In the last decade animal studies has become a vibrant field of scholarship comprising animal ethics, critical animal studies, and cognitive ethology. The present volume is a fine and much-needed addition to such literature, especially to what has been called the “political turn” in animal studies. This political turn focuses on issues of citizenship, justice, and political representation of animals’ interests but has remained inattentive to other relevant areas of social life such as labor. The volume includes contributions from scholars working in Anglo-American, British, and Australian universities at different stages of their academic careers and with diverse disciplinary backgrounds: as political theorists, philosophers, lawyers, specialists in animal welfare, and scholars of the environment. The result is a challenging book that breaks new ground on the issue of animal labor as “a site of interspecies justice” (p. 12).

The introduction by the editors Charlotte Blattner, Kendra Coulter, and Will Kymlicka lays out the main purpose of the book: to position animal labor within the field of animal ethics. This means situating animal labor in a field still marked by the debate between welfarism and abolitionism. Whereas welfarism promotes legal regulation of the humane use of animals for human purposes, abolitionism seeks to respect the rights of animals by severing relations with them—by leaving them alone to lead their own lives undisturbed. Such debate has reached an impasse, the editors argue, between two options: “rights without relationships (as proposed by abolitionists), and relationships without rights (as proposed by welfarists)” (p. 4). The editors seek to move forward to develop new perspectives on sociability, agency, and communication that could foster “not only an interspecies ethics of intersubjective attunement, but also an interspecies politics” (p. 9).

The book is divided into two thematic sections: “The Promise of Good Work” and “The Dilemmas of Animal Labour.” In the first section, Kendra Coulter discusses which “principles, rights, protections, and/or benefits” (p. 42) could serve to underpin humane jobs and work lives for animals. Coulter draws on a plurality of approaches such as capability theory, care work, and intersectionality to explore new ways of improving the conditions of animal labor. Alasdair Cochrane’s chapter is a good complement to Coulter’s, because it poses the question of how to conceptualize not only humane (harmless) jobs for animals but also jobs that could be good for them. Cochrane suggests that a good job promotes animal flourishing by enabling “pleasure and agency” (p. 58), as well as self-respect and self-esteem (pp. 58–59). The first section closes with Renée D’Souza, Alice Hovorka, and Lee Niel’s application of Coulter’s approach to humane jobs and interspecies solidarity to a case study of detection dogs who “assist biologists and conservationists with environmental protection and wildlife research” (p. 66) in Canada. Their conclusions are mixed: whereas dogs showed positive emotions and had opportunities for enjoyment, they also exhibited “a number of stress-related behaviours” (p. 79) while at work.

The second section is longer and offers insightful accounts of the commodification of animal work and of alienated animal labor. Charlotte Blattner’s piece suggests that animal labor has often been conceptualized as a thing or commodity completely devoid of a subject. Thus, Blattner seeks to rethink animal labor from the perspective of animals’ self-determination so as to distinguish, as we do with humans, between free animal labor and forced animal labor. Blattner’s chapter is connected with Jessica Eisen’s discussion of what she calls “agricultural exceptionalism” (p. 142). Eisen contends that agricultural farming remains an unregulated space of economic activity where animal cruelty provisions do not fully apply. Hence, Eisen remains skeptical about investing in animals’ membership through their recognition as workers and suggests alternative forms of inclusion that could “focus on the social relationships that animals value themselves” (p. 154). In their chapters, Omar Bachour and Dinesh Wadiwel explore the concept of alienation introduced by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Both authors conceptualize animal labor as alienated labor. However, whereas Bachour focuses on alienation as the animal’s inability to “experience herself as an effective agent in the world” (p. 135), Wadiwel focuses on labor time instead. Based on the idea of “enabling flourishing by diminishing work” (p. 200), Wadiwel suggests that alienation “reflects the demand for animals to enjoy time during their lives that is not dominated by the processes we thrust them into” (p. 197).

Section two also includes Nicolas Delon’s critical engagement with Jocelyn Porcher’s “labour-based defense of humane agriculture” (p. 160). Porcher vindicates animal husbandry as a kind of complex human–animal relation, in contrast with the detached productive and technological approach of industrial farming. But Delon takes issue with Porcher’s position, because it accepts that raising and killing animals for food are part of the cultural milieu harbored by husbandry. The closing piece by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka addresses animal labor in the context of a postwork society. The authors claim that just as the denigration of women’s work has been characteristic of patriarchy, the “denigration of animal’s work has been central to human supremacism, and justice requires tackling these biases head on” (p. 211). The postwork society that they envision brings both the normalization and moralization of work to a halt, exploring new ways of belonging that could include, but are not limited to, granting basic income to nonhuman animals.

As stated earlier, Animal Labour stands as a major addition to the literature in animal studies. Nevertheless, in the book the key concept of labor remains somewhat underexplored. Even if the editors depart from anthropocentric understandings of labor predominant in liberal (Locke) and socialist (Marx) traditions, challenging species bias in labor is not tantamount to tackling the concept of labor as such. And the issue is contentious: Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), questions the lack of distinction in political modernity between labor and work. For Arendt, labor concerns the satisfaction of the needs of mere life and remains caught in the recurring cycle of nature; work (poiesis and techne), in contrast, implies a break with nature and the human fabrication of things (poetry, memorials) that can endure through time. Thus, from Arendt’s perspective, although animals do indeed labor, it would be difficult to assert that they actually work. More importantly, because Arendt opposes both labor and work to the realm of the political (action), understood as a shared world of appearances, she would resist democratic augmentation through the recognition of political membership based on labor. Put differently, it remains to be shown how the world alienation of animal labor/animal laborans can be superseded by a combination of leisure time, humane labor conditions, and the satisfaction of the basic needs of life—a combination that, from Arendt’s perspective, looks like alienation itself in a polity run as a well-managed household.

This critique notwithstanding, Animal Labour will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across the social sciences and the humanities. Normative political theorists focused on justice, critical political theorists interested in alienation under capitalism, moral and political philosophers working on animal ethics, social scientists focusing on labor and political economy, and scholars in the environmental humanities and conservation studies will surely be challenged and instructed by this fine collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the vibrant field of animal studies.