Linking Animal Cruelty and Family Violence By Lisa Anne Zilney

will enrich our inquiries into the 'nature' and 'culture' of ... the histories of domination and oppression in general” (p. 381; emphasis in original). Feminist, multicultural, and postmodern critiques of modernism create spaces for considering nonhumans, making nonhumans an appropriate theme of discourse in some disciplines. “Artfully hidden behind factory-farm gates or research-lab doors, obscured by disembodiment and endless processing, and normalized by institutional routines and procedures, the thoroughly modern instrumental rationality that characterizes contemporary human-animal dependency has rendered animals both spatially and morally invisible” (Emel and Wolch 1998: 22). When such invisibility is broken and one starts to look around the cultural landscape, the nonhuman animal is everywhere. In a spiritual novel entitled Ishmael (1992), author Daniel Quinn suggests that we live in a society wherein “the world belongs to man,” as opposed to an historic society wherein “man belongs to the world.” In our historic societies, the significance of the nonhuman animal was obvious.

In a thought-provoking work, David Nibert (2002) explores the connections between the oppression of humans and the mistreatment of animals, arguing that the mistreatment of animals globally fuels human exploitation. Both human and nonhuman animal oppression are believed to require economic exploitation or competition, an unequal balance of power, and ideological control to persist. Nibert makes the case for unification of social movements, and dismisses the opinion of many leftists who assert that linking human and animal oppression serves to trivialize human suffering. Instead, Nibert uses sociological, specifically minority group theory, to elaborate the root economic connections