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The question of animal labour has emerged as an important topic in both the academic study of human–animal relations and in public debates about the rights of animals. While the human use of animal labour has been a site of intense instrumentalization and exploitation, some people argue that (good) work can be a site of cooperation, mutual flourishing, and shared social membership between humans and animals, and that recognizing animals as ‘workers’ could have a transformative effect on our relationships with them. This introductory chapter explores some of the developments in animal ethics and animal studies that have informed this new interest in animal labour, and in particular how animal labour can be seen as overcoming the ‘welfarist–abolitionist’ dichotomy that dominates the field. It also explores some of the obvious challenges and dilemmas that animal labour raises, including questions of consent, labour rights, and the link to other social justice movements. The chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters in the volume, and how each contributes to a richer understanding of the potential for animal labour to serve as a frontier of interspecies justice.

Tarr and Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse opens with a voiceover recounting Nietzsche’s apocryphal encounter with animal suffering – a horse being beaten in the streets of Turin on 3 January 1889. The film approaches this history obliquely, through the fictional story of another horse – a horse kept by a man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, in a desolate, inhospitable part of Hungary, in an unidentified time. As the horse increasingly resists eating or moving, the film traces human lives of routine pitted against a nonhuman life refusing to submit to routine any longer. While critical commentary on the film has tended to emphasise an existentialist, Beckettian focus on the inescapability of death and an apocalyptic ‘end time’, this chapter reads The Turin Horse as a film about labour, and about animal labour in particular. Alongside the work of Deleuze, it draws on Jacques Rancière’s discussions of duration in Tarr’s work, while engaging critically with Rancière’s apparent neglect of questions of animal labour. While bearing witness to modes of exhaustion and precarity that reach across human and animal worlds, The Turin Horse is a quietly revolutionary film that patiently documents an animal’s revolt through her withdrawal of labour – a deterritorialising line of flight.

An analysis of alienated animal labour has much to contribute to our understanding of the systems of animal oppression under capitalism. However, the humanist model of alienated labour which dominates the current literature, drawn from Marx’s early works, is predicated on a concept of ‘species-being’ that presupposes an untenable dichotomy between humans and animals, leaving no room for animal agency or flourishing, and severely limiting the application, scope, and emancipatory potential of the alienation critique. This chapter attempts to chart a way out of this dilemma by putting forward an ‘appropriative’ rather than ‘humanist’ model of alienated animal labour that allows us to avail ourselves of the rich social and political dimensions of the alienation critique while avoiding the difficulties that attend it. The chapter begins with a general definition of alienation before surveying Marx’s account of alienated labour as well as various attempts to apply his account to animals. It then focuses in particular on the notion of species-being, which underpins Marx’s theory of alienated labour, and argues that its humanist presuppositions preclude any coherent application to animals. The chapter then puts forward an alternative appropriative model of alienated animal labour, and makes the case that this account overcomes the difficulties plaguing the humanist model, giving way to an emancipatory conception of unalienated animal labour.

This chapter examines the idea of animals having humane jobs. The concept of humane jobs has been proposed primarily to help conceptualize and propel good work for people which also benefits animals. Here the focus expands to interrogate whether animals can be engaged in what could be considered humane jobs and what that would involve. By building in particular on feminist political economy and care ethics, as well as the front-line efforts of people who work with animals, the chapter elucidates key preconditions and perameters for certain animals to have humane jobs, including important inclusions and exclusions. Moreover, it argues that humane jobs are not sufficient on their own, but rather that we also ought to be emphasizing animals’ work-lives. This means understanding animals not only as workers but as whole beings, and taking seriously their lives, relationships, and experiences, before and after work, on a daily basis, and over their lifetimes. The chapter is thus both inductive and generative, and offers a constellation of ethical and conceptual considerations, intended to drive further research, foster nuanced and contextualized analysis, and help inspire tangible changes in thought and political action.

This chapter challenges the strategy of seeking material improvements for animals through recognition of animals as ‘workers’ or ‘labourers’, especially as this strategy may relate to farmed animals. It argues that this strategy risks overlooking the realities of ‘agricultural exceptionalism’, whereby agricultural producers are consistently insulated from regulations seeking to advance a range of social priorities from trade to labour to animal well-being to environmental protection. In particular, this chapter notes that seeking improvements for farmed animals by casting them as ‘workers’ may have the effect of 1) whitewashing the violence and exploitation of contemporary animal-agricultural practices (taking dairy farming as a key example); and 2) whitewashing the treatment and status of human agricultural workers, who are in fact often socially and legally isolated, excluded, and debased. Having set out this critique, the chapter concludes with reflections on the application of this strategy to non-farmed animals, including a concern with strategies for animal inclusion and justice that are unable to illuminate or elevate the concerns of farmed animals. Instead, this chapter urges the adoption of theories and strategies grounded in the identification and advancement of priorities that most resonate with animals’ own priorities and the harms: for example, those related to kinship and parenthood (bonds which we know to be both highly valued and highly disrupted for agricultural and other domesticated animals), rather than to work they may perform for humans under conditions of inequality and coercion.

Through an examination of the role of domesticated animals as forms of property in rural Ottoman Egypt, this chapter argues that historians of the early modern Muslim world must pay greater attention to the economic and social importance of animals. Based on the Islamic court records of multiple cities in both the Nile Delta and southern Egypt, this chapter documents the roles of animals as agricultural laborers, means of transport, and sources of food. It then analyzes several court cases in which the ability of animals to move, die, and procreate challenged notions of property and legal ownership in Ottoman Egypt. Because animals were everywhere in rural Ottoman Egypt, they were enmeshed in nearly all aspects of the social and economic history of the countryside.

Labour has been associated historically with a cluster of values, including individual security, self-development and freedom, social standing and recognition, and meaning. Insofar as these values are also relevant to animals, this suggests that we should seek to include animals into the world of labour. We should recognize that animals, as well as humans, are workers, and deserve access to the security, self-development, status, community, and purpose wrapped up in the role of being a worker. The reality, however, is that work life fails to deliver many of these goods, much of the time, for many people. Moreover, given technological development, there is no necessity for everyone to be a producer, and indeed the cultural expectation that everyone should be ‘productive’ is culturally pernicious and environmentally unsustainable. As a result, we see increasing discussion of a ‘post-work’ society. This chapter explores how animals fit into the emerging debate about the post-work society. It argues that animals can in fact be major beneficiaries of, and indeed exemplars of, this shift, engaging in socially beneficial activities that do not fit standard models of wage labour and economic production. Instead of bringing animals into our current work society, this chapter explores the possibility that animals could exemplify the ethics of a post-work world—one in which the values traditionally tied to ‘productive’ work are instead realized through new conceptions of community—being, doing, and taking care together.

This chapter explores how acts of animal kindness and cruelty were markers of American belonging and exclusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Journalists, SPCA officers, the police, and courts treated public displays of animal kindness as a litmus test for good citizenship, while condemning animal cruelty as proof of inassimilable difference in an era of escalating racial segregation and accelerated immigration. Humane advocates interpreted their own culturally contingent definitions of kindness and abuse through the intersectional optics of gender, race, and class in four interconnected areas of concern: labor; cultural customs, such as kosher slaughter; fashions using animal bodies; and entertainment. While anticruelty surveillance and law enforcement could magnify extant forms of inequality, the American Humane Education Society, which included several black humane leaders, argued that their initiatives—which prioritized education over prosecution—combated nativism and racism in a wholesale gospel of human and animal kindness.

For centuries, dogs have played a key role in the lives of humans both as companions as well as working animals. In recent years, the value of dogs in environmental work has been documented in the literature—namely their ability to detect targets more efficiently than humans and equipment. However, the environmental work dogs perform in Canada has been largely understudied in terms of both the specific tasks they are responsible for, as well as their welfare within these roles. This chapter addresses those gaps through an exploration of whether conservation canines could be an example of a humane job—one that is good for people, animals, and the environment. To do so this chapter explores tangible and moral issues related to dogs’ enjoyment of and suffering within conservation work, highlighting the complexity of dogs’ work-lives related to issues of freedom and consent. Findings are presented from two main case studies: Alberta and Ontario. An ethogram was used to assess dog welfare, while semi-structured interviews and participant observations revealed further insights into dogs’ work and work-lives. Ultimately, this chapter offers a discussion regarding how the study’s findings might inform assessment of humane jobs and work-lives, offering enjoyment, control, agency, respect, and recognition for dogs in this sector and for possibilities of fostering interspecies solidarity in other areas.