Introduction: Animal Industry, Literature, and Imagining the Future

The study of “livestock” in literature is not only a long overdue, but also a worthwhile endeavor—both from an animal ethical and from a literary studies perspective: firstly, animal texts provide information about the attitudes that are responsible for our current treatment of animals. At the same time, they may irritate conventional perceptions of our nonhuman kin and experiment with new, perhaps less harmful ones. In its core, this chapter introduces a “deindustrialization of the imagination” as an open-ended process in which imaginary battery hens, pigs, and cows escape from the barns, cages, and slaughterhouses holding them captive within readers’ minds. Science and speculative fiction narratives that reimagine “livestock” characters as postanimal companion species pose productive challenges to readers’ animal-sensitive imaginations. In light of the urgent need for breaking the patterns of thought dictated by the animal industry, the possibilities authors play with in the “laboratory of the mind” (Elgin 2007, 43–54) prove worthwhile to engage with.