Have you ever tried to count, listen to or look at an entire truck of chickens packed for slaughter? Paid attention to every individual life, or given them an ounce of your time? Working to complete a large painting of a truck crowded with chickens, Taylor realized farmed animals are bred to be disabled. Their disabilities, or ‘super-abilities’, are selected to better cater to the market: in the meat industry, chickens are bred for their huge breast, which causes skeletal malformation; in the egg industry, chickens are bred to lay hundreds of eggs a year, as opposed to their normal dozen, which causes reproductive problems. In this capitalist economy and probably, in any other anthropocentric growth-based economy, animal disability is profitable and desirable. Yet, if we were to abolish such consumption, how would these nonhumans live, given that they, at least partly, depend on humans for survival? Taylor suggests that the animal rights movement has much to learn from disability studies, as it is not only that ability should not determine the right to live, but neither should being dependent.  

“Dependency has been used to justify slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, colonization, and disability oppression. The language of dependency is a brilliant rhetorical tool, allowing those who use it to sound compassionate and caring while continuing to exploit those they are supposedly concerned about.”

Learning an ethics of care, and realizing we are all, to certain degrees, dependent on each other, is a good, humbling start at working towards better lives for us all. Moreover, realizing how power works, and how oppression operates, is helpful in our many fights for justice.

“When animal commodification and slaughter is justified through ableist positions, veganism becomes a radical anti-ableist position.”

Taylor proposes a “social model of veganism”, in recognition of the fact that some of the challenges to practicing veganism are not just personal, but structural. Some people have little control over their food choices, others live in food deserts or nursing homes.  

“Cripping animal ethics means acknowledging that veganism as a diet is not as easy for some as it is for others, but that there are countless other ways one can challenge anthropocentrism, speciesism, and violence against animals. You can avoid animal products in other arenas, raise awareness about the violence of animal industries, participate in movements for animal liberation, protest the systemic economic exploitation of nonhumans, and you can bring an intersectional animal liberation framework into your other activist work.”

Thinking courageously requires being able to grasp contradictions and difficulties. Seeing veganism politically, as a radical stance against oppression, has to manifest beyond just changing habits to avoid the use of nonhuman animals - although that, too, is necessary. There is no reason to claim the difficulty of access others have to justify one’s own consumption of nonhuman animals.

We must acknowledge how being ‘animalized’ and thus objectified is hurtful and even deadly for some human beings, as well as it is hurtful and deadly for nonhuman beings, too. We should challenge the idea that some ability gives life more worth or value, in human and nonhuman animals alike. We are to tread lightly, this is fraught territory. Yet liberation can only be achieved commonly - if one axis of power remains untouched, it will come back to hunt and dominate us.

So let us work for a world in which foxes live freely outside of human fables. A world in which other animals are not farmed and bred to be disabled for human benefits, nor are they used and objectified. A world that can grasp complexity, that can cherish difference and honor caring. Let us strive to live in this world, where we act against disabling environments while truly valuing disabled lives.