Witness: How Do We Come to Occupy a Different Skin?

The chapter addresses the question of how and why people come to work on behalf of animals. It argues that a primary modality of this transformation is sight and, specifically, the witnessing of an animal in pain, which compels in the witnesser an obligation. The human interlocutors in this chapter, mostly women, accepted that obligation in a manner that led them, at times, to become animal. The chapter asks what it means for humans to “become animal” and how this process represents an indifference to the species boundaries that compel and justify violence.