Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People tells the story of Animal, an animal who is human. He is a severely disabled boy living in a fictional city modelled on Bhopal in India. Animal has a twisted back that forces him to walk on all fours as if an animal, and this chapter reads his disfigured body as a symbol of an exploited body politic, an interrogation of racist discourses which depend upon the inferiority implied by the term ‘animal’, and a dismantling of the notion that there are stable conceptions of humanity and animality with stable relations to material bodies. The chapter sets out theory fundamental to Literary Animal Studies, and develops concepts of disfigurement and defacement.