When Animals Die

A groundbreaking collection that explores human–animal relations and deaths with depth and hope

When Animals Die is an innovative collection of essays that delves into the intricate and uneasy dynamics between humans and other-than-human animals, particularly concerning animal deaths, which are predominantly caused by humans. This groundbreaking book brings together prominent scholars from various disciplines to address the challenging field of animal death studies, incorporating perspectives from social sciences, humanities, biological sciences, and perspectives from beyond academia.

The collection explores profound questions about the experience of animal death for both animals and humans. It examines how humans rationalize animal deaths and utilize deceased animals, and sheds light on the interconnectedness of animal death with issues like race, colonialism, gender, capitalism, and other systems of inequality that humans have established and perpetuated.

By confronting these pertinent issues, When Animals Die seeks to deepen our awareness of the relationship between animal death and humanity’s involvement in it. While grappling with the reality of humans’ impact on the earth, the collection offers hope for an alternative future that does not entail the mutual destruction of human and other-than-human animals.

Katja M. Guenther is Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, winner of the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Section of Animals and Society Distinguished Book Award, and Making Their Place: Feminism after Socialism in Eastern Germany.Keenan Julian Paul :

Julian Paul Keenan is Professor of Biology and Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Montclair State University. He is the co-author and co-editor of numerous books, including The Face in the Mirror: The Search for the Origins of Consciousness and Handbook of Research Methods in Health Psychology.Katja M. Guenther (Editor)
Katja M. Guenther is Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, winner of the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Section of Animals and Society Distinguished Book Award, and Making Their Place: Feminism after Socialism in Eastern Germany.

Julian Paul Keenan (Editor)
Julian Paul Keenan is Professor of Biology and Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Montclair State University. He is the co-author and co-editor of numerous books, including The Face in the Mirror: The Search for the Origins of Consciousness and Handbook of Research Methods in Health Psychology.

In this cutting-edge collection of interdisciplinary essays, the lives of animals are brought more vividly into view by exploring the ethical and political significance of the ends of those lives. This volume helps us get a hold of the meaning of death as it is understood by humans and by other animals. This is a tremendously important contribution to the growing literature in animal studies.

When Animals Die is a brilliant book about what death means in multispecies existence today. Provacatively, the text doesn't take as a given a universal understanding of what ‘death’ is, sparking a creative exploration not just about how, when, and for what purposes animals die (or are killed), but also about what constitutes death itself at a fundamental level -for humans, for animals, for the perishing ecosystems in which we all live. The contributing authors offer a wonderfully rich excavation of animal death from a breathtaking range of perspectives ensuring that readers will not think about animal death in the same way again.