terminal animals

"Terminal animals" is the phrase coined by Carol J. Adams to describe farm animals that are confined and maintained until they are killed to become flesh-meat. In "The War on Compassion" Adams writes: "We are all fated to die, we share this fate with the animals, but for domesticated animals their finitude is determined by us, by human beings. We know when they will die, because we demand it. Their fate, to be eaten when dead, is the filter by which we experience them becoming 'terminal animals.'" (5)

Howells' story charts the sudden imposition of this "terminal" condition on a human character by an animal actor, in a reversal that undermines the function of the shared condition of mortality as an ideological "filter."