Humane Extraction Technologies

• In Event: More-Than-Human Histories of Extraction: Violence and Care in the Technological Landscape

Abstract

In the first decade of its publication, the oldest humane periodical in the United States not only printed numerous articles on the best way to run a dog shelter, to lobby for animal protection legislation, and to encourage responsible pet ownership. It also featured over one hundred articles on the problem of the "defective." From laws against prohibiting such people to marry to mandatory segregation of these citizens in colonies, and from sterilization proposals to immigration screenings, The National Humane Review considered multiple ways of eliminating people they marked mentally, physically, and morally unfit. If they were not contained, the "defective" would, humane societies feared, overrun the country, ruin the American "stock," and deplete both the charitable and penal resources of cities. This paper questions the entanglement of the discourse around human and animal fitness in the early twentieth-century humane movement and the spatial terms in which their fears about the "defective" and the stray alike were articulated. It tracks the way humane societies sought to extract value even from these so-called "surplus" populations. And it argues that capitalism, white supremacy, and ableism were inseparable from the ways in which humane societies enacted care for the more-than-human environments in which they lived.

Author

• Kat Poje, Harvard University