Such efforts need not be constrained to animals. The act of providing sanctuary—of caring for others and building structures of resilience to protect them from violence and exploitation—as a mode of political action can be implemented in a wide variety of social contexts and communities. It has the potential to contribute to and strengthen broader movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.
Image by
Jo-anne McArthur, We Animals
Renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson died at the age of 92 on Sunday,
December 26th. Among his many rich contributions to human
understanding of the natural world was a proposal as simple as is
bold, inspiring, and vital: to prevent mass extinction and the
collapse of our biosphere, we should preserve half the surface of
the planet as undeveloped or rewilded nature. In other words, we
should make half the earth into a sanctuary from human interference
for all the life that lives there.
For many of us who are acutely aware of our shared vulnerability on
this planet, the desire for some form of sanctuary resonates even
more profoundly after the past two years in which we have faced a
global pandemic, worsening social and economic inequality,
environmental disasters ranging from devastating hurricanes to
relentless wildfires, and a seemingly unshakeable intransigence on
the part of political and business elites to do anything to change
these conditions. Adding to the claustrophobic weight of the world
is the awareness that many of these social and ecological
catastrophes are largely self-inflicted, resulting from unbridled
destruction and consumption patterns that fundamentally devalue
life.
Rather than a mere escape, the yearning for sanctuary could be an
impetus for change. Just as Wilson’s half-earth proposal could help
stave off the biodiversity crisis, embracing an ethos of the
sanctuary is one way that we can begin to push back against these
other destructive forces. But given our current reality, how can we
even imagine what such an ethos would look like?
I was surprised to find that an answer to this question may lie in
animal sanctuaries. As I describe in my new book, Saving Animals:
Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care, I conducted several years
of ethnographic research at a range of animal sanctuaries throughout
the U.S., where I saw firsthand how these unique spaces of
human-animal coexistence model an approach to care and empathy that
could help guide us toward a more resilient future.
To be clear, in drawing inspiration from animal sanctuaries I am not
conflating the suffering of humans with other animals. Indeed, the
long history of violence and exploitation of oppressed peoples
around the world has frequently been facilitated precisely by their
dehumanization. However, my previous experience studying this
history as both a lawyer and an anthropologist has taught me that it
is rooted in a value system that treats humans, animals, and the
environment as raw resources for the creation of profits, leading to
structures of violence and exploitation that intensify inequity
across lines of indigeneity, race, class, gender, sexuality,
ability, and species.
While I was initially drawn to my research on animal sanctuaries out
of a desire to understand what motivated people to rescue and care
for animals, I quickly recognized that sanctuary work reflects an
alternative value system grounded in principles of empathy, care,
and mutual aid—a value system that could inform and strengthen
efforts to achieve justice across all these contexts.
What do animal sanctuaries have to teach us about how to dismantle
these structures of inequality? The mission of animal sanctuaries is
as simple as it is difficult: to care for animals rescued from abuse
and exploitation by humans and to educate people about these harms
in order to end the practices that cause them. For example,
sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals educate the public about the
many negative impacts of animal agriculture while encouraging people
to stop consuming animal products. At the same time, they provide
lifelong quality care to animals who would have otherwise been
slaughtered in adolescence (or only a few years later, after their
egg or milk productivity was no longer profitable).
I met many chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep with injuries caused by
their previous lives of confinement and neglect, or with chronic
medical conditions caused by selective breeding intended to maximize
their meat, egg, or milk production. At factory farms, they would
most likely have been left to suffer until slaughter, because they
are valued and treated only as instruments of production. But at the
sanctuaries I visited, they were provided with veterinary care
developed specifically to address the needs of geriatric farmed
animals.
Some treatments, such as specially designed diets or limb braces,
didn’t even exist until sanctuaries realized the need for them and
partnered with veterinary schools to develop them. I saw caregivers
strive to provide rescued animals with the best possible lives they
could have within the bounds of captivity, working long hours for
relatively low pay to provide the animals with preferred foods,
clean shelter, and social enrichment.
The sanctuary ethos of care fosters creativity and the ability to
find solutions that were once thought impossible. In a society that
typically treats these animals as mere resources for human
consumption, sanctuaries create spaces where animals can live as
individuals entitled to their own autonomy, wellbeing, and dignity.
Such efforts need not be constrained to animals. The act of
providing sanctuary—of caring for others and building structures of
resilience to protect them from violence and exploitation—as a mode
of political action can be implemented in a wide variety of social
contexts and communities. It has the potential to contribute to and
strengthen broader movements for social, economic, and ecological
justice.
For example, if municipalities can pass local ordinances to be
sanctuaries against xenophobic immigration policies, they can also
pass ordinances and invest resources into building more robust
sanctuary communities that can guarantee all members—both humans and
animals—access to food, shelter, clean air and water, and medical
care. The only real impediment to such change is a value system that
doesn’t see human and animal rights as worth the financial cost it
would take to realize them, a system that can be directly challenged
by an ethos of sanctuary that values community health and wellbeing
over the accumulation of capital.
Of course, we can’t bring an immediate end to systemic racist police
violence, climate change, or the many injustices of the COVID-19
pandemic with local community work. But animal sanctuaries have a
lesson to offer us here as well. One remarkable thing about
sanctuaries is the almost impossible challenge of achieving their
ultimate goal: the end of animal exploitation and abuse. In a world
where trillions of animals are killed every year for food alone,
sanctuaries save an infinitesimal number of animals from this fate.
Yet, undaunted, they continue applying their creative ingenuity to
finding novel solutions to seemingly intractable problems. In small
spaces scattered throughout the larger global system of animal use,
they are realizing a better world in which care, rather than
exploitation, is the guiding ethos.
As I’ve now had the occasion to say to numerous classes of college
students since the pandemic started, to the extent that we are going
to get through this moment, it will have to be together. Sanctuaries
provide a particularly promising model for how to do that. There are
many aspects to the current circumstances that are beyond our
control, but how we treat each other and the other beings in our
orbit is not.