The latest issue of the Animal Studies Journal is now available online:

Current Issue:  Volume 6, Number 2 (2017)

“This special sanctuary edition of the Animal Studies Journal is dedicated to Minuet, who died not long ago after living an exceptionally long life for a cow in this world. She was 26 years old, almost 27. Minuet was a Friesian cow who lived all her life in the same little herd at a farm which in many ways resembles a sanctuary, in the sense of a sanctuary as a place where the animal’s life and wellbeing is of central importance; but also a sanctuary in the sense of the limitations that almost always includes – human control and lifelong captivity. I was there when she was born, and when she died, and I think she had a happy life, even though at times it was clear to me that she suffered humans gladly in the face of our inadequacies. Without the sanctuary of the farm she may, like her mother, have been sold at the saleyards when only a few weeks old (I saw her there and took her home), or she may have found herself captive and put to work in a dairy farm like her grandmother. Sanctuary seems utopic in the face of these kinds of realities for cows; but, as Foucault suggests, utopias are not real.”