Freedom is one of the values humans most cherish. We are free if we are not imprisoned or enslaved. We are free if we are not unduly coerced or constrained in our choices or actions. Freedom can be difficult to define, but surely, we know when we lose it or when it has been taken from us.

Human rights advocates are rightly concerned when certain groups of people are exploited for their labor, like migrant workers forced into virtual slavery on fishing vessels or toiling in fields for little pay. They are concerned when groups of people are exploited for their bodies, as when young girls are forced into the sex trade. And they are concerned when groups of people are not allowed to move about or speak freely or engage in cultural rituals that are important to them. We value the freedom to choose our family and friends, to bear and raise children, to think for ourselves, and to work for a decent living. Of course, there is no such thing as pure, unadulterated freedom – we are controlled by our unconscious impulses, genetics, unspoken social conventions, and by government rules that ensure public safety and order. But we are nonetheless free in important respects. Some measure of freedom is fundamental to human well-being: it provides the substrate for human flourishing.Footnote ¹

Yet although we prize our freedom above all else, we routinely deny numerous freedoms to nonhuman animals (animals) with whom we share our planet. We imprison and enslave animals, we exploit them for their labor and their skin and bodies, we constrain what they can do and with whom they can interact. We do not let them choose their family or friends, we decide for them when and if and with whom they mate and bear offspring, and often take their children away at birth. We control their movements, their behaviors, their social interactions, while bending them to our will or to our self-serving economic agenda. Animal incarceration is so pervasive and insidious that we often do not even notice that animals are being held prisoner. If we think about it at all, we imagine animals as creatures so different from us that they don’t value the same things – and, in particular, that they don’t value their freedom because they lack the cognitive awareness to know what freedom is.

But, in fact, animals are like us in the most important respects. All animals want and need food, water, air, sleep. They need shelter and safety from physical and psychological threats, and an environment they can control. And like us, they have what might be called “higher-order” needs, such as the need to exercise control over their lives, make choices, do meaningful work, form meaningful relationships with others, and engage in forms of play and creativity. Some measure of freedom is fundamental to satisfying these higher-order needs and provides a necessary substrate for individuals to thrive and to look forward to a new day. Although they might not write books about the concepts of freedom and incarceration, animals nonetheless value their freedom and suffer in captivity just as we do.

The goods that animals value stand in stark relief against the lives that we force on them. Animals are held captive in a dizzying array of venues: zoos, factory farms, research laboratories, wet markets, fur farms, breeding facilities, pet store shelves, and so on and so on. Billions of animals around the globe are subjected to a lifetime of incarceration. (Incarceration and captivity are taken to be the same, for the purposes of this chapter.)

Incarceration clearly is more complicated and far-reaching than merely being behind bars. When we put nonhumans and humans in prison, we are dealing out punishment. Being physically confined is understood as a temporary deprivation of life’s higher-order goods. But with animals, the routine deprivations of prolonged incarceration are not understood by humans as a punishment, but rather as a neutral action, or even – as is the case with pets – a favor we do them.

Although there might be some reasonable conversation or debate about the appropriateness of incarceration for humans, there is no reasonable justification for incarcerating animals. Animals should not be behind bars, whether those bars are real or metaphorical. Animals don’t commit crimes, they aren’t violent offenders, and they don’t disregard any real or imagined social contract with humankind. Any confinement of animals against their will (which would be pretty much every instance of confinement one could imagine) counts as incarceration.

12.1 The Myriad Harms of Captivity

The fact that there is an entire literature dedicated to so-called captivity effects should leave us in no doubt that captivity causes suffering. “Captivity effects” refers to the range of physical, physiological, and even neurobiological changes induced by captive conditions. These captivity effects are similar in humans and other animals. The vast empirical database on captivity effects in nonhuman animals spans a broad range of species – from chimpanzees, dolphins, and wolves to domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, and chickens, to reptiles, amphibians, and fish – kept in a range of captive conditions, from the most obviously captive (the cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals on factory farms) to the animals caged in research and testing laboratories, to animals caged in zoos, to the animals who are captive in more ambiguous ways, such as pet dogs and cats.Footnote ² (Because the literature uses the language of “captivity” rather than “incarceration” we will use the term captivity in this section – but take it to be synonymous with incarceration.)

Captivity – including physical confinement, social isolation, and chronic exposure to stress – leads to measurable physiological changes in the brain, including loss of neural plasticity, long-term activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis,Footnote ³ and permanent changes in brain morphology.Footnote ⁴ It can lead to changes to immune function,Footnote ⁵ reproductive behaviors,Footnote ⁶ circadian rhythms, and psychological trauma.Footnote ⁷ The loss of freedom often manifests in observable abnormal behaviors. Since many of the people who will read this book come from the perspective of human incarceration, we offer a few specific examples of the physical and psychological sequelae of incarceration documented in animals. In particular, we give a few examples of what, in the scientific literature, are called “stereotypic behaviors or stereotypies” but which we could more loosely call “captivity-induced madness.”

Stereotypic behavior is the term used to describe animal behavior which is invariant, repetitive, and serves no obvious function. Stereotypes are thought to be caused by brain dysfunction brought on by stress-induced damage to the central nervous system. It is important to note that stereotypic behaviors do not occur in the wild; they are a product of captivity, a captivity-induced psychosis.Footnote ⁸

Irregular pacing behavior is often observed in captive animals who, in the wild, have large home ranges. This behavior pattern is referred to as a repetitive locomotion stereotype, or locomotory stereotypy. Polar bears, to give one example, are known to do poorly in captivity. A study published in Nature suggested that the reason why locomotory stereotypies may be so common in polar bears is that in the wild, the animals can range over tracts of land as large as 185,000 square miles each year.Footnote ⁹ Locomotory stereotypies are well documented in elephants, tigers, lions, wolves, and other canids.Footnote ¹⁰ The frenetic weaving of the mink back and forth within their tiny wire cages, as seen in undercover video footage of mink farms, is a disturbing example of locomotory stereotypy or captivity-induced madness.Footnote ¹¹

Grooming to the point of baldness, feather plucking, and other self-mutilation behaviors are sometimes called self-directed stereotypies.Footnote ¹² These behaviors occur in a wide range of species including rodents and primates in research laboratories, parrots, and other birds in captivity and cats in shelter environments or other stressful situations.

Oral stereotypies, in which an animal performs repetitive and seemingly functionless oral and oronasal activities, are prevalent in captive ungulates such as cows, pigs, and horses.Footnote ¹³ One example is a repetitive movement of the jaw, such as the “sham-chewing” commonly seen in pigs kept in gestation crates.Footnote ¹⁴ The behavior mimics the exact movement of the jaw when food is being consumed. However, sham-chewing is performed in the absence of food. Oral stereotypies surrounding food and eating are a good place to explore why providing animals with their basic needs – food, shelter, enough space to turn around – isn’t enough to ensure that they don’t suffer from profound distress caused by captivity. Next to breathing, eating is the behavior most essential for survival, and different species are exquisitely adapted to meet their survival needs within the ecosystems in which they evolved. Many of the behavioral patterns of a given animal are directed at finding food, and animals are highly motivated to perform these food-acquiring behaviors, because they are basic to survival. Providing a cow with a trough of grain may satiate the cow’s physical hunger but will not allow the cow to use any of the behavioral skills she has evolved to acquire food for herself. The behavioral urge to forage is present, even when cows are fed ad libitum. And a strong behavioral urge or motivation that goes unsatisfied leads to welfare problems. Other commonly seen oral stereotypies include tongue-rolling, object licking, chewing on cage bars or chains, and polydipsia or excessive drinking.

Often, and unfortunately for animals, the behavioral sequalae resulting from captivity are described as “problem behaviors” – this is to say, they are problematic for us, the animals’ keepers. This is perhaps most obvious in relation to animals caught in the wheels of the food industry, where the sequalae of incarceration pose a challenge to productivity. For example, agonistic behaviors among chickens or tail-biting behaviors among piglets kept in unnaturally crowded conditions can lead to injury and death – and loss of revenue. The human response to these manifestations of suffering is indecent: instead of addressing the source of suffering, we go for a Band-Aid solution, and one that simply piles one cruelty on top of another. Chickens have their beaks cut off with a hot knife and piglets have their tails cut off with clippers. A less obvious example – but closer to home for many of us – are the perceived behavioral problems of dogs who are confined to a home or crate or backyard for long periods of time: excessive barking, obsessive compulsive behaviors such as self-grooming to the point of developing lick granulomas. Many people who live with dogs fail to connect their animals’ “problem behaviors” with psychological distress, boredom, or frustration, and, as with the chickens and piglets, simply compound cruelty with more cruelty: excessive barking is “fixed” with a shock collar or a one-way trip to the shelter.

It can be difficult to untangle the threads of harm arising from animal incarceration: which aspects of animal suffering are attributed to the specific conditions of their captivity and which are the result of captivity itself? This distinction is critically important because the focus of attention in discussions of animal welfare and animal ethics is often on reducing specific harms suffered by captive animals, and never questions the broader harms of captivity itself. The physical, psychological, social harms to animals caused by the captive state are not or at least not always the result of poorly executed captivity, but of captivity itself. Take, for example, the problems of captive snakes, which have been highlighted by the work of Clifford Warwick. Most snakes in captivity as kept in enclosures that are too small to allow full extension of the snake’s body, and snakes are harmed physically and psychologically by not having enough space to spread out.Footnote ¹⁵ But they are also harmed by captivity itself, no matter whether their enclosure is adequately large relative to their body size.

Suffice it to say that alleviating some of the suffering caused by “bad captivity” may be a good short-term goal, as we move beyond cultural and economic structures that institutionalize violence toward animals. But improving the lot of captive animals is not enough. There is no such thing as “good captivity” or “good incarceration” for animals, and we need to stop pretending that there is. A well-appointed prison is still a prison.

12.2 Fake Freedoms: The Appropriation of “Freedom” Discourses

Many people who have taken an interest in issues of animal protection are familiar with the “Five Freedoms.” The Five Freedoms have become a popular cornerstone of animal welfare around the world and in various contexts of animal incarceration.

The Five Freedoms originated in the early 1960s in an eighty-five-page “Report of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals Kept under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems.”Footnote ¹⁶ This document, informally and widely known as The Brambell Report, was a response to public outcry over the abusive treatment of animals within agricultural settings. Ruth Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines brought readers inside the walls of the newly developing industrialized farming systems in the United Kingdom, what we have come to know as “factory farms.” Harrison, a Quaker and conscientious objector during World War II, described appalling practices like battery cage systems for egg-laying hens and gestation crates for sows, and consumers were shocked by what was hidden behind closed doors.

To mollify the public, the UK government commissioned an investigation into livestock husbandry, led by Bangor University zoology professor Roger Brambell. The commission concluded that there were, indeed, grave ethical concerns with the treatment of animals in the food industry and that something must be done. In its initial report, the commission specified that animals should have the freedom to “stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs.” These minimal requirements became known as the “freedoms,” and represented the conditions the Brambell Commission felt were essential to animal welfare.

The Commission also requested the formation of the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee to monitor the UK farming industry. In 1979, the name of this organization was changed to the Farm Animal Welfare Council, and the “freedoms” were subsequently expanded into their current form. The Five Freedoms state that all animals under human care should have:

1. 1. Freedom from hunger and thirst, by ready access to water and a diet to maintain health and vigor.

2. 2. Freedom from discomfort, by providing an appropriate environment.

3. 3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease, by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.

4. 4. Freedom to express normal behavior, by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and appropriate company of the animal’s own kind.

5. 5. Freedom from fear and distress, by ensuring conditions and treatment, which avoid mental suffering.

The Freedoms are now invoked not only in relationship to farmed animals, but also to animals in research laboratories, zoos. and aquaria, and even to companion animals in shelters and breeding facilities. The Freedoms appear in nearly every book about animal welfare, can be found on nearly every website dedicated to food animal or lab animal welfare, form the basis of many animal welfare auditing programs, and are taught to many of those working in fields of animal husbandry.

It is worth stopping for a moment to acknowledge how forward thinking the Brambell Report on animal freedoms was. The report was crafted at a time when the notion that animals might experience pain was still just a superstition for many researchers and others working with animals. The Brambell Report not only acknowledged that animals experience pain but went a giant step further by also providing evidence that they experience mental states and have rich emotional lives. The report (the full text of which very few people who ascribe to the Five Freedoms actually read) said plainly that making animals happy involves more than simply reducing sources of pain and suffering, but also involves providing them with positive, pleasurable experiences.

Yet although widely hailed as a huge step forward, the Brambell Report was arguably the worst thing that has happened to animals in the past century. The Five Freedoms became the cornerstone of an academic discipline called “animal welfare science” and provided a justificatory framework – a logic of incarceration which we call “welfarism” – for thinking about and justifying the widespread confinement and exploitation of animals. The Five Freedoms have become shorthand for “ethical treatment of animals.” They provide, according to a current statement by the Farm Animal Welfare Council, a “logical and comprehensive framework for analysis of animal welfare” and are typically the end of the conversation about what animals need and want. Welfarism delivers a scientific and moral buttressing for incarceration, under the auspices of caring for animals and giving them Freedoms. Under the welfarist regime, the number of animals under incarceration around the globe has been steadily climbing.

Why the Brambell Commission fixed upon the word “freedom” in their formulation of welfare guidelines remains unclear – no record exists of how this language came to be adopted. It is hard to imagine that the crafters of the Freedoms failed to recognize the fundamental paradox: how can an animal in an abattoir or battery cage be free? Being fed and housed by your captor is not freedom; it is simply what your caregiver does to keep you alive. Indeed, the Five Freedoms are not concerned with freedom but rather define the outer limits of incarceration; they provide guidance for keeping animals under conditions of profound deprivation.

Welfare concerns generally focus on preventing or relieving suffering, and making sure animals are being well-fed and cared for, without questioning the underlying conditions of incarceration that shape the very nature of their lives. We offer lip service to freedom, in talking about “cage-free chickens” and “naturalistic zoo enclosures” and in producing a steady stream of academic papers offering incremental improvements to animal prisons. But real freedom for animals is the one value we don’t want to acknowledge because it would require a deep examination of our own behavior. It might mean we should change the way we treat and relate to animals, not just to make cages bigger or provide new enrichment activities to blunt the sharp edges of boredom and frustration, but to allow animals much more freedom in a wide array of venues.

12.3 Working toward Abolition

A great deal of advocacy on behalf of animals focuses on “improving welfare” by paying attention to the Five Freedoms. This amounts to making animal prisons somewhat nicer, somewhat kinder and gentler. But the fundamental violence against animals remains intact. Welfarism and “the Freedoms” do considerable damage to animals by reinforcing and even providing improved moral padding for the logic of incarceration. This explains why some of the most vocal advocates for animal welfare work for zoos, slaughterhouses, and animal research laboratories, and sit on the boards of organizations who support the industrialized incarceration of animals.

Even the literature on captivity effects has been entwined into the logic of animal incarceration, using what we are learning about animal cognition and emotions – the very research that confirms how much animals have to lose in captivity – to make their incarceration incrementally less torturous while simultaneously reinforcing the structures of violence that keep them imprisoned.

The typical justification for holding animals captive is that although captivity may impose some harms, these harms are justified by the benefits that accrue from these practices. But one of the golden rules of ethics is that in a balancing of harms and benefits, it is unjust for the harms to befall one group and the benefits another. In the case of incarcerated animals, all the harms fall on animals while all the benefits fall to us. The animals have everything to lose and nothing to gain. This is a serious justice issue and a blatant abuse of power.

It is hard not to see a profound moral problem in our unjust incarceration of billions of animals. Making incremental welfare improvements and giving lip service to Five Freedoms is a face-saving maneuver: let’s admit that holding animals captive is not ideal and causes some harm, so let’s make the prison experience less unpleasant by decreasing the harms of captivity. The audaciousness of the workaround is remarkable: incarcerating animals is morally wrong, so let’s give them “freedoms.” The Five Freedoms are really designed to liberate us, allowing us to slip quietly past the prison gates, ensuring our peace of mind in the face of animal suffering.

The incarceration of animals, in all its myriad forms, should stop. But it cannot and will not suddenly tomorrow. A phase out is key. The animals who are currently in captivity will need to remain so, because it is unlikely that they could survive on their own and offering them “freedom” without the requisite skills to survive and without a home or family will only compound their suffering. But starting tomorrow there should be no more captive breeding of animals in captivity, for captivity. No animals should be captured from the wild and made captive, even for experiments that are aimed at saving the species from extinction since it is not fair to ask an individual to suffer for the sake of a group. (We wouldn’t justify this with humans, so shouldn’t with animals either.)

Abundant scientific research supports the idea that animals suffer physically and psychologically when held captive. It is not only the “aversive” experiences felt within captivity – the too-small cages, the boredom of eating the same food every day for your whole life, or the lack of sensory stimulation – but the captivity experience itself, the loss of self-determination, bodily integrity, the sense of experiencing life as the kind of animal that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years of evolution have prepared you to be. Captivity is a harm because it robs animals of their own lives.

13.1 Introduction

This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Critics and scholars note the entwined nature of race, gender, and species logics that shape and unite these spaces and object to the short- and long-term incarceration these institutions make possible as well as the conditions residents confined within experience.Footnote ¹ Prisoner rights, migrant rights, and animal rights critics also contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience.Footnote ² These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education.Footnote ³

In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I seek to add to the literature on “humane-washing”Footnote ⁴ as well as contestations and uses of “childhood” and “family” narrativesFootnote ⁵ in general in this analysis. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces.Footnote ⁶ The argument acknowledges that these carceral spaces can yield positive benefits for some, such as rehabilitation or rescue of a specific individual or even conservation of a specific species. However, it accepts the existing critical scholarly literature against such spaces overall to focus on the question of how carceral spaces mask their problematic and oppressive nature by integrating the presence of human children.

13.2 The Use of “Children” to Humanize Carceral Spaces

To be sure, prisons, detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are not primarily or simply spaces for children. But this makes the question of when and where children do acquire importance in these “paradigm institutions of domination”Footnote ⁷ all the more pressing. This part of the analysis takes up this question.

13.3 Human Child–Animal Nexus: Understanding Child-Invoking Carceral Discourses as Perverse Deployments and Betrayals of Childhood

It is well established that certain human bodies are associated with nature and animals more than others. As Western societies were industrializing, human children were posited as closer to nature and surrounded with animal figures (through the rise of stuffed animals, companion animal keeping, and jungle gyms) even as societies and families transitioned from rural to urban landscapes.Footnote ¹¹² In contemporary times, the association of children as closer to nature and animals is still intact through the continuation of stuffed animals and companion animals as normative in middle-class households,Footnote ¹¹³ coveted outdoor early childhood educational curriculums,Footnote ¹¹⁴ children’s picture books, readers, and other literature that is highly mediated by animal figures,Footnote ¹¹⁵ and, as we saw above, zoos and aquaria that pitch themselves as the ideal place for family-friendly outings where children can see “wild” animals. With this nexus in mind, this Part illuminates how this human child-animal nexus is marshaled to harm both animals and human children.

13.4 Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic and the bans on public gatherings it has entailed gave many humans worldwide their first experience of lockdown, shelter in place, and of generally not being able to leave their homes for many weeks if not months. Even if they could leave, the closure of familiar places of learning, recreation, and business did not allow them much choice as to where to go and what to do. Although the privileged among us had our many digital devices as per usual, many media stories appeared, presumably meant for those securely resourced and at home but now without their regular range of mobility, as how not to get bored,Footnote ¹³⁴ how to keep children entertained and stimulated,Footnote ¹³⁵ and how generally to keep a positive mood and get through the experience.Footnote ¹³⁶ Although doubtless a stressful experience for even those privileged by class, geographic location, and species, the reality is that we place captive animals and humans in something markedly worse and vulnerability-inducing than a COVID-19 lockdown every single day of their captive existence. What this chapter has shown is how the presence of the human child helps to obscure the chronic harms of the permanent lockdown sites our societies normalize as well as justifies their continued existence.

The social and legal remedy for zoos seems straightforward (which is not to say it will be easy to implement or that other social supports will not be needed for transitions to sanctuaries or other models of living for the former captive animals). As Pierce and Bekoff argue, the vast majority of the world’s zoos should be shut down and technological exhibits should replace live animal ones in the remaining zoos that remain open and are well managed. They write: “If zoos are mainly for children (and, as the paying addendum, the parents), these interactive exhibits have the potential to be more fun and more educational than traditional zoo animal exhibits without the collateral damage of real animal lives … Zoos with live animals would become a thing of the past.”Footnote ¹³⁷ As for the captive breeding argument, zoo administrators themselves admit the limits of this argument given the increasing difficulty of introducing animals back into the wild and the loss of their natural habitat in any case.Footnote ¹³⁸

The answer to the harms that prison and detention centers occasion for children also behooves us to seek out alternative justice models and community-based alternatives to prison and detention while processing immigration claims.Footnote ¹³⁹ If countries, like Canada, have signed and ratified the CRC, then they have committed themselves to upholding the CRC’s championing of the best-interests-of-the-child test as the primary consideration involving all state decisions regarding children and their parents.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Given the literature showing both the harms to children in prison or detention as well as the harms if they are separated from their parents, particularly mothers, the answer here also seems straightforward: children and their mothers or other caregivers should not be incarcerated or detained.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Instead of bringing children into captivity to avoid separation, the mother or caregiver and child should remain together outside of captivity (where there is no safety risk to the child and older children able to decide for themselves wish to do so). The rights and present and future interests of the child in remaining with a loving mother or other caregiver must take priority over incarceration rationales. The funds used to support incarceration and detention can now be redirected to the social services that will be required to implement alternative justice models and housing arrangements. These funds can also support the mother and her child(ren) in the community and mitigate vulnerabilities in communities in general which shape most adults’,Footnote ¹⁴² particularly women’s, pathways to prison.Footnote ¹⁴³

14.1 Introduction

Thousands of scholarly books and articles, films and documentaries, memoirs, biographies, illustrated weeklies, paintings and other artistic works, and museum artifacts and displays have depicted the history and geography of the nineteenth-century western American “cattle trails” and the small rural towns that sprang up at their termini.Footnote ¹ This outsized body of American West literature and culture has collectively depicted bovine animals as an instrument, albeit an integral one, of cowboys, ranchers, cattle barons, and a multitude of other enterprising entrepreneurs who economically, politically, and culturally maneuvered control over the emerging livestock (beef) industry in the United States. From the classic John Hawkes 1948 Western film Red River to the more recent 2018 Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, key sites of this emergent industry such as Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, figure prominently, while the animals themselves appear only as figures on the landscape, without lives, experiences, or agency. In such Western films the animals are typically portrayed as either peacefully grazing in beautiful pastoral landscapes or wholly out of control and wildly stampeding in clouds of dust. Once captured within the Abilene or Dodge City “cow town” we find them obediently if anxiously being herded into stock pens or other controlling devices, being made ready for shipment by railroad to slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond.

My assessment of this body of work is that real animal lives and stories are nearly totally absent and remain to be studied and documented. My ultimate aim in this chapter is to begin to center these animals’ experiences within the “carceral archipelago” of the cattle trails and towns into which they were forced, identifying some of the material, social, and psychological experiences and trauma of becoming an animalized commodity within the carceral practices and infrastructures of the emergent cattle industry. Studying these animal lives fundamentally involves understanding their gradual commodification – these formerly free-roaming lives were literally turned into money, “free for the taking,” with virtually no official regulatory apparatus at the time guiding their capture, enclosure, movement, exploitation, and eventual death.

Animals had not heretofore figured in my field of carceral geography until my attempt to conceptualize a “trans-species carceral geography” in Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (2018), a book which considered factory farms, slaughterhouses, research labs, and zoos as prisons or prisonlike spaces, with those incarcerated within them as animalized prisoners. In the book I placed into parallel conversation the connected and entangled spatial, structural, operational, and embodied carceral practices and processes of a number of industrial sites and institutions in the present-day United States. I aimed to uncover the epistemic violence that pervades spaces of both human and nonhuman animal captivity, confinement, exploitation, and death, a violence that is normalized and neutralized in countless ways in everyday life. Naming spaces of animal captivity and confinement as prisonlike allowed insights into the way that “carceral logics”Footnote ² extend throughout the prison-, agricultural-, and medical-industrial complexes in similar ways. These logics impact both human and nonhuman animals in consistent and detrimental ways via processes of animalization, racialization (particularly via anti-blackness), and criminalization.

My conceptual intervention in this chapter occurs at the interface of carceral geography, critical animal histories, and material culture. Such an intervention requires a new understanding or remapping of the historical and empirical context of the Texas-Oklahoma-Kansas cattle trails and towns as a “rural carceral archipelago” – an archipelago with a very specific rural spatiality.Footnote ³ Unlike the scores of works that have focused on these trails and towns from cultural, economic, political, agricultural, or social lenses, I chart new ground by thinking about historical animal lives as those lived within carceral practices, operations, structures, and logics. Framing the carceral as a lived experience for bovine animals, as well as how this space developed as a specifically carceral archipelago, structures what follows in this chapter.

The illegal enclosure of the land by the emergent “cattle baron” class in the nineteenth century, enabled with new technologies such as barbed wire and governments lacking the interest, will, or ability to challenge it, offers important insights into how carceral logic works in place, and the impact of these practices and institutions on animals. Fencing became a primary mode of seizure of public land and resources for the benefit of individual ranching enterprises in the West. Despite the fact that land laws prohibited taking public lands, there were usually no repercussions for doing so. What then does it mean to think of the enclosure of public lands as illegal? The evolution of land law, with its ostensible legal remedies to resolve conflict among big-enterprise cattlemen and between smaller-scale farmers and ranchers, is an important component of carceral logics, particularly when considering who is helped by such legal remedies and who is not. Certain legal as well as extragovernment actions mediated human relations at the time, for example the “fence-cutting wars” emerged as one human resistance to carceral enclosure. But an equally important part of the story is about carceral practices mediating relations among humans (mostly men) and animals.

So rather than thinking of cattle trails and towns as sites of adventure, work, endurance, and romance for some humans, then, we can also focus on these places as sites of violence enacted upon animals – the capturing, transporting, fencing, corralling, branding, ear-marking, whipping, and shipping of animals as commodities for distant markets. What was it like for the animals to be “driven” quickly by workers (cowboys) who were themselves laboring under difficult circumstances? How did the cattle experience the new technologies such as wire fencing? What forms of bodily modification and appropriation were the animals subjected to – for example, the brutality of branding, whipping, and harnessing that marked them as property? What were the physical, emotional, and psychological implications of existing as beings with no legal standing, outside of the informal claims made by cattle barons and others? Any “laws” with oversight to the emergent cattle industry related only to access and control over land and water, not treatment of animals. No ostensible “protections” for farmed or ranched animals would appear in the United States until well into the twentieth century, and these to an extremely restricted degree. Even today, the only law that governs treatment of farm animals is the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958.

In this work I focus on the period prior to extensive railroad advancement onto the Great Plains and West and shipment via train of live animals or carcasses to slaughterhouses beyond – a period with practices that have received much needed and important scholarly attention.Footnote ⁴ This project requires a creative methodological engagement with historical sources that offer insights into animals’ lived experiences and thus the foundational, violent building blocks of the beef industry.Footnote ⁵

14.2 The Colonial Carceral Archipelago: Land and Law

In her Creatures of Empire (2004), Virginia Anderson details the important, agenic role of farm animals – especially cows and horses – in the North American colonial project. Anderson argues that animals were one of two “immigrant groups,” human and nonhuman, who were “central to the plot” of colonization. Though highly mobile under a free-range style of animal husbandry – the animals foraged and fed themselves, found their own shelter, transported themselves to new areas, and cared for their young – they not only altered whole ecosystems but were key to English colonists’ land claims and the “cause of permanence.”Footnote ⁶ Though they required little human labor, these animals required vast acreages for foraging – five-to-twenty acres per animalFootnote ⁷ – which quickly led to overgrazing, moving on to new lands, and ultimately complete appropriation and displacement of indigenous land and peoples (the carceral effect writ large). As such the animals functioned as what Specht calls a “technology” or “biotechnology” of conquest.Footnote ⁸ While authors such as Anderson focus primarily on the eastern colonies, similar colonial processes and increasing land acquisitions were in play in western cattle enterprises as well, if on a remarkably larger scale than the small-scale farming enterprises in the East.

Southern Texas as the epicenter of US cattle ranching and origin point of the cattle trails dates to the Spanish colonial period. The first bovine animals were shipped to North America by Spanish explorers and conquistadors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Fast forward to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and Franciscan clergy had established more than fifty missions in what is now Texas, each with their own small herds. After Mexican independence in 1821 most clergymen refused loyalty to the Mexican government and abandoned their missions, with their animals free to run loose, allowing wild herds to flourish. Estimates are that 100,000 bovine animals roamed Texas by 1830. Three decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, that number had increased to an estimated 3.5–5 million.Footnote ⁹

The history of grazing “rights” on western land tells us a great deal about the evolution of the carceral landscape under study here, and can also tell us a great deal about the experiences of animals ensnared within it. In the boom years of the 1870s and 1880s, the cattle barons enjoyed “near hegemony” over western public lands by declaring a simple right of sovereignty. An informal code of entitlement, range rights if you will, was established if a rancher could claim to be the first to appropriate a local stream. The aspiring cattle grazer could, by claiming the water supply, control the surrounding terrain. Thus, the first step in consolidating power over the herds was in gaining control over grazing land – grass for food – and water. Richard White describes cattlemen as “the most prone to violence of any economic interest group in the West,” with their predilection for violence “largely result[ing] from the tenuousness of their own legal claims to the land.”Footnote ¹⁰ Legal ownership of the land was secondary to simply gaining access to it, and ranchers employed various means to graze animals on land to which they had no legal title. Most conflicts over land and grazing rights related to attempts to maintain an illegal monopoly on public-domain lands, and the ranchers’ preference was to physically drive out the competition rather than fight them in courts.

A number of scholars have shown how the “Wild West” get-rich schemes of turning public land and other resources into private ownership was largely unregulated, and cattlemen sought control over vast acreages mostly by simply claiming them, as well as through manipulation of federal law such as the Homestead Act of 1862. Land fraud of various flavors was used to create large blocks of real estate under a single title, and involved an intersection of war widows, children, and family members working together with land agents and local politicians. In the mid-nineteenth century, Texas was particularly ripe for land schemes due to overlapping and contested Mexican, Texan, and US sovereignty claims, but so were numerous other locations throughout the Plains and West. On such illegally acquired land, animals could be fed for free, guaranteeing an enormous profit margin at the point of sale north. Thus, part and parcel of the American colonial project was this type of land acquisition – the process of turning the public domain into private property – yet the General Land Office, a Bureau under the Secretary of the Treasury, was inefficient and ill-equipped to handle the highly complex machinations of surveying, selling, and registering of public lands. This was particularly the case when prior appropriation or “getting there first” bumped up against the complexity and overlapping nature of the 375 land laws passed by Congress from 1789 to 1834 – laws adjusting the size of lots for sale, shifting the price per acre, altering the requirements for payment, and granting rights of preemption in specific regions.Footnote ¹¹ As Limerick argued, “first arrival” made the distinction between legitimate acquisition and theft a fine one. In both cases, the act was similar – one simply appropriated something for one’s own use – but, by a sometimes-subtle difference of timing, one act was honored and protected by law, and the other was punished. This would provide a basis for the carceral logic of the time and place.

As the railroads began to extend and connect to rural outposts in the Plains states, entrepreneurs in the new cow towns such as Abilene, Kansas, sought out Texas livestock trails to reach them, benefiting greatly from the new trade. The most-well-known of the western cattle trails ran from Texas northward to the state of Kansas, as herders drove millions of cows north from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1880s. From 1867 until 1871, the 1,000-mile-long Chisholm Trail was the main livestock trail from Texas, a trail that ran from San Antonio to Fort Worth, Texas, through Oklahoma and ended at Abilene.Footnote ¹² An individual cowboy would oversee the movement of 245–350 animals, and they collectively drove 600,000–700,000 of them north from Texas during 1871 alone, all eventually bound for abattoirs in St. Louis and Chicago. These animals generally covered between ten and twelve miles per day on their three-month trek north to the rail link, becoming more “trail broke” as days and weeks wore on and thus becoming “easier to handle” – or to put another way, less able to resist their circumstances. Stock breeding and domestication always have the effect of “breaking” animals and thus reducing their potential for resisting their conditions, even if they also then appear to be colluding with or somehow collaborating with their oppressors.Footnote ¹³ In the case of the cattle trails, as cowboys needed to minimize the weight loss of their herds, they moved them slowly, pasturing them along the way.

They arrived at sites such as Abilene that were still relatively unpeopled, well watered, and offered plentiful grass for the incoming herds. The geography and carceral infrastructures that developed in Abilene and other towns would reflect their central nodal function in the developing cattle beef industry. These also collectively constituted what I call a colonial “carceral archipelago” of cattle trails and cattle towns. In using that term I am borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1978), wherein he argued that this island concept can be applied to a set of institutions, surveillance systems, and technologies that “discipline” and exert power and control over populations and indeed whole societies in a spatially ordered and universalizing way.Footnote ¹⁴

Importantly again, though, the Texas longhorns of the emergent beef industry were nearly wild, and thus their capture, movement, and enclosure, by fencing and other means, was an important piece of this historical carceral logic. At the time, acquiring physical control over herds was more efficacious for the cattlemen and cattle barons than seeking legal control over them. Those who were most successful at turning these animal lives into personal property simply rounded them up, claimed them, branded them, and enclosed them. Sometimes whole herds would be collected through rustling or “mavericking” (hunting and branding wild calves).Footnote ¹⁵ As the herds were gradually declared property of individual humans and commodities for capital accumulation, not only their status but their lives and experiences dramatically changed. While the animals’ status as property, much discussed among animal scholars, had a violent impact on their lives, it does not explain all the violence.Footnote ¹⁶ Violence toward animals occurs whether they are “owned” or not. Having particular status within the law would not have likely changed much about their treatment; despite certain protections for certain animals within the law, then and now, the lack of bovine animals’ legal “standing” simply made it easier to claim, buy, sell, and kill them.

14.3 The Carceral Infrastructure and Technological Developments

Infrastructural and technological developments at towns such as Abilene where bovine animals were corralled and then loaded onto railroad cars at the termini of the cattle trails also represent a singularly important carceral phenomenon of the nineteenth-century United States Innovations in transportation, specifically, the “cattle car” (and by 1869, the refrigerated car that hauled dead animal carcasses) was one of the most important technological developments that impacted and increased the trade in bovine animals, and indeed, that structured so much of their lived experience. It was primarily British companies that played a major role in developing the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s and 1880s – the foreign “cattle barons” – and who eventually also shipped refrigerated cow carcasses to Britain in ocean steamers. Railroad development actually included an array of ancillary infrastructural developments in the cow towns that impacted animal lives – railroad stations with telegraph facilities, supervisory personnel, and company-owned cow pens and stockyards.

One of the earliest and most successful Kansas entrepreneurs to link the cattle trails with the railroad, the dealer and town promotor Joseph McCoy built stock pens near the rail depot on 250 acres of land in Abilene, Kansas, to hold cows awaiting shipment north on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The first twenty-car shipment of cows from Abilene to Chicago was in September of 1867. McCoy convinced the railroad to construct a rail siding for a cow pen at the Abilene depot, and then pay him a commission on every carload of animals shipped. This north-south cattle complex expanded in the 1870s, as the demand for beef, tallow, and hides greatly expanded amid postwar prosperity.Footnote ¹⁷

Concomitantly, one of the most significant instruments of violence and spatial control within the emergent bovine and other livestock industry of the time was the revolutionary invention of wire fencing, which facilitated the enclosure of public pasture land for private use. The traditional wooden fence of the East or Europe would not be feasible in a landscape lacking trees for lumber; large-scale fencing only became possible in this region with the invention of barbed wire. Netz argues for the critical importance of examination of this technology across species lines – and in the case of barbed wire, the violent enclosure and control of bovine animals during colonization of the American West.Footnote ¹⁸

Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire in 1874 and opened a small manufacturing plant in DeKalb, Illinois, for its production, with large-scale production and sale eventually located to Washburn and Moen Manufacturing in Worcester, Massachusetts. More than 350 barbed wire patents were issued between 1875 and 1890, although it was the Glidden patent that came to monopolize the market (and indeed, is the fence still in use today). The ideal barbed wire purportedly prevented injury to animals – or at least purportedly did not cause open wounds that would become infected – and aimed to increase a wire’s visibility to humans and animals alike (including horses). Marketing of the wire fence was an important piece of advancing this carceral technology, as were improvements in iron and steel production. Glidden’s patent (no. 157,124) is an interesting document of torture unto itself,Footnote ¹⁹ declaring that unlike other wires that seriously harmed animals, “the double, machine-twisted stand of galvanized steel wire, carrying four-pointed steel barbs … prick[s] smartly on contact and warning, but not wounding the animal.” This “perfect fence … borrowed from nature the principle of the sharp pricking thorn thus appealing to the sense of pain and danger that resides in the skin of the farm animal.” Many of the proposed wires caused too much injury and loss of animals; competition among wire makers thus focused on loss of one’s property value rather than concern for animal welfare or suffering. The barbs were intended to domesticate or “retame” by shock an entire breed of animals through such immediate painful impact,Footnote ²⁰ but also ultimately served as an efficient biotechnology through which enclosed animals could be more easily bred, fed, and controlled.

One rather infamous early adopter in the Texas Panhandle, Charles Goodnight, fenced in over 3 million acres of public range with illegal fences while others followed suit, fencing land over which they had no legal claim.Footnote ²¹ Also in the Texas Panhandle, the Scottish-backed XIT ranch pursued its own 3 million acre fencing project, operating on a grant from the state with an estimated 6,000 miles of fence. Fencing provided greater control over animals for ranchers who had possession, if not the title, to large sections of land.

Such fraudulent or at best questionable fencing activities led to what has been called the “Fence Cutting Wars” in the early 1880s, which pitted such large cattle companies that had illegally fenced thousands of acres of public lands against the smaller scale “open range” ranchers – many of whom were former cowboys trying to eke a living from ranching – as well as pitting farmers against ranchers, the latter of whom argued that farmers should fence their crops to protect them from free-grazing animals. Widespread fence cutting ensued by the small-scale ranchers and farmers in 1883–84, with more than half of Texas counties reporting fence cutting and pasture burning, and episodes of violence including gunfights and deaths in places like Dodge City, Kansas. Local, state, and federal governments attempted to legislatively prevent fencing of public land. Many small farmers and ranchers wrote to the Secretary of the Interior angered by “unauthorized fencing” by cattlemen, with their letters presented to Congress in 1884. The letters explicate the extent of large-scale and fraudulent inclosures [sic] of public lands by stockmen, including entire counties in Kansas. As the then–Secretary of the Interior H. M. Teller wrote to Congress,

The US Congress finally passed a law in 1885 designed to prosecute anyone who attempted to fence public land for private use. The large British and American cattle companies suffered little repercussion from such legislation, however, and continued large-scale fencing unabated through manipulation of the Homestead Act (1862), the Timber Culture Act (1873), and the Desert Land Act (1887) throughout the Great Plains and West, which awarded land based ostensibly on building construction, planting trees, or installing irrigation (respectively), or they purchased land abutting the railroads and preempted the public lands next to them. Estimates are that up to 7.3 million acres of public land was fraudulently expropriated by cattle companies in this way in the 1870s and 1880s. The endgame of this system of “imprisonment” of cows via fences, of course, legally or illegally, was their eventual death in the northern slaughterhouses.Footnote ²³

14.4 Centering Animal Experiences in the American Carceral Archipelago

Bovine animal experiences that began with their forced migration to North America in slings on Spanish sailing ships in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and ended with their boarding railroad cars bound for Chicago abattoirs in the nineteenth represent a singularly poignant historical example of how violence toward nonhuman animals with attendant pain and suffering is a basic ingredient – and outcome – of industries whose design is based on carceral logic.Footnote ²⁴ Recent scholarship in critical animal studies offers helpful understandings of the lived experiences of captive animals on farms, in zoos, in research labs, and in other carceral spaces within which they undergo harmful processes and practices. Gillespie’s The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (2018) offers an example of “witnessing” bovine social, emotional, and psychological responses to a number of carceral settings such as auction yards and dairy farms, as well as sites of refuge. But how might one engage such affective, visceral knowing in a historical context? A different or more expansive approach is needed to understand the experiences of historical animals, those long dead and no longer able to be directly “witnessed.” If we consider bovine animals as shapers of histories and geographies as Anderson suggests, we must entertain the notion of them as historical agents with lives, kinship relations, emotions, preferences, interests, and agency along with those of their human captors. Thus, an important question revolves around how to access animal experiences to try to understand the worlds – albeit colonial carceral worlds – that they cocreated with their human captors and for themselves. Many scholars of animal histories and historical geographies have demonstrated that this can be done and have modeled useful approaches.Footnote ²⁵

Colonial and postcolonial scholars have taught us that the experiences of those heretofore silenced in the historical record or archive can be made accessible – indeed must be made accessible – and in much the same way that we understand the historical experience of any other “other” whose lives and stories were represented in archival, textual, photographic, and so forth, sources by someone else. Erica Fudge reminds us that past subjectivities, human and nonhuman, have always been difficult to access – that the archive is always already fraught as a representational tool. Both humans and nonhumans have been shaped by an archive not of their own making. As Fudge observes, humans can write anything about animals, whether “true” or “false,” but this applies to all history and any being written about: “these are problems of history in general and not specifically about the history of animals.”Footnote ²⁶ It is important to keep in mind meanwhile that animal cultures, identities, experiences, and so on are not simply a function of species habits and characteristics: the spaces and places of their experiences, in the case here, within carceral contexts, is equally important. Different environments or communities will produce different kinds of animals and animal experiences and behaviors.Footnote ²⁷ As always though, decentering our human, anthropocentric interpretations of animal perspectives and experience, of carceral or any other spaces, remains our collective challenge.Footnote ²⁸

Obviously, animals express themselves. But as Buller argues, though we may not “share language with non-humans we do share embodied life and movement and, in doing so, different – yet both biologically and socially related – ways of inhabiting the world.”Footnote ²⁹ But can we even imagine bovine animals creating life-worlds for themselves in nineteenth century western trails and towns? RoyleFootnote ³⁰ argues that such animals have been so thoroughly objectified that to think of them as having any sort of life at all is almost unthinkable. What would it mean to discover historical bovine subjectivity – that of beings under intense external human control accompanied nonetheless by the everyday experiences of walking or running across pastures and streams, eating, resting, playing, fighting, caring for one another, procreating, and so on. The Finnish authors and editors of History according to Cattle (2015) offer a most provocative attempt to try to capture this embodied way of inhabiting the world for bovine animals, via the Museum of the History of Cattle exhibitions. To these authors, for example, the “cattle tongue is not a written language. In cattle culture, the tongue is a means of touching others.” Installations feature partial, blurry, shadowy images of light, objects, and landscape as well as intensely vibrant magnified images of other objects within close range such as “companion species” dress patterns and the veins on a leaf, all imaginings of bovine perspective.Footnote ³¹

Historians have typically relied on narrative mechanisms to understand animal pasts. Many refer to animals in historical narratives as “absent presences” – presences in the archive albeit ones who do not speak or control the narrative. Archival documentary sources and narratives produced by humans provide one access point to these lives – films, paintings, photographs, memoirs – even if they offer only traces of historical animals’ lived experiences. A poignant example we might easily return to is one seemingly innocuous but unforgettable scene in the Western film Red River, whose depiction of branding restrained animals – searing hot irons onto sizzling animal flesh – is gruesome in its realistic detail. And yet, the overall effect of this filming is wholly artificial and sanitized for a meat-eating postwar American audience; the real, live animals undergoing an undoubtedly painful procedure lie still and are portrayed as eliciting no reaction at all. When examining such representations we must think seriously about the extent to which human ideas about bovine animals were “invented” by certain actors whose purpose was to produce certain kinds of bodies and behaviors upon which to profit.

The second access point to past animal lives are historical-material artifacts that can speak to the kinds of bodily management practices and tools that cowboys and ranchers employed to capture and commodify animal lives – for example carceral apparatuses and practices such as barbed wire, stock pens, branding irons, and dehorning tools. Wilcox and RutherfordFootnote ³² observe that histories and memories are passed down through generations of animals in ways that humans cannot fathom. For scholars attempting to materially reconstruct past animal lives, though, little remains that testifies to these prior existences. Individual lives are erased by chemical, biological, and physical processes acting upon the landscape that wipe away identifiable traces, tracks, and remains. Cox illustrates how material objects in the archive, in her case, veterinary archives, are useful in writing the history of animals.Footnote ³³ Cox interestingly found that such objects and instruments contained traces of fur, skin, and blood of real, deceased animals that can help formulate theories about emotional and psychological stress. These insights should prompt us to recategorize objects such as fences, branding irons, ropes, whips, and a myriad of restraining devices as important and relevant archival evidence, to human-animal interaction as well as animal-to-animal experience.

Examining samples of such instruments and artefacts of torture at museums such as at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, alongside “cinematographical” tricks of film production such as that of Red River against other photographic and artistic images of carceral practices, can help us begin to triangulate important understandings of animals’ lived experiences. As Fudge writes, “material and rhetorical are linked in their context, and the history that recognizes this can, in turn, force a reassessment of the material through its analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the written record.”Footnote ³⁴

The Barbed Wire Study Collection located at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame museum offers a useful entreé into instruments of animal control and dominance – by the sheer volume of variously pointed and strung iron and steel devices – as well as evidence of how an individual might experience their use. As Netz writes, the “history of barbed wire took place precisely at the level of the flesh … the tool was created to control animals by inflicting pain on them … the simple and unchanging equation of flesh and iron.”Footnote ³⁵ On display are 1,300 strands of barbed wire, among a collection of 8,000 strands, claimed to be the largest such collection in the world. The text accompanying this well-maintained and catalogued collection primarily emphasizes “advancements” in wire technology, belying the pain and trauma inflicted by its samples. Entanglements in wires, suffering open wounds derived from them (which led to insect infestation), and becoming stopped and trapped by fencing have been well documented by human observers. White details eyewitness accounts of impacts of wire fencing during dangerous weather events such as droughts and blizzards. One poignant example involved animals encountering and being stuck by the “drift fences” that the Texas Panhandle Cattlemen’s Association, working with large cattle companies in northern Texas, erected in the 1880s, intended to control the number of animals traveling south. Winter blizzards drove tens of thousands of animals south but the “drift fences” became “death traps” for perhaps two-thirds, who ran into them, piled up against them, and died by freezing or starving.Footnote ³⁶

The National Cowboy Hall of Fame museum also features a Branding Exhibition, a special collection of branding irons and instruments used (and still used) to differentiate property claims made by various cattlemen by marking cow flesh with a hot, heavy iron poker, typically a symbol about four inches in height. While the collection primarily is focused on the historical evolution of brands and the various “styles” and symbols used by cattlemen, these instruments and accompanying wall text also offer a unique and indispensable insight into the painful procedure of burning a mark onto cow flesh. The “stamp irons,” some now corroded with age, were used to apply a mark in one impression. Wall text accompanying the irons recounts the branding process:

As human witnesses have recounted,Footnote ³⁷ during this gruesome process “there is an acrid odor, strong, repulsive … [the animal] will go BAWR-R-R-R, its eyes will bulge alarmingly, its mouth will slaver, and its nose will snort.”

Both the barbed wire and branding iron museum artifacts force us to consider more nonrepresentational, emotional, affective approaches to the historical study of animal suffering: “visceral knowing.”

14.5 Concluding Comment

The nineteenth-century American cattle trails and cattle towns remain an integral piece of American legend and mythology, and though many scholars have made valuable interventions into the “reality” of the political, economic, environmental, and cultural factors that constituted the emergent cattle beef industry, much remains to be studied about animal experience in this story. It is a story of lived animal experiences of carceral spaces, developed within and facilitated by a range of legal or extralegal, technological, and political-economic carceral apparatuses. Certainly use of instruments of torture such as wire fencing and branding have not abated – although perhaps today’s cows are tattooed with identification numbers on their ears or lips or have computer chips inserted under their skin, and owners of the mass production of meat processing have become the twenty-first-century version of the cattle baron. But through study of available historical, especially material cultural, sources and evidence these lives ensnared within an American carceral archipelago can be understood and appreciated anew.

15.1 Introduction

On November 25, 2019, the president of the United States signed the bipartisan Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT). Given the bill was unanimously supported by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, it would seem incarceration is becoming the preferred solution to specific forms of abuse against certain animals. Prior to PACT, there was no US federal felony law prohibiting animal cruelty. PACT does “not apply to people who slaughter animals for food or to those who hunt, trap and fish,” nor does it apply to non-human animals threatening human life or property, subject to scientific experimentation, or under veterinary care.Footnote ¹ Instead, it makes a federal crime the “crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling or sexual exploitation” of animals that would fall outside of state legal jurisdiction.Footnote ² This broadens previous federal legislation prohibiting the sale of “crush videos” by criminalizing not just the sale but the actions these videos capture. It has been celebrated by animal protectionists as a reflection of “American values” and as a mechanism that will enhance the investigatory power of animal protection groups to “truly bring justice for the animals … by ensur[ing] some of the most horrific acts of animal cruelty are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”Footnote ³

If convicted under PACT, offenders can be fined or sentenced to a maximum of seven years in prison. Animal cruelty legislation in all fifty US states includes felony provisions. While what constitutes a “felony” varies across states, it often refers to sentences of incarceration that are more than twelve months and that can be served at either state or federal institutions. PACT is meant to allow for the prosecution of cases not captured by state law, such as those involving multiple state jurisdictions or occurring on federal grounds. The establishment of PACT could also result in more resources for the investigation and prosecution of violence against animals, thereby adding to available laws that drive incarceration. Animal protection groups have been instrumental in lobbying for the institution of new animal cruelty legislation and the strengthening of extant law.Footnote ⁴ Like the laws themselves, the supposed “justice”/”benefit” achieved would be almost explicitly limited to companion animals. As I argue in this chapter, these laws will not benefit animals writ large. Instead, such laws will bolster the intertwined logics of race and species that underpin the caging and incarceration of those categorized as sub-/non-humans.

In the Americas, race and species are inseparable. Indigenous theorists, Black studies scholars, and political theorists have argued that the making of race and animality have been integral to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote ⁵ This does not mean that we ought to analogize between the experiences of racialized individuals and non-human animals, but to instead “focus on interspecies connectedness” as “the history of the animal and the Black in the black Atlantic is connected, rather than simply comparable.”Footnote ⁶ In this sense, race is “a permanent presence inextricably part of the animal question.”Footnote ⁷ In her work on race and animality, Claire Jean Kim shows that taxonomies of life rely on the subjugation of animality and blackness.Footnote ⁸ It is upon this mutual subjugation that “the human” is established. For Kim, “blackness is a species construct (meaning ‘in proximity to the animal’), and animalness is a racial construct (meaning ‘in proximity to the Black’), and the two are dynamically interconstituted all the way down.”Footnote ⁹ A clean separation between race and species is, according to Kim, impossible because their mutual constitution is foundational to how “the human” is ontologized: “the anti-black social order that props up the ‘human’ is also a zoological order, or what we might call a zoologo-racial order.”Footnote ¹⁰

In the Americas the prison is a colonial and racial project. Prior to colonization of what are now called the Americas, responses to harm did not include confinement or incarceration. Lisa Monchlin demonstrates that specific to “the Indigenous cultures of the northern hemisphere, no First Nations practiced methods of incarceration and no communities used holding cells for punishment.”Footnote ¹¹ For Katherine McKittrick, the prison “twins” and continues the placelessness constituted by plantation slavery as it is a location of racialized spatial violence premised on “displacement, surveillance, and enforced slow death.”Footnote ¹² Projects of colonialism also entail the intentional placelessness of nonhuman animals who remain targeted by violent and racialized geographies.Footnote ¹³ The prison remains a place of racialized and animalized encountersFootnote ¹⁴ that maintains the singularity of colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁵

Nonhuman animals are part of prison life in various manners: as food, as “pests,” as therapy and/or companion animals, as commodities in penal agricultural programs, and as those liminal to the grounds. Some examples include those used in prison rodeos,Footnote ¹⁶ in penitentiary agriculture,Footnote ¹⁷ and those who live with and amongst prisoners as “pests.”Footnote ¹⁸ Prison-animal programs (such as “puppy programs”) have also become popular in the United States and Canada since the late 1990s.Footnote ¹⁹

Animals who live on or near prison grounds have often had their habitats destroyed or irreparably altered by building the prison in the first place, and prisons are a source of ongoing environmental harm associated with their operation.Footnote ²⁰

While animal cruelty laws are promoted on the basis that they “protect” animals, I argue that they, rather unwittingly, participate in and further promote harm to animals – harms that are enacted by the prison through its racialized logic of caging those deemed subhuman.Footnote ²¹ I do so by examining the prominent human-animal relationships produced in the context of incarceration: liminal animals, farmed animals who are prison property and industry, and animals used in rehabilitative/therapeutic programs. The examples that follow are by no means exhaustive, but they provide a précis of specific human-animal relationships occurring in Canadian and US prisons. It is then the case that in the bid to denounce animal cruelty, PACT and other legal mechanisms that drive incarceration also drive the forms of animal cruelty that remain culturally acceptable. Criminalization measures such as these find their footing in flawed notions of rehabilitation and justice. As this chapter shows, it is not possible for a prison to rehabilitate animal cruelty when it itself requires and practices animal cruelty.

15.2 Animals in Prison

15.3 Conclusion

It is a gruesome irony that incarceration is positioned both by lawmakers and the animal protection movement as a mechanism to achieve justice for non-human animals. The prison as structure harms surrounding waters, lands, and ecosystems, often making life impossible for the more-than-human displaced and affected by its presence. More directly, as this chapter has shown, the prison also structures human-animal relationships: between prisoners and liminal animals, in animal agriculture, and in community service training programs. Liminal animals are not targeted for transformation in the way that those in animal agriculture and PAPs are. While they might, to some degree, enter and exit prison grounds on their own accord, some are targetted for extermination, while others are in relationships of mutual care with human prisoners. Farmed animals in prisons are produced as deaded life, whereas those present in training programs are valuable as lively commodities. Both are used as props from which the prison sustains itself materially and makes (empirically unfounded) claims about its ability to rehabilitate. Because the prison always entails multi-species relationships, it is not the case that criminalizing animal abuse will protect animals. At best, it will protect some animals while redirecting violence to farmed animals in prisons. At worst, it will bolster the prison’s colonial and anti-black function and perpetuate harm to communities.

The prison also serves an ideological function; it animalizes captives who are often constructed as extra-bodily in their dangerousness – as animals who cannot be controlled otherwise and thus require caging.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Yet, ontology and power are not unidirectional. It is not just that we understand the human and the animal in a way that authorizes various treatments, but that these ontological orderings are justified and remade through our witnessing of caged prisoners and other animals.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The prison’s continued existence, in part, relies on our racialized and speciesized acceptance of cages and the evisceration of life – purposefully and collaterally – that the prison requires and produces. Animal cruelty will only be meaningfully addressed through anti- and de-carceral strategies that take a multi-species approach – strategies which are are better positioned to decrease harm while protecting and benefiting humans, animals, and the environment.

16.1 Introduction

Josh Harper is a long-time animal liberation activist and former political prisoner who became a national figure in the movement when he was sentenced to prison for three years on “animal enterprise terrorism” charges related to his support of a direct-action campaign focused on the notorious Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) animal testing lab. The organization he worked with was called Stop Huntingdon Life Sciences or SHAC, and Harper was one of several activists – known as the SHAC7 – sent to prison for their involvement in this effort. The campaign was ambitious, bold, creative, and highly impactful. The aim was to shut down HLS, which was one of the largest animal testing contract services in the world and had been accused of animal cruelty and multiple violations of animal welfare laws in the United States and Britain. In addition to directly targeting HLS, the SHAC campaign also focused on businesses that supplied HLS with key resources, and further singled out those businesses that contracted with HLS’s suppliers in what activists refer to as primary, secondary, and tertiary targeting. Specifically, any business in HLS’s network of clients was pressured to cancel those contracts or face relentless public protests, including actions outside the homes of directors and employees. This series of tactics supported a strategy of starving HLS of the resources it needed to survive, and SHAC successfully persuaded scores of companies to cut ties with the laboratory. When the campaign’s victory seemed imminent, UK and US governmental authorities stepped in to to provide emergency financial support for HLS and to bring the full power of state repression down on the advocacy campaign. Josh Harper paid for his activism with a three-year prison term. Harper’s time on the inside was difficult, beginning with dietary concerns:

Harper described his time in prison as a “monstrous…thirty-two-month nightmare.”Footnote ² He has been quite open about the mental health impacts associated with serving time and has advocated that activists providing support for political prisoners do a better job of addressing those needs more directly and effectively. He stated, “Prison is something that’s horribly traumatizing, I can’t imagine most people being incarcerated for very long at all without having some sort of long-term effect on their lives.”Footnote ³

In this chapter I examine prisons and imprisonment to explore how these institutions, policies, and practices constitute a form of multispecies repression and a set of structural forces that are directly harmful to animal liberation movements and intersectional environmental justice movements (those grassroots efforts focused on defending marginalized communities and their land bases). I argue that by imprisoning animal liberation activists and intersectional environmental justice movement leaders, the criminal legal system hampers or removes critical resources for addressing the harm to nonhumans and that prisons themselves are sites of routine violence against more-than-human populations. Drawing on a range of sources of evidence and literatures, I find there are two reasons explaining this wide-ranging series of impacts by carceral institutions on both human and more-than-human communities:

First, some of the most effective leaders in the animal, earth liberation, and intersectional environmental justice movements are locked behind bars. Removing them from society and daily engagements with social movements significantly diminishes their ability to foment social change. Key activists from groups like SHAC, the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front, as well as “lone wolves” have spent many years behind bars, making it difficult for them to intervene materially and discursively in service to the cause of defending and protecting nonhuman populations and ecosystems. Frequently, when such activists speak out from behind bars during their time in prison, they are severely punished. For example, while he was in prison, SHAC7 activist Kevin Kjonaas wrote a statement about animal liberation that a musical artist read over the public address system at a concert, and Kjonaas was punished by prison officials. Similarly, his colleague Josh Harper was placed into solitary confinement for one hundred days for speaking out from prison. And when they are released from prison and return to their communities, these activists frequently carry the burdens of their disabling time in prison and feel less efficacious and less willing to engage in the level of activism they pursued prior to incarceration.

While many committed animal liberation activists have spent time in America’s penal system, activists from revolutionary movements in communities of color and Indigenous communities (such as the Black Liberation Army, MOVE, Puerto Rican Independence, and American Indian Movement) have tended to face much harsher sentences as well as more violent repression by agents of the state (compounding the more general, daily repression those entire communities face). While the latter set of movements is not usually thought of in the vein of animal liberation causes, I include them here because I consider them to be a part of intersectional environmental justice movements. By that, I mean they are concerned with defending and improving the well-being of marginalized populations and their land bases, which are necessarily multispecies territories. What also makes these movements relevant to intersectional environmental justice is that among their primary concerns are combating state and corporate power, racism, colonialism, and militarism and their effects on vulnerable peoples and ecosystems, in favor of community-based solutions that would result in peoples exercising democratic control over land, territory, and space. The American Indian Movement continues to fight for Native American treaty rights and sovereignty. The Puerto Rican Independentistas seek nothing short of the removal of the US occupying government from that island, while the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army have fought for the same with respect to African American communities. And the MOVE organization in particular is explicitly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and pro–animal liberation. More recently, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (or the Movement for Black Lives) has continued to build on these earlier efforts, promoting a vision of justice that is intersectional and deeply critical of racist state violence. In sum, these revolutionary movements offer an opportunity to articulate and achieve a broader aim, which is to develop a more robust way of linking movements for animal liberation and environmental and social justice, with efforts to abolish prisons in particular and the caging of living beings of any species more broadly.

The second reason for the wide-ranging spectrum of impacts of carceral institutions on multispecies communities is that prisons and jails produce a range of direct and indirect harms to nonhuman species and ecosystems. In many cases, carceral facilities are constructed on or adjacent to lands and bodies of water that are critical habitats for vulnerable and/or endangered species. Prisons and jails regularly pollute waterways through waste discharges, both routine and accidental, which place many aquatic species at risk. Furthermore, the day to day functioning of a prison or jail is made possible by the mass consumption of nonhuman animals for food, clothing, and other “goods” and “services,” reflecting the general trends we see outside of prisons. Finally, the carceral system contributes significantly to global anthropogenic climate change by producing considerable greenhouse gas emissions,Footnote ⁴ a socioecological phenomenon that, in turn, contributes to the devastation of nonhuman habitats, well-being, and lives.

Below I elaborate on these two arguments above by considering cases that support these claims.

16.2 Prisons as Sites of Political Repression

Many activists from animal liberation, earth liberation, and social justice movements have served time in carceral facilities, making it difficult for them to promote and support transformative social change. This is a major aim of the prison industrial complex – to repress the people and ideas that generate resistance to multispecies oppressions and to ensure the continued functioning of a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, speciesist, ecocidal capitalist state.

16.3 Prisons as Harmful to Nonhuman Species and Ecosystems

Prisons, jails, and other carceral facilities are also sites of direct harm to nonhuman animals and ecosystems. These impacts include the use of nonhumans for food and profit, the effects of prison construction and daily operations on sensitive ecological habits where endangered species live, and the significant contributions to global climate gas emissions associated with prison systems.

16.4 Conclusion

Prisons and jails represent a form of multispecies violence and repression directed at nonhuman animals and their defenders. Carceral institutions are literally built on and rely upon the bodies and territories of nonhumans and vulnerable human populations, producing massive harm across species and space. Furthermore, activists from animal liberation, earth liberation, and intersectional environmental justice movements have been frequently imprisoned as punishment for their resistance efforts and as a way to neutralize their efficacy, which means they have fewer means to promote justice for nonhumans and humans alike. Since this book volume is aimed at confronting the logic of criminalization and incarceration as a pathway toward justice for nonhumans, this chapter offers a critical perspective on this matter. The evidence presented here suggests quite clearly that the criminal legal system and the prison-industrial complex operate in ways that are deeply detrimental to the present and future life chances of nonhumans for a myriad of reasons.

My inclusion and consideration of intersectional environmental justice movements (such as the American Indian Movement, the Black Liberation struggles, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the Movement for Black Lives) stems from my view that these political formations present scholars and activists with an opportunity to articulate substantive linkages between animal liberation and environmental/social justice efforts, with a specific focus on prison abolition and the abolition of caging across species. Here I draw on the wisdom and vision of the Black Liberation struggle to make this case. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former member of the Black Panther Party, a supporter of the MOVE organization, an internationally renowned journalist and activist on death row in Pennsylvania. Widely viewed as a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal is serving time at SCI Frackville, Pennsylvania, for the alleged murder of a police officer, another case based on highly questionable and suspect “evidence.” During the 1980s, Mumia Abu-Jamal served time at SCI Huntingdon in Pennsylvania, and, in 1989, wrote about contaminated water in that facility:

In the passage above, Abu-Jamal quotes MOVE founder, the charismatic John Africa, who once declared, “Go as far as you want in the forest, and you won’t find no jails. Because the animals of the forest don’t believe in jail. But come to civilization, that’s all you see.”Footnote ⁴³

These two quotations underscore my view that carceral systems are harmful and destructive of everyone and everything they touch because caging – whether of humans or nonhuman animals – is inherently violent and environmentally unjust. Abu-Jamal and Africa both insist that all life is connected, so whether one is among the caged or the “not-yet-caged,” the overwhelming majority of us are impacted by the prison industrial complex’s widescale impacts on our bodies, climate, land, food sources, and water, and therefore have a vested interest in seeking its abolition.