Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts [Hardcover]

The emotional exchange between so-called humans and more-than-human creatures is an overlooked phenomenon in societies characterized by the ubiquitous deaths of animals. This text offers examples of people across diverse disciplines and perspectivesfrom biomedical research to black theology to artlearning and performing emotions, expanding their desires, discovering new ways to behave, and altering their sense of self, purpose, and community because of passionate, but not romanticized, attachments to animals. By articulating the emotional ties that bind them to specific animals lives and deaths, these authors play host to creaturely ghosts who reorient their world vision and work in the world, offering examples of affect and feeling needed to enliven multi-species ethics.

Brianne Donaldson Brianne Donaldson is the author of Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (2015), and the forthcoming Insistent Life: Foundations for Bioethics in the Jain Tradition (2020, co-authored with Ana Baj~elj). She is the editor of Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: A Common World for Animals and the Environment (2014), and The Future of Meat Without Animals (2016; co-edited with Christopher Carter). She is assistant professor and Shri Parshvanath Presidential Chair in Jain studies at University of California, Irvine.


Ashley King is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Northwestern University. Their dissertation project, Body, Flesh, Meat: A Science-fictional Theory of Soteriology, develops the concepts of flesh and meat to theorize racialized queerness, transness, and animality in the viscously embodied soteriologies of contemporary science fiction.

This is an ambitious collection that brings an intimate voice to the discussion of ethical issues that are usually developed in more distanced rights-based discussions. Jane Desmond, Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA