In 2015, as I was flying all over the country reporting on how police had been using guns, gas, and even dogs to terrorize the Black Lives Matter movement, I got a surprising email from a reader. It was from a police officer named Suzanne Kessler, who also happens to be my cousin, from the white side of my family. I hadn’t been in touch with her since I was a teenager. Something we had in common was that my father was Black and hers was Palestinian, placing us both a bit on the outside at family functions. Suzanne had been a big fan of my dad, “Uncle Bill,” who intervened loudly when an elderly white relative mocked her for being Arab and then took her aside and told her to hold her head high because she came from a people with a proud history.
A vegetarian who also ran a small organic farm, Suzanne worked as a police officer in Bellevue, Nebraska, a modest Midwest city of about fifty thousand people just south of Omaha. Her husband, a white man, was an officer in the same department. Their son also worked in law enforcement, and their son-in-law was a military veteran. All of them had been reading my dispatches from St. Louis, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland describing the racist horrors of policing. They wanted to talk to me about them, and even invited me to visit. I was nervous but intrigued.
It took me two years, but in September 2017, I embarked on a long road trip to take my Nebraska cousins up on their offer. To my surprise, my cop relatives were not angry at me for depicting policing from the point of view of those harmed by it, nor for having spent years reporting on Michael Johnson, the young Black wrestler accused of breaking the law. Rather, they were generally curious about what I had to say, and they trusted my analysis. They spoke candidly about the racism in their own department and shared with me how they’d been taking stock of their own participation in a structurally racist institution. (I shared that I, too, was examining the institutional racism of journalism.)
Suzanne offered to take me on a ride-along with her in her police car. So, one day, I accompanied her in her cruiser, on foot, and at her police station for a twelve-hour shift. At one point, she drove the cruiser into a trailer park. The children I saw playing in its streets had brown skin and eyed the car warily. I felt guilty, like I was some kind of native informant riding on a colonial patrol. The park’s streets were lined with dumpy, dilapidated mobile homes, and many of them had several cars in front of them. Some of these “homes,” Suzanne told me, were the very same Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers used after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita displaced tens of thousands of people from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf in 2005. Even though these FEMA units had long been known to leak toxic chemicals and make their inhabitants sick with respiratory problems and headaches, they were still turning up all over the country—including in this trailer park more than a decade later, where they were renting for $1,800 to $2,500 a month, cash, plus $100 a month or more for the lot rental.
I was shocked. How could a mobile home in a small midwestern city be renting for more than what I was paying at the time for an apartment in Manhattan?
Suzanne explained what was going on. Often, the people who lived in these mobile homes were undocumented workers. Many of them were from Mexico or other Latin American countries, and they worked in nearby slaughterhouses and “CAFOs” (for “concentrated animal feeding operation” facilities, buildings where overcrowded farmed animals are literally made to defecate where they eat, often without ever seeing daylight). As often happens with work done in violation of immigration law, most of the risk of the work is shifted onto the low-paid laborers and away from the corporation employing them. If caught, the workers might be arrested and detained in immigration camps, where they’d be at high risk for contracting influenza, mumps, and chicken pox. Then they might be deported—even if that meant separating them from their children who were U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, the employers who’d brought them to town and profited from their labor would risk only a slap on the wrist, if that.
Most landlords in town would not rent to workers without papers or to people with bad credit, but the trailer park would. With an absurd price set by a limited supply and by a tacit ransom agreement not to call immigration authorities, the landlords shook down these poorly paid rural workers for big-city real estate prices. And to be able to afford these extortionate payments, far too many of these workers (and sometimes their multigenerational families) piled into these FEMA hellholes.
“Who are they going to tell?” Suzanne later told me. “There’s no one to report it to, because they don’t want to come forward” for fear of deportation.
“It’s total exploitation of people’s fears.”
But the exploitation, Suzanne told me, didn’t stop there. Because they are frightened that talking to government authorities for any reason could lead to their deportation, these workers and their families are vulnerable to all kinds of atrocities they can never report—like wage theft, unsafe housing, and domestic violence. Suzanne recalled that once, she stopped a truck with improper license plates. When the young driver showed her an ID that was probably fake, saying that he was nineteen, she noticed that “he only had, like, two fingers on each hand. And I asked him, ‘What happened to your hands?’”
“Oh, they got cut off. They were caught in a machine, down at the meatpacking house.”
“That looks like a workman’s comp situation. Did you get workman’s comp?”
“No, they fired me.”
“Fired you? Why?”
“I couldn’t do the work anymore, without my other fingers.”
“Did you see a doctor at all? Did they get you any medical care?”
“They have a clinic, they gave me some stitches, then they fired me.”
“Stitches?” she described her incredulity to me. “Most of his fingers were missing!”
Suzanne didn’t ticket the man. Instead, she gave him a card with the phone number for his nation’s consulate, where she said people from his government could help him.
While the horrors of American meatpacking in cities like Chicago have been widely available to readers at least since Upton Sinclair published The Jungle at the start of the twentieth century, the dangers have mutated over time. A desire to stymie unionization efforts, reduce the possibility of ethnic community building, and utilize cheaper commercial real estate has driven such work out of cities. The meat overlords have made the work they profit from even more dangerous and alienating by moving slaughterhouses far from urban life and into low-density regions. And while white supremacists have tried to depict immigrants moving into “the heartland” as viruses, it’s really industrialized farming that is blighting rural America with increased violence, union busting, lower wages, and ecological destruction.
And this is only what happens in the United States. Meat production is a transcontinental affair. It is possible for an animal to be raised on one continent and killed, flown to another to be ground up, and flown to a third to be cooked and eaten. And at every step, that carcass is creating vectors of viral transmission among countless drivers, pilots, seamen, and butchers. (At the same time, it increases global warming with an enormous carbon footprint, creating conditions that are the most likely to dangerously affect people who can’t even afford to eat meat.)
This is a cycle that implicates all of us, including those of us who buy meat from grocery stores or burgers from McDonald’s (or even vegetarians who eat crops fertilized with manure from industrial animals). But our relationship with the world is too often one of extraction and exploitation, with no regard for the costs. In fact, the costs are myriad, from increasing the likelihood of zoonotic jumps (when viruses transmit from nonhuman animals to humans or vice versa) to creating lethal conditions for people working in factories. For many, it took the novel coronavirus pandemic to consider the ways that speciesism (defined as the presumption that human beings are superior to nonhuman animals and can treat or kill those nonhuman animals however we like) unleashes viruses on the human world and condemns to sickness or death the members of the viral underclass who are forced onto the front lines.
While he didn’t use it to fulfill the massive shortage of protective gear for workers, President Donald Trump did invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) in April 2020 to make ventilators and keep slaughterhouses open. Yet, while ventilators clearly helped save the lives of people affected by SARS-CoV-2, meat production did the opposite. On the day I logged on to the New York Times during the summer of 2020 to check its coronavirus maps (which I wrote about in chapter 7), fifteen of the top seventeen locations with a thousand or more coronavirus cases were jails or prisons; the lone two exceptions were a Smithfield Foods pork plant in South Dakota and a Tyson chicken plant in Iowa. Because of their cold temperatures, which better allow viruses to thrive; their conveyor belts, which quickly shuttle hundreds or thousands of carcasses an hour; and their workers standing shoulder to shoulder with knives that purposely cut the carcasses and unintentionally cut the workers, slaughterhouses were the most potent vectors of viral transmission for people who weren’t incarcerated—even more so than the kind of nursing homes where my friend Ward Harkavy died.
As Axel Fuentes, the executive director of the Rural Community Workers Alliance, told me, workers he helped organize at the Smithfield Foods plant in Milan, Missouri, told him while crying that they “feel like they are treated like animals.” Sometimes, he said, “workers have to wear diapers” and even “defecate on themselves, urinate on themselves” because “the speed of the line” moving pigs cannot stop, for any reason. Ever since I first read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal in 2002, one line has stayed with me: when it comes to U.S. beef, Schlosser reported, “There is shit in the meat,” a disaster of one kind. Two decades later, I realized that meat workers having to shit on themselves was a disaster of another magnitude altogether.
Defecation is used not only to make workers vulnerable, but over a certain age (say, three years old), it is used to determine who is valuable and who is disposable. We rarely look at infants who need Pampers and think, You’re disgusting and worthy of death. But an adult who depends on Depends? When Alice Wong described people in congregate settings as “trapped,” a justification for locking them up is often their incontinence, which betrays the dream of American independence with the “nightmare” of interdependence.
Even as millions of Americans were food insecure during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s enforcement of the DPA did little to get food to those who actually needed it. The reopened meat processing plants could not keep up with the supply of hogs in the United States; the National Pork Producers Council predicted that farmers and plant workers would have to kill as many as ten million pigs by even more brutal means than usual, only to throw them away. Meanwhile, the workers who continued to supply America with its meat were set up to be infected at work and then to have pathogens ride along with them home to crowded FEMA trailers.
As a lawsuit against Smithfield Foods alleged, its Milan plant failed to offer personal protective gear, stagger breaks, or develop a plan to test and trace the SARS-CoV-2 virus. According to the suit, this was after “hundreds of employees of Smithfield’s plant in South Dakota contracted COVID-19,” two of them died, “and Smithfield was forced to close that plant after it became the country’s leading hot spot” for COVID. Indeed, as one worker on the “cut floor” in Milan who sued Smithfield as “Jane Doe” wrote in the Washington Post, “maintaining distance is almost impossible in our plant.” Smithfield was “disciplining workers who missed a scheduled shift” even if they had COVID-19 symptoms, and the company was even offering “a $500 ‘responsibility’ bonus to anyone who manages not to miss a single shift from April 1 through May 1,” to incentivize working while sick.
Already dangerous before the pandemic, pork production became even more lethal during COVID-19. In another lawsuit, Oscar Fernandez alleged that his father, Isidro, was one of 1,000 employees at Tyson Foods’ pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, to become infected with the novel coronavirus—more than one-third of the 2,800 workers who processed “approximately 19,500 hogs per day.” While refusing the local sheriff’s pressure to close the plant, the suit charged, “most managers at the Waterloo Facility started avoiding the plant floor because they were afraid of contracting the virus.” And yet, according to the suit, “Defendant Tom Hart, the Plant Manager of the Waterloo Facility, organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19.”
Remember in chapter 2 how ABC News, CNN, and the AP perpetuated the myth of “COVID parties” without any direct evidence? Alleging that young people should be ashamed for gambling on who got the virus first? Turns out it was corporate supervisors doing the gambling with workers’ lives. A month after Oscar Fernandez filed suit, Tyson fired seven managers for the betting ring at the Waterloo facility.
It’s true that workers in low-wage jobs of all kinds face increased viral risk in a pandemic. But people who work with animals face some of the severest risks. Because of how speciesism devalues nonhuman animals, companies squeeze together too many species into tight spaces and deny them room to live in relation to one another with any sense of equilibrium. This, in turn, places the humans who work with these animals in some of the most dangerous working conditions possible.
The viral danger faced by people working or living in close proximity to nonhuman animals can’t be blamed entirely on Trump or cartoonishly evil factory managers. It’s not new, and it’s not random. Such proximity is an example of what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment. People who work with animals don’t just wind up moving thousands of miles from their homeland, traveling across dangerous borders, killing mammals in frigid temperatures, living in crowded FEMA trailers on the outskirts of a minor U.S. city, being patrolled by my vegetarian cop cousin (and observed by me), and/or having managers bet on their lives by accident. It’s systemic, and its drivers are deeply entrenched in our legal, business, policing, and social systems.
For instance, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is set up to protect workers from the very kinds of risks these meat production workers were facing. But when Reuters identified 106 U.S. workplaces “where employees complained of slipshod pandemic safety practices around the time of” COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020, a mere 12 resulted in discipline by OSHA by the end of the year. “The agency,” Reuters reported, “never inspected 70 of those workplaces, where at least 4,500 workers were infected by the coronavirus and 26 died after contracting COVID-19.” Of the work sites Reuters identified, the government largely deserted the workers it deemed the most essential in a majority of the cases—at a time when those workers needed protections the most.
As with so many other members of the viral underclass, the vulnerability of people who work killing (nonhuman) animals is as manufactured as a box of Smithfield’s Fully Cooked Maple Sausage Patties. And the justification for consigning people to such damnation? Their proximity to animalness.
If we think of ourselves as animals at all, we humans tend to imagine ourselves as the best animal. We draw pyramids of hierarchy and imagine ourselves on top of them, at the pinnacle, as royalty ruling over the animal kingdom. We conjure zoonotic threats where they don’t exist, being told in childhood that we will get warts from frogs (when, in fact, warts are caused by the human papillomavirus and move only from human to human). We downplay how 99 percent of the DNA of humans and bonobo chimpanzees is the same. And even though nature has literally coded us almost the same way as certain monkeys, we regularly divide the world into the “man-made” and “natural,” which smacks not just of sexism but of speciesism—as if Homo sapiens were separate from and above all other living beings in nature.
Who is considered a human animal or a nonhuman animal is also highly gendered, racialized, and ableist, with those closest to white, straight maleness being categorized as human, while the rest of us have historically been considered nonhuman to varying degrees.
Taxonomy is the scientific classification of organisms, and the eighteenth-century “father of modern taxonomy,” Carl Linnaeus, classified Mammalia as organisms with breasts. As the historian of science Londa Schiebinger has noted, one of the reasons Linnaeus did this was because, at the time, men were defined by their brainy reason while women were defined by their beastly bodies.
When nineteenth-century taxonomists Josiah Clark Nott (who owned enslaved humans) and George R. Gliddon organized biological beings, they created nasty hierarchies of race and species. They were informed by phrenology, a pseudoscience that argued that measuring the dimensions of skulls proved how races were intellectually inferior or superior. In 1854—just five years before Charles Darwin’s 1859 landmark On the Origin of Species would argue that humans of different races were of one species—Nott and Gliddon published Types of Mankind, a book that “documented what they saw as objective racial hierarchies with illustrations comparing blacks to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans,” as Wulf D. Hund and Charles W. Mills wrote in the Conversation. In 1857, Nott and Gliddon followed up Types of Mankind with Indigenous Races of the Earth, which argued that Black people fell somewhere between Greek people and chimps.
Under a twisted logic, if women and Black people are closer to animals, then they deserve the kinds of lives and deaths of farmed animals. If Michael Johnson is an animal, he should be allowed to die in prison or of AIDS; if Isidro Fernandez is an animal, his life should be mere gambling fodder, as expendable as the hogs in America’s hot dogs. If an elder (or a factory worker, or someone gay like Zak Kostopoulos, who once lost control of his bowels while running from attackers) defecates without a toilet, they deserve anything else that happens to them. If any child crossing the border into the United States is an animal, then they deserve to possibly die of influenza in an ICE detention camp.
The hubris with which some humans have sought to master the so-called natural world, through colonialism and capitalism, has led directly to the spread of viruses from animals to humans. But this risk is not shared by all humans equally. The viral underclass bears the most risk of infection, and once afflicted by viruses, these humans are needlessly marked as unhuman, perpetuating a vicious circle.
But viruses could be a guide to a different kind of taxonomy—to a transgressive taxonomy in which humans aren’t on top of or master of anything, but live in relation to every other species on earth. This approach might help alleviate the suffering of the viral underclass and help us address current and future pandemics.
While its exact origins are as yet unknown, the novel coronavirus is close to viruses found in bats and pangolins. Some bats have been flying around with certain viruses for millions of years, and bats have evolved to live symbiotically with all kinds of pathogens that might harm other mammals. But while SARS-CoV-2 brought humanity to a halt in 2020, it didn’t seem to be harming these flying nocturnal mammals.
As various empires have shown, even some members of the same species who live on different parts of the globe have adapted to life with pathogens while others have not—but if they are brought into close contact too quickly, a virus living harmoniously with one group might kill off the other. For instance, when Europeans arrived in the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they had some level of immunity to smallpox; but Native Americans had never encountered the smallpox virus and had no immunity, and it wiped out millions of them.
Like certain seabirds, bats defecate near one another in caves in large quantities that accumulate to make guano. Many species in cave ecosystems rely upon guano, and humans use it for fertilizer. In fact, it is so valuable that, as my colleague Daniel Immerwahr wrote in How to Hide an Empire, the United States vastly expanded its geographical footprint in the nineteenth century to gain more access to it. Many life-sustaining nutrients are bountiful in guano, but guano is also rich in pathogens. And so, the quest to harvest it has made humans vulnerable to the viruses it carries.
It is possible that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats to some poor person whose livelihood depended on scooping up guano in a remote region of central Asia. People may have died from it over many years without the virus moving broadly between groups of humans before it made its way, in 2019, to the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market that is its suspected source. There, it may have spread not through exotic animals for sale, but between human workers and shoppers.
People outside the United States who live or work near “exotic” animals—like people farming guano or selling pangolins in China—are highly stigmatized and othered by Americans. It is precisely the sort of work the United States (and other empires) demands, but from which those in power distance themselves. This process constitutes a kind of organized abandonment, where interests in the United States depend upon such work, even if those in the country pretend not to benefit from it. When Donald Trump repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the “China virus,” the remark was meant not only to make the novel coronavirus seem un-American, but to mark those people originally infected by it as subhuman others, in part because of their proximity to the animals from which the virus may have derived.
A decade prior, the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic originated in North America. A “nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses,” Tim Philpot wrote at the time in Grist, the swine flu outbreak was associated with a subsidiary of Smithfield Farms in Mexico. Still, many of the pork workers who were infected by H1N1 were othered by the United States—not coincidentally because they were either working in Mexico or were immigrant workers from Latin America in the United States. And rather than being given respect and support for providing humans with food, these members of the viral underclass have been widely despised by those they feed. They became hated not merely for being considered animallike, but because the viruses in their bodies connected all of us human animals to other animals. When they became exposed to a virus, the essentialist boundary between the species was exposed, too, and the boundary itself began to look as batshit as guano. Yet, because this zoonotic outbreak originated in North America with the beloved pig—and because the U.S. pork industry was at fault for its initial transmission—swine flu has never been othered nationally as a virus as the coronavirus has been.
Since humans first became aware of HIV in the 1980s, the virus has been associated with monkeys. Like bats with SARS-CoV-2 or any cousin virus, simians have likely been living with a close relative of HIV called SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) without harm for a very long time. Though HIV and SIV are both a kind of lentivirus, which attacks the immune system, primates have lived with SIV for so long that they’ve adapted to it. It doesn’t affect them as HIV affects humans.
Incorrectly, rumors have swirled for decades that HIV jumped from simians to humans when people on the African continent had sex with monkeys. Researchers have long believed that HIV likely jumped when hunters with machetes killed chimpanzees for bushmeat in the early twentieth century—probably in the 1920s, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It likely entered the hunters’ blood through cuts in their skin—a fairly common way slaughterhouse workers still become plagued by infections. The virus may have traveled with African “porters,” who were coerced laborers forced to cut deep into forests by Belgian colonizers. HIV then likely hitched rides along routes of colonialism, as the European “Scramble for Africa” robbed the continent of its resources—which means that neocolonialism moved HIV in the twentieth century around the globe much as European classical colonialism moved pathogens to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade.
So much of why and how people come into contact with animals is economic; thus, the risk of humans encountering zoonotic viruses is very classed. It is not wealthy meat eaters who are in immediate danger, but the lower classes. Whether they are butchering meat in the bush or in a factory, those on a lower rung of the social ladder are the ones wielding machetes and factory saws.
Also, factory-farmed animals are bred to have weakened immune systems and are given high quantities of antibiotics and then crowded together in toxic environments. This is the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant mutations of pathogens. The poor are also the most likely to live near animal kill sites and their inherent dangers—such as in 2018, when a town near a meat processing plant in North Carolina flooded and was overwhelmed by waters teeming with pig feces, hog ash, and viruses.
Months into the COVID-19 era, poor people were still collecting guano from seabirds in Thailand, despite its known dangers and despite the growing pandemic. Not doing so might have resulted in their starvation. As the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding in February 2020, the World Bank South Asia Twitter account wrote that 71 percent of Bhutan’s “territory is covered in forest, but with a contribution of only about 2% to GDP per year, the forest sector remains underutilized. How can the country sustainably invest in its forests?” Perhaps the most valuable investment Bhutan could make on behalf of humanity would be to just leave its forests, which are full of bats, alone. As climate change destroys diverse biohabitats for both animals and humans, the ruling class wants to push an increasingly desperate viral underclass to harvest the forests that sustain them, much as European colonizers pushed African porters into the territory of chimpanzees living with SIV. The climate crisis is only going to make the encounters between nonhuman animals and human animals more common, as all animals amass upon a decreasingly hospitable portion of the globe.
Proximity to mosquitoes is also a marker of the viral underclass, and a result of the forces that create it: capitalism, racism, environmental destruction, and speciesism. While neither COVID-19 nor HIV can move between humans by mosquitoes, many pathogens do move through mosquitoes, like the parasite Plasmodium malariae (malaria) and the Zika, West Nile (WNV), and dengue fever viruses. Outside the United States, class determines who has prophylaxis against mosquitoes, and even though protection can be as complex as a dengue vaccine or as simple as mosquito netting, the results of a lack of protection can be equally deadly.
Inside the United States, proximity to mosquitoes is driven by economics and class as well. For instance, the mortgage crash of 2008 began a foreclosure crisis of some ten million U.S. homes. Many of those homes had pools, and when the families living in them were evicted, the pool maintenance stopped, turning the standing water into dank, fetid mosquito breeding grounds. At the same time, neighbors who could keep paying their mortgages not only were left with “underwater” homes whose debts exceeded their value but became targets for the mosquitoes breeding in those unchlorinated pools and the West Nile virus they carried. As the New York Times reported, a 300 percent increase in mortgage delinquencies in 2008 led to a 200 percent increase in cases of West Nile virus.
The predation of the subprime lending crisis literally led to the breeding of mosquitoes who could bite, infect, and condemn people living in zip codes of foreclosure to West Nile virus and to the viral underclass. Even socializing with or just living near those who could not pay back their debt ensnared people in viral vulnerability and premature death—not unlike how the Greek debt crisis led to increased cases of West Nile virus, too.
And much like when the Defense Production Act was invoked with meat processing workers, when the United States does try to counter the spread of viruses and diseases like West Nile virus or malaria, the policies often further dehumanize the very people most at risk. In the 1940s, the United States and Mexico created a program for braceros, or farmworkers, that allowed citizens of Mexico to travel to the States to harvest crops. But upon legally crossing the border, the braceros were sprayed down with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. DDT, while effective at killing mosquitoes, has also been shown to be extremely toxic to humans. (In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned its use entirely.) And although DDT had been used to kill mosquitoes mostly with aerial spraying, the United States willingly used it directly on people as if they were ridden with insects—or as if they themselves were insects—without any concern for the toxic effects of the chemical.
When the United States washes humans down with chemicals at the border like they’re bugs, or forces migrants onto cold kill floors during a pandemic when viruses are flowing freely, it is not only policing a manufactured human/nonhuman animal species divide. It is policing the boundaries of who should have access to life itself.
The day I spent riding along with my police officer cousin Suzanne in Nebraska ended at her police station. There, as she filled out paperwork, I talked to one of her fellow officers, who trained their police dogs. And I met the dog he was currently training, which he took home at night to live with his family, a menacing Belgian Malinois/German shepherd mix with several titanium teeth, to help the dog take a harsher “bite out of crime.” In front of several other people, the officer casually referred to the female canines as “bitches” and joked that he used his “bitches” not just to keep the public in line, but to establish his own animallike pecking order. He was the alpha leader of his pack, the K9 dogs were below him, and then came his “bitches”: my cousin Suzanne (the only woman police officer on the force) at work and his wife at home.
I had been obsessed with police dogs ever since reading the 2015 Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Michael Brown. In addition to finding that “Nearly 90% of documented force used by FPD officers was used against African Americans,” the DOJ found that “in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the person bitten was African American.”
Even though K9s tend to be vaccinated, dog bites represent a moment in which a pathogen like the Rabies lyssavirus, which is zoonotic, can jump from a dog to a human. Once their skin is broken, a human’s epidermal prophylaxis becomes open to any pathogens in the dog’s mouth as the K9 tries to eat them alive. Whether or not rabies or other microbes are riding along in any given cop dog’s mouth, moments of actual viral transmission are just the last event in a chain of social predeterminants of health. From Selma to Ferguson, any police dog’s teeth are likely to slice the human flesh of people already plagued by pathogens.
My interest in this subject only grew when I read an essay by a scholar of police dogs, Tyler Wall, on how “German police dogs” had been imported as a biotechnology in the United States after World War II. This was expressly because they’d been so good at causing racial terror in Nazi Germany. German shepherds were first systematically used as “canine cops” in the 1950s, in St. Louis and Baltimore, two heavily Black cities where I’d been reporting. Two K9s were used to suppress a sit-in of Black college students fighting for civil rights in Mississippi in 1961. Eventually, K9s became a staple in American police departments, even in small towns in the rural Midwest.
Anthropomorphism is the process of assigning (nonhuman) animals human qualities, and zoomorphism is the process of turning human (animals) into nonhuman beasts. When police dogs and emotional support dogs are depicted in certain media, prosecutors play a role in assigning sympathetic, human qualities to them for the benefit of white people. The dogs are meant to bolster white people’s sense of comfort and humanity. But as Wall has shown (and my own reporting has revealed to me), those very same dogs are used by police and local media to scare Black people and relegate them to the domain of the nonhuman—potentially exposing them to viruses.
This brings me back to my cousin. When we reconnected online, I was fascinated to learn that while she was a police officer—a violent job in which she was trained to potentially kill people—she was also an animal activist, an organic farmer, and a vegetarian. As a journalist who has covered police torture and murders, I was not surprised to learn that many cops are carnivorous hunters who enjoy killing animals. Similarly, it didn’t surprise me when I heard a streak of sadism in the voice of Suzanne’s colleague, who bragged about how he trains his “bitches.”
When not on duty, Suzanne does not train dogs at home to kill or go hunting; she spends much of her time tending to a small farm with horses and egg-laying chickens. Officer Kessler’s life as a vegetarian cop is a stark portrait in contradiction.
When I think of Suzanne’s life as a vegetarian, I think about the violence-plagued lives of the people who work on a factory’s kill floor and who live in the trailers she showed me on the ride-along. I think about how vegetarianism can lead us away from the hierarchy of speciesism, which could lead not only to less cruelty experienced by nonhuman animals but to less vulnerability for the most marginalized human animals, too. And I think about how, if we didn’t eat meat, maybe the young man Suzanne pulled over wouldn’t have lost his fingers, and maybe the migrants in those trailers wouldn’t have had to dangerously travel so far from home in the first place.
In other words, vegetarianism, veganism, and organic, humane farming are good forms of harm reduction. But if we’re going to abolish the other isms and hierarchies that produce a viral underclass, speciesism, and the hierarchies it imposes on our understanding of the world, needs to be abolished, too.
We are all, as Alice Wong says, “in the same soup—the very same soup.” What if humans didn’t believe that viruses and bacteria were at the bottom of the food pyramid, but at the top of it? Or between every step? What if we didn’t imagine a species pyramid at all, but a species cycle—a round map without beginning or end, which we all share? We humans need other animals. Even vegans do. We depend on bat feces for guano and horse manure to grow vegetables. Plant agriculture would collapse without animals. But what if we humans respected other animals more and didn’t condemn them to living in their own feces in “animallike conditions”? If we didn’t believe that certain humans are not human and if we didn’t think nonhuman animals should be condemned to hellish circumstances, perhaps it would be harder to condemn those certain humans to wallowing in their waste, not having ventilation, and not having time or space to enjoy their lives “like animals.”
And what if we stopped thinking of nonhuman animals as not just the cause of human illness but also the solution? After all, healthy animal ecosystems have provided a healthier planet for all of us animals, and they offer a model for how to live sustainably without capitalism.
If we human animals want to avoid the next viral pandemic, we can’t rely upon meat eating, even under the force of the Defense Production Act. Such a world could free the viral underclass considerably not just from infection, but from the many ways social death predicts and compounds it.