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In this provocative and original work, artist, activist, and scholar Sunaura Taylor, “Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi” (The New Yorker), explores the profound connections between animal liberation and disability justice. With keen insight and lyrical prose, Beasts of Burden asks us to reconsider long-held assumptions about autonomy, dependence, and what defines a life worth valuing.
Blending memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, Taylor draws on her lived experience as a disabled person and lifelong animal advocate to examine how society marginalizes both disabled people and nonhuman animals—often through the same systems of power and exclusion. From the ethics of caregiving to the realities of factory farming, she invites readers to “crip” our understanding of animal ethics, opening the door to new forms of empathy and solidarity across difference.
As Rebecca Solnit has written, “Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn’t know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime.”
2018 American Book Award Winner
"Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi."
—The New Yorker
"I am not the same animal I was before I read this book."
—Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip
"Finally, finally someone has come along to undo all the damage Peter Singer has done. Beasts of Burden is a brave and brilliant book."
—Michael Bérubé, author of Life as We Know It and The Secret Life of Stories
"Beasts of Burden is a game-changer."
—Marc Bekoff, author of Rewilding Our Hearts and The Animals' AgendaFeminist, Queer, Crip
"This is a profound and wondrous book. Sunaura Taylor challenges us to rethink what is normal, what is natural, how to measure the value of a life—and how to imagine a world in which both human and nonhuman animals, resplendent in their differences and multiplicity, might flourish."
—Claire Jean Kim, author of Dangerous Crossings
"A powerful blend of sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, personal stories and sharp, passionate writing."
—Lori Gruen, author of Entangled Empathy and Ethics and Animals
"Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside-out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn't know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime. A startling, readable, sometimes hilarious inquiry into the human condition from a whole new direction, this book might be very, very important, a book to stand alongside The Body in Pain and The Human Condition."
—Rebecca Solnit
"Sunaura Taylor has written an amazing book that acts both as an intervention into widely held beliefs about disability and animals and an invitation to reimagine ourselves. Her thoroughly original, brilliant narrative transformed my imagination."
—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat
Prologue: Chicken Truck
Part One: Epiphanies
1: Strange but True
2: What Is Disability?
3: Animal Crips
Part Two: Cripping Animal Ethics
4: The Chimp Who Spoke
5: Ableism and Animals
6: What Is an Animal?
7: The Chimp Who Remembered
Part Three: I Am an Animal
8: Walking Like a Monkey
9: Animal Insults
10: Claiming Animal
Part Four: All Natural!
11: Freak of Nature
12: All Animals Are Equal (But Some Are More
Equal Than Others)
13: Toward a New Table Fellowship
14: Romancing the Meat
15: Meat: A Natural Disaster
Part Five: Interdependence
16: A Conflict of Needs
17: Domesticated, Dependent, and Dignified
18: The Service Dog
Acknowledgments
Notes