Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age investigates the changing roles of animals in medieval culture, economy and society in the period 1000 to 1400. The period saw significant changes in scientific and philosophical approaches to animals as well as their representation in art. Animals were omnipresent in medieval everyday life. They had enormous importance for medieval agriculture and trade and were also hunted for food and used in popular entertainments. At the same time, animals were kept as pets and used to display their owner's status, whilst medieval religion attributed complex symbolic meanings to animals. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Animals, this volume presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary Symbolism, Hunting, Domestication, Sports and Entertainment, Science, Philosophy, and Art. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Animals edited by Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

What role does an animal play in a child's developing sense of self? Are children and animals interacting in ways no longer recognizable to adults? The Significance of Children and Animals addresses these and other intriguing questions by revealing the interconnected lives of the inhabitants of the preschool classroom - an environment abounding in childish verbal and nonverbal interactions with birds, turtles, toads, birds, bugs, and other creatures. Regarded as a pivotal analysis of child-animal interaction with wider implications for human-animal studies, the original 1998 edition has been revised here to incorporate the recent literature, while preserving the basic nature of the text. This book provides a delightful and rewarding opportunity for parents, educators, and students of early childhood social development, as well as scholars of the intersection of human experience and the natural environment.

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet. Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild-in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques-is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans. At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow Disease are but two of the results of treating animals as commodities, subject only to commercial constraints and ignoring all natural and moral considerations. Chickens hanging by their necks on conveyor belts, caged pigs covered in sores, bloated dead sheep with their legs in the air, mutilated dogs waiting to die after undergoing horrendous experiments in the name of science or just product testing--these are some of the images that illustrate the indifference of a consumerist society to the suffering of animals. Few are willing to recognize that the packaged sanitized supermarket meat that materializes on their dinner tables every day is the result of an industrial process involving unimaginable pain and suffering. We would be horrified if our pets were harmed, yet every day we eat animals that have been tortured and executed.
Mark Rowlands claims that it is simply unjust to harm animals. A conscious sentient beings, biologically continuous with humans, they have interests that cannot simply be disregarded. Using simple principles of justice, he argues that animals have moral rights, and examines the consequences of this claim in the contexts of vegetarianism, animal experimentation, zoos and hunting, and animal rights activism.

The dramatic transformation of relationships between humans and animals in the 20th century are investigated in this fascinating and accessible book. At the beginning of this century these relationships were dominated by human needs and interests, modernization was a project which was attached to the goal of progress and animals were merely resources to be used on the path towards human fulfilment. As the century comes to an end these relationships are increasingly being subjected to criticism. We are now urged to be more sensitive and compassionate to animal needs and interests.

This book focuses on social change and animals, it is concerned with how humans relate to animals and how this has changed and why. Moreover, it highlights, through chapters on companion animals, hunting and fishing, animal leisures such as birdwatching and wildlife parks, and the meat and livestock industries, how attitudes and practices towards animals vary widely according to social class, ethnicity, gender, region and nation.

Kari Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries.

Weil's considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Cixous, and Hearne, while incorporating the aesthetic perspectives of such visual artists as Bill Viola, Frank Noelker, and Sam Taylor-Wood and the "visual thinking" of the autistic animal scientist Temple Grandin. She addresses theories of pet keeping and domestication; the importance of animal agency; the intersection of animal studies, disability studies, and ethics; and the role of gender, shame, love, and grief in shaping our attitudes toward animals. Exposing humanism's conception of the human as a biased illusion, and embracing posthumanism's acceptance of human and animal entanglement, Weil unseats the comfortable assumptions of humanist thought and its species-specific distinctions.

Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing.
An attempt to understand human attachment to the "canis familiaris" in terms of reciprocity and empathy, "Melancholia's" "Dog" tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts--the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.

When we think about the Victorian age, we usually envision people together with animals: the Queen and her pugs, the sportsman with horses and hounds, the big game hunter with his wild kill, the gentleman farmer with a prize bull. Harriet Ritvo here gives us a vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations. Victorian England was a period of burgeoning scientific cattle breeding and newly fashionable dog shows; an age of Empire and big game hunting; an era of reform and reformers that saw the birth of the Royal SPCA. Ritvo examines Victorian thinking about animals in the context of other lines of thought: evolution, class structure, popular science and natural history, imperial domination. The papers and publications of people and organizations concerned with agricultural breeding, veterinary medicine, the world of pets, vivisection and other humane causes, zoos, hunting at home and abroad, all reveal underlying assumptions and deeply held convictions-for example, about Britain's imperial enterprise, social discipline, and the hierarchy of orders, in nature and in human society. Thus this book contributes a new new topic of inquiry to Victorian studies; its combination of rhetorical analysis with more conventional methods of historical research offers a novel perspective on Victorian culture. And because nineteenth-century attitudes and practices were often the ancestors of contemporary ones, this perspective can also inform modern debates about human-animal interactions.

Human beings have long imagined their subjectivity, ethics, and ancestry with and through animals, yet not until the mid-twentieth century did contemporary thought reflect critically on animals' significance in human self-conception. Thinkers such as French philosopher Jacques Derrida, South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, and American theorist Donna Haraway have initiated rigorous inquiries into the question of the animal, now blossoming in a number of directions. It is no longer strange to say that if animals did not exist, we would have to invent them.

This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of "animality" as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on a par with race and gender. Essays consider the role of animals in the human imagination and the imagination of the human; the worldviews of indigenous peoples; animal-human mythology in early modern China; and political uses of the animal in postcolonial India. They engage with the theoretical underpinnings of the animal protection movement, representations of animals in children's literature, depictions of animals in contemporary art, and the philosophical positioning of the animal from Aristotle to Derrida. The strength of this companion lies in its timeliness and contextual diversity, which makes it essential reading for students and researchers while further developing the parameters of the discipline.

Now in paperback! Discover how Mouse finds the courage to be kind. It's a perfect day on Rainbow Island for a boat trip and a picnic, but when Mouse accidentally makes a hole in his boat, he gets scared and lets his friend Fox take the blame. It doesn't take long before Mouse starts to feel awful about what he has done. Will he be a kind friend and own up to his mistake? Will Fox forgive him? Will Mouse get to be a member of the Kindness Club? Children will love the myriad of animal characters and learning and understanding the different ways we can be kind to one another. There are lots of extra learning opportunities, from questions about the story to activities showing you how to make your own Kindness Badge to notes for parents and carers to extend learning and reinforce positive behaviour. In the words of Badger, who runs the Kindness Club, "When you show kindness, it makes you and your friends feel good."

The staggering rate of environmental pollution and animal abuse despite constant efforts to educate the public and raise awareness challenges the prevailing belief that the absence of serious action is a consequence of a poorly informed public. In recent decades alternative explanations of social and political inaction have emerged, including denialism. Challenging the information-deficit model, denialism proposes that people actively avoid unpleasant information that threatens their established worldviews, lifestyles, and identities. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze analyzes how people avoid awareness of climate change, environmental pollution, animal abuse, and the animal industrial complex. The contributors examine the theory of denialism in regards to environmental pollution and animal abuse through a range of disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural history and law.

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

Ethology, or how animals relate to their environments, is currently enjoying increased academic attention. A prominent figure in this scholarship is Gilles Deleuze and yet, the significance of his relational metaphysics to ethology has still not been scrutinised. Jason Cullen's book is the first text to analyse Deleuze's philosophical ethology and he prioritises the theorist's examination of how beings relate to each other. For Cullen, Deleuze's Cinema books are integral to this investigation and he highlights how they expose a key Deleuzian theme: that beings are fundamentally continuous with each other. In light of this continuity then, Cullen reveals that how beings understand each other shapes them and allows them to transform their shared worlds.

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin's tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty , playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more, introducing a stunning new writer to British readers.