Pierce is a bioethicist and faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She is the author of ten books, including The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the Ends of Their Lives and Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets, and has published essays in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-dogs-go-heaven). Her website is http://jessicapierce.net. Her newest book, Unleashing Your Dog: How to Give Your Canine Companion the Best Possible Life, (with Marc Bekoff) was released by New World Library in spring of 2019. Will Potter Distinguished Lecturer, English, University of Michigan Will Potter is an investigative journalist, author, and lecturer focused on how individuals and institutions respond to threats to democracy. He is a leading international voice challenging the erosion of civil liberties in the name of fighting "terrorism." Pulitzer-Prize winner Glenn Greenwald said he is the “most knowledgeable journalist in the country on these issues,” and National Book Award winner Andrew Solomon describes his work as “fiercely courageous.” His book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, exposed the criminalization of nonviolent protest groups by the FBI, and was awarded a Kirkus Star for "remarkable merit." He has been invited to speak before the U.S. Congress and meetings of the Australian Parliament and Council of Europe. Will was the first investigative journalist to be selected as a TED Fellow, and his TED Talks have been viewed more than 6 million times. After receiving the prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship, Will was appointed to a unique role at the University of Michigan, where he focuses on how the media and higher education must rethink public engagement in order to fulfill their shared social responsibility. David Rosengard Senior Staff Attorney, Animal Legal Defense Fund While attending Lewis & Clark Law School, David focused on animal and criminal law, receiving the law school’s Animal Law Leadership Award. During this period, David clerked for the Center for Animal Law Studies, Co-Directed Lewis & Clark’s Animal Legal Defense Fund Student Chapter, was an Animal Law Review Editor-in-Chief, and worked on farmed animal and vegan prisoner issues through the Animal Law Clinic. He also represented the state of Oregon in criminal court on behalf of the Multnomah County District Attorney’s
19 Office as a certified law student. While completing his LL.M. in Animal Law at Lewis & Clark Law School, David co-taught L&C’s core animal law course, edited and contributed to the second edition of Animal Law in a Nutshell, and worked on identifying legal frameworks supporting expanded prosecution of animal crimes. David has also worked internationally on animal law issues through the Kenya Legal Project. By way of continuing involvement with that program and the Lewis & Clark Human- Animal Studies Collaboration, David seeks to contribute to animal interests being valued across both national and academic boundaries. Prior to embarking on his legal career, David earned a B.A. in History and Gender Studies from Claremont McKenna College, and worked in higher education, where he focused on community justice, sexual assault prevention and response, peer counseling, crisis management, co-curricular education, and sex-blind housing programs. David lives in Portland, Oregon with his spouse and a quartet of felines (three rescues and one long-term foster). Laura Rovner Professor of Law & Director of Civil Rights Clinic, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Laura Rovner is Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she has taught for 15 years. Through the clinic, she supervises law students representing incarcerated clients in constitutional litigation about prison conditions, such as indefinite solitary confinement, denial of outdoor exercise, lack of adequate medical and mental health care, and the free exercise of religion. She is a recipient of the ACLU of Colorado’s Edward Sherman Award for Outstanding Legal Work on Behalf of Further Civil Liberties in Colorado, the University of Denver’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and was named as one of 5280 Magazine’s Top Lawyers in Civil Rights in 2015 and 2016. Professor Rovner was a member of the litigation teams that led to the creation of outdoor exercise yards at the state of Colorado’s supermax prison, for which the team was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award from the Public Justice Foundation. She has provided expert testimony before the European Court of Human Rights about conditions of confinement in the federal supermax prison, and served on the Colorado legislature’s Work Group on Serious Mental Illness in Long-term Isolated Confinement. She lectures and writes frequently about the rights of people incarcerated in prisons and jails, particularly about solitary confinement. Her 2018 talk at TEDxMileHigh – "Why US prisons need to abolish solitary confinement"— has been viewed over 6,000 times.
20 Kelly Struthers Montford Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia Okanagan Kelly Struthers Montford is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and is the Senior Advisor to the Independent Expert on Human Rights and Corrections for the Province of Ontario. Her research interests lie at the nexus of captivity, power, and political ontology as manifest in carceral locations such as prisons and animal agriculture. From 2016 to 2019 she was a postdoctoral fellow in Punishment, Law, and Social Theory at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta and was the 2013- 2014 Institute for Critical Animal Studies Hilda Scholar of the year. Her work has been published in Radical Philosophy Review, the New Criminal Law Review, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Societies, and the PhaenEx Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, as well as in various edited collections. Paula Tarankow Lecturer in History, Smith College Paula Tamara Tarankow is a social and cultural historian of the 19th-century United States. She specializes in histories of race, interspecies and human violence, and reform in the post–Civil War era. Her current book project is tentatively titled “Loyal Animals, Faithful Slaves: American Animal Advocacy, Race, and the Memory of Slavery.” This research centers on the relationship between antebellum paternalism and postbellum animal anticruelty reform in the U.S. South. In this work, she exposes how the white southern logic of protecting animals emerged from Lost Cause mythology and legacies of slaveholding. She argues that the powerful cultural symbol of the grateful and loyal slave helped white southerners in the South and beyond develop sentimental attachments to animals. On the other hand, African American animal advocates, many of whom were former slaves, produced humane sentiment that worked within this limiting social script but also constructed an expansive vision of social justice predicated on racial progress and the potential for interracial harmony through kindness to animals. She has received research and writing support for this project from the Culture and Animals Foundation and the Animals and Society Institute.
21 Philip Tedeschi Clinical Professor, Executive Director, Institute for Human-Animal Connection, University of Denver Some of Philip Tedeschi's best friends are animals. He studies and teaches on the intricate relationship between people, domestic and wild animals, and the natural world. Tedeschi is the executive director of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection and a clinical professor at the Graduate School of Social Work. He is globally recognized for expertise in the clinical methods of animal-assisted Interventions and coordinates the school's animal-assisted social work certificate program for master of social work (MSW) students, as well as the animals and human health global professional development certificate program. He received his MSSW degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his specialization was the bio-affiliative connection between people and animals. Tedeschi's research, scholarship, presentations, training and community practice work have focused on human-animal interactions, conservation, human ecology, causes of violence toward people and animals, environmental social work, experiential therapy and forensic social work practice. Tedeschi is a certified Master Therapeutic Riding Instructor, former course director and instructor with Outward Bound, wilderness medical technician, forensic evaluator and has many years of experience in non-traditional therapeutic approaches with children, adults and families. He specializes in the therapeutic potential of human-animal interaction, trauma informed methods and intervention in interpersonal violence, including assessment and intervention with animal abuse.
Stephen Wells CEO, Animal Legal Defense Fund Stephen Wells is the executive director and CEO of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Since 1990, Stephen has been a leader in the nonprofit wildlife conservation and animal protection movements. Stephen grew up in Chicago, where he grew a successful business serving the city’s expansive manufacturing and industrial sector. A passion for outdoor adventure led him to sell the business and move to Alaska to be closer to nature. There he worked on the cleanup in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, an experience that convinced him to dedicate his life to protecting the planet’s remaining wildlife and wild lands. After serving on the boards of two conservation organizations in Alaska, Stephen was hired as executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. Under his watch, the organization more than doubled in size, and Stephen became well-known for his work to protect Alaska’s native wildlife, particularly its wolves and bears, and their habitats.
22 Stephen moved to California and joined the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s staff in 1999. Almost immediately, Stephen pioneered new strategies to advance animal protection under the law, including launching ALDF’s law student chapter program and pro bono firm network. Today, ALDF has student chapters in more than 200 law schools, and more than 450 law firms have signed up to donate more than $4 million in legal work to support ALDF’s mission annually. Stephen became the executive director and CEO of ALDF in 2006, succeeding ALDF’s founder, Joyce Tischler. Under his leadership, ALDF has more than quadrupled in size and has become renowned as the pre-eminent legal animal advocacy organization in the country, and a force to be reckoned with by animal abusers and animal exploitative industries, including the single largest source of animal abuse, factory farming. Never losing sight of his desire to build strong and effective coalitions, in addition to working with other animal protection organizations, ALDF has successfully partnered with law schools, environmental protection, food safety, public health and civil rights organizations, and has built strong relationships with companies that are creating humane products to replace those dependent on animal exploitation. Maintaining a love for entrepreneurial ventures and the role that business can play in creating humane alternatives for consumers, Stephen founded and helped run a plant- based and organic restaurant in his hometown of Guerneville for five years. Stephen continues his love of nature and the outdoors and enjoys hiking and exploring near his home in the redwoods of western Sonoma County. He is also an avid sailor and enjoys riding the winds in San Francisco Bay, where he loves to take friends out to view whales, porpoises, sea birds and other marine wildlife. He currently shares his home with his two rescued cats, Ocho and Rumor. Delci Winders Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School Delcianna (Delci) Winders is a clinical professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School, where she directs the Animal Law Litigation Clinic (ALLC)—the nation’s only clinic focused exclusively on animal law litigation. Professor Winders’ animal law and administrative law scholarship has appeared in the Denver Law Review, Florida State Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, NYU Law Review, and Animal Law Review. She has also published extensively in the popular press, including The Hill, National Geographic, Newsweek, New York Daily News, Salon, and U.S.A. Today. Prior to joining the Lewis & Clark faculty, Winders was vice president and deputy general counsel for the PETA Foundation, the first academic fellow of the Harvard Animal Law &
23 Policy Program, and a visiting scholar at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Winders received her BA in Legal Studies with highest honors from the University California at Santa Cruz, and her JD from NYU School of Law. Following law school, Winders clerked for the Hon. Martha Craig Daughtrey on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced animal law in a variety of settings. She has also taught animal law at Tulane University School of Law and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Winders has been interviewed by numerous major news outlets, gives frequent presentations, and was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “Six Women Who Dare.” G. Carole Woodall Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Carole Woodall has been exploring and studying Istanbul for nearly two decades with a specific interest in cultural and sensory urban environments. Dr. Woodall's scholarship focuses on the interplay between urban space and cultural practices and its effect upon the formation of modern identities in the late-Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods. Her interpretive approach combines theories of modernity with cultural and sensorial approaches to the urban environment. Specifically, Dr. Woodall's research examines the perceived and embodied urban modern sensory experience of 1920s Istanbul through a critical examination of the "decadent modern" - a way to address what contemporary critics and Turkish republican scholars have referred to as a "crisis." She is currently preparing her manuscript, The Decadent Modern: Cocaine, Jazz, and the Charleston in 1920's Istanbul, which provides a counterpoint not only to a dominant Turkish nationalist narrative, but also to key approaches to understanding modern Middle Eastern history. Her work revises and complicates that narrative by questioning the multiple ways that social and non-state actors participated in the refashioning of post-Ottoman society. Most notably Dr. Woodall's work is shaped by interdisciplinary research on transnationalism, popular culture, jazz and dance studies, and the embodiment of place. In the fall of 2009, Woodall founded a non-profit public/academic program called Intersections Film Festival (IFF)TM, which is attached to UCCS's College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences (LAS). The festival provides innovative cultural film programming around contemporary political, social, and cultural themes related to the Middle East by screening award-winning Middle Eastern films and documentaries. The interdisciplinary project is a vital form for public engagement by creating access to critical debates and making global issues relevant at the local level. Middle East historians constantly struggle with how to dispel systemic stereotyping and misrepresentations in an age of intense post-911
24 mediatization whereby historical substance becomes overly simplified. Intersections Film Festival specifically addresses this obstacle through its pairing of engaged "talk back" discussions with screenings. The festival conveys the diverse political, social, and economic realities of modern Middle East society, while also providing moments of visual humor and poignant thought for the audience. The festival remains committed to making screenings free and open to the public in accordance with its mission of supporting diversity, institutional collaboration, and community outreach. Dr. Woodall also founded the citizens group, Canada Geese Protection Colorado.
25 Abstracts for Panel 1: Histories of Carceral
Thinking in Animal Protection – Justifications and Repudiations
Examining Anti-Cruelty Enhancements - Historical Context and Policy Considerations Pamela Frasch This chapter explores 1) the policy reasoning behind, and the historical roots of, the late 20th century animal protection movement’s efforts to increase penalties for animal cruelty; and 2) the need for data narrowly focused on anti-cruelty investigation and prosecution outcomes. As of the mid-1990s, the vast majority of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices failed to invest meaningful resources into investigating and prosecuting crimes against animals despite the existence of misdemeanor level anti-cruelty provisions. Animal suffering was not taken seriously, and social norms allowed and sometimes even celebrated human activity that caused physical and psychological harm. To combat this paradigm, the movement worked to stigmatize animal cruelty by enhancing criminal penalties in the hopes that this would prove to be an appropriate and effective method of deterrence. With enhanced penalties, some in the animal protection movement also began to consider more seriously the foundations of criminal justice, including the importance of victim’s voices. Empirical and statistical evidence show that the criminal justice system is rife with biased procedures and outcomes that are racist, classist, and misogynistic. A rebalancing and restructuring are long overdue. Within the animal cruelty context specifically, however, there is a need for more bias interrogation. This chapter explores whether extrapolating general criminal justice data to the animal abuse context is appropriate and suggests that without focused data, such an approach can lead to ineffective or counterproductive policies. Animals Confinement, Animal Interests, and Criminal Justice Stephen Wells & David Rosengard In this chapter the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), as a leading animal protection organization, will explain its support for criminal justice interventions, including incarceration. ALDF will argue that criminal sentencing is a critical component of their work for at least two reasons: to seek justice on behalf of animal cruelty victims, and to prevent future cruelty. The Animal Legal Defense Fund recognizes that each animal cruelty case is
26 unique, and therefore advocates for a tool-box approach that eschews rote sentencing formulations in favor of case-specific sentences that best acknowledge the animal victim’s experience of being cruelly treated, hold the perpetrator responsible, and prevent and deter future crimes. In particular, as elaborated in this chapter, ALDF advocates for, and assists stakeholders in pursuing, outcomes where animal victims receive the ameliorative care they need, perpetrators are prevented from engaging in future cruelty, and underlying causes of animal cruelty are addressed (to the extent they exist in a given individual case). Race and the Carceral Logics in the History of the American Animal Welfare Movement Paula Tarankow The predominant historical narrative about the American animal protection movement is one of men and women on “the right side” of history—those who took a stand in the antebellum era against the logics of slavery and redirected their gaze upon the eye of the suffering animal in the postbellum era. Yet in the research that I have previously conducted on the origins and development of the predominantly white-led animal anticruelty movement in the fifty years after the abolition of slavery, I find that many white reformers viewed their work through the lens of prevailing understandings of race and the so-called “Negro Problem.” Reformers above and below the Mason-Dixon line set precedents for defining cruelty and “humane” behavior while setting legal standards for animal cruelty prosecution. Many believed in the so-called “white man’s burden” to improve the character of non-white groups, especially formerly enslaved peoples, and purify the nation from the specter of slavery that many perceived existed in violent post¬–Civil War human-animal relations. Ultimately, in my prior work on the movement in the U.S. South, I have explored how white reformers often humanized animals at the expense of black humanity. In my proposed book chapter, I will explore the carceral logics that were inseparable from the inception of American animal welfare reform among white reformers who had previously been opponents as well as proponents of slavery. I will further interrogate how animal-centered discourses became a crucial site for negotiating racialized anxieties about Americans’ moral obligations to animals and the importance of kindness to national belonging. White reformers who emboldened the criminal justice system to prosecute cases of animal cruelty are crucial sites for exploring the condemnation and criminalization of blackness and the growth of the carceral state. In my contribution to this volume, I will seek to unite the insights of Animal Studies scholars and historians in ways that contribute to the overarching goals of the anthology.
27 Carceral Progressivism and Animal Victims Benjamin Levin Conventional explanations of mass incarceration and the rise of the carceral state tend to lay blame at the feet of the political right. Whether framed in terms of neoliberalism, white supremacy, or social conservatism, these accounts generally downplay the role of the political left (broadly conceived). In this essay, I build on my past work and a small-but- growing literature that examines the role of the left as not only complicit in mass incarceration, but also, at times, one of its drivers. Using the movement to criminalize harm to animals as a case study, I trace out a theory of “carceral progressivism.” Despite widespread condemnations of mass incarceration from critics on the left, carceral solutions retain significant allure. Progressive criminal law may have many functions and justifications, but the progressive case for criminalization frequently relies on some expressive vision of punishment. Yet, what exactly does an individual prosecutorial decision or criminal sentence really express, and to whom? Some expressivist accounts point to “society” or “the community” as the imagined recipient of criminal law’s message. Frequently, though, a claim among many left proponents of criminalization is that there is a need to send a message to a class of generally marginalized victims: by prosecuting a given defendant, the state will express to an oft-ignored, oft-suffering community that it matters. This essay looks to carceral responses to animal abuse as a vehicle for critiquing these left and progressive accounts. In this essay, I explore how prosecuting humans for harming animals belies claims about prosecutors acting in dialogue with victims. Of course, animal victims differ from human victims in a host of different ways. Nevertheless, in the efforts to frame animal victims as criminal victims, we can see more clearly how the dynamic of speaking for and speaking to victims via harsh criminal punishment displays a troubling logic, repeated in other progressive criminalization projects. By describing the shortcomings of an expressivist case for punishing in the context of harmed animals, I hope to illustrate the deeper flaws in using the carceral state as a vehicle for vindicating the interests of the powerless.
28 Abstracts for Panel 2: The Problem with Carceral Strategies
Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago Karen Morin This research offers a critical historical geography of the lived experiences of bovine animals on the 19th century U.S. ‘cattle trails’ and in small rural settlements that sprung up at their terminus, for subsequent shipment by railroad to slaughterhouses in Chicago and elsewhere. Animals on the cattle trails have been typically portrayed as merely figures on the landscape; as either peacefully grazing in beautiful pastoral landscapes or wildly stampeding in clouds of dust. What is missing is a study of these animals’ lived experiences, their stories, and their agency (however unwillingly or unwittingly) in playing an integral role in the U.S. colonial project. My research is specifically focused on the early stages of the commodification of these animals as beef; their experiences of being trapped within the emergent carceral practices and infrastructures (branding, barbed wire, stockyards) that supported their captivity, movement, and eventual death. On Solitary Confinement Laura Rovner In America, the use of penal isolation has existed almost since the founding of the republic. Nearly abandoned in the 1880s and for nearly a century after as a failed experiment begetting mental illness rather than rehabilitation, the use of solitary confinement expanded dramatically in the 1970’s. The era of mass incarceration was upon us, driven by the War on Drugs; changes in sentencing, probation, and parole policy; a belief in a “new breed of criminal” – the “super-predator”; and a shift in correctional philosophy away from rehabilitation and toward retribution and incapacitation. The resulting overcrowded prisons were ill-equipped to address the explosion of prisoners with mental illness, or the increase in violence caused by the growth of prison gangs. Prison officials believed they could pinpoint the “troublemakers” and the “worst of the worst” who most frequently engaged in prison violence and then isolate them to restore order. And so came the rise of supermax prisons, where states and the federal government had the ability to dramatically expand the number of people in solitary, and to keep them there for a very long time—sometimes for years or even decades. Prisoners in solitary confinement spend 22-24 hours each day alone in cells that are designed to minimize human contact and environmental stimulation. Accordingly, prisoners in solitary confinement routinely are deprived of almost all meaningful perceptual, social,
29 and occupational stimulation, including natural light, most or all personal property, and almost all human interaction (which is vital to maintain a sense of identity and grasp of reality), except that which occurs through bars or slots in solid metal doors. Unsurprisingly, the results are catastrophic: “[n]early every scientific inquiry into the effects of solitary confinement over the past 150 years has concluded that subjecting an individual to more than 10 days of involuntary segregation results in a distinct set of emotional, cognitive, social, and physical pathologies.” Recognizing the direct link between solitary confinement and the harms it causes, experts advise that “the inherent restriction in meaningful social interaction and environmental stimulation and the lack of control adversely impact the health and welfare of all who are held in solitary confinement.” Despite knowing this, American prisons and jails hold upwards of 80,000 people in solitary on any given day. It is not an overstatement to say that in doing so, our government is torturing its citizens by violating “the sacredness of the human person.” It does so in our name, violating both the dignity of those we hold in isolation as well as that of our collective humanity and society. Caging and Immigration Enforcement Jennifer M. Chacón Some of the largest and highest profile immigration raids of the past decade have taken place at slaughterhouses and chicken processing plants. A 2008 raid of the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, generated nationwide headlines when the nearly 400 workers – the vast majority indigenous Mayans from Guatemala – were rounded up, caged, and, in many cases, criminally processed and deported. In August of 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained nearly 700 workers in raids at chicken processing plants outside of Jackson, Mississippi. The pattern of human caging, criminal processing and “civil” removal repeated itself. This essay will use the stories of those raids as a means of exploring the varied and inter-related forms of caging in these intentionally isolated and under-examined geographic spaces. The Animals’ Agenda: Give us our freedoms Jessica Pierce & Marc Bekoff For many people working in animal advocacy, the failure of science to produce better ethical results has been a bitter disappointment. For both of us (a scientist and an ethicist), an early feeling of optimism has given way to frustration, even alarm, about what is happening to animals around the globe. Animals are, by many measures, objectively worse off than ever before. Although captivity is known to cause profound emotional trauma to large mammals such as orcas and elephants, entertainment venues continue to keep these animals on display. Although numerous non-animal alternatives to animal experimentation
30 are readily available, the numbers of monkeys, cats, dogs, rats, and mice used in research and testing continue to grow. More and more exotic animals such as geckos, sloths, and fennec foxes are being marketed and purchased as “pets,” despite the profound unsuitability of cages and tanks in human homes to these animals’ biological needs. Problems of captivity are not limited to animals used in human industries but extend also to billions of wild animals who are captive to human excess and encroachment and are losing the freedom to thrive, much less survive, within increasingly unstable and degraded ecosystems. Abundant scientific research supports the idea that animals need to feel in control of their own lives and choices and that they suffer from the loss of self-determination. Early work on learned helplessness in animals, which forms the basis of our current understanding of human depression, demonstrated that animals who are exposed to repeated and inescapable “stressors” (which is welfare-speak for “aversive” experiences such as electric shocks or forced swimming in a smooth-sided tank of water) suffer a kind of mental collapse, where efforts to escape the aversive stimuli give way to despair. Captivity, social isolation, and chronic exposure to stress—the fate of millions upon millions of animals— lead to measurable physiological changes in the brain, including the loss of neural plasticity. The loss of freedom also manifests in observable behaviors. Captive animals often display abnormal behavior patterns called stereotypies (more welfare-speak)—for example, a polar bear pacing back and forth in a zoo enclosure or a rat ruining her teeth by obsessively biting the bars of her cage or a pet parrot who plucks out all her own feather clearly. These animals are telling us in no uncertain terms that the conditions in which they live are driving them mad. The bottom line is that even “good welfare” cannot be good enough. Rather than being used to enhance the freedoms of animals, welfare science has been put into the service of human industry. We offer a new paradigm we call the science of animal well-being in which the life of every individual matters and which commits to radically improved freedoms for animals—especially freedom from human captivity and exploitation. We should work to create a world in which animals are free to live their own lives and make their own choices. The Prison as Multi-Species Carcerality Kelly Struthers Montford While prisons are designed for the captivity of humans, prisons also entail carceral relationships to non-human animals. This chapter considers the intersections of human and animal carcerality in three manners: prison expansion and building that targets wild animals through the destruction of their habits, which can cause extinction; prison-based animal agriculture and agriculture work-release programs that can effect a double incarceration upon farmed animals who are held captive by both the institutions of animal agriculture and the prison; and, prison-based animal therapy programs that enlist companion animals,
31 often dogs, who are brought into prisons for prisoners to train them for life on the outside. The chapter considers each of these in turn to understand how prison expansion, penal labour, prison diets, and rehabilitation are shaped by multi-species carceral relationships. I propose that by considering the carceral as capacious, and as fundamentally an expression and organization of human-animal relations, we can better lay out and resist its colonial, anti-black, and eco-destructive function. Geese or No Geese G. Carole Woodall In June 2019, the 1600+ forced removal and extermination of Canada geese populations in four of Denver’s parks began without the public being aware. Two years earlier a neighborhood grassroots organization Citizens to Restore the Parks (CRP) lobbied successfully with a Denver City Council representative to advocate on behalf of a more vigorous goose management plan, which would eliminate the parks of geese excrement, and make the parks more user-friendly for the public. The logic of cleaning the parks was not initially directed toward the extermination of the geese. However, the council representative began talks with the director at USDA/APHIS-Colorado, a federal agency recognized by wildlife advocacy groups for its indiscriminate and inhumane killing. As the act of extermination played out other marginalized populations were impacted – individuals with lack of food and shelter security relying on non-profit food distribution centers were fed untested urban park resident geese meat, and future DPR plans to remove Canada geese populations from other city parks marginalized city residents from being able to voice concerns. Human animal logic – authorities and residents – targeted the Canada geese based on a natural act of elimination, as opposed to questioning the maintenance and facility record of DPR. A larger backdrop that has yet to be confirmed is the role that a four-day international conference of park stakeholders – managers, developers, real estate holders – from national and international locations had on the decision to exterminate the Canada geese from four parks - three of which provided the showcase for Greater & Greener, which took place in Denver. “Geese or No Geese” thinks through the way that the removal of Canada geese implicated marginalized sentient and disenfranchised populations in an interlocking process of punishment, removal, extermination, and silencing.
32 Abstracts for Panel 3: Carceral Strategies Have not Worked The Failure of the War on Drugs Sam Kamin The war on drugs is an often misunderstood American phenomenon. Formally announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, the war is unlikely to end any time soon. If anything, current crises over prescription opiates, synthetic drugs like fentanyl, and contaminated vaping devices indicate that this war continues to expand into new campaigns against new enemies. In this paper I discuss the drug war’s ongoing legacy as it approaches its fiftieth birthday. I argue that while it has rightly been seen as a failure, it is important not to give the drug war too much power. While the war on drugs contributed to mass incarceration in the United States, for example, it certainly did not cause it. Understanding the reality of the war on drugs will be important as activists and policymakers attempt to move the United States into peacetime. Particularly with regard to marijuana – the substance whose regulation is moving most rapidly away from prohibition – it will be important not to move too rapidly in the opposite direction. The end of the war on marijuana presents an opportunity for the federal government to play a role it has not played during the long period of its prohibition – that of regulator. Lessons Learned from the Tough on Crime Approach to Intimate Partner Violence Tamara Kuennen This Chapter recaps current critiques in the feminist scholarly literature of mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies in the context of intimate partner violence, and demonstrates that these critiques apply with equal force in the context of the current law and policy seeking to redress violence perpetrated on non-human beings. Specifically, it argues that a “crime control” approach in the arena of adult intimate partner violence has had numerous unintended consequences, including over-incarceration (generally), deployment of resources from solutions that could more effectively address the causes of the problem, distraction – rather than attention to - the victims of the problem, and a backlash in terms of changing an undesirable social norm, to name but a few. In short, the Chapter considers the lessons learned in the movement to end the norm of intimate partner abuse, and applies these to the movement to end the norm of non-human being abuse. It argues that blunt responses to what are often complex situations indiscriminately dispense with the many contextual factors that are necessary to good decision-making and sound, long-term policy. More importantly, it demonstrates the painful lessons learned in the realm of the anti-intimate partner violence movement in which, perhaps like no other civil rights
33 movement to date, a carceral approach utterly coopted what started as a grass-roots, liberation movement. Applied to the realm of non-human abuse, the lesson to be drawn is the foreseeability of such a mistake. Beyond Codifying the Contours of Confinement Delci Winders It’s well-established that nonhuman animals, like humans, suffer tremendously when confined and deprived of appropriate space, enrichment, and companionship. Although animals have the legal status of property and their interests are often overlooked by the law, we have in fact codified requirements for social companionship and appropriate space for at least certain categories of animals. Thus, though confining these animals is not prohibited, the contours of their confinement are ostensibly dictated by law. These de jure protections, however, are routinely disregarded without consequence. This chapter will expose how a combination of legal carve outs and poor enforcement results in frequent disregard of fundamental animal interests that have been recognized by both science and the law, and will make policy recommendations for making good on our commitments to take these interests seriously. (Human) Children and Humane-Washing in Prisons, Detention Centres, and Zoos and Aquaria Maneesha Deckha Through various legal and social venues, prisons, detention centres, and zoos and aquaria profess to care about their incarcerated inhabitants and to have adopted best practices in administration and management (Palmer, Malone and Parek 2016). They generally claim to promote the larger public and “progressive” interests of safety, border control, conservation, and education (Blum, Anstis and Will 2017; Parkes 2017; Braverman 2013). In effect, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing”, as scholars have noted, occurs through science- based discourse about conservation and rehabilitation, almost invisible enclosures that shield the public from the barriers the animals experience, and the hidden close bodily management of captive populations including the slaughter of healthy animals. This paper considers how the concepts of the human child and childhood and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children also figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as “humane” and thus legally and socially legitimate spaces.
34 Progressive Pet Issues and the Carceral Carve-Out
Please note: Chapter will be included in book, and discussed during the concluding remarks, however it will not be addressed on this panel Aya Gruber Why do so many progressives who generally criticize mass incarceration clamor for enhanced criminal penalties and law enforcement when it comes to their pet issues? Left- leaning commentators regularly lament that policing is racist authoritarianism incarnate, prosecution is a naked exercise of indiscriminate (or, worse, discriminatory) power, and incarceration is a barbaric practice of putting bodies in cages. Yet, when it comes to sex offenders, batterers, hate criminals, and, increasingly, animal abusers, progressives entertain a carve-out from the mass incarceration critique, even though there is no such carve-out for aggravated assault, drug dealing, or even murder. When it comes to heinous crimes that are not pet issues, progressives exercise empathy for offenders, look to structural causes, and reject state violence as the solution. In answering the initial question, I first explain why equality-minded commentators embrace incarceration and crime logic for pet issues. Drawing on moral panic theory, I argue that many are wedded to sentimental narratives involving perfect criminals (privileged, powerful, sadistic, hate- mongers) and victims (marginalized, traumatized, innocents). Second, I argue that this sentimentality-driven logic is virtually indistinguishable from that of the American crime victims’ rights movement, which in the 1980s and 1990s, played a critical role in the uniquely American phenomenon of non-wartime, democratic, everyday mass incarceration.
35 Abstracts for Panel 4: Expanding the Critique of
Carceral Logics - Practical and Theoretical Considerations
The Problem of Animal Policing Even When Incarceration is Not Sought Amanda Arrington & Justin Marceau The term carceral is defined to include anything that relates to or suggests jail or prison. Yet the primary critiques of criminal justice interventions tend to focus on actual, physical incarceration. In this chapter, Marceau and Arrington discuss the problematic carceral logic that posits that police interventions in marginalized communities in the name of animal protection is an unmitigated good when, as is often the case, the individual is not ultimately prosecuted, or perhaps even arrested. The objective data is clear. Our justice system is broken; poor persons, persons of color and other marginalized groups are over-represented in the system. Marginalized groups are not necessarily committing more crime, as data in the realm of drug prosecutions has repeatedly shown. Rather, persons in these groups are unfairly targeted and they suffer diminished expectations of privacy that result in their over-representation in our criminal courts. Even the most race neutral laws are applied disparately. For example, a 2019 analysis conducted by the Stanford Computational Policy Lab of over 100 million municipal and state traffic stops conducted in jurisdictions across the country confirmed what was already common knowledge -- there is “widespread discrimination in decisions to stop and search drivers.” The term “driving while black” is used to describe the application of racial profiling to driving offenses, but experts know that driving offenses are not different than other crimes in terms of enforcement patterns. Yet somehow, the animal protection movement has convinced itself that when it comes to animal cruelty, the broken justice system is not broken. And this is particularly true, the movement leaders tell us, if incarceration is not sought for a violation of an animal welfare law. As a 2015 law review article puts it, prosecutions are the movement’s “best hope” for achieving animal rights. Although incarceration is nearly always destructive, this chapter focuses on the animal- centered interventions that are primarily not enforced through jail time. Through a variety of measures, including the enactment of vaccine laws, the movement has aligned itself with an interventionist, “broken windows” model of policing that places marginalized communities in a state of hyper state surveillance. For many low-income families, animal welfare laws may be law enforcement’s most convenient point of entry, and to sometimes devastating ends. Overpolicing and the enactment of laws that invite such circumstances
36 warrant critical attention no less than overzealous prosecution. The animal protection movement seeks to assure itself that its own limited criminal justice interventions are different, and not part of the problems that plague our tough-on-crime culture. This chapter shows that there may not be a more empirically unfounded claim in all of animal law.
American Autopsy Timothy Pachirat In this chapter, I draw on extensive interviews and archival research to tell the story of a young man named David who worked on a pig factory farm in Wyoming and took his own life after a major animal advocacy organization released undercover video footage of him allegedly abusing pigs at the farm. In the chapter, David’s story serves as an interlocutor for extended reflection on, and critical examination of, widespread assumptions about guilt, responsibility, transparency, and carcerality in the animal rights movement, and, by extension, in American law and society at large. Habeas Corpus for Non-Human Animals: Toward a Critical Approach Jessica Eisen The writ of habeas corpus has long served as a mechanism for reviewing the legality of detention. Because of its close procedural and substantive connection to liberty interests, this “Great Writ” is often characterized as an essential instrument in the protection of constitutional human rights. In recent years, animal rights advocates have sought to extend the use of the writ of habeas corpus to animals, arguing that courts ought to recognize certain animals as having essential qualities of personhood that ought to qualify them for access to the writ. This chapter will argue that the discourse surrounding the use of habeas corpus for animals might be productively enriched by more serious engagement with the writ’s uses and limitations in human justice contexts. In particular, the writ’s emancipatory potential for animals should be assessed in light of the apparently comfortable coexistence between formal access to the writ of habeas corpus and such entrenched practices of human confinement as racialized mass incarceration and immigration detention. This chapter will seek to undertake such a critical approach to the use of habeas corpus for animals. The first part of the chapter will offer two interrelated criticisms of prevailing approaches to habeas corpus for animals: first, that they risk overstating the writ’s achievements in human justice contexts; and second, that they do so through recourse to selective accounts of the writ’s history. The second part of this chapter will seek to offer a historical corrective, and an alternative account of the writ’s potential for animal advocates. In particular, it will be argued that the writ’s history across jurisdictions
37 demonstrates that its effectiveness in addressing systemic justice problems is a function of the underlying legal rules authorizing detention, and the political-institutional posture of reviewing courts. In light of this account, the chapter will conclude by emphasizing a more restrained vision of the writ’s potential: as a mechanism for reviewing the lawfulness of detention, even in contexts where the underlying laws governing detention are inadequate or unjust. This approach promises not only to be more persuasive to courts, but also to support forms of practical legal advocacy that might more comfortably co-exist with deeper structural critiques of incarceration across species.
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TheAbstracts Failure of the for War Panel on Drugs 5: Social Change Cause Lawyering for the Caged: A Comparative Examination of Law Reform Approaches in the Prisoners’ Rights and Animal Rights Movements Vikram D. Amar & Alan Chen This paper examines and compares cause lawyering in the prisoners’ rights and animal rights movements. Drawing on the rich literature on cause lawyering and social movements, we discuss the similarities and differences in engaging in legal advocacy for prisoners and non-human animals. To the extent that there are similarities, we suggest that lawyers might benefit from sharing strategic approaches across movements. To the extent that there are differences, we examine structural, legal, and political reasons why those might exist. Finally, we map this discussion on to conventional critiques of rights-oriented approaches to law reform and observe how, in the context of these two movements, those critiques may be both descriptively inaccurate and normatively questionable. For example, much of the literature critiques the priority of litigation as a tactical approach to reform, but those critiques may be less valid given the context of these two social movements. At the same time, we take seriously the concerns that because of finite resources, a critical examination of the value of litigation, or an evaluation of when it is most valuable, is a worthwhile inquiry. “False” Imprisonment Doug Kysar The U.S. legal tradition includes a civil tort of false imprisonment, whereby one who acts intending to confine another within fixed boundaries may be held liable, so long as the other is conscious of or harmed by the confinement. This cause of action is distinct from the criminal and constitutional law framework that governs the authority of the state to detain, investigate, or imprison. The false imprisonment tort encompasses such concerns regarding government overreach, but also extends to confinement that is wrongfully imposed by nongovernmental actors. This paper will examine the evolution of the false imprisonment tort with a specific focus on the “awareness of confinement” requirement that exists as an alternative to demonstration by a plaintiff of actual physical harm. The awareness of confinement alternative was introduced into American tort law as a self-consciously progressive recognition of the wrongfulness of depriving actors of their liberty, irrespective of whether identifiable physical harm had resulted. Once recognized, however, the “awareness of confinement” alternative
39 cast light on yet another possibility, in which an actor might be involuntarily confined but neither aware of nor harmed by the confinement. Such a case seems to slip through the cracks of the false imprisonment tort, yet still gives us pause when dwelled upon. This paper will attempt to “think with animals” to shed light on the false imprisonment tort and the particular case of the involuntary but unaware prisoner. The paper will draw from research on animal confinement to catalogue the kinds of harms suffered when nonhuman animals are incarcerated, not only in terms of demonstrable welfare impacts but also in terms of foreclosed opportunities to thrive. The denial of dignity that might result from animal incarceration, even in the absence of demonstrable harm or consciousness of detention, will also be explored. The paper will conclude by arguing that the false imprisonment tort remains inchoate and confused because it rests on a dichotomy of freedom and confinement that is inadequate to the normative task it is being invoked to resolve. To identify “false” imprisonment one might instead begin by asking what constitutes “true” imprisonment. To ask that question, though, is to ask the most basic questions regarding the state’s membership and legitimacy, including how it came to be that animal confinement is presumed to constitute “true” imprisonment absent some extraordinary showing to the contrary. Imagining Animal Protection as a Civil Rights Movement Will Potter Since the 1970s, the campaigns of animal protection advocates have been met with increasingly draconian government response, reflected in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s post-9/11 classification of animal rights activists as the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Animal advocates—who have never harmed a human being— have been targeted by expanded federal and state anti-terrorism legislation, elevated criminal prosecutions and sentences, and extreme restrictions on communication in experimental prison units, among other attacks. This unprecedented use of terrorism powers to stifle dissent has largely gone unnoticed and unopposed by the civil rights and civil liberties organizations and attorneys, however. In this article, the crackdown on the animal protection movement will be examined in the context of government repression of civil rights movements more broadly in order to better defend the rights of all marginalized advocates from political backlash. Rethinking the Link: Criminal Justice Response and Accuracy to Cruelty toward People and Animals Philip Tedeschi & Shelby McDonald This chapter will invite a discussion and deeper exploration that challenges the historical approach to the concept of LINK Violence, the body of research that presumes a connection between acts of violence against an animal and future violence against humans. New
40 perspectives on this important topic offer collective opportunity for greater accuracy in understanding the causation and connection between animal cruelty and human interpersonal violence and requires efforts to reframe the LINK narrative. This chapter will define a new framework that shares a balanced and accurate response to animal cruelty from the criminal justice systems initial response, to the assessment, disposition and intervention of these cases, to an amended understanding of the dynamics of animal cruelty and best practices for effective response.
Animal Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, and Adverse Childhood Experiences Frank Ascione Research demonstrating the higher prevalence of animal abuse in environments where humans are also abused uncovered a need for sheltering the pets, and at times, farm animals, of women survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). The role and responsibility of veterinarians whose human clients may be experiencing violence is receiving systematic attention. Legislative responses have included making some forms of animal abuse felony- level crimes and including pets and other animals in orders of protection sought by women escaping IPV. I describe the growing number of programs dedicated to creating safe environments for IPV survivors, their children, and their companion animals as well as increasing attention to animal welfare in cases of elder adult abuse and neglect. This area of research on animal abuse has led to veterinary research on non-accidental injuries to animals and developmental research on children exposed to IPV as well as animal abuse in their home environments. I close with recommendations for collaboration among professionals and agencies devoted to human welfare, animal welfare, and enhancing the “health” of environments shared by people and animals.
Abolition: A World without Cages Lori Gruen Abolition has many different meanings. Originating as a strategy to end slavery, the term has been taken up in a variety of social justice struggles, most notably, by Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and a collection of activists who made vivid the idea that the prison industrial complex, as they call it, doesn’t solve, indeed exacerbates, the social problems is it supposedly designed to fix. Within the animal protection movement, there are also some who take up the term abolition, but in this case, the meaning of the term is different again. This chapter will explore the history and meanings of abolition and unpack some of the tensions that appear between different contexts of use. Despite the variety of meanings of abolition, many people reject the idea as utopian or at least unrealistic. Drawing on careful work on abolition ethics, the chapter will highlight what can be gained by thinking in a fundamentally different way about how oppressive structures would change in a world without cages.
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