Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement

This multi-sited ethnography of the US animal sanctuary movement is based on 24 months of research at a range of animal rescue facilities, including a companion animal shelter in Texas, exotic animal sanctuaries in Florida and Hawaii, and a farm animal sanctuary in New York. In the last three decades, animal welfare activists have established hundreds of sanctuaries across the United States in an attempt to save tens of thousands of animals from factory farms, roadside zoos, and other sites of contested animal treatment. These facilities function as laboratories where activists conceive and operationalize new models for ethical relationships with animals, models they hope will influence broader public debates. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer as a person who lacks all rights and legal protections (1998), this dissertation argues that animals treated by humans as property or material resources can be understood as bestia sacer. Comprising an alterity that defines and makes possible the human liberal subject, bestia sacer is precisely what personhood is not. In an effort to disrupt this category by leveling conventional species hierarchies, animal sanctuary activists strive to create spaces in which humans can interact with animals as autonomous subjects with their own interests worthy of consideration and respect. However, the realities of living with and caring for captive animals often require compromises to this aspiration. Caregivers regularly contend with difficult decisions such as how to best serve animals’ needs with limited resources and when to limit the exercise of animal agency through such practices as sterilization to prevent overpopulation or the segregation of animals deemed dangerous to humans and other animals. Remaining entangled in larger political-economic contexts of animal capital circulation and still susceptible to physical control and potentially harmful treatment by humans as a result of their legal status, animals in sanctuaries are neither fully autonomous subjects nor property. Instead, they function in their relationships with humans as improperty, living beings within a shifting spectrum between property and subjecthood. To the extent that they are able to participate in the sanctuary community as subjects with limited rights to life, sustenance, and freedom from harm, sanctuary animals operate as members of a sort of multispecies polity composed of human and animal citizens. Due to material constraints and the dilemmas of care, though, both animals and caregivers must make sacrifices for the requirements of the larger sanctuary community. As a result, human-animal interactions in sanctuaries constitute a variation of what Wendy Brown describes as “sacrificial citizenship” (2015). To understand how these animals transform from bestia sacer to sacrificial citizens, this ethnography focuses on six main aspects of sanctuary dynamics. Chapter One, “Coming to Sanctuary,” introduces the primary research sites and describes the different ways in which animals arrive at sanctuaries and become improperty in the process. Chapter Two, “History of US Animal Activism,” situates the sanctuary movement in relation to other forms of animal advocacy by tracing the philosophical genealogy and political and social history of the contemporary animal protection movement, examining how conflicting ideologies of human-animal difference and shifting patterns in human-animal relations shaped the landscape of twentieth century animal activism. Chapter Three, Creating and Operating Sanctuaries, examines the political economy of sanctuaries and explores how caregivers navigate the tensions that arise from using rescued animals as fundraising mechanisms while simultaneously seeking to challenge the commodification of these animals. Chapter Four, Animal Care, analyzes animal care practices, specifically focusing on the many post-rescue dilemmas caregivers face and how their methods for addressing these dilemmas transform animals into sacrificial citizens. Chapter Five, Animal Death,” examines one of the most complicated dilemmas of care – the fact that saving animal lives sometimes requires sacrificing animal lives – and explores the different ways that sanctuaries navigate this dilemma through practices of “necro-care,” forms of care that actively employ death in the service of fostering life, such as feeding animals that consume other animals, protecting sanctuary animals from external predators, and euthanizing ill, injured, or dangerous animals. In conclusion, this ethnography considers the possible futures of animal sanctuaries and examines the important role they currently play in furthering the greater animal advocacy movement’s goals. The realization of sanctuaries’ visions for the future of human-animal relations will remain limited without larger transformations in social and political-economic systems of value that still treat animals as means for satisfying human needs. Despite these current limits, sanctuaries are invaluable to the broader animal advocacy movement both for the qualitative difference they make in the lives of individual animals and for the symbolic power these experiments in alternative species relations have in illustrating that different ways of living with animals are possible. Beyond their symbolic value for inspiring struggle toward a better future, sanctuaries perform the essential task of working through the difficulties and contradictions of manifesting that future – the pragmatic labor that must be done in order to achieve more radical transformations in human-animal relations

Drought effect on isoprene production and consumption in Biosphere 2 tropical rainforest

Isoprene is the most abundant of the hydrocarbon compounds emitted from vegetation and plays a major role in tropospheric chemistry. Models predict that future climate change scenarios may lead to an increase in global isoprene emissions as a consequence of higher temperatures and extended drought periods. Tropical rainforests are responsible for more than 80% of global isoprene emissions, so it is important to obtain experimental data on isoprene production and consumption in these ecosystems under control of environmental variables. We explored isoprene emission and consumption in the tropical rainforest model ecosystem of Biosphere 2 laboratory during a mild water stress, and the relationship with light and temperature. Gross isoprene production (GIP) was not significantly affected by mild water stress in this experiment because the isoprene emitters were mainly distributed among the large, canopy layer trees with deep roots in the lower soil profile where water content decreased much less than the top 30 cm. However, as found in previous leaf level and whole canopy studies, the ecosystem gross primary production was reduced by (32%) during drought, and as a consequence the percentage of fixed C lost as isoprene tended to increase during drought, from ca. 1% in wet conditions to ca. 2% when soil water content reached its minimum. GIP correlated very well with both light and temperature. Notably, soil isoprene uptake decreased dramatically during the drought, leading to a large increase in daytime net isoprene fluxes

The effect of elevated atmospheric CO2 and drought on sources and sinks of isoprene in a temperate and tropical rainforest mesocosm

Isoprene is the most abundant volatile hydrocarbon emitted by many tree species and has a major impact on tropospheric chemistry, leading to formation of pollutants and enhancing the lifetime of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Reliable estimates of global isoprene emission from different ecosystems demand a clear understanding of the processes of both production and consumption. Although the biochemistry of isoprene production has been studied extensively and environmental controls over its emission are relatively well known, the study of isoprene consumption in soil has been largely neglected. Here, we present results on the production and consumption of isoprene studied by measuring the following different components: (1) leaf and soil and (2) at the whole ecosystem level in two distinct enclosed ultraviolet light-depleted mesocosms at the Biosphere 2 facility: a cottonwood plantation with trees grown at ambient and elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and a tropical rainforest, under well watered and drought conditions. Consumption of isoprene by soil was observed in both systems. The isoprene sink capacity of litter-free soil of the agriforest stands showed no significant response to different CO2 treatments, while isoprene production was strongly depressed by elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In both mesocosms, drought suppressed the sink capacity, but the full sink capacity of dry soil was recovered within a few hours upon rewetting. We conclude that soil uptake of atmospheric isoprene is likely to be modest but significant and needs to be taken into account for a comprehensive estimate of the global isoprene budget. More studies investigating the capacity of soils to uptake isoprene in natural conditions are clearly needed

A Note on the Different Interpretation of the Correlation Parameters in the Bivariate Probit and the Recursive Bivariate Probit

This note makes the point that, if a Bivariate Probit (BP) model is estimated on data arising from a Recursive Bivariate Probit (RBP) process, the resulting BP correlation parameter is a weighted average of the RBP correlation parameter and the parameter associated to the endogenous binary variable. Two corollaries follow this proposition: i) a zero correlation parameter in a BP model, usually interpreted as evidence of independence between the binary variables under study, may actually mask the presence of a RBP process; and ii) the interpretation of the correlation parameter in the RBP is not the same as in the BP -- i.e. the RBP correlation parameter does not necessarily reflect the correlation between the binary variables under study