When Animals Die by Human Hands: Justifications and Justice

Nonhuman animals (animals) and human animals are constantly dying for a wide variety of reasons. Each individual's death is a loss, and while most people I know have thought about their own and others' deaths, many, for one reason or another, haven't given as much, if any, thought to the death of nonhumans, predominantly caused by humans. This is one of many reasons why I was attracted to, and learned a lot from, an eye-opening and heart-opening new book titled When Animals Die: Examining Justifications and Envisioning Justice edited by Drs. Katja M. Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan.

While the essays don't offer a universal understanding of what "death is," I cannot imagine anyone, after reading this wide-ranging book, will look at animal death in the same ways they did before reading the contributors' essays. The truth is, we are surrounded by, and immersed in, animal death, and many people don't know about, think about, or believe, for example, the undebatable fact that countless otherwise healthy nonhumans are killed by humans for food, by cars, or because they don't fit into the breeding programs of zoos. Often, the deaths of food animals, zoo animals, and wild animals are written off and sanitized as being examples of euthanasia—mercy killings—which they're clearly not.¹ I totally agree with part of the book's description: "A groundbreaking collection that explores human–animal relations and deaths with depth and hope."

Here's what Katja and Julian had to say about their seminal and wide-ranging book.

Source: New York University Press

Marc Bekoff: How does your book relate to your backgrounds and general areas of interest?

Julian Paul Keenan: My background is in neuroscience, psychology, biology, and philosophy. I look at death as a neurological process, and my colleagues see death in animals, for example, as a forensic crime to be solved. Evolutionary biologists see death as not the end, but as part of the process that has existed for billions of years.

Katja approaches death from a societal viewpoint, especially thinking about how animals get caught up in systems of inequalities humans have created. It’s impossible to be thinking about inequality and animals and not address animal death. Katja did a lot of research in a high-intake animal shelter for her last book, so she was in an institution where humans killed animals pretty much every day. And those were companion animals—the ones we claim to love and who sit very high on the species hierarchy. That research led her to spend a lot of time thinking and asking questions and writing about animal death and about how grief can motivate human action on behalf of animals. Both of us were really excited about working together to bridge many different areas of knowledge.

MB: Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important book?

JPK: This book should reach a wide audience—everyone, really!—and I am especially eager to bring in readers who might not think about this topic that often. Those readers could include people concerned about the climate crisis but who haven’t had the opportunity yet to think much about the place of animal death in environmental catastrophe. Our readers will also include people who are interested in understanding structural inequalities and who are open to at least considering how animals and the deaths of animals are part of, and consequences of, those inequalities.

MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?

Katja Guenther: Each chapter focuses on a different topic related to animal death, but a common theme among most of them is the connection between human ideologies and activities and animals’ deaths. Whether analyzing the practices of the burgeoning guinea pig farming industry in Peru or the development and then decommissioning of transgenic animals, each chapter shows how entangled humans and animals are in the processes that lead to animals’ deaths. And while we recognize that engaging with the topic of death can be challenging, When Animals Die also opens up avenues for hope, and for action, to improve the lives and reduce the suffering and deaths of animals.

Source: Pixabay / Pexels

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

KG: What sets our book apart from the small number of existing collections on animal death is its interdisciplinarity and its commitment to troubling animal death. What I mean by interdisciplinarity is that we really worked to bring in voices from a lot of different fields of study and areas of activism, so the book includes contributors utilizing perspectives on Indigenous food sovereignty, prison abolition, feminist animal studies, farmed animal welfare, and more. And what I mean by “troubling” is that the contributors to this book approach animal death as complex and multidimensional and too often problematic in that it involves suffering and violence and devaluation of life, and they work to understand animal death—and the events and actions and institutions that lead up to it—that way.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about death and dying in animals they will come to understand what the individuals experience during their last days?

KG: I think anyone reading the book will come away with a better understanding of both animals’ lives and their deaths, including the processes that lead to their deaths and how humans are active in that. As several of the chapters bring up, it’s challenging even to define death (or life), and humans can't comprehend the experience of death any better than any other animal. What this book illuminates is this complexity of death and the diverse meanings we give to animals’ deaths. Some deaths—like those of farmed animals and roadkill (farming and road accidents being the first and second most common causes of animal death in the United States)—go almost entirely unrecognized and ungrieved.

One chapter of When Animals Die, for instance, presents an analysis of the terrible deaths that now over 80 million U.S. chickens living on farms where there is a concern about an avian flu outbreak have endured, with the active involvement of the USDA. In industrial agriculture, animal death is rarely grieved, unless as an economic loss—but U.S. taxpayers minimize even that. Yet, other animals’ lives and deaths, like those of salmon caught by members of the Tseshaht community, are honored and reflected upon, as detailed in a chapter that centers Indigenous food sovereignty. Humans attach different meanings to the deaths of different types of animals, and those meanings in turn impact the types of lives and deaths humans make possible for those animals.