ABSTRACT
For critics such as Walker and Wise, the racial equality and inclusiveness that they believe many white animal rights activists want to assume—a society in which all humans currently receive the same privileges under liberal humanism in their inclusion within "the human"—is an evasive fantasy. Both Walker and Wise ask crucial questions of (white) animal activists and rightly demand that animal activism pay attention to issues of injustice that concern all animals, nonhuman and human alike. Neither, however, completely discounts the animal rights movement (despite his excoriations, Wise describes it, after all, as a "struggle for greater compassion for all"). Animal studies, attempts to resist anthropocentrism and to acknowledge the lives and histories of animals, and, in doing so, demands the radical interrogation of the very idea of the human. Erica Fudge argues, that the history of animals can only be told at the expense of the human, demanding its demolition. This chapter also presents an overview of the book.
