Anti-Carceral Approaches to Addressing Harms Against Animals: Considerations on Multispecies Restorative and Transformative Justice

The animal protection movement has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the criminal punishment system through lobbying and campaigning for harsher punishments for animal abuse, while at the same time showing an interest in restorative justice (RJ) as a response to harm against animals. In this article, we take a critical position aligned with anti-carceral feminists and prison abolitionists against the carceral systems that fail humans and animals in circumstances of violence. We consider the potential of RJ as an alternative approach to address and prevent harm against animals in abuse cases on an individual level while highlighting the limitations of RJ in achieving the necessary changes on a societal level to end structurally produced violence against animals, such as industrial animal exploitation. We propose that transformative justice (TJ), which involves some RJ processes, is the most promising approach that could achieve justice for both humans and nonhumans in the long term without reproducing traumas and violence for the individuals and communities involved in harm reduction and prevention. Drawing on examples of RJ and TJ as developed and practised in marginalized human communities, we apply their lessons to thinking through similar practices in the context of animal abuse and neglect.