Image by Aitor Garmendia, Tras los Muros. Ear tags in a slaughterhouse, recording assets ‘processed’ to realise financial value for their ‘owner’. Each one represents a broken individual whose entire existence was a prelude to the moment their tag appeared on the shelf.

I’ve written about ‘property’ before but it’s a topic that bears repeating. Maybe I’ll stumble across new ways of expressing the monstrous abomination that owning other individuals represents. As the crushing impacts of widespread climate-collapse increase in frequency, along with disease and other horrors related to our astonishing sense of entitlement to butcher our way through our lives, more and more members of nonhuman species are paying with everything they have for our folly and neglect of the planet we all need for survival.

No room to criticise

While the terror of the latest in an endless series of zoonotic diseases stalks the planet, hate-filled tirades sweep…