The War against Animals

Critical Animal Studies #3

by Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

Are non-human animals our friends or enemies? In this provocative book, Dinesh Wadiwel argues that our mainstay relationships with billions of animals are essentially hostile. The War against Animals asks us to interrogate this sustained violence across its intersubjective, institutional and epistemic dimensions.

Drawing from Foucault, Spivak and Derrida, The War against Animals argues that our sovereign claim of superiority over other animals is founded on nothing else but violence. Through innovative readings of Locke and Marx, Dinesh Wadiwel argues that property in animals represents a bio-political conquest that aims to secure animals as the “spoils of war.” The goal for pro-animal advocacy must be to challenge this violent sovereignty and recognize animal resistance through forms of counter-conduct and truce.

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals

302 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2015

About the author

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, Ph.D. (2005), University of Western Sydney, is a Lecturer in Human Rights and Socio-Legal Studies at The University of Sydney. His research interests include sovereignty and the nature of rights, violence, race and critical animal studies.

Reviews

[Timothy Conway · Rating 5 out of 5]

I confess i've only had time (because of immense ongoing busy-ness and time-demands) to read the opening 63-page Introduction by Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel to his important book THE WAR AGAINST ANIMALS, but that Intro certainly can function as a stand-alone argument, a manifesto, challenging the arrogant human presumption of sovereignty over animals.

Those who are impressed by the academic and popular work of longtime animal rights advocate Gary Francione, professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers Univ., in advancing the notion of animal rights through an ABOLITIONIST approach (almost identical to the 18th-19th century arguments against human slavery) will appreciate Wadiwel's contributions. He mentions or cites Francione several times in his long Intro, at one point stating that he is extending beyond Francione’s argument about “property rights” to emphasize the entire fundamental matter of SOVEREIGNTY.

It’s a very useful category within which he presents his many insights and arguments.

I presume that the rest of Wadiwel's text is coherent in tone and style with his long Introduction, which is a beautiful combination of quietly passionate muckraking reporting and advocacy (his opening description of the nightmare of how billions of chickens are put to death each year will likely move you to tears) and careful philosophical examination of the systemic presumption of human superiority and sovereignty over animals.

On these grounds, Wadiwel puts forth a scathing indictment of the status quo.

Read it and weep... and then quickly GO VEGAN (in accordance with what you deeply know to be moral/ethical truth) and, crucially important for the next step, network and organize with fellow humans to advocate for an entirely different set of relationships with the animals who share this fast-deteriorating planet with us.

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

A provocative critique of human sovereignty over other animals. Some of the more Foucauldian stuff was a little out of my wheelhouse but I got a lot out of the later chapters especially.

[Mills College Library]

179.3 W122 2015