"By investigating the... connection between the... shelter and the community... vastly expands... notions of intersectionality, democracy, and inclusivity." -Leslie Irvine, American Journal of Sociology
Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animalstakes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency.
"Powerful and timely.... Katja M. Guenther unlocks the shelter door and eloquently explains this complicated and contested multispecies space, as she reflects on issues such as witnessing, vulnerability, advocacy, grievability, compassion, and animal resistance." -Carol J. Adams,author of The Sexual Politics of Meat
"In this compassionate, incisive ethnography... Katja M. Guenther illuminates the entangled injustices that shape human relationships with other animals." -Lori Gruen,author of Entangled Empathy
"With the perfect balance of intimacy and analytical depth, the author reminds us of how messy things can get when caring and killing become one, or when the value of the animal companion's life is measured by the race, gender, and zip code of the owner." -Bénédicte Boisseron,author of Afro-Dog
Autorentext
Katja M. Guenther is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Making Their Place (Stanford, 2010).
Klappentext
Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency.
Inhalt
Monster, a muscular gray pit bull, spent the final days of his life at a high-intake animal shelter in southern California, the Pacific Animal Welfare Center (PAW). Monster's fate is the outcome of multiple social processes, including the precarious lives of low-income people in the United States, breed discrimination grounded in racism, the commodification of companion animals, and the human conviction that humans may kill animals as we see fit. This introductory chapter situates the book within the practice of feminist and critical animal studies, the history of animal sheltering in the United States, and contemporary shifts in the animal-sheltering industry, especially the move toward no-kill sheltering. The chapter concludes with a short preview of the chapters that lie ahead.
This chapter brings readers behind the scenes at PAW to examine how PAW is a hybrid institution that operates as an arm of the welfare state, the carceral state, and the anthroparchal state. PAW blurs the boundaries between providing needed help to stray and unwanted animals (welfare), policing animals and relationships between animals and low-income people of color (carceral), and controlling and killing animals in the name of human needs (anthroparchal). While typically examined as separate systems of state power, welfare, carceral, and anthroparchal states operate together in state settings like PAW to both legitimate and disguise each other. Understanding PAW-and animal shelters more generally-as hybrid institutions is important because doing so reveals the range of their work, the scope of their power, and the conflicts that exist within these institutions from the outset.
Shelter workers, volunteers, and rescuers place responsibility for the large number of companion animals who enter PAW at the feet of one group of people: irresponsible owners. The discourse of irresponsible owners holds that animals come into the shelter because of individual-level human behaviors. Yet the guardians whose dogs end up at PAW are disproportionately lower-income people of color who are subject to population-level conditions of control and power that make them especially vulnerable to losing their animals to the shelter system. The discourse of irresponsible ownership has obscured the structural conditions that facilitate the entry of so many animals from low-income communities into animal shelters, contributes to misguided interventions, and deflects responsibility for what happens to shelter animals away from the institution and the society and back onto the former guardians of the animal.
Because of their different views of shelter killing, animal shelter staff and volunteers routinely come into conflict. Volunteers at PAW-who are almost all women, mostly from middle- and upper-class communities-use their social capital from outside the shelter to challenge and resist the authority of staff within the shelter. In so doing, they reinforce existing social hierarchies of class, race, and gender, while simultaneously challenging PAW's institutional discourse of adoptability, which deems the lives of sick or "stressed" animals to be not worth saving. They thus reject PAW's commitment to upholding anthroparchy vis-à-vis companion animals even as they uphold human hierarchies.
This chapter centers on grief as a form of resistance. Shelter volunteers employ rituals of mourning to mark the deaths of impounded animals as losses. In so doing, they restore the dead animals' social intelligibility and ultimately transform animals who are otherwise unseen, unrecognized, and unappreciated into animals who have social value. Mourning allows volunteers to draw attention to the problematic practice of shelter killing by making it visible and creating a space for discourse around it. For them, honoring the life of the animal who has died means trying to prevent another animal from being killed at a shelter: each death should be a lesson, a reminder of the need for change, and a push for action against human violence against animals.
Pit bulls are the most likely type of dog to come into a shelter and the most likely to die in one. This chapter examines the unique predicament of pit bulls within the context of American conflicts around race, gender, class, and animality. Pit bulls are subject to breed-specific policies and practices in the shelter. Pit bull rescuers-mostly affluent white women- attemp…