Justin Marceau's book Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment shines a light on three very serious problems in the U.S. animal protection movement brought on by its connections to the criminal justice system: (a) implicit racism baked into the race neutral or color-blind position the movement takes; (b) reliance on faulty “link” research used to justify harsher sentences for individuals who harm animals; and (c) having accepted in the 2000s, either explicitly or implicitly, the availability of tougher felony convictions in exchange for industry-wide agricultural exemptions for cruelty prosecutions involving food animals. Marceau argues that these positions have seriously compromised the animal protection movement's aspirations to be a civil rights and social justice movement. It is a mistake, he argues, to yoke a movement motivated by “progressive social reform” to the train of “regressive social policy” (p. 1), namely, the misguided “carceral logic” of the U.S. criminal justice system (p. 2). Marceau writes: “Incarceration is a most unlikely ally for a movement that might earnestly desire far-reaching social reform” (p. 6).First I'll discuss race, an issue that has become even more pressing since the book was published. Chapter 5 takes up the issue most directly, arguing that “race is never irrelevant when it comes to justice system reforms” (p. 152). This chapter is highly instructive reading for anyone wondering why the animal rights movement is seen as a White movement that does not care about racialized or otherwise marginalized people. The problem goes beyond the Whiteness of the membership and leaders of animal protection groups and an absence of African Americans in the movement (p. 42). There are, of course, the issues that frequently come up in terms of conflicts between animal rights groups, and those defending cultural or religious practices that involve cruelty to animals, and the xenophobia that is unleashed on those positioned as “others,” “outsiders,” “barbarians,” or “uncivilized.” There is also the industry scapegoating and blame of low-income (and often racialized) workers who end up being the targets of animal cruelty undercover investigations on factory farms in which animal protection groups participate (see pp. 15–17, 188–191). White privileged people seem to care a lot about animals. Marceau provides the following striking quote from Black feminist Roxane Gay, who, reacting to the killing of Cecil the Lion in 2015, wrote in The New York Times: “I'm personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care” (p. 163). Sympathy for the animal abounds. However, there is usually zero understanding for the abuser. Here Marceau provides an extended analysis of Black professional football player Michael Vick's dogfighting prosecution. Marceau also discusses what happened to Andre Robinson, a less high-profile case in which a young Black man was prosecuted to the full extent of the law for kicking a cat in 2014 (see pp. 52–53, 186–187). The harsh approach advocated by animal advocates in these and other cases is hypocritical and inconsistent, Marceau says, for “a movement that trades on the need for compassion, understanding, and empathy” (p. 181). Relentless pressure for “mandatory minimums, the prosecution of juveniles as adults, more felony prosecutions, [and] offender registries” (p. 151), with no consideration for the disparate racial impact of such measures, is “itself racist” (p. 154). Incarceration and its concomitant losses (“criminogenic consequences”) relating to voting; housing; being barred from office and certain professions, both public and private, especially those that involve a security clearance; holding a government contract or obtaining government licenses and permits; sitting on a jury or testifying as a witness in a court of law; adopting, fostering, or maintaining custody of one's own children (the list goes on and on) are tantamount to a “New Jim Crow,” constituting a human rights abuse (see pp. 26, 34–37, 40, 155, 253). Marceau convincingly argues that these consequences cannot be ignored by the animal protection movement in the name of race neutrality or color blindness.The second theme I want to draw out, the focus of Chapter 6, is the shaky empirical evidence for a claim often made by animal protection advocates and taken up by politicians, namely that those who abuse animals (e.g., as children) are more likely to (e.g., “graduate”) to harm humans. This claim has become so commonplace that Marceau has a bit of an uphill battle to fight in terms of establishing just how problematic it is. Those familiar with the context of domestic abuse, for example, are very familiar with the practice of an abuser who targets a domestic animal in order to hurt the human victim. However, Marceau establishes in a painstaking way in this chapter that “sloppy link-think” is responsible for falsely thinking that people who harm animals progress to harming humans and, even if this were true and animal abuse is one among many “links” that could be used to show a propensity toward violent crime, there is no evidence that incarcerating abusers will, once they are released, make them likely to be less violent toward animals (p. 194). The argument against the causal link is essentially that many people who engage in acts of animal cruelty (e.g., as children) do not go on to commit crimes against people and, conversely, most people who commit violent crimes do not have a history of animal abuse (p. 197). Marceau walks through the classic foundational research on the topic, as well as newer studies, none of which support the “sweeping, general conclusions about the predictive power of past animal abuse” (p. 219). While “there may be a ‘link’ between animal abuse and human violence,” as there is between human violence and bullying, or having an alcoholic parent, or being abandoned by a parent, or being physically or sexually abused, “it is not the strongest link, nor the most predictive or useful” (p. 226). Reliance on the link is “more of an urban myth” and “a convenient cultural script” (p. 229), “more an ideological value than a scientific fact” (p. 232), and animal protection groups should stop peddling it as a way to make governments take animal abuse seriously (p. 231, 235). “A movement committed to truth over myth and scientific fact over speculation should distance itself from the unfounded hyberbole” (p. 236), Marceau writes. Moreover, even if the link were true in a strong sense, there is no evidence that incarceration will be able to break a cycle of violence and make a community safer (p. 198). In fact, evidence of the effect that prison has in terms of “dampening” empathy would suggest that incarceration will result in “more callousness” rather than less (p. 238).The third point in the book that really must be emphasized is explored in a relatively discrete place, namely, in Chapter 4 (between pp. 98–110). This is the argument about the trade-offs made, either implicitly or explicitly, of tougher felony laws for exemptions for the institutional abuse involved in common agricultural practices. In an “exhaustive original study of the legislative history surrounding the creation of felony cruelty laws,” Marceau shows that 12 out of the 40 states to enact exemptions for customary farming practices did it at the exact same time as they added a felony provision (p. 104). And of these 12 states, 10 were enacted in 1998 or later (p. 107). He writes that “wittingly or unwittingly, the movement struck a deal with the devil” in which it agreed to a lack of protection for billions of animals used in agriculture, 90% of domestic animals, in exchange for the ability to charge sadistic “rogue” acts toward companion animals as felonies (p. 102). Marceau calls it “the movement's dirty secret” that “its obsession with enacting felony cruelty laws paved the way for agricultural exemptions” (p. 109), a classic “bait-and-switch” (pp. 109–110).This is all very damning, rising above the “in-fighting” Marceau occasionally refers to when discussing why leaders in the movement prefer not to discuss these difficult (and compromising) issues, as if it would be an embarrassing airing of dirty laundry. Marceau is clearly genuinely outraged as he writes about the movement's need to avoid “diluting” its “moral standing” (p. 159) and calling for the avoidance of hypocrisy (p. 187), collective naiveté (p. 188), and corruption or blindness (p. 182).Yet what Marceau has painted is so damning one must wonder about the idea that something pure has been diluted. Indeed, the history of animal cruelty laws would seem to suggest the opposite. They were always understood in terms of something like a link between harm done to animals and harm done to humans, specifically that being insensitive to animals would make humans insensitive to other humans (see Andrew Linzey's, 2009, discussion of the original Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822 or Martin's Act). Marceau points out that early cruelty laws tended to be about protecting one person's property from another person who would harm that property (see p. 55, referring to a new wave of U.S. animal protection laws “changing the tradition of only protecting animals from abuse by someone other than their owner” by allowing for penalties that applied regardless of “ownership”). In other words, the movement has a history of being motivated by convergence with the interests of humans (“interest convergence”), not caring about all animals for their own sake, and, most relevant to the third criticism Marceau raises, drawing a clear line between animals used for food and other domestic animals.The protection of companion animals attracts widespread support whereas the former is threatening to the eating and consumption habits of most people. I think then that the best way to understand the critiques of the animal protection movement Marceau raises is to see them as a series of challenges made to the movement to evolve, change, and grow; to be better than it has been in the past; to be consistent with its own best self that would strive, for instance, to work toward dismantling intersectional oppressions rather than remaining “single issue.” What he writes of the movement is stinging, and as I have said, really very damning; however, it is also provides important and explicit direction on what needs to be done in order for the movement to occupy the moral high ground it should. Can it be “mainstream” while attempting to occupy that space given how racist, punitive, and human-centered the past has been and the present continues to be? That is the question. Marceau has provided a compelling argument that it must try to do so and move “beyond cages,” for both human and nonhuman animals.