Animal Cruelty, Human Violence, and the Animal-Industrial Complex

In this book Piers Beirne confronts animal cruelty. Further advancing the multidisciplinary research program in non-speciesist and green criminology he has pursued for three decades. Beirne finds existing approaches to animal cruelty to be heavily burdened by religious, cultural and, especially, juridic baggage.

He establishes that the key concept of animal cruelty law, firmly entrenched since the mid-1870s, is the fictive distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering. While it criminalises certain interpersonal violence as animal cruelty, this murderous distinction also permits―in zones of exception created by statutory exemptions for animal capital―the slaughter of many billions of animals in the animal-industrial complex. Beirne argues that because it is so imbricated in the couplet of permissible and impermissible violence, the concept of animal cruelty is anathema to non-speciesist criminology. It should be abandoned. He therefore proposes a vigorous approach to animal abuse in which a central part is played by non-speciesist concepts of interpersonal, institutional and epistemic violence. This framework is applied in successive chapters on anthroponosis; sexist and speciesist verbal violence; human-animal sex; and the doomsday scenario of zooanthroponosis.

This book is essential reading for scholars in criminology, animal studies, law, philosophy, multispecies justice and environmental ethics.