I really liked the first picture we see in the introduction of the chicken and pig hanging out. Was very heartwarming!
I will confess I am not really an “animal person”—I didn’t grow up around a lot of them and honestly some of them kind of creep me out. Even some domesticated pets like rabbits or reptiles bother me. I did get to meet an opossum the other day through the wildlife club though, and he was very lovely.
Thus, echoing Eden’s statement about positionality, I’ve never really given human-animal relations much thought at all, and I’ve especially never really looked at sanctuaries outside of pro-and-anti-zoo arguments online.
In reading Abrell’s writing, I found myself much more sympathetic to the animals and the animal rescue/sanctuary movement. Like Mandy mentioned in her blog post, “Ultimately, every animal in a sanctuary takes the place of another animal in need under our current agricultural/agribusiness system.” How could I not be more invested in this ‘exploitation’ of animals? Can we really equate exploitation of humans with current agriculture practice towards animals?
In this vein of thought as well, in the introduction, Abrell says there is “sanctuary as a specific bounded place or state of being and sanctuary as an ideological/ethical mode of
being” (4). I hope we spend time on this later because I found it very profound to tie the concept of sanctuary as a mode of being into animal rights, and also because Abrell specifically also refers to the concept of immigration sanctuary when discussing the rerise in popularity of the term. Similarly to JP, I wonder if this comparison is apt, or even really makes sense once we dive deeper?