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Gender Studies Prof Blames Shelter Animal Deaths on Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy

(Campus Reform) A gender studies professor wrote a 312-page book about race and gender applied to shelter pets.

Katja Guenther — who teaches at the University of California-Riverside — argued that inequalities in the treatment of shelter animals are “powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species” in her book The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals.

“Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles,” reads the book’s description. “Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed.”

In the first chapter of her book, Guenther blames Monster’s death on “anthroparchy” — the notion that humans systemically dominate animals and the natural world.

She also claims that Monster died because he “lived in a community of lower-income people of color in which human residents face challenges that threaten their ability to maintain continuous, geographically proximal relationships with anyone, human or animal.”

More broadly, Guenther said that the shelter animals’ deaths were the “outcome of everyday and sustained collisions of capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”

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