Tracking Animal Studies

W ild animal species are declining at an alarming rate while factory farms and industrial fisheries continue to breed an unfathomable number of animals to feed a seemingly endless supply chain of animal products.When not transformed by anthropogenic climate change, natural habitats around the world are reduced and repurposed to accommodate displaced human populations living under the uneven and inequitable conditions of global development.Unique among animal species, humans have driven life on earth to the brink of extinction.Scholars in the humanities, tasked with making sense of human accomplishments, must now also help us come to terms with this catastrophic legacy.For the last few decades, the field of animal studies has drawn attention to our ethical responsibilities regarding animal exploitation, animal suffering, and animal extinction and made us look back at the complex history of human-animal relations with a new sense of urgency.But how effective has animal studies as a field been in making animals matter to the humanities and, more important, in bringing justice to bear on our treatment of animals?The three essays under consideration offer encouraging if varied answers to these questions.Even though they all fall under the purview of literary studies, each essay roughly follows one of the principal tracks of inquiry crisscrossing animal studies-ethics, history, and representation-and may therefore be made to approximate, collectively, the current state of the field.Jessica Murray's essay, "Using Critical Animal Studies to Read Climate Change Fiction: Literary Reflections and Provocations," offers a corrective to what Murray perceives as lapses in the representation of animals in a literary genre, climate fiction, whose relatively recent emergence ought to have inured its practitioners to the perils of anthropomorphism.Critical animal studies, an arm of animal studies founded on activist praxis based on the notion that animals are sentient beings, can contribute, in Murray's reading, a valuable perspective on the persistent use of inadequate terms to describe animals that perpetuate, or conceal, rather than prevent anthropocentrism.In her reading of A. E. Copenhaver's My Days of Dark Green Euphoria (2022), for instance, Murray notes that while the protagonist makes a concerted effort to refer to a spider using personal pronouns, she (the protagonist) cannot overcome the difficulty of referring to a pet cat other than by using anthropocentric notions such as "adoption" and, more problematically, cannot but feed him food that contains animal parts.Murray suggests that veganism, not only en gl ish lan g u a ge no t es