Book Review: Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare

Abstract

relations. For example, in an otherwise illuminating chapter on the shelter’s control of time, Guenther describes “volunteers, clients, and animals” as temporally “dominated groups,” whereas staff tend to appear as agents of the shelter’s domination (232). But while the mostly middle-class volunteers may negotiate moral anguish and gendered norms, they are also free to leave the shelter at any time. The Latinx staff, as workers, have less ability to leave because they depend on the shelter for their livelihood (and surely, to be a wage laborer is to face temporal control.) Captive animals, of course, have no real exit options at all. Guenther’s designation of volunteers as “dominated” continues in other parts of the book, but there seems something off—especially with a method attuned not only to relationality but knotty differences—of using the same category used for captive animals. It is not that I think Guenther is unaware of these differences, but that, analytically, their intersections seem to exist on a homogenous plane oriented around an undifferentiated “domination.” This conceptual issue should not detract from the many strengths and insights of the book, like Guenther’s inspiring vision of a world where shelters are unnecessary, an abolitionist vision that partners with other struggles for justice. In this world, companion animals do not belong to a single human but form part of a community, free to choose and be chosen by a variety of humans. Getting there requires steps that provide common praxis for human and animal advocates alike, like allowing companion animals at facilities for the houseless, ending housing and insurance discrimination against pit bulls, and economic justice measures like wage increases and lower housing costs. In sum, The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals offers a much-needed look into an institution as ubiquitous and revealing as it is generally ignored.