The prescense of ethical agriculture still relies on the binary of human and non-human that justifies all of the atrocities by making the human a shifting status that can be taken away from people.

3) We can’t treat a disease by esteeming human beings over more-than-human beings.

We can’t incarcerate or spend our way out of the current pandemic. And still, the state continues to treat the coronavirus with another symptom and key stakeholder in carceral logics and capital accumulation – animal agriculture. We can’t treat a disease without remaining in communion with the ecosystems and nonhuman animals that global capitalism is responsible for disrupting and destroying. We can’t treat the coronavirus by invoking Defense Production Acts to sustain life-taking (i.e. human and nonhuman animal life) industries. We can’t treat COVID-19 by passing an executive order barring local governments from closing slaughter houses.

As we critique industrial ranching operations and slaughterhouses as breeding grounds for future diseases, we must also level a critique of a capitalist system that exploits the need for poor and racialized migrants to survive in some of the most socially-and economically-dispossessed regions of this country.

There exists the opportunity to create more life-giving and life-affirming jobs, but only if we begin to make preexisting social conditions nonexistent. So as we make the call to #FreeThemAll, we must also demand the liberation of more-than-human beings held captive within zoos and other animal-exploitative industries.

As Christopher Sebastian reminds us, neither prisons nor zoos rehabilitate humans and non-human-animals. Zoos, factory farms, and other sites of animal captivity are close cousins to the prison industrial complex. The fact that zoos once held both black people and non-human animals in the same cage means black liberation is intimately connected to animal liberation. How do we destabilize the human-nonhuman animal binary to produce what David Pellow describes as “racial sociological indispensability” – the recognition of the “excluded, marginalized, and othered populations, beings, and things – both human and more-than-human – are indispensable to our collective futures”? Destabilizing this binary requires that humans no longer esteem ourselves at the expense of more-than-human beings. We must critique the false opposition between the two groups and recognize that both poor and racialized persons and nonhuman animals remain subject to similar forces of ecological violence. In doing so, we see that speciesism and racism are mutually-constitutive of one another. Refusing to treat diseases with symptoms requires an understanding that we are fed more than just animal products.