'Born to Fly' is a poignant and heart warming story based on true-life adventures of captive birds being safely released back into nature...blended with a fictional story about a Rainbow Lorikeet named Cherub. It is predominantly a book for all ages, for storytelling and learning is universal. 'Born to Fly' is also a metaphor for us all - to free ourselves to live happy, fulfilling and creative lives...and as we do this we automatically assist others to do the same. It is this inherent wisdom that Cherub and her friends are lovingly and patiently teaching us. As caretakers and guardians of the natural world, our role is to observe and delight in the many wondrous miracles and beauty of nature. It is also to teach each and every one of our children this precious gift, so we can all truly fly free.

Ethnoprimatology, the combining of primatological and anthropological practice and the viewing of humans and other primates as living in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces, has become an increasingly popular approach to primate studies in the twenty-first century. Offering an insight into the investigation and documentation of human-nonhuman primate relations in the Anthropocene, this book guides the reader through the preparation, design, implementation, and analysis of an ethnoprimatological research project, offering practical examples of the vast array of methods and techniques at chapter level. With contributions from the world's leading experts in the field, Ethnoprimatology critically analyses current primate conservation efforts, outlines their major research questions, theoretical bases and methods, and tackles the challenges and complexities involved in mixed-methods research. Documenting the spectrum of current research in the field, it is an ideal volume for students and researchers in ethnoprimatology, primatology, anthropology, and conservation biology.

Rhino occupy a unique part of the food chain and wide niches in specific ecosystems in which they have developed their own behaviour patterns and interactions with other species. They form an essential part of the animal kingdom and their loss would have significant ramifications for other dependant flora and fauna. The large numbers of rhino orphans and the loss of pregnant females are decimating wild rhino populations. This decline is mainly due to poaching for their horns that are made of keratin and which have no proven medical benefit to humans. Greedy markets in China, Vietnam and Yemen, and criminal syndicates offer extremely high prices for rhino horn making it more valuable than gold. Whilst tackling the poachers head on is essential, it is sadly not enough and vigorous education programmes need to be put in place to inform people of the ecological, economic, aesthetic and touristic value of rhino. This book is dedicated to the plight all rhino species face including museum specimens and fossils.

The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to conserve threatened and endangered species, including sea turtles, and the ecosystems on which they depend. The act provides for listing species that need protection; designating habitat deemed critical to a listed species' conservation; protecting listed species against certain harms caused by federal and nonfederal actions; conducting 5-year reviews on species' status; and developing recovery plans that contain objective, measurable criteria that, when met, would result in a determination that the species can be removed from the list.

In this important new book from a distinguished scholar, Josephine Donovan develops a new aesthetics of care, which she establishes as the basis for a critical approach to the representation of animals in literature. The Aesthetics of Care begins with a guide to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, leading to a reconceptualization of key literary critical terms such as mimesis and catharsis, before moving on to an applied section, with interpretations of the specific treatment of animals handled by a wide range of authors, including Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, George Sand, and J.M. Coetzee. The book closes with three concluding theoretical chapters. Clear, original, and provocative, The Aesthetics of Care introduces and makes new contributions to a number of burgeoning areas of study and debate: aesthetics and ethics, critical theory, animal ethics, and ecofeminist criticism.

Afternoons with Puppy is a heartwarming account of dynamic relationships and outcomes involving a therapist, his therapy animals, and his patients, gathered from almost two decades of ongoing practice. It is a narrative of Dr. Aubrey H. Fine's experiences and his growing respect for the power of the animals' effects on his patients and himself. Fine observes that healing is rarely, if ever, accomplished in isolation. There is always a reaching out and a connection at the heart of the therapeutic enterprise. Afternoons with Puppy reveals the ways in which our bond with animals centers our being. Interacting with an animal, as simple as having a puppy in your lap gnawing on your thumb, strips away the unimportant and provides the neutral, primal ground on which healing and new growth can take place. Afternoons with Puppy is an emotional journey that will continue long after the last page.

The analysis of meat and its place in Western culture has been central to Human-Animal Studies as a field. It is even more urgent now as global meat and dairy production are projected to rise dramatically by 2050. While the term 'carnism' denotes the invisible belief system (or ideology) that naturalizes and normalizes meat consumption, in this volume we focus on 'meat culture', which refers to all the tangible and practical forms through which carnist ideology is expressed and lived. Featuring new work from leading Australasian, European and North American scholars, Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, interrogates the representations and discourses, practices and behaviours, diets and tastes that generate shared beliefs about, perspectives on and experiences of meat in the 21st century.

Public concerns over large losses of wild ungulates to predators arise when restoring large carnivore species to former locations or population densities. During the 1990s, mountain lion and grizzly bear numbers increased in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and gray wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We investigated effects of these predators, as well as black bears and coyotes, on mortality of an abundant and increasing prey species, elk.

HISTORIES OF HUMAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination assembles eleven substantive and original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century. The imaginative (and actual) construction of landscapes and the appropriation of Nature - through image-fashioning, curating museum and zoo collections, making 'friends', 'enemies' and mythical symbols from animals - are recurring subjects. Among the volume's thought-provoking essays are a group enmeshing nature and the visual culture of photography and film. Canonical environmental history themes, from colonialism to conservation, are re-inflected by discourses including gender studies, Romanticism, politics and technology. The loci of the studies included here represent both the microcosmic - underwater laboratory, zoo, film studio; and broad canvases - the German forest, the Rocky Mountains, the islands of Haiti and Madagascar. Their casts too are richly varied - from Britain's otters and Africa's Nile crocodiles to Hollywood film-makers and South African cattle. The volume represents an excitingly diverse collection of studies of how humans, in imagination and deed, act on and are acted on by 'wild things'.

The analysis of meat and its place in Western culture has been central to Human-Animal Studies as a field. It is even more urgent now as global meat and dairy production are projected to rise dramatically by 2050. While the term 'carnism' denotes the invisible belief system (or ideology) that naturalizes and normalizes meat consumption, in this volume we focus on 'meat culture', which refers to all the tangible and practical forms through which carnist ideology is expressed and lived. Featuring new work from leading Australasian, European and North American scholars, Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, interrogates the representations and discourses, practices and behaviours, diets and tastes that generate shared beliefs about, perspectives on and experiences of meat in the 21st century.