Deviant accumulation at farmed animal sanctuaries

Abstract

In much of Western society, animals such as chickens are considered commodities. As such, they are bred and raised to produce eggs, meat, and entertainment. Farmed animal sanctuaries challenge this status quo by rescuing, rehabilitating, and caring for these animals. In so doing, sanctuaries implicitly and often explicitly challenge chickens’ and other farmed animals’ status as commodities. What does decommodification entail? How do we get from capitalist lively commodities to other interactions with living beings? Drawing on mixed methods ethnographic fieldwork, this paper theorizes the decommodification process, elaborating the more-than-capitalist political economy of chicken rescue and sanctuary. I make the case that the political economic work of sanctuaries begins, though occasionally tragically ends, with processes akin to hoarding. In turn, I suggest that we think of hoarding less stigmatically and more in terms of political economy, as deviant accumulation. Building on Marx's understanding of hoarding as a process of accumulating without exchanging, deviant accumulation is accumulation that challenges capitalocentric norms. As such, by taking animals out of a system of exchange value, all sanctuaries practice deviant accumulation. Deviant accumulation thus becomes a practice that is potentially radically anti-capitalist: a practice from which different and non-anthropocentric values can emerge. I explicate the concept of deviant accumulation, how sanctuaries practice it, and to what ends.

Highlights

• Hoarding should be thought of in structural context and without stigma, as deviant accumulation.

• Deviant accumulation is a potentially radical, anticapitalist reframing of hoarding.

• Deviant accumulation entails accumulating without exchanging, challenging societal assumptions about waste and value, and facing structural difficulties providing adequate care.

• Farmed animal sanctuaries practice deviant accumulation. This often leads to co-creating new values about nonhuman animals and interspecies relations.

• Deviant accumulation can be the first step in decommodifying lively commodities.

Preface

Most people don't think about the horrendous suffering that those [farmed] animals must endure simply in order to become food products to be consumed by human beings. And I think that the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world. (Angela Davis, in Davis and Boggs, 2012)

I can’t adopt to you, because if that's how you feel, you don’t see them as a companion animal, you see them as a thing to give you eggs. (February 2017, personal communication with sanctuary staff)

Rescuing… is addictive. It feels so good to give somebody a new home, and some people don’t think about the cost, or if something happens to them, if they get sick. What happens? (February 2017, personal communication with former sanctuary employee)

Farmed animal sanctuaries rescue, rehabilitate, and care for animals who have been bred and raised to be commodities in a capitalist system. The chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, cows, and other animals at sanctuaries almost always come from exploitive, usually agricultural, environments. Once at a sanctuary, they receive care and a home that, at least to some extent, is developed to promote their individual and collective wellbeing—a stark contrast with the commodity status of animals that scholar-activist Angela Davis points out is predominant in places like the United States.

As such, sanctuaries provide refuge from the colonial-capitalist spaces of agriculture (Gillespie, 2021). In so doing, they offer models for multispecies community (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2015; Rosenfeld, 2022). Abrell (2021: 193) suggests that sanctuaries can be understood as Foucauldian heterotopias, or “counter-sites to the political-economic arenas of animal use that embody an ethical critique of such use by enacting different ways of living ethically with animals.” A heterotopia contrasts with the placelessness of a utopia. It also reflects something of a utopian, idealistic vision in being a “counter-site” that subverts the status quo.

For the most part, refuge at sanctuaries is life-long. While a few sanctuaries have adoption policies, these tend to be strict—involving an interview and/or application about the amount and type of space would-be adoptees would have, how they would be protected from predators, other animals they might live with, and the care they might receive should they fall ill. If these answers are unsatisfactory, sanctuaries will often refuse to allow the adoption. As the sanctuary employee above noted, successful adoption screenings are undergirded by adopters seeing the animals as companions, rather than “things.” In practice, this vastly limits the number of animals that sanctuaries can adopt out.

I want to linger on the phrase “the number.” It is difficult to not think of sanctuary work in semi-quantitative terms. As Farm Sanctuary, the oldest farmed animal sanctuary in the United States, has pointed out, tens of billions of land animals are slaughtered annually for food worldwide. In the United States in 2018, over 9 billion chickens, 30 million cows, and 100 million pigs were slaughtered for food alone (Farm Sanctuary, no date a, no date b, no date c, no date d). By comparison, even the largest sanctuaries can rarely rescue more than hundreds of animals per year. This contrast between animal agriculture and sanctuaries has several implications. First, it is a testament to how germane it is to see animals as commodities, per Davis. The sheer number of animals in a sanctuary situation is immensely eclipsed by the number of animals in agriculture. Second, it adds context to the challenge of saying “no” to an animal in need of rescue, as lamented by the former employee above. An individual sanctuary will always receive significantly more requests to take in animals than they can support. And while this is sometimes the case for companion animal shelters and other types of animal sanctuaries, it is always true for farmed animal sanctuaries (Abrell, 2021). Third, the numbers gap gestures toward the fact that farmed animal sanctuaries’ work must be more than quantitative to make a difference in terms of the system of animal agriculture.

From this predicament emerges the education and advocacy missions of many ¹ sanctuaries (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2015). Farmed animal sanctuaries are united by a critique, variously articulated, of industrial animal agriculture and a usually explicit mission of having an impact beyond the sanctuary space. Advocacy often entails encouraging in-person and digital visitors to develop empathy with sanctuary residents, contributing to cultural and political economic change in the status of farmed animals. A common refrain at sanctuaries is indeed that chickens, pigs, goats, cows, ducks, and other so-called farmed animals should not be resources, that they should not be commodities. ²

Building on sanctuaries’ cultural work, the deeply frictive nature of adoption and the difficulty of saying no to taking in animals, and the primacy of animals as commodities, this paper analyzes the work of sanctuaries in political economic terms. I ask: how do sanctuaries decommodify farmed animals, and to what ends? More broadly, how does the decommodification of animals at sanctuaries speak to efforts to decommodify life?

I suggest that decommodification often takes place through what I call deviant accumulation. Deviant accumulation is a concept I build from subverting common understandings of hoarding in psychology, geographies of waste, cultural studies, and political economy. Using this subtly but significantly different concept, I develop the assertion that all sanctuaries practice deviant accumulation. It is therefore not despite, but precisely through what is traditionally called hoarding that sanctuaries challenge chickens’ status as commodities and advocate for alternative political economies and value systems, to various ends. Thus, for some animals, particularly domesticated ones, deviant accumulation serves as a pivot point in the process of decommodifying life.

In the following sections, I review how economic geographers and other political economists have understood the decommodification process and where this research falls short for understanding decommodification at sanctuaries. I introduce what I mean by deviant accumulation, at first calling for suspending its traditional normative connotations (namely, stigma) in my discussion. Then, I turn to how deviant accumulation manifests at sanctuaries. At this point, I add normative elements back in, discussing deviant accumulation as a potentially liberatory practice. In the next section, I recognize that while deviant accumulation is itself promising, recommodification, oppression, and complicity with capitalism are still possibilities. The conclusion has three parts. I emphasize the normative challenges posed by deviant accumulation and suggest ways to navigate them. Second and third, I speculate on the usefulness of deviant accumulation as a concept, at sanctuaries and then more generally.

This article was written after over a year of ethnographic field work at several sanctuaries in the United States, including over 60 interviews with staff at over ten sanctuaries. I also reviewed documents on sanctuary websites and in sanctuary social networks. Quotes are from interviews or sanctuary websites. Field work mostly involved volunteer animal care—cleaning chicken coops and outdoor areas; preparing and distributing food, water, and treats; collecting and redistributing eggs; assisting with medical care and bringing birds to and from the vet; and helping to construct new coops and outdoor habitats. As many scholars and activists have noted, chickens are among the most marginalized animals in contemporary capitalist animal agriculture (Rosenfeld, 2021). They are also the most abundant animal in animal agriculture, in terms of the number of individuals passing through the system, making up 95% of commercially slaughtered animals in the United States (Farm Sanctuary, no date b; Potts, 2012). For these reasons, I focus primarily on chickens at sanctuaries, but throughout I speculate on connections to farmed animal sanctuaries, and the decommodification of life, in general.

Additionally, to an extent this paper practices ethnographic refusal in not naming human or nonhuman animals or sanctuaries and excluding some stories, despite having individual consent to share names and stories. As Tuck and Yang note (2014: 233), ethnographic refusal is partially premised on the assertion that “there are some stories that the academy has not yet proven itself responsible enough to hear,” and that knowledge sharing is not always productive for social movements. I practice refusal because I engage with concepts and groups that are variously stigmatized (hoarding, even when reframed as deviant accumulation) and/or marginalized (farmed animals and animal advocacy). Although I seek to challenge stigma and marginalization, I unfortunately don’t expect this paper to immediately remove it, and I wholly support the liberatory project of many sanctuaries. Therefore, out of concern for and wanting to act in solidarity with my human and nonhuman farm sanctuary comrades, I use pseudonyms for people—human and nonhuman—, I use general rather than specific titles (e.g. “staff”), and I distinguish sanctuaries by letter rather than giving names. ³ I also describe individual sanctuaries and people in broad strokes, rather than telling stories with more ethnographic or geographic detail. This is both to avoid any stigma associated with the topics I discuss getting mapped on to sanctuaries, and to emphasize that the empirical work of this paper is more about farmed animal sanctuary processes and workings than any individual or institution.

Decommodifying life, challenges of decommodifying chickens

Literature on decommodification frequently emphasizes reversing a script, of sorts, of commodification, in which something or someone that was a commodity attains a different social or physical status. Reversing a script can be relatively straightforward: as Appadurai theorizes (1986: 13), commodities are “thing[s] in a certain situation.” Take the thing out of the capitalist situation in which it is abstracted and alienated (Castree, 2003), and it is no longer a commodity, per Appadurai's understanding. This can certainly be the case for some commodities, and it offers a relatively hopeful lens. Tsing (2015), for example, traces how matsutake mushrooms pass through different social, cultural, and political economic situations, as they are gathered, bought and sold, and gifted. Only the buying and selling portions entail the mushroom being a commodity, and throughout its movement, the mushrooms, for the most part, remain unchanged. Tsing's approach is useful for studying the edges and outsides of capitalism (see also Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006). Likewise, political economist Esping-Anderson (1990: 23) theorizes the decommodification of the welfare state, in which “citizens can freely, and without potential loss of job, income, or general welfare, opt out of work when they themselves consider it necessary.”

Unfortunately, these approaches are of limited relevance to many lively commodities in agriculture. Because of the extent to which chickens have been bred, raised, and socialized for capitalist purposes (Potts, 2012; Striffler, 2005), taking a hen out of an egg farm and/or adopting a rooster who was abandoned are only beginnings. Their bodies have been significantly modified by capitalist circulation. Moreover, echoing multispecies critiques of Marx (Haraway, 2007), Esping-Anderson's theory is anthropocentric; it focuses on human labor and providing humans with rights and support outside of their production. To the extent that nonhuman commodities are considered, it is in terms of their value to humans. However, Esping-Anderson does offer several ideas to think with in terms of this paper: promoting social rights or social support, extended to nonhumans animals, can and should be seen as part of decommodification (an idea returned to in the empirical sections of this paper) Further, decommodification is a matter of degree, rather than being an “issue of all or nothing” (Esping-Anderson, 1990: 37). Finally, and most significantly, the previous paragraph illustrates two views of decommodification: as something that happens to individual entities or lives (Appadurai and Tsing), and as a broader social process that entails reducing the significance of exchange value in favor of other ways of valuing life (Esping-Anderson). Throughout this paper, I toggle between both views, seeing them as inextricably intertwined: sanctuaries work with individual animals while concurrently acting as institutions that value them and that encourage others to value them outside of use or exchange.

Another group of studies builds on the notion of decommodification as a matter of degree, emphasizing that commodification is “an inherently unfinished tendency” (Polanyi, 1944; Prudham, 2007). Bakker (2004: 31), for instance, argues that water's “biophysical characteristics” make commodification tend to fail. Decommodification as failed commodification does apply to chickens, whose biological characteristics make complete commodification impossible. Despite breeding, they exhibit characteristics that are not profitable—the skittishness of white leghorns, often used for eggs; the mere existence of roosters; the chickens who escaped trucks going to slaughterhouses. Inadvertent decommodification can also occur through accidental death of a potential lively commodity (Collard, 2014; Collard and Dempsey, 2013). Again, this can apply to chickens, particularly those whose value is measured in lively production, such as laying hens.

Especially relevant to sanctuaries is decommodification that is deliberate and transformative. In Collard’s (2014) work on the decommodification of exotic pets, she shows how rehabilitation workers tried to actively discourage “humanized” behaviors – wearing clothing, readily interacting with humans, and so forth—and encouraged behaviors that would enable the animals to have a good chance of survival without human support. These efforts are only sometimes successful, and animals that do not adopt appropriately “wild” behaviors are kept at the rehabilitation center. The intentions and deliberateness of this project certainly speaks to sanctuary animals’ situations. However, the staff at sanctuaries I worked with asserted that chickens could not exist without human support, because of their geographic location and, more significantly, how they had been bred. Concerning the former, sanctuaries cited domestic chickens’ ancestry as tropical jungle fowl (Potts, 2012), which contrasts with most of the United States. Where Collard (2014: 153) noted that a lively commodity has “a wild life and a commodity life,” and the objective of wildlife rehabilitation was to reduce the influence of the latter in favor of the former, farmed animal sanctuaries are premised on chickens and other animals’ wild lives being bred out of them. Decommodification at farm sanctuaries must therefore differ from wildlife rehabilitation. In the following section, I introduce the concept of deviant accumulation to describe the decommodification of farmed animals.

From hoarding to deviant accumulation

Bridging work in geographies of waste, political economy, and psychology, in this section I develop the concept of deviant accumulation, a potentially counter-hegemonic form of hoarding that can characterize how decommodification begins at sanctuaries. Building on research that shows how stigma often marginalizes those who are already disempowered (Brewis and Wutich, 2019), in developing the concept of deviant accumulation and in approaching hoarding in general, I seek to destigmatize hoarding. Stigma characterizes whole people as “less valuable, undesirable, or unwanted … villains” because of habits, behaviors, or conditions (Brewis and Wutich, 2019: 3). In this review and throughout the paper, I encourage readers to attempt to suspend their judgment of hoarding as inherently or always problematic. Even in more critical sections, I aim to dismantle shame and stigma.

Perhaps the most traditional way to think about hoarding is through psychology. Within psychology, animal hoarding was given little attention by psychologists until the 2000s, with the formation of the Hoarding of Animals Research Collective at Tufts University. One of the first contemporary articles on animal hoarding notes that only one paper on the subject was published before then, in 1981 (Patronek, 1999). A commonly accepted definition of an animal hoarder is:

Someone who accumulates a large number of animals; fails to provide minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, and veterinary care; and fails to act on the deteriorating condition of the animals (including disease, starvation, and even death) or the environment (severe overcrowding, extremely unsanitary conditions) or the negative effect of the collection on their own health and well-being and on that of other household members. (Patronek, 1999: 81)

The psychopathology of animal hoarding is therefore not defined by the number of animals, but when the number precludes “acceptable care” (Patronek, 1999: 81). Accordingly, hoarding is not inherently pathological, but can become so when it impedes on the hoarder's or animals’ quality of life. The psychological approach has been criticized for this very reason. Phrases like “acceptable care” and “quality of life” have been demonstrated to be tacit and uncritical references to hegemonic norms of “cleanliness, sanity, and domestic order” (Herring, 2014: 16). Furthermore, terms such as “quality of life” can also frequently be ableist, whether describing humans or nonhuman animals (Taylor, 2017). I would suggest that rather than throw these terms out altogether, that we devote significantly more attention to who gets to define them, along with scrutinizing how they are defined. There is a significant case to be made, for example, that farms don’t provide “acceptable care” to the (human or nonhuman) workers and residents there (Blanchette, 2020; Bohanec, 2013; Striffler, 2005). This does not make farms hoarding situations as they are premised on circulation, discussed below, but it does serve as an example of how societal norms for acceptable care merit questioning (including for humans, as care is deeply unequal across race, gender, class, and more).

Psychologists have identified three categories of animal hoarders that it is useful to consider (Frost and Steketee, 2010). First, the overwhelmed caregiver is someone who has multiple animals and is able to adequately care for them until something happens that causes the caregiver to become overwhelmed. This is often a loss of support, such as human companionship, human labor, or a source of income. Even so, overwhelmed caregivers most often acquire animals passively rather than actively seeking more. Second, mission-driven animal hoarders are the most common. These people seek to rescue animals from suffering and death, sometimes objecting to euthanasia and spaying/neutering. They actively acquire animals believed to be at risk, and while they often begin with adequate resources, they then get overwhelmed. In contrast with the overwhelmed caregiver, these people often “actively avoid and resist intervention by authorities. They consider themselves to be the only ones who can provide adequate care for their animals…. Ironically, when their animal counts overwhelm them, they end up causing the very kind of harm they seek to prevent” (Frost and Steketee, 2010: 131). The third kind of hoarders are the least common. These are deliberate exploiters: individuals who have little emotional connection to animals, seeking them as a means to an end, be it control or finance. Psychologists have identified exploiters who use animals as “props for generating money to run ‘rescue’ operations,” for example. Animal hoarding researchers write: “[t]o other people, exploiters seem articulate and appealing, but in fact they are cunning manipulators, often conning money from others for their ‘rescue’ efforts.” (Frost and Steketee, 2010: 130–131). All three of these personae are present in the sanctuary world, but, I argue, should be interpreted differently.

This typology of hoarders reveals a second problem with the psychological approach to hoarding: that it characterizes hoarding as a wholly individualistic problem. Inasmuch as it is social, it is when individual hoarders impact those around them. Geographic and cultural approaches to hoarding, particularly geographers of waste, redress the individualistic approach. Scholars of waste have demonstrated that what gets considered waste and how so-called waste is treated can either reinforce or upset existing socio-spatial relations (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011; Kristeva, 1982; Moore, 2009; Popke, 2001; Reno, 2014). Moreover, capitalist development hinges upon converting waste into exchange value, rather than finding use value in otherwise “wasted objects” (Lepawsky and Billah, 2011; Lepawsky and Mather, 2014). Gidwani and Reddy (2011: 1636) point out that waste in present-day urban India is both “society's excrement” and a “vector of realized and potential [exchange] value.” While capitalism produces waste, this waste in turn can be commodified—and according to the capitalist, it should be. On the other hand, opposing capitalism might look like deliberately wasting or refusing to manage waste, as in the garbage workers’ strikes Moore describes (2009).

This can be read as congruent with the psychological literature, in prompting us to recognize that the difference between “collectors” and “hoarders” is culturally produced and inflected with capitalist norms. “Collectors” curate and care for “important” objects—turning what might have been wasted into objects with perhaps significant exchange value as a capitalist would. So-called hoarders, on the other hand, are distinguished by their inability to distinguish between important and unimportant objects. Instead, they sometimes find value—primarily use value—in objects that most people wouldn’t. One psychological report gives the example of a hoarder who saved a pen cap, thinking it could be useful as a board-game piece (Frost and Steketee, 2010). In this way, hoarding can also be understood as an inability to distinguish between (what mainstream society determines to be) waste and value, or a refusal, whether to conscious or unconscious, to commodify or expel what is considered waste.

Cultural studies scholar Herring (2014) mobilizes this interpretation of waste and value. He characterizes hoarding as not pathological at all, but instead a symptom of our consumption-oriented society, which is deeply entangled with racism, classism, and sexism. Beginning with the suggestion that “there is no natural relation to our objects,” Herring suggest that societal prejudices cause us to see hoarders as practicing “material deviance”—they are unable to properly “differentiate between valuables and the valueless” (Herring, 2014: 53). By challenging the capitalist tendency to transform waste into monetary value, they are pathologized. Herring therefore offers an alternate interpretation of the Collyer brothers. Homer and Langley Collyer were considered a well-known pair of (object) hoarders per the psychological definition: their house was full of objects and only navigable to them, and at one point, only navigable through trap-filled tunnels. Herring adds to this story: he notes that the Collyer brothers were from a wealthy white family living in Harlem during the early twentieth century, and they continued living there as Black people began to move into the neighborhood. Herring interprets their description as hoarders as racist: to white supremacists, the Collyer brothers were out of place (Douglas, 1966) in that they should have fled Harlem. By not doing so and by socializing with the new Black residents of the neighborhood, the Collyer brothers didn’t behave in the white supremacist and classist way that was expected of them. The “material deviance” that challenged societal assumptions about waste and value, is, according to Herring, a large part of why they were described as hoarders.

A final point about hoarding is hinted at in the psychological and cultural studies literature, but articulated by Marx (1867). Marx claimed that hoarding is a fulcrum of the development and continuation of capitalism. The hoarder accumulates without exchanging, and Marx notes that “the accumulation of commodities in the sense of hoarding them would be sheer foolishness. In fact the accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either of a bottleneck in circulation or of overproduction.” His comment reads as a jab at capitalism, meaning that it is sheer foolishness to the capitalist. Creating “bottlenecks in circulation” by commodities from circulating is thus a momentary rejection of capitalism, challenging the importance of exchange value. On the other hand, addressing overproduction or removing the bottleneck can further enable capitalism, in a way echoing Gidwani and Reddy’s (2011) point about the capitalist conversation of waste to value.

However, what if rejection lasts more than a moment? Drawing on Marx, we can identify two possibilities: hoarding can be a direct opposition to the production of capital (or commodities, as the building blocks of capital), or it can simply be a point where it pauses and then resumes. I identify these two trajectories at sanctuaries, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the first. Also, given the problematic norms associated with hoarding, I suggest that we instead talk about it as deviant accumulation, in which “traditional” hoarding is but one path.

Deviant accumulation at farmed animal sanctuaries

Western industrial society has a long and deep history of seeing nonhuman animals as commodities, evident in mundane terms such as “livestock” as well as in the historical equation of “cattle” with “capital” (Franklin, 2007: 53). Treating farmed animals otherwise is therefore in itself socially deviant, akin to Herring's description of hoarding as “material deviance.” The mission statements of three farmed animal sanctuaries offer a window into how animal sanctuaries deviate from animal agriculture:

Farm Sanctuary: “We pursue bold solutions to end animal agriculture and foster just and compassionate vegan living. Farm Sanctuary fights the disastrous effects of animal agriculture on animals, the environment, social justice, and public health through rescue, education, and advocacy. (Farm Sanctuary, no date)

Chicken Run Rescue: “Chicken Run Rescue fosters an evolution in critical thought about who is food and who is friend through rescue, rehabilitation, sanctuary and education. Help all animals by adopting a vegan diet. Help individual chickens by adopting them as companions.” (Chicken Run Rescue, 2022)

Farm Bird Sanctuary: “Farm Bird Sanctuary's mission is to provide sanctuary to liberated farmed bird with a focus on those with special needs. We are here to educate the public on the plight of farmed birds while encouraging a vegan lifestyle, and to recognize the need to take an active stance towards ending the oppression of both human and non-human animals. (Farm Bird Sanctuary, 2022)

By emphasizing rescue, companion care, and changing societal views and behaviors, sanctuaries reject the commodity status of chickens and other farmed animals. In their on-site practices and in their education and advocacy, sanctuaries further reject the commodification of farmed animals by refusing to exchange rescued animals’ bodies, eggs, milk, or other products. Additionally, it is widely considered bad practice to purchase animals (e.g. Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, 2020: 18). In these respects, deviant accumulation at sanctuaries entails Marxian hoarding: accumulating without exchanging. Sanctuaries as organizations accumulate animals without exchanging them, while also challenging the norm of valuing farmed animals in terms of exchange.

Moreover, echoing cultural critiques of hoarding, accumulation at sanctuaries is socially deviant. Sanctuaries take in and care for animals in ways unsanctioned and unsupported by contemporary social and legal norms. Agricultural practice, much of mainstream US society, and in several respects, the law all characterize chickens as commodities or waste. Whereas the first may be more obvious (Gillespie, 2021; Pachirat, 2013), the latter is widespread, as in cases of “spent” hens who are past their laying prime, male chicks who won’t become laying hens, or grown roosters who are widely considered social nuisances. Many of these become the backstories of chickens at sanctuaries—I return to them in the following section. However, in general, sanctuaries reject both these paths, treating chickens neither as commodities nor as waste, but as subjects of care. Moreover, care is multidirectional and attentive to animals’ autonomy. As Abrell (2021: 28) notes, “animal sanctuaries involve care-based interspecies relationships that reflect intentionally subversive ideas about how animals should be situated in human society.”

And finally, sanctuaries practice deviant accumulation per the psychological definition of hoarding: sanctuaries take in many animals, refuse to give them up, and are frequently unable to provide what many, even those of us at sanctuaries, would consider adequate care. This is rarely because of carelessness, maliciousness, or even being overwhelmed, but because of a structural lack of knowledge about rescued chickens: veterinarians who focus on chicken care are taught to do so in an agricultural context. They thus know little about how to care for individual chickens, rather than a flock, or older birds (Rosenfeld, 2021). As the founder of a major sanctuary noted, we as a society “know more about exotic animals than we do about a pig or a cow or a chicken or a turkey” (2017, personal communication). While advances have been made in recent years, sanctuary medical care is still highly limited.

For now, I want to tentatively add a normative element back in to the general topic of hoarding. While hoarding has been called pathological on the individual level when it interferes with the wellbeing of a hoarder or the care of animals, I have also attempted to show that hoarding is a product of social pathologies that sanctuaries endeavor to address. The terminological shift to a social pathology thus offers a shift in viewpoint. Sanctuaries respond to and attempt to redress harmful societal norms. These deviant acts call into question where the social pathology is located: at sanctuaries or in the capitalist agricultural status quo to which they respond. Challenging the social norm that chickens are commodities or waste, taking in chickens and refusing to exchange them, and the anomie and lack of knowledge around what constitutes adequate care together enable us to redirect blame from individual sanctuaries or individuals at sanctuaries to anthropocentric, late industrial capitalism.

To summarize, sanctuaries (1) take in animals but rarely exchange them, (2) challenge norms about waste and value, and (3) struggle to provide adequate care. Further, these activities and their deviant nature are a product of capitalist social pathologies. Beyond these initial steps, deviant accumulation at sanctuaries seems to take two different paths. Building on the decommodification literature, both entail first rewinding the commodification process as detailed in this section: commodities become an anticapitalist hoard. Then, a major trajectory, and a more radical one, entails rewinding the capitalist script further, propagating other interspecies values. The second is less significant but still present. It entails reiterating capitalist or otherwise harmful norms and often recommodification. I elaborate on both of these next.

Scrambled eggs and values: Material and relational transformation

The major path deviant accumulation takes at sanctuaries is akin to rewinding a capitalist script, in which deviant accumulation enables material and relational transformations. Broadly, who animals are and what they produce are no longer considered resources or commodities. This section outlines the details of decommodification at sanctuaries and its significance.

In providing care at sanctuaries, staff give attention to the characteristics that have been bred to give animals value through exchange. Such characteristics become points of attention at sanctuaries, not to be controlled or exploited, but, rather, recognized in context of who animal residents are more broadly. As a sanctuary founder stated:

“I was determined that [the sanctuary] was not only going to investigate factory farming issues… but to educate people about who chickens and turkeys actually are when they're not being abused by our species…who are these birds really … what do they do, what do they like, what do they know.” (2017, personal communication)

Indeed, a common refrain in interviews was that they should simply be able to “be chickens,” regardless of whether they were friendly or agreeable or enjoyed or even tolerated human interaction. And being chickens necessitated human caregivers being attentive to their actions and desires, per the sanctuary founder's comment.

One way of “being chickens” that gives attention to farmed animals’ commodified lives entails feeding eggs back to chickens. Critics have asserted that this is unnatural or cannibalistic, but sanctuaries assert that it is a way to offer them nutrients lost through the excessive laying bred into modern hens, and that chickens’ ancestors would sometimes eat their own eggs (Rosenfeld, 2021). Eggs are neither waste nor value, precisely, though they share characteristics of both. They are produced by chickens, but are not exchanged, and, on the other hand, laying poses significant health risks. Nonetheless, given that many sanctuary chickens still lay eggs, the sanctuary space has made it possible for chickens to exercise agency in choosing to eat eggs, for human caretakers to recognize that many chickens seem to enjoy this, and that eggs have nutritional value for chickens (especially laying hens). Sanctuaries developed these practices independently and through conferring with one another, and have different recipes. Frequently they are “prepared” by sanctuary workers because many hens from the egg industry have been debeaked, which makes opening the eggs themselves difficult to impossible. The practice of feeding chickens eggs, therefore, destabilizes hegemonic waste/value dichotomies, literally scrambling (or hard-boiling) eggs and values. These sanctuaries challenge what gets considered waste by virtue of it being “disgusting” or “unnatural,” but refuse to turn it into monetary value.

Another practice at sanctuaries that revalues chickens while giving attention to their commodified lives is the creation of rooster-only flocks. As the Rooster Sanctuary at Danzig's Roost, the first rooster-focused sanctuary, notes: “[f]or every hen hatched who is used for her eggs, there is a rooster. 99% of the time that rooster is unwanted, discarded, often mistreated and sometimes despised” (Rooster Sanctuary at Danzig's Roost, no date). The widespread social devaluation of roosters is often a focus of sanctuaries, and many chicken sanctuaries, especially newer ones focus specifically on rooster rescue (Rosenfeld, 2022). Sanctuaries occasionally receive negative attention specifically because of their roosters and the reputation of roosters. One sanctuary in Washington state was in the news, for example, because of roosters’ crowing being considered a nuisance to neighbors (Hanchard, 2018).

Rooster abandonment is often associated with the rise of the backyard chicken movement. When communities encourage the practice of backyard chicken keeping, the “backyard chicken” is often code for “backyard hen.” Even so, many people purchase or hatch chicks, thinking they will be hens. When they find out that half of them (on average) are roosters, they then abandon them in parks, to shelters, or elsewhere. Many sanctuaries have strict policies about taking in these so-called “oops roosters,” such as requiring that backyard chicken keepers surrender their whole flock and/or not purchase chicks or hatch eggs again. Despite these policies, roosters commonly wind up at sanctuaries. Because of this, and because flocks including hens and more than one rooster often resulted in fighting, workers and volunteers at many different sanctuaries tried creating rooster-only flocks while also giving attention to roosters’ preferences. These efforts often succeeded, making it possible for sanctuaries spaces to support more roosters and for residents to choose their flock. Concerning the latter, when roosters did not seem to get along with other roosters, sanctuary staff would try to place them with hens, even though this made it difficult to take in more roosters.

In both these examples, work at sanctuaries contrasts with other forms of scholarship and activism that are central in animal rights work (e.g. Bohanec, 2013; Gillespie and Collard, 2015; Pachirat, 2013). Much of this scholarship and activism is devoted to “removing the veil” of commodity fetishism, to show the labor relations that went into the commodities. In a more multispecies sense with lively commodities, scholars and activists seek to show conditions of production: not only that human labor is exploited, but also that human and nonhuman animals are suffering, and that this exploitation and suffering are structural, built into the workings of animal agriculture.

Sanctuaries that rewind the capitalist script take a different path. Engaging with the products of one's labor (or at sanctuaries, engaging with the living no-longer-products who have been subject to breeding to maximize exchange value) is a way to create new, multispecies social responsibilities and values. This is congruent with Marxist hoarding, reinterpreted as deviant accumulation. As Stallybrass (1998: 187) notes, reflecting on fetishism and value-production:

The problem for Marx was thus not with fetishism as such but rather with a specific form of fetishism that took as its object not the animized object of human labor and love but the evacuated nonobject that was the site of exchange. In the place of a coat, there was a transcendental value that erased both the making and the wearing of the coat. Capital was Marx's attempt to give back the coat to its owner.

Commodity fetishism can therefore be understood as fetishizing exchange over use or other material value: “fetishism is not the problem; the problem is the fetishism of commodities” (Stallybrass, 1998: 184; see also Page, 2005). The problem of fetishizing lively commodities goes part of the way to explain the work done at and by sanctuaries, in that sanctuaries remove birds and other animals from exchange. However, as many have pointed out (e.g. Haraway, 2007), Marx's political project was anthropocentric, seeking, in Stallybrass’ words, to return the coats to their owners, to show the human labor in objects. By contrast, sanctuaries challenge anthropocentrism more deeply by asserting chickens’ value as subjects—able to express individual preferences and often have those preferences respected (e.g. Blattner et al., 2020)—and not for use or exchange value, production, or reproduction. For chickens fortunate enough to be at sanctuaries, the commodity fetish then becomes a legacy to negotiate, and such negotiation entails creating different social structures and enabling other values to circulate. ⁴

Sanctuaries do this through practices such as offering eggs to chickens as food and creating rooster flocks. More broadly, they also do this through challenging the notion of one-way care (where humans provide care for nonhuman animal residents), in favor of more deliberately creating an “integrated multispecies community or society whose members shape spaces and practices together, take on recognized social roles, and create and transmit social norms across species lines” (Blattner et al., 2020: 2; see also Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2015). Where many sanctuaries are sites of enhanced nonhuman animal agency, in which, for example, humans endeavor to meet residents’ preferences regarding flockmates, a few indeed go farther in terms of multispecies community building.

Risks of deviant accumulation: Limited transformation, reproducing exploitation, and complicity with capitalism

Thus far I have characterized sanctuaries in a largely positive light and have likewise attempted to reframe deviant accumulation, associating both with anticapitalist and liberatory possibilities. However, the term “sanctuary” itself is not standardized, for better and for worse. As Winders (2017: 162) notes, “‘[s]anctuary’ has become a buzzword.” Indeed, some facilities call themselves sanctuaries to gain popular approval, but in practice violate extant welfare standards and standards for veterinary care. As aforementioned, I suggest that these institutional care standards are themselves inadequate for farmed animals, making their violation especially egregious. Winders describes this intentional or unintentional misuse of the word “sanctuary” as “humane-washing” (ibid). Likewise, deviant accumulation is itself deviance from capitalocentric social norms. Deviance can be liberatory, promoting the agency and wellbeing of nonhuman and human sanctuary affiliates. However, deviance is not always good—even deviance from capitalism. In this section, I discuss some of the exceptions to my otherwise more optimistic characterization of sanctuaries and deviant accumulation.

One problem some sanctuaries struggle with that reprises deviant accumulation's ties to traditional hoarding is saying “no.” As the founder of Sanctuary A griped, “what am I gonna do this spring? I’m gonna get thousands of calls about roosters down the street. I’ll tell myself I’ll adopt them out, but nobody wants a rooster” (2017, personal communication). They then talked about how the sanctuary had taken in a lot of roosters, who lived in the main sanctuary as well as, to my perception, crowding the living room where we were talking. They noted that the pressure to say yes to taking in animals sometimes came from other sanctuaries, too. “[Sanctuary B] gave me 120 white chickens [leghorns]. I didn’t know that was too much.” Another sanctuary, Sanctuary C, built limits to care into their program, noting that “it's still above and beyond what backyard chicken people provide” (2017, personal communication). This statement was echoed by another employee, who remarked that it was better than a factory farm.

Not saying “no” to taking in animals can be coupled with not having enough help for caregiving and maintenance of the sanctuary environment. At Sanctuary A, local activists mentioned that they had stopped volunteering there a few months ago, because the founder had gotten into an argument with members of the group. Sanctuary C also struggled with their volunteer program. I learned that several volunteers who were scheduled to live on-site for months at a time left early, out of conflict with the manager or because of the living and working conditions. Likewise, there were occasional volunteers who lived off-site and talked about doing regular shifts, but most seemed to decide against it. “The major challenge has been staffing,” an employee confessed (2017, personal communication). Adequate care for both humans and nonhumans at both these sanctuaries was strained. Core to operating a good sanctuary is recognizing that “humans are as much individual as the animals,” and that their labor and needs should be respected (Abrell, 2021: 122).

This struggle is common, especially when sanctuaries are starting out. As a former sanctuary employee said, “Knowing your limits is a big deal, a huge deal. Sometimes you get lost and don’t realize you’re going over” (2017, personal communication). Sanctuary A and Sanctuary C are examples of deviant accumulation producing overwhelmed caregivers or mission-driven hoarders, respectively. However, the phrase “overwhelmed caregiver” also conspicuously leaves out the multidirectional nature of care and enhanced animal agency that occurs at sanctuaries, as described in the previous section. Being overwhelmed occurs from three directions: not enough humans to support the project, too many (nonhuman) animals on site, and structural pressure due to the immensity of animal agriculture.

Another problematic practice that can occur is being institutionally complicit with farms. Sanctuary C is one such example. They had a mission unique among sanctuaries: to work with farmers who were “depopulating” hens past their egg-laying prime. “I firmly believed,” an employee said, that “we would be able to offer farmers an alternative to depopulating on their egg farm” (2017, personal communication). Per the program founder, the norm at many egg farms is that hens would be slaughtered at 12–18 months old. A former employee elaborates: “There's several farmers we’ll call when we have space,” she explains, “and ask them how much more time until they depopulate again. They can write it off as a donation if they want, ‘cause it's property” (2017, personal communication). Value here is partly produced in terms of benefits for farmers, whether directly in tax benefits, or indirectly in saving resources that would go into depopulation. In both cases, the sanctuary is less oriented around valuing hens as subjects of care or members of a multispecies community than in the previous section.

Moreover, the way that they challenged traditional waste-value relations entailed recommodification, in a way, by collaborating with farms to receive their “waste” and then adopting to people who wanted chickens for egg production. This echoes Prudham's (2009: 136) analysis of fair trade and organic commodities. He observed the transformation of commodities into ones associated with more progressive values and the sometimes simultaneous erosion of these values. In the case of organic foods, he noted that, “absent certain prescribed chemicals and farm practices, [these foods] look more and more like conventional, industrialised food circuits every day.” This can be the case at farm sanctuaries as well: Prudham's statement mirrors some of what I heard during interviews. One volunteer, for instance, instance, remarked of her time at Sanctuary C: “it sometimes felt like being on a farm,” rather than at a sanctuary (2017, personal communication). One employee's comment was more bluntly pessimistic: “they’re all doomed” (2017, personal communication).

Adoption is also a fraught process. Unlike sanctuaries in the previous section, a small minority of sanctuaries adopt them out to people who wanted backyard chickens for eggs. Some of these do so when starting out, and then change their mind. The co-founder of Sanctuary D noted, “A year and a half ago we decided that we would only adopt out to vegans. Which essentially means we don't adopt out” (2017, personal communication). As a manager of Sanctuary C stated, they expected the adopted chickens to facilitate encounter. “It's their biggest job,” she said. “We want people to fall in love with them and not eat them, go plant-based, go vegan” (2017, personal communication). Here, the representation of animals as encounterable by humans is placed above understanding and trying to meet their needs. This is consonant with the concept of encounter value (Haraway, 2007: 47). Encounter value considers face-to-face interaction and the development of interspecies companionship important, but, on the other hand, it can erase the uneven power relations therein (Barua, 2017). And it did seem to be the case, according to employees, that most new and returning adopters were simply interested in backyard hens for eggs rather than developing deeper relationships and/or becoming vegan (2017, personal communication).

Despite this example of recommodification, it merits recognizing that valorizing encounter is more nuanced and does not always lead to recommodification. Indeed, encountering animals through tours is part of the work of many sanctuaries, who hope that by giving tours and enabling the public to encounter farmed animals, they will influence broader social change (Abrell, 2021; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2015). Rather, valorizing encounter at sites like Sanctuary C becomes problematic when it becomes prioritized above care and agency for residents, avian and human.

Conclusion

This article contributes to interdisciplinary work on decommodification and alternative economies, accumulation and hoarding, and sanctuaries themselves. Though there has been progress in psychological understandings of hoarding, animal hoarding is still considered one of the least understood forms (Frost and Steketee, 2010: 133). Further, it has been considered an individual problem and a wholly negative phenomenon, rather than something entangled with societal problems and potentially subversive (Herring, 2014). This paper bridges that gap, demonstrating that deviant accumulation can be a crucial step in the process of decommodifying animals. Deviant accumulation can be the beginning of an alternative political economy, one where nonhuman animals are active and agential members of a multispecies community. Even so, this paper serves as a call for more work on decommodification, especially of lively commodities.

To conclude, I want to make three points. First, I want to emphasize the slipperiness of the distinction between the two paths I’ve traced. As Frost and Steketee (2010: 14) write, “we all share something of hoarding orientation.” Exploring how sanctuaries practice deviant accumulation sheds light on how we can move from anthropocentric, late industrial capitalist value systems to alternative ones, at sanctuaries and elsewhere. However, these alternatives can nonetheless result in more problems, capitalist and otherwise, for both humans and other animals. While I have painted two paths, the distinction between them can be slippery in practice. Characteristics of both trajectories are often present at individual sanctuaries, at least to some degree. The case of sanctuaries promoting encounter value is one such example. Recognizing the slipperiness between these two trajectories, in combination with understanding sanctuaries as a particular and situated response to a social pathology, offers a way to start a conversation about decommodification, values, and problematic practices at sanctuaries—even those that are doing well.

One way to navigate this slipperiness, at sanctuaries and in terms of deviant accumulation more generally, might be reflecting on points of reference. Many of Sanctuary C's comparisons regarding animal care were to farms or backyard chickens. In taking those as points of reference, they inadvertently focus on commodified chickens as a norm. This contrasts with the rooster flocks (largely without a point of reference, but with attention to roosters’ preferences in terms of companionship) and the variously justified use of eggs (which references the situation at hand, chickens’ heritage, and also chickens’ agency). While these points of reference are not deterministic, they can be useful to illuminate how sanctuaries are enacting and/or departing from their more liberatory missions.

Some cases are less clear. For example, many sanctuaries attempt to develop “enrichment” activities or toys for residents. “Enrichment” often involves food, such as a ball of cabbage or head of lettuce, suspended from a branch or beam for chickens to peck at, but doesn’t have to—at one sanctuary, a few of the chickens would play on makeshift swings. Enrichment, though, is itself a fraught practice, and one often associated with animals in confinement (e.g. laboratory animals) (Davies, 2012). At sanctuaries, it can be a practice for enhancing animals’ quality of life in the presence of significant barriers (e.g. the winter weather in some places can prevent chickens from going outside), and/or for justifying not enhancing their quality of life more significantly. Enrichment especially, but also rooster flocks, feeding eggs, and references to farms and backyard flocks have some normative ambiguity in them. Reflecting on points of reference can be useful to identify patterns. If all of a sanctuary's norms are relative to being only marginally better than industrial agriculture and do not consider (human and nonhuman) animal agency, for instance, it would likely be worth reconsidering or critiquing their practices.

Second, I want to reiterate that deviant accumulation as a perspective is useful largely because it allows us to put blame where it should be: on late industrial capitalist society. Sanctuaries are a response to a specific social context, themselves a liminal space (Abrell, 2021). Many of the problems they face are not the fault of individual sanctuary workers, but of a society in which chickens and other animals have been bred, trained, and raised to be commodities, and in which the sheer number of chickens and other farmed animals living and dying for capitalist accumulation is historically unprecedented (Potts, 2012). This structurally creates a false choice: take in more animals than a sanctuary has capacity for, or the animal will be slaughtered. Although sanctuaries might call out and attempt to address the false choice through their education and advocacy work, the pressure remains. Consequently, animal sanctuaries and other advocacy organizations might learn from one another to identify and work against the more negative tendencies of deviant accumulation, remembering that, structurally, these tendencies are because of late capitalist society and are indeed false choices.

Finally, deviant accumulation can be a vital part of the decommodification process—vital literally and figuratively. Here I have made the case for its significance at sanctuaries that work with chickens, but I suspect it has relevance to farmed animal sanctuary work and, more broadly, to the decommodification of other lively and less lively commodities. Just as Castree (2003) described multiple steps in the commodification process, recognizing that some would likely be more prominent than others for a given object or living creature, I suggest that deviant accumulation is a step in the decommodification process, one which will speak more loudly and clearly to certain once-commodities over others. A key feature of hoarding as decommodification is the rejection of exchange value in favor of socially deviant accumulation. Decommodifying lively commodities can begin with deviant accumulation.