Beasts of Burden

A bold and beautifully written inquiry into the intertwined struggles for animal and disability justice—challenging what it means to be human

In this provocative and original work, artist, activist, and scholar Sunaura Taylor, “Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi” (The New Yorker), explores the profound connections between animal liberation and disability justice. With keen insight and lyrical prose, Beasts of Burden asks us to reconsider long-held assumptions about autonomy, dependence, and what defines a life worth valuing.

Blending memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, Taylor draws on her lived experience as a disabled person and lifelong animal advocate to examine how society marginalizes both disabled people and nonhuman animals—often through the same systems of power and exclusion. From the ethics of caregiving to the realities of factory farming, she invites readers to “crip” our understanding of animal ethics, opening the door to new forms of empathy and solidarity across difference.

As Rebecca Solnit has written, “Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn’t know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime.”