What if our most sophisticated critiques of capitalism, race, and gender still rely on a blind spot—the assumption that the human stands apart from the animal? In Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory, philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen insist that this blind spot isn’t incidental; it is constitutive. The result is a slim but urgent book that aims to rewire critical theory so it can confront the intertwined crises of animal exploitation, environmental collapse, and social injustice.
Context: From Domination of Nature to Interdependence
Crary and Gruen enter a tradition—Adorno and Horkheimer, Fanon, Butler—that has long examined how domination works and reproduces itself. But while the Frankfurt School diagnosed the “domination of nature,” animals rarely appeared as political subjects. Crary and Gruen close that gap. For them, the animal question is not a niche ethical add-on; it is a structural feature of modern power. Factory farms, extractive landscapes, and biosecurity regimes are not parallel to racialized labor or gendered violence; they are entangled with them.
The authors also position their project against two familiar footpaths. On one side, the formal moralism of rights-talk that treats animals as units of welfare; on the other, a technocratic pragmatism that hopes innovations—lab-grown meat, better cages—can finesse the problem. Both, they argue, leave intact the forms of life that make mass animal harm intelligible and permissible.
Theory Snapshot: Moral Perception, Entangled Lives
Crary, known for work on moral perception, and Gruen, known for “entangled empathy,” build a shared method: ethics is not a ledger of principles but a practice of attention. Our capacity to see animals as subjects is shaped by social arrangements—markets, media, institutions—that dull perception. Critical theory, then, must be emancipatory at the level of vision: it must help us learn to notice animals as participants in our moral world.
This is not sentimentality. The book argues that the human/animal divide props up hierarchies among humans. Dehumanization works by animalization. Conversely, widening our circle of moral attention helps unmake those hierarchies. The point is political: transforming how we live with animals requires transforming the systems that sort lives into killable and ungrievable.
Case in Point: Pandemics, Prisons, and Supply Chains
Where the book is strongest is in its case-based analyses. The authors read zoonotic disease not as “nature’s revenge” but as the predictable outcome of global supply chains that compress species into intimate, lethal proximity. They link industrial meat production to climate crisis and to labor regimes that render certain workers—often migrants and the poor—disposable. They track how carceral logics extend across species: control, confinement, surveillance. In each arena, animals are not metaphors; they are co-victims and—when we pay attention—co-constituents of resistance.
This insistence reshapes familiar debates. Veganism is treated not as a purity ethic but as one tool within broader coalitions for food justice. Conservation is evaluated not by headline species counts but by whether it dismantles or reinscribes colonial land politics. Even hopeful technologies are approached with caution: progress that preserves exploitative forms of life is, by their lights, not progress.
A Provocation with Teeth
As a piece of philosophical writing, Animal Crisis is admirably clear. It compresses a great deal—Murdoch’s moral attention, Wittgensteinian forms of life, feminist and postcolonial critique—without losing the thread. Readers looking for a comprehensive policy program will not find it here; the book is diagnostic and normative more than procedural. Its power lies in reorientation. After reading, arguments that bracket animals as “special interest” feel oddly anachronistic.
There are tensions. The emphasis on attention risks sounding overly pedagogical—can seeing differently scale against agribusiness? Yet the authors anticipate this worry: attention is not a mood but a political practice that informs organizing, law, and everyday consumption. A second tension is strategic: entanglement can make action feel diffuse. But here the book’s wager is compelling—if the crises are entangled, so must be our remedies.
Why It Matters
Animal Crisis clarifies a cultural turning point. Animal ethics has moved from the margins of analytic debates about pain to the center of questions about democracy, labor, race, climate, and care. For scholars, the book extends critical theory’s franchise to nonhuman life without evacuating politics of specificity. For activists, it offers a language to build coalitions that don’t trade off harms across species lines. And for the rest of us, it reframes a daily ethical field—from what we eat to how cities plan for multispecies life—less as private virtue and more as shared world-making.
The deeper lesson is simple and unsettling: a society that organizes indifference toward animals is already practicing the habits it needs to disregard human suffering. Change the habits; change the horizon of the possible.
