13Interspecies Atrocities and the Politics

of Memory

Guy Scotton

13.1 Introduction

The unfolding “political turn” in animal rights theory has enriched theagenda of animal ethics with the central concepts and concerns ofpolitical theory, extending new paradigms for inclusion, representation,and redress to nonhuman animals within the rubric of justice. Theseprojects have concentrated on various forward-looking aspects of themoral, political, and legal standing of different nonhuman animals, withmost theorists within the political turn so far having little to say aboutthe symbolic, narrative, and affective dimensions of interspecies justice.In this chapter, I employ a framework of interspecies atrocities in orderto begin a conversation with the broad literature on memory andreconciliation after violence and atrocity, exploring the opportunitiesas well as the limitations and asymmetries this approach highlights for

G. Scotton (*)Independent researcher, Sydney, New South Wales, Australiae-mail: guyscotton@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2017A. Woodhall, G. Garmendia da Trindade (eds.), Ethical andPolitical Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues,DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54549-3_13

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the project of just interspecies community. What might it mean forsocieties to be sorry, and to take historical responsibility, for vast and stillexpanding systems of exploitation and dispossession of nonhumananimals?

In the first and second sections of this chapter (13.2 and 13.3), I surveysome philosophical resources for attending to interspecies atrocities. In thethird section (13.4), I apply a framework of moral repair to interspeciesjustice. This framework is attentive to existing practices of interspeciesmourning and memorialisation, considering examples of events staged byactivists as well as the changing complexion of public awareness andeducation. These cases illustrate the contested nature of collective memoryas a resource for political judgement, with various practices of remembrancedisrupting or stabilising different perspectives and attitudes towards inter-species justice. Finally (in 13.5), I consider how the themes of remembranceand atonement my chapter has foregrounded might develop a broaderconversation within the political turn in interspecies ethics about the roleof political emotions and narratives in advancing interspecies justice.

13.2 Invoking Interspecies Atrocities

Shifting ethical attention towards the symbolic dimensions of interspe-cies justice, and especially to the symbolic dimensions of historicalrelationships, faces an uphill battle of justification. Clare Palmer makesexplicit a central concern about any such project as she develops a modelof material compensation for nonhuman animals that are displaced ordeprived by human activities. In the course of her case study of coyotesdisplaced by development, Palmer contends that coyotes (and othernonhuman animals) “cannot gain psychologically from knowing thatreparation is reparation; anything like an apology or a memorializationwould be wasted on them. They lack concepts of justice, bear no grudgesagainst either perpetrators or beneficiaries, and seek no satisfaction fromeither” (2010, p.104).

There is an obvious and substantial sense in which Palmer is right:namely, that nonhuman animals receive no psychological gratification

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from the norms of dignity and recognition which (however understood)shape symbolic acts of moral repair (Walker, 2006, p.5). But, as beingsinextricably implicated in symbolic relations with human communities,it does not follow that acts of symbolic justice necessarily are “wasted”on nonhuman animals. Apologies for the treatment of human genera-tions long past, or infants, or people otherwise unable to benefit psy-chologically from them, generally are considered both coherent and(potentially) constructive acts of historical justice. As Roy Brooks putsit in relation to apologies for long-past injustices:

While I would not go so far as to say that apology is for the perpetratorand reparation is for the victim, I would say that, in a real sense, apology isas much for the perpetrator as it is for the victim . . . In sum, the presenceof the victim is not necessary for the tender of apology, or for that matter,reparations, to take effect . . . It would be better, of course, if the victimswere able to witness this special occasion, but their absence should notinvalidate the redemption—the perpetrator’s ability to redress its self-inflicted moral wound. (2006, p.226)

Donaldson and Kymlicka are more forthcoming on this point, holdingthat “the focus of our efforts should be forward-looking justice. Even so,we have strong reasons at least to acknowledge the facts of historicinjustice, through education, memorials, collective apologies, and otherforms of symbolic compensation” (2011, p.196). However, Donaldsonand Kymlicka conclude their book by calling for “a fresh start—for firstcontact all over again. Fortunately, most animal communities do notretain detailed intergenerational records of abusive treatment byhumans” (Ibid, p.258). I am not suggesting that their emphasis hereon the political opportunities of new forms of community with nonhu-man animals is misplaced, a point to which I return in Section 13.5. Myobservation is just that these passages, together with Palmer’s, representsome of the only explicit attention to the symbolic life of justice, andhistorical justice in particular, within the political turn so far. The vastliteratures of memory studies and historical justice link public norms torituals, symbols, narratives, and emotions in ways that could enrichtheories of interspecies justice and enhance their abilities to converse

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with developments in other domains of political theory. I turn now tothe concept of evil in order to grasp what is at stake in the cultural andemotional life of interspecies justice.

Philosophical, psychological, and historical accounts of evil haveconsolidated in the past three decades around a secular frameworkparadigmatically concerned with inter-human atrocities such as tortureand genocide. Outside of the work of Claudia Card, whose theory of evilI take up subsequently, attention to nonhuman animals within thecontemporary philosophical literature on evil can very nearly be can-vassed in one paragraph. Geoffrey Scarre opens After Evil with theremark that “To reflect on evil is to consider the myriad ways inwhich lives—animal, as well as human—can be destroyed or damagedor prevented from reaching their full potential” (2004, p.1), although hedoes not follow up on this point.1 John Kekes notes in Facing Evil that“A full account would have to consider animals and perhaps also plants,other organisms, and possible sentient beings not presently known, butI shall ignore all of them here” (1993, p.45). Jonathan Glover remarks atthe outset of his moral history of twentieth-century catastrophes that“[a] more generous conception would include”—amongst various othertopics—“attitudes towards animals, to the natural world and to theenvironment” (2012, pp.2–3).2 In On Evil, Adam Morton lists factoryfarming amongst other examples as one of the “factors . . . of dubiousmoral status” on which our society “depends”, and about which we areliable to suppress reflection: “We learn strategies for not noticing thatour actions lead to atrocity” (2004, pp.57–8). To my knowledge, nomonograph deals extensively with interspecies evils.3

1 Elsewhere, Scarre offers, without elaboration, that “hunting animals purely for sport plausiblycounts as evil under my working definition” (2012, p.75n.2).2 In an essay responding to Glover’s book, Nussbaum (2010) evokes interspecies comparisons,though her purpose is not to highlight nonhuman animal suffering per se; rather, she explores “twoimportant silences” in Glover’s book, one being the affinities between the emotional lives ofhumans and nonhumans, the other being “the human denial of kinship with the animal, and themisogyny that is all too often a concomitant of that denial” (2010, p.206). The issue of “sufferingin the factory food industry” is invoked in a subsidiary way to illustrate compassion (Ibid, p.209).3 I use “interspecies evils” and “interspecies atrocities” throughout to mean “human evils towardsother species” and “human atrocities towards other species”.

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The situation is little better in the recent cluster of works examiningthe social psychology of evil and atrocity (for popular and representativemonographs, see Waller, 2002; Zimbardo, 2007; Baron-Cohen, 2011).In this literature, nonhuman animals feature principally as the absentreferents of discussions about de- or infra-humanisation, as models forinvestigating human psychology,4 or occasionally as the victims ofsocially aberrant instances of cruelty, interesting largely as symptomsof human-directed malevolence.

Conversely, animal ethicists, including those of the political turn,have paid no systematic attention to the concept of evil itself.Presumably, many animal ethicists hold doubts in common withother “evil-skeptics”, to borrow Russell’s (2006) terminology. Asmoral philosophers work to disentangle a post-metaphysical under-standing of evil from its roots in the Western tradition, and politicaltheorists largely remain “[t]emperamentally wary” of such a loadedterm (Haddock, Roberts & Sutch, 2011, p.3), evil-skeptics worryabout evil’s theological heritage, its abuse in political rhetoric, andthe resemblance of the emotions it evokes to the hatreds and fearsthat impel injustice and violence. Perhaps animal ethicists haveadditional reasons to avoid any such impression of sermonising,given the charges of sentimentality and misanthropy so often flungtheir way; in any case, the conceptual priorities of animal rights havelain elsewhere.

But despite the mutual disengagement of animal ethics from discus-sions about evil, references to inter-human atrocities—ranging fromisolated evocations to explicit analogies or extensions of concepts—arescattered throughout the animal rights literature. Steven Wise, forinstance, describes the murder of chimpanzees and bonobos as “geno-cide” (2000, pp.265–266), Donaldson and Kymlicka refer to the

4Often, nonhuman models for human psychology are discussed by reference to experiments thatin and of themselves constitute interspecies atrocities—a point which troubles Baron-Cohen in histreatment of “the science of evil”: “In Chapter 1 I was clearly condemning of the Nazi experimentsthat tested how long a person could tolerate freezing water, yet here I seem to be willing to justifyHarlow’s and Hinde’s monkey experiments. I suspect I am guilty of a double standard when itcomes to human versus animal research” (2011, p.203n.v).

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eradication of “pest” animals as “ethnic cleansing” (2011, p.211), and abrace of more involved historical and sociological comparisons to humanslavery and the Holocaust have been advanced by Spiegel (1989),Patterson (2002), Davis (2005), and Sztybel (2006). The Holocaustanalogy is also a dramatic and conceptual crux of Coetzee’s The Livesof Animals (1999) and in much of the ensuing commentary on Coetzee’swork.

In public discourse, animal rights activists have deployed these com-parisons in slogans, pamphlets, and multimedia campaigns, most notor-iously in the mid-2000’s campaigns of People for the Ethical Treatmentof Animals (PETA). Popular outrage at particular instances of nonhu-man animal suffering—often those brought to light through the effortsof activists—also grasps for the language of atrocity, sometimes inunexpected ways. Thus, a former Australian Commonwealth meatinspector proclaimed in 2011, after investigative footage of Indonesianslaughterhouses catapulted Australia’s live cattle export industry tonational attention: “Of all those years as a meat inspector I have neverseen the atrocities against animals as I did last night” (Taylor, 2011).

All of these invocations of atrocity have proven fraught. Scholarlycomparisons to inter-human atrocities occupy a narrow cul-de-sac,ignored by the fields studying human atrocities. PETA’s campaignspublicly ran aground; amidst recriminations from human civil rightsgroups, PETA was sued by Marjorie Spiegel not only for tarnishing thereputation of her work but also for “degrad[ing] and impair[ing] publicdiscourse” (Goldstein, 2008). Popular outrage remains sporadic andinconsistent at best; the former meat inspector in my example aboveobjects to “the cruelty over there” while advocating for a correspondingincrease in local slaughtering operations (Taylor, 2011).

I will not adjudicate on the legitimacy or effectiveness of thesecomparisons here.5 Rather, I will suggest that by turning to the moralvocabulary of evil and atrocity underlying much of this discourse, and by

5 For representative criticisms of these comparisons from non-animal rights perspectives, seeCostelloe (2003) and MacDonald (2006). Kim (2011) defends PETA’s exhibits on the “moral”grounds that they contribute to the “destabilization” of historically particular dualities andhierarchies, but criticises them for their “political” hazards in alienating the mainstream media

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locating nonhuman animals within the philosophical literature on eviland atrocity, we can look past the dilemmas of particular comparisons tomore productive questions about how to attend to, and make amendsfor, a history of interspecies atrocities, and how best to approach the pastas a moral resource in the ongoing project of interspecies justice.

Horror at evil—moral horror6—stakes out an extreme zone on thecompass of moral psychology which can help to locate emotions such asoutrage, sorrow, and shame. My interest in evil here raises broader issuesof moral psychology: how do political emotions form and sustaincommitments to justice, and what sorts of institutions and practiceswould cultivate the emotional bases of interspecies justice? The case ofinterspecies atrocities thus serves as a vivid way to connect the politicalturn to developments in political theory concerning the symbolic andaffective dimensions of justice and to begin a conversation on the role ofpolitical emotions, rituals, and narratives in cultivating and sustainingcommitments to interspecies justice.

13.3 Pursuing Interspecies Evils in ClaudiaCard’s Atrocity Theory

Claudia Card’s theory of evil offers a substantial starting point for myinvocation of interspecies evil and atrocity. Card’s working definition ofevil is that “evils are foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpablewrongdoing” (2002, p.3), or, in expanded form:

and for hindering intersections with other anti-oppression causes, concluding that coalition-building should take prominence.6Despite being a “high-temperature and high-profile phenomenon”, the concept of moral horrorhas received little philosophical attention (Wilson & Wilson, 2003, p.321). Wilson and Wilson’spaper raises apt concerns about the resemblance of horror to disgust and the tendency to aversionand its corresponding affiliation with discourses of purity and contamination. However, I disagreewith their assessment of moral horror as a form of taboo which occludes rational reflection, a sortof psychological allergic reaction which in our moral reasoning “we should strive to get rid of”(Ibid, p.327). Horror is not simply an aversive reaction—a moral sneeze—and, in the particularityof our own experience of horror, we may in fact become more receptive to the particular sufferingof victims of evil, and to the specific “ordinary goodness” of the lives which evil so definitivelyruptures (Ruddick, 2003, p.218).

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[A]n evil is harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2)culpably inflicted (or tolerated, aggravated, or maintained), and that (3)deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others of the basics that are necessaryto make a life possible and tolerable or decent (or to make a death decent).(Ibid, p.16)

Card’s specifications readily accommodate nonhuman animals, andCard commits to this implication, acknowledging “evils done to animalswho are raised on factory farms and butchered in mass productionslaughterhouses” (Ibid, p.9), and noting that “hunting animals forsport is an evil widely not recognized as such” (Ibid, p.10). In herfollow-up volume, Confronting Evils, Card outlines laboratory testingon nonhuman animals as one of five forms of socially prevalent violencein which “vast amounts of torture remain publicly unacknowledged”(2010, p.225).

Nonhuman animals disappear soon after they are introduced in the firstchapter of The Atrocity Paradigm, and though they return in somewhatmore detail in Card’s Confronting Evils, they scarcely feature in thecommentary these works occasioned. Here, the predicament of nonhu-man animals arises only within a further extension of Card’s theory: theconundrum of whether or not non-sentient forms of life such as ecosys-tems can themselves be regarded as victims of evils (Norlock, 2004; Card,2004). Nonetheless, in addition to the explicit inclusions of nonhumananimals noted above, Card’s theory contains a number of other featureswhich can be pressed to yield insights about interspecies evils.

First, since Card’s definition of evil involves culpability on the part ofthe perpetrator but not particular dispositions or motivations, her theoryis psychologically thin. This has two advantages for Card: one is torestore attention to “the relatively neglected experience of victims” ofevils (2002, p.10), whose experiences often are side-lined as philosophersand social psychologists investigate the character of evildoers. The other,interrelated advantage is to direct our view to structural or institutionalevils, and so to the role of collective systems of complicity and denial insustaining these evils. The colossal enterprises of animal agriculture andanimal experimentation involve evils which make their victims invisibleeven as their products suffuse every aspect of the social world.

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Second, Card’s account treats evils explicitly as “evils, plural” (Ibid,p.9): that is, her attention to the experiences of victims, along with hertheory’s sensitivity to the ambiguities and complexities of mass evil-doing, resists broad comparisons and rankings of atrocities even as itstrives to make them mutually intelligible (Ibid, pp.13–16). This resis-tance accords with Carol J. Adams’ objection to employing theHolocaust and other atrocities in order to evoke identification withnonhuman animal suffering: “These metaphors attempt to make others’experience ‘borrowable.’ It is not for us to compare suffering. We shouldacknowledge suffering but not compare it. Acknowledging grants theintegrity of the suffering, while comparing assumes the reducibility, theobjectification of suffering” (Adams, 2007, p.212; emphasis in original).Card’s theory offers non-metaphorical standards for assessing evils, andmoral responses to evils, in a common light, but remains attentive to theirreducibility of victims’ experiences. Her atrocity theory is responsive tothe idea of testimony and the moral voices of victims. While thesedimensions of attending to evil may seem to demand complex commu-nicative abilities on the part of victims, I will suggest in the next sectionthat issues of testimony have analogues in the interspecies case as well.

Third, Card develops three case studies of atrocities as evils “writlarge” (Card, 2002, p.9), and although she discusses slavery and theHolocaust, especially in investigating the institutional structures behindatrocities and the moral powers and obligations of victims and perpe-trators, her case studies are carefully selected to reveal new aspects offamiliar categories. Thus, her focus within war atrocities is on mass rapeand sexual slavery; and she employs the concepts of terrorism and tortureto describe the “private atrocities” of domestic abuse (Ibid, p.5).

It is worth pausing here to consider how nonhuman animals alreadyare implicated in Card’s case studies. Because of the destructive scope ofmodern combat and because of the ubiquity of nonhuman animals asresources, warfare predictably involves the destruction of nonhumananimal lives, whether in the testing of weapons, in the ecologicaldevastation of wilderness, in the collateral killing of domestic animalsor their deliberate killing to subjugate human populations, or in the“enlistment” of other species for military support roles. As Weinsteinobserves, “the environment [including nonhuman animals] is often both

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a victim and a tool of armed conflict” (2005, p.698). Edmund Russellremarks that “war and environmental change were not separate endea-vors, but rather related aspects of life in the twentieth century”, andnotes that the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea“became one of the most bountiful nature preserves in Asia” (2001,p.235)—a poignant illustration of war’s entanglement of intra- andinterspecies atrocities.7

Nonhuman animals are both victims and tools in domestic violence aswell. Card notes that domestic abusers manipulate their victims using,amongst many other methods of coercion, “threats to significant thirdparties (including animal companions)” (2002, p.145; 2010, p.143).Card proceeds to argue that the institution of marriage as currentlyconstituted—legally and socially ordained as a lifetime bond—enablesthe evils of domestic violence so predictably that it must be judged anevil-facilitating institution, to be drastically altered or abolished.Correspondingly, I suggest that the institution of animal companionshipas currently constituted—legally and socially ordained as a chattel prop-erty relation8—facilitates the evils of animal abuse, governed, as withmarriage, by a patriarchal nexus in which ““biology” and “privacy”provide alibis for abuse” in the home (Adams, 1994, p.75).Recognition of the property status of nonhuman animals asevil-facilitating—a structural evil—raises important themes of compli-city and agency, dimensions of social philosophy which a theory of evilsuch as Card’s may help to consolidate in animal ethics.

The final salient feature of Card’s theory is the most challenging to aninterspecies extension of the concept of evil. Having examined para-digms of atrocity, Card examines the central moral powers of bothvictims and perpetrators. Her treatment of the “ethical issues of attitu-dinal response” appears most remote from the situation of interspecies

7 Interest in the more-than-human consequences of warfare is growing in environmental historyand the emerging sub-discipline of warfare ecology. However, as Bankoff remarks, nonhumananimals “rarely appear directly in these narratives but are generally regarded as an undifferentiatedpart of an abstract environment or, at best, as elements of a threatened ecosystem” (2010, p.205).8 Card notes Gary Francione’s formulation of this argument in passing (2010, p.118), in one ofher only direct references to the animal ethics literature.

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atrocities, since—as in much of the literature on moral repair—Cardtakes the personal apology as a central model: “Paradigm forgiveness isinterpersonal” (2002, p.174). Yet working through this model illumi-nates new aspects of the possibilities—and limitations—of interspeciesjustice.

The question is what these processes of repair might look like absent thetight coupling Card observes between the moral powers of victims and theburdens of perpetrators. Processes and attitudes grounding the receptivityof victims, but which are largely absent from the interspecies case, includetrust, respect, mercy, forgiveness, and clemency or rescue from punishmentor reparations (to the extent that these are in the victims’ hands) (2002,chaps. 8 & 9). Also absent or greatly different in the nonhuman case is theemotional dynamic propelling different phases of what is often studiedunder the rubric of “trauma”, including complexities such as the “secondinjury” which may occur when societies fail to acknowledge or supportvictims’ grievances (Walker, 2006, pp.15–21). Correspondingly, gratitudeis lacking from the perpetrator’s repertoire of responses to victims ofinterspecies atrocities; but many of the other burdens remain intact,including guilt and shame. Fearing no vengeance9 and expecting noforgiveness, how might human communities meaningfully assume themoral burdens of perpetrators?

Other moral powers may be distributed: “one need not be a victim inorder to blame or condemn” (Card, 2002, p.184); indeed, we can blameor condemn ourselves (Ibid, p.176), and this is one of the necessarycriteria of a successful apology on most accounts. Picking up fromCard’s claim that guilt “is not just masochism, self-torture, or theinternalization of victims’ hostilities” (Ibid, p.190), perhaps the spec-trum of moral powers and responsibilities in the face of interspeciesatrocities could be said to lie between self-flagellation andself-forgiveness. This spectrum includes introspective as well as other-directed tasks: “Appreciating moral luck in general, as well as our own

9As my interest here is in secular accounts of evil, I leave aside the prospect of divine judgementand punishment. Also, I assume that the animal rights movement will continue to be over-whelmingly non-violent.

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strengths and weaknesses in particular, may be one intermediate positionbetween the refusal to feel guilt and obsessive self-torture” (Ibid, p.201).Yet the danger remains that guilt and shame

[c]an lead to excessive self-absorption, centering one’s own character,culpability, or defectiveness, one’s own need to be redeemed or rein-stated . . . [E]xcessive self-absorption can hinder moral regeneration,which requires us to act in the world and get involved in projects sensitiveto others’ needs—other than their need to know that we are aware of ourfaults. (Ibid, p.207)

In the next section, I sketch some ways of beginning to respond tointerspecies evils through forms of narrative, memorial, and testimony.Precisely where many evil-skeptics are most suspicious of evil—itsnarrative power—I hold that it has explanatory and normative advan-tages that are worth the hazards that its invocation also entails. Thisnarrative—indeed, performative—aspect of talking about evil has parti-cular resonance in the wake of the “apology phenomenon” (Lazare,2012, p.7; Celermajer, 2009, chap. 1), and what Pauline Wakehamterms “the phenomenon of reconciliation” (Wakeham, 2013, p.209),which covers a host of scholarly and popular discourse on truth commis-sions, official apologies, commemorations, and other measures, typicallyby nation-states, to respond to historical injustices.

13.4 Interspecies Moral Repair: A SocialRight to Truth?

Here, I apply the framework of interspecies atrocities to the theory andpractice of historical justice, expanding the “right to truth” now pre-valent in human rights discourse (Walker, 2010, pp.526–529) toencompass the experiences of nonhuman animals systematically andegregiously wronged by human communities. The right to truth is aclaim for the significance of truth-telling as a reparative action distinctfrom, though usually informed by, whatever truth-gathering measuresare necessary to stop a given atrocity or to punish its perpetrators (where

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legal sanctions are available). Thus understood, the truth commissionmodel advances an ethic of social attention to the experiences andperspectives of nonhuman animals in light of their ongoing massoppression, informed by emerging theories and practices of exploringand enabling nonhuman agency. This will involve remedial attention toanimal suffering in its historical fullness, but also to animal pleasures andcapacities and opportunities for flourishing—attention that incorporatespublic rituals and institutions of care as well as the cultivation ofpersonal habits and other-regarding skills.

One objection to the idea that anything like a truth commissionwould be constructive in the case of interspecies atrocities is that,precisely because violence against nonhuman animals has been (and is)so widespread and so normalised, there has been no comparable effort toconceal or concertedly deny the core facts of interspecies atrocities.However much corporations prevaricate, the treatment of nonhumananimals is blithely documented in reams of industry literature, as indeedPeter Singer employs to harrowing rhetorical effect in his recitation oflab reports and trade magazines (2002, chaps. 2–3). However, thisobjection ignores the performative import of truth commissions andmisses the crucial point that atrocities are sustained by many interactingmodes of silence, denial, and confected ignorance. The public confron-tation of “open secrets” thus is psychologically intricate, and the mean-ing of public acknowledgements of atrocities varies accordingly (Cohen,2001).

It is true, as Palmer observes, that nonhuman animals can gain nodirect psychological satisfaction from a procedure such as a truth com-mission. Moreover, the communicative differences between humans andother species affect the structure of interspecies solidarity. As JeanHarvey observes:

Great attention and concern is owed the victims and their suffering, butthey make no pronouncements others should defer to and there are noconsultations where the approval of the victims must be given, not becausewe would not wish to do so, but because by the nature of the case it cannotbe done. There is nothing in fact that places the victims in an “author-itative” role as distinct from a morally central one. (2007, p.30)

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But as with Palmer’s point, these implications should not be overstated.Such asymmetries do not rule out a constructive role for particularnonhuman animals and their “authority” as victims in a broader sense.It is possible to imagine forms of assisted political agencyhere—remembering as remembering with nonhuman animals—basedupon the embodied testimony of nonhuman animals.10 Indeed, insofaras interspecies atrocities have been enabled by modes of denying thesocial presence of nonhuman animals, any truth commission shoulditself aspire to model the reincorporation of nonhuman subjectivitywithin the polity. Ongoing theoretical developments in nonhumanagency and representation will be central to any such initiative, and atruth commission could serve as the basis for a permanent office ofcultural representation. Such a system would acknowledge that, evenwhere nonhuman animals cannot participate in human discourse, theyare profoundly affected by it, and so have a stake in their representationin history, the media, and human culture more broadly.11

What would remedial attention to nonhuman animal flourishing looklike? Karen Emmerman (2014) is one of the only scholars to apply atheory of moral repair to nonhuman animals, and she identifies sanctu-aries for animals used in farms and laboratories as a vital frontier for thework of atonement. This is not just a question of learning about evils andtheir effects on nonhuman victims, and doing what we can to aid themnow. It is an obligation to learn, via embodied experience, the specificgoods of nonhuman animal lives which evil disfigures and destroys.

In Martha Nussbaum’s recent study of political emotions (2013), sheargues that building a public culture of justice requires explicit attentionto the emotional structure of political commitments, promoting love,compassion, and pride while grappling with “compassion’s enemies” infear, shame, and disgust. Indeed, the contest of this psychology is

10Discussing the model of communal decision-making practised at VINE Sanctuary, in whichhumans deliberate in a large barn in the presence of the sanctuary’s nonhuman residents,Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest that nonhuman animals “cannot articulate their views indiscussion, but they are a presence, a reminder, and a check, on human deliberation” (2015, p.67).11 Recent contributions to a media ethics for nonhuman animals are suggestive here; see, forinstance, the proposal by Freeman, Bekoff, & Bexell (2011), and the media guidelines developedby Merskin and Freeman (2015).

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underwritten by Nussbaum’s own account of radical evil (2013, ch.7).Political emotions should be studied and exercised expansively in con-crete instances of public speech and action: in rituals, stories, monu-ments, and the design of public spaces. Nussbaum takes the tragic andcomic festivals of ancient Athens to be exemplary:

Large modern nations cannot precisely replicate the dramatic festivals ofancient Athens, but they can try to understand their political role and findtheir own analogues—using political rhetoric, publicly sponsored visual art,the design of public parks and monuments, public book discussions, andthe choice and content of public holidays and celebrations. (Ibid, p.261)

Nonhuman animals feature in Political Emotions only as indirect sub-jects. They teach us about the animal heritage of our own moralpsychology: “By studying the other animals, we learn a great dealabout common roots of compassion and altruism on which we canpotentially draw” (Ibid, p.160). Nussbaum later suggests, in remarkablyKantian terms, that the formative lessons in “tragic spectatorship” in themodern world often come from stories about, and childhood experienceswith, the death of nonhuman animals: “This loss typically prepares themfor a later confrontation with human losses” (Ibid, p.276).

Neither Nussbaum nor her commentators have connected her exposi-tion of political emotions here to her prior work on interspecies justice.This is an unfortunate omission, since on Nussbaum’s account elsewhere,nonhuman animals are entitled as a matter of justice to “to a world publicculture that respects them and treats them as dignified beings” (2004,p.316), and such commitments to interspecies justice must be guided andmotivated by “imaginative sympathy” (2006). Bridging this gap by exam-ining practices of interspecies mourning and remembrance offers a way forthe political turn to engage with civic emotions, and so to begin a deeperinvestigation of the civic scaffolding of animal rights.

Nonhuman animal rights activists have long employed tropes of mourn-ing and remembrance, ranging from roadside tributes to vigils, “die-ins”,and days of remembrance, and a small literature now connects these sortsof acts to the ethics of mourning and witnessing—where the recovery ofnonhuman animal lives as “grievable”, to use Judith Butler’s much cited

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formulation, is a foundational act for interspecies justice (e.g. Taylor, 2008;Stanescu, 2012; Gruen, 2014). As Lori Gruen argues:

[R]ecognizing and engaging in mourning can be a way of moving towardjustice, perhaps not just for humans but for other animals aswell . . .Those not currently experiencing grief can help to support thecreation of communal possibilities for mourning, take grief out of theprivate realm, and publicly help make the lives, deaths, and relationsvisible and meaningful. (Gruen, 2014, p.63)

Combining these resources, the political turn might expand the engage-ment with critical geography and the importance of public space forjustice inaugurated in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis by consultingthe critical literature on the material and symbolic “human rights land-scape”, developing a vision for an “animal rights landscape” incorporatingmuseums, monuments, public art, festivals, and other forms of convivialattention to the historical experiences of nonhuman animals.

13.5 Emotions and the Moral Imaginationin Interspecies Justice

Seeing nonhumans as subjects of justice and members of human com-munities in a robust sense demands, I suggest, an apprehension of ourhistory, and the mobilisation of narrative and affect to sustain commit-ments to interspecies justice. I have argued that recent philosophicalaccounts of evil are a promising resource, despite their mutual lack ofengagement with animal ethics, since they combine a framework forinterpreting atrocities with a focus on the moral powers of perpetratorsin relation to their victims. This avoids some of the pitfalls of earlierworks that have sought to apprehend interspecies atrocities, enrichingthe moral vocabulary of interspecies justice while pointing to new fieldsof inquiry in memory studies, political emotions, and moral repair.

The coherence of moral outrage depends on the conception of out-rageous acts, and the language of atrocity is a significant and perhapsinescapable way of shaping this. Mary Midgley argues in defence of

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sentiment in moral reasoning that “real indignation is not just anemotional state, but one formed by and containing the thought of thespecial sort of outrage which calls for it” (1983, pp.42–43). The conceptof atrocity evokes and constitutes just such a “special sort” of outrage,and the failure to extend it systematically to atrocious interspecies actswhen it is ubiquitous in the inter-human case is, I suggest, not only asymptom of speciesism, but one aspect of speciesism’s social causes.Many people will readily, if hurriedly and non-specifically, acknowledgeinterspecies wrongs with a variety of epithets—some strong, andstrongly felt; but in the serial mismeasure of language, Stanley Cohenidentifies a structure of “interpretive denial”: “People who readily admitto themselves, their fellow citizens and even outsiders that ‘somethingbad is happening’ find it difficult to use the language of genocide, deathsquads or torture. Some ways of naming reality are not admissible”(2001, p.146). Claudia Card suggests a biting example from the realmof interspecies atrocities: “Some products not tested on animals aremarked in the US ‘cruelty-free’. It would be a sign of moral progressto be able to mark, instead, products that are so tested as ‘torture-certified’” (2010, pp.233–234).

All ways of naming reality present interpretive challenges. Bracingconcepts all too easily become brittle, and the language and affect ofoutrage can end up stymying moral discourse and action. Perhaps talkabout interspecies evils and atrocities will in fact not often be construc-tive for this reason. But properly formulated, even extreme emotions andlanguage are an indispensable part of social action, and a thoughtfulaccount of evil and its social causes may help to recover this sort ofoutrage from belaboured analogies and contested comparisons. Trainedtowards the tasks of remembrance and repair, moral horror can be apowerful resource for the civic imagination. The case of outrage alsohelps to illuminate the role of emotions and narratives in sustaining theprospect of interspecies justice.

Extending Nussbaum’s account of political emotions in line with herown convictions about interspecies justice, I hold that ritual and rhetoricmatter for interspecies justice, even where nonhuman animals cannotbe interlocutors in any comparable sense. Accordingly, Donaldson andKymlicka’s call for a new beginning—for “first contact all over again”

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(2011, p.258)—might itself be read within the storied rhetorical traditionof “public forgetting” (Vivian, 2010). Resisting the cultural tendency todefine forgetting as the absence or failure of appropriate attentionto the past, Vivian argues that public forgetting, like public remembering,is a political resource, crafted from ritual and rhetoric in a process of“commemorative restructuring and transformation” (Ibid, p.14). Weshould then be attentive to discourses of remembering and forgettingas complementary political resources, both engaged with the sentimentsand stories that constitute public life. This does not mean that thehistory of interspecies atrocities—whether performatively rememberedor forgotten—should be the definitive core of a culture of interspeciesjustice. As Donaldson and Kymlicka stress, the process of “expectingagency, looking for agency, and enabling agency” (2011, p.110) willshape the social horizon of enduring interspecies communities, and thisis an experimental process borne out in personal relations with individualnonhuman animals. This is why it matters, as Donaldson and Kymlickaalso contend, that we see nonhuman animals in sanctuaries, for instance,as “pioneers of a just future, rather than as ambassadors of an unjustpresent” (2015, p.68)—a remark that resonates here with Card’s admoni-tion against a self-absorbed mode of guilt about evils (2002, p.207).

At the same time, if we are to get people “excited” about animal rights(Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011, p.257), then this means confronting thefull suite of emotions evoked by, and constitutive of, interspecies solidarity.A fully fledged political theory of animal rights should consider the emo-tional bases of enduring justice, including the role of negative sentimentssuch as anger, sorrow, and contempt. I have employed the framework ofinterspecies atrocities here not in order to displace or attenuate constructivevisions of the future of interspecies relations but to better explore therichness of their moral and psychological vocabulary. Thinking about thepractice of moral repair in paradigmatic forms such as truth commissionsand memorials suggests new tools for interspecies justice; moreover, itconnects actual practices of mourning and remembrance pioneered byactivists to political theories of animal rights. Focusing on the politics ofmemory, and on the intricacies of the moral relationships exemplified bythe interpersonal apology, may also reveal new challenges or limits in therealisation of just interspecies community.

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It is reasonable to object that other matters must take conceptualpriority for now. As Card recognises, even to grant ongoing interspeciesevils the moral priority they deserve “would require enormous and far-reaching changes in social organization and practice in Western culture”(2004, p.31). Moreover, a deep culture of interspecies justice withmemories and traditions cannot be prescribed and must be forged inthe long struggle against still expanding atrocities. In this case, mychapter still can be read as a speculative prompt: What would it meanfor a society truly to begin to acknowledge the atrocities it has com-mitted against nonhuman animals? What would it mean truly to besorry, individually and collectively, for interspecies evils? If it is in factdifficult even to imagine a substantial public reckoning with this legacy,then this raises questions about the scope and stability of humancommitments to a just interspecies community.

I have suggested here that, asymmetries in the moral powers and com-municative abilities of perpetrators and victims notwithstanding, the con-cepts and practices of historical justice in the face of atrocity could help toinform a robust interspecies politics of memory. If animal ethics has told usto stop, then we must now find ways to say “never again”.

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Guy Scotton is an independent researcher, currently exploring the role ofemotions, virtues, and public institutions in theories of interspecies justice.He is an editor of the open access journal Politics and Animals (www.politicsandanimals.org/).

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