educe animals to mere metaphors, similes, or symbolsdo not seem promising for theorizing ethical recognition of actual animals.Donna Haraway, for example, criticizes philosophical texts that show a “pro-found absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals,even as innumerable references to diverse animals are invoked.” 15 SusanMcHugh, meanwhile, suggests that “the aesthetic structures of metaphor,though precariously supporting the human subject, seem unable to bearanimal agency.”16 An

She maybelieve the comparison reveals the moral horror of industrial animal agri-culture, but, as Bénédicte Boisseron argues, such comparisons “instrumen-talize” Blackness in a “self-serving” way, ignoring the complex and ongoingBlack struggle against dehumanizing discourses and institutions in order toframe “the animal” as “the new black.

remind us of the historical reduction of the human to the status of ananimal under transatlantic slavery, but also were used as a mode of resistancefor enslaved peoples

Paraphrasing Joel Chandler Harris, BryanWagner writes that animal stories were “political allegories in which therelative position of the weaker animals corresponded to the global per-spective of the race.”