Reece’s Pieces: The Limits of Law and the Life Sentences of Lucy the Elephant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine the public debate over the welfare of Lucy, the zoo elephant at the heart of the 2011 Alberta Court of Appeal case of Reece v Edmonton (City). Attending to three sites of study ("species," "location," and "law"), I engage in a critical discourse analysis to uncover the conceptual limits within which this debate occurred with respect to animals and the law. Being socio-legal in nature, this is a case study not of Reece, but of "Reece's pieces" insofar as this project analyzes the discourse spread across print news media, websites, blogs, online videos, and social media feeds spanning from 2005 to 2018. Moving beyond the familiar legal animal studies binaries of welfarism versus abolitionism, property versus personhood, and so on, I use ecofeminist and posthumanist perspectives to uncover conceptual pressure points. For instance, while Lucy's trunk is alien in relation to human features, yet apparently capable of "human" capacities like art-making, go-to concepts of "the animal" and "the human" are found to be fundamentally unstable throughout this discourse. Similarly, insofar as the feel-good concept of "home" is deployed with respect to past, present, and would-be locations for Lucy, the discourse actively attempts to resist engaging with the conditions of a zoo elephant in North America -- ones that may actually imply that "home" is a fundamental impossibility for such a being. Relatedly, rather than the repeated deployment of criminal-law terms being a layperson's mistake when speaking of the civil lawsuit of Reece, this go-to legal language instead points to what is spoken around by all sides in the debate: the underlying power structures that accompany the figure of the captive elephant, with pastoral logics of care and carceral logics of punishment competing and combining in ways formal law cannot sufficiently articulate. Ultimately, in locating these limits, I spotlight what traditional ways of thinking one may need to move beyond if justice to animals is ever to be done, also identifying how and where the "life sentences" of the elephant at the heart of this debate may someday end.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".