Beasts of burden

Some excellent positive essays here, finding commonalities and expanded ground for disability and animal rights. Mostly personal reflections on burdens of care and dependency, claiming animality, and analogies between ableism/normalcy and vegan/natural and Singer-rebutting (hence "Animal Liberation") questions of hierarchies of harms and biases. Other ways of knowing, other ways of being, and our common need for diverse accommodations in inter-dependence with other beings.

This collection of essays by Sunaura Taylor unpacks their carefully considered relationship between disability politics and animal rights. Each chapter deals with a different aspect, drawing both from research and personal experience.

It is in the more personal writings thay Taylor shines, as they are an artist before an activist. When the entanglements of environment, colonialism, disability and mistreatment of animals are layered, the argument is brilliantly presented. Taylor is not unaware of how problematic the disabled/beast comparisons are, but takes enough care in the writing, and this is because they value animals so highly, countering many arguments of human exceptionalism. The result is both engrossing and revealing, and is a truly great book that gives space to the biases we all carry.