Unlocks the hidden world of a high-intake animal shelter, revealing the inequalities that lead to one million animal deaths each year. Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest intake animal shelters. Over the course of her ethnographic research, Katja M. Guenther met countless animals, including Monster, and saw the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned them and, ultimately, their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. By deftly decoding the language and behaviors of shelter staff, she explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency. Current efforts to help shelter animals largely fail to address the underlying causes of companion animal homelessness, such as poverty and precarity. Guenther offers a radical rethinking of the problem of shelter confinement and death, demanding a new way of seeing the relationship between humans and nonhuman companions. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals forces us to reacquaint ourselves with the animals we claim as "best friends."

Book Information
ISBN 9781503612853
Author Katja M. Guenther
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press
Weight(grams) 152g