"Throughout Western-colonial history, the lack of ability to reason by slaves, indigenous peoples, or nonhuman animals was often taken as a precursor to justifying their enslavement and slaughter. Likewise, whether one can walk, see, or hear serves as a precursor to justifying exclusion from certain environments and social locations. In all cases, the privilege of being able-bodied is taken as a given, while those who are labeled as dis-abled are subordinated. To challenge this cultural paradigm, we must question the ontological environments that mental and physical abilities construct. These constructions are anything but neutral".

"Inspired by eco-feminism, eco-racism, and eco-colonialism, eco-ability challenges cultural conceptions of “normalcy” as determined by dominant social groups. As part of this challenge, Nocella, Bentley, and Duncan (2012) evaluate special education and dis-ability studies as civil arenas built upon the “charity model” that attempts to make those with disabilities as mainstream as possible (p. xv). In defiance of this tradition, Eco-ability argues for the respect of difference and diversity, challenging social constructions of what is considered normal and equal. Eco-ability also challenges labels and categories that divide and separate rather than unify and collaborate. Eco-ability respects imperfection and the value of “flaws.” … Difference was, and is, the essential ingredient for human and global survival. (Nocella, Bentley, & Duncan, 2012, pp. xvi-xvii) Indeed, for nonhuman survival as well. Other-than-human animal species have traditionally been viewed as “flawed” by nature of their not being born human. As such, they are always already excluded from conventional conceptions of who gets counted in the moral community. This is seen in their use within nearly all major profit-making institutions from corporations, to education, to entertainment, and so on".

"Derrida recalls that the god Prometheus stole fire for humans to compensate for Epimetheus, who neglected to clothe clothed humans. It is “within the pit of that lack … man installs or claims in a single stroke his property.” This property, which is “the peculiarity [le propre] of a man whose property it even is not to have anything that is proper to him,” establishes a “superiority over what is called animal life” (p. 20). Philosophy is preoccupied with the attempt to fix something “proper” to human, such as reason, consciousness, or language. But because there is nothing proper to “the human” that isn’t also proper to some or other animal, the “propers” keep changing".

"We may even think of ableism as a kind of speciesism. Speciesism relentlessly asks of nonhuman animals that they be like us, that their speciescapabilities be measured against that of the Homo sapiens sapiens, a term that pings its own echo, a call and response of “the human” to “the human.” Sapiens? Sapiens. As we seek to make visible that which has been withdrawn into itself—our private suffering in pain and debilitation; the suffering inflicted on nonhumans in seclusion—we must maintain vigilance against curing through harm".

Journal for Critical Animal Studies