Animal labour in ecological utopian literature: an animal ethics perspective

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze representations of animal labour in ecological utopian literature and situate them within debates in animal ethics. It draws on a corpus of six canonical ecological utopias, News from Nowhere (1890), Island (1962), Ecotopia (1975), Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Tomorrow (1980), and Always Coming Home (1985), within a descriptive qualitative framework using microanalytic open coding. From the 421 quotations identified in the original doctoral study, the 38 quotations directly concerning animal labour constitute the focus of the present article. The findings revealed two primary representational approaches. The first, productive function and instrumentalization, depicts animals as embedded in agricultural, transport, forestry, and interspeciesmanagement systems, where labour persists but recognition of animals as labouring subjects remains absent. The second, cooperation, moral limitations, and regulation of labour, frames animal labour through relational practices, moral limits on killing and productivity, and attention to bodily needs such as rest, feeding, and pacing. The findings indicate that ecological utopias do not abolish animal labour but situate it within slower, less industrial, and more regulated forms of communal life. Although mediating figures such as the animal advocate gesture toward indirect representation, animals are not portrayed as political subjects capable of shaping the conditions of their labour. Theuneven distribution of relevant material across the corpus, with only four of the six works containing labour related passages, mirrors the marginal status of animal labour in animal ethics scholarship more broadly. Ecological utopian narratives thus occupy a middle position between exploitation and abolition: animal use is neither legitimized in its industrial form nor wholly rejected, but ethically constrained and reorganized within communal life, making visible the ethical tensions that persist when animal use is limited rather than eliminated.