Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 Human culture is now more dangerous to nonhuman animals than ever before. The destruction of natural habitats and the killing of animals for food, science, medicine or trophy - sometimes to the point of extinction - is the stuff of newspaper headlines. We live in a time when the idea of an animal's habitat has almost become irrelevant, except as a historical curiosity, yet also in a time when the public and philosophical acknowledgement of animal rights and environmental ethics is on the rise. Animals are enmeshed in human culture simply because people are so interested in them. Animals remain central to our sense of the natural world. Our pets are often seen as our closest companions through life. At the same time, the last century has seen the use of animals in scientific experimentation and the major changes in industrial-scale animal farming. Never has the relationship between human and non-human animals been more hotly contested. 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 6 in the Cultural History of Animals edited by Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers are Transforming the Lives of Animals

Gender and Sexuality in Critical Animal Studies explores nonhuman animals' experiences of gender, physiological sex, and sexuality while in nature and captivity. The contributors in this collection analyze nonhuman oppression issues, such as reproductive freedom, deconstructing dichotomous thinking, and promoting animal liberation within and beyond the academy. The scholar-activists featured in this collection investigate injustice in news stories, literature, and other media that shape human perceptions and treatment toward nonhumans. Each chapter confronts notions of gender, physiological sex, or sexuality as construction by applying literary theory, cultural studies, disability studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, and more to promote justice and equity for nonhuman animals.

Mary Midgley is one of the most important moral philosophers working today. Over the last thirty years, her writings have informed debates concerning animals, the environment and evolutionary theory. The invited essays in this volume offer critical reflections upon Midgley's work and further developments of her ideas. The contributors include many of the leading commentators on her work, including distinguished figures from the disciplines of philosophy, biology, and ethology. The range of topics includes the moral status of animals, the concept of wickedness, science and mythology, Midgley's relationship to modern moral philosophy, and her relationship with Iris Murdoch. It also includes the first full bibliography of Midgley's writings. The volume is the first major study of its kind and brings together contributions from the many disciplines which Midgley's work has influenced. It provides a clear account of the themes and significance of her work and its implications for ongoing debates about our understanding of our place within the world.

Advanced biomedical techniques such as genetic engineering are now used extensively in animal related research and development. As the pace of development has quickened, there has been growing public anxiety about the ethical issues involved. Animal Biotechnology and Ethics draws together in one book some of the leading themes and issues which have emerged in the recent debates surrounding biotechnology as applied to animals. With contributions from authors of many different viewpoints, the subject is given a thorough and balanced treatment. Among those to whom the book will be of particular interest are practitioners of animal biotechnology, and those whose interest lies in assessing its credentials, such as philosophers and social or political scientists. It also has a great deal to interest policy-makers and pressure groups, as well as more general readers. The strong chapters on the legal and regulatory framework will make it useful to those involved in advising on company policy, patenting or litigation.

Nineteenth-century Britain was one of the birthplaces of modern vegetarianism in the west, and was to become a reform movement attracting thousands of people. From the Vegetarian Society's foundation in 1847, men, women and their families abandoned conventional diet for reasons as varied as self-advancement, personal thrift, dissatisfaction with medical orthodoxy and repugnance for animal cruelty. They joined in the pursuit of a perfect society in which food reform combined with causes such as socialism and land reform, stimulated by the concern that carnivorism was in league with alcoholism and bellicosity. James Gregory provides a rich exploration of the movement, with its often colourful and sometimes eccentric leaders and grass-roots supporters. He explores the rich culture of branch associations, competing national societies, proliferating restaurants and food stores and experiments in vegetarian farms and colonies. "Of Victorians and Vegetarians" examines the wider significance of Victorian vegetarians, embracing concerns about gender and class, national identity, race and empire and religious authority. Vegetarianism embodied the Victorians' complicated response to modernity in its hostility to aspects of the industrial world's exploitation of technology, rejecting entrepreneurial attempts to create the foods and substitute artefacts of the future. Hostile, like the associated anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, to a new 'priesthood' of scientists, vegetarians defended themselves through the new sciences of nutrition and chemistry. "Of Victorians and Vegetarians" uncovers who the vegetarians were, how they attempted to convert their fellow Britons (and the world beyond) to their 'bloodless diet' and the response of contemporaries in a variety of media and genres. Through a close study of the vegetarian periodicals and organisational archives, extensive biographical research and a broader examination of texts relating to food, dietary reform and allied reform movements, James Gregory provides us with the first fascinating foray into the impact of vegetarianism on the Victorians, the history of animal welfare, reform movements and food history.

Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. `Liminal' animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.

Animals are everywhere. They inhabit our forests, our fields, our imaginations, our dreams, and our stories. Making appearances in advertisements, television programs, movies, books, Internet memes, and art, symbolic animals do tremendous work for us selling goods, services, and ideas, as well as acting as stand-ins for our interests and ideas. Yet, does knowing animals only symbolically impact their lived experiences? Seeing Species: Re-presentations of Animals in Media & Popular Culture examines the use of animals in media, tracking species from appearances in rock art and picture books to contemporary portrayals in television programs and movies. Primary questions explored include: Where does thinking of other beings in a detached, impersonal, and objectified way come from? Do the mass media contribute to this distancing? When did humans first think about animals as other others? Main themes include examining the persistence of the human-animal divide, parallels in the treatment of otherized human beings and animals, and the role of media in either liberating or limiting real animals. This book brings together sociological, psychological, historical, cultural, and environmental ways of thinking about nonhuman animals and our relationships with them. In particular, ecopsychological thinking locates and identifies the connections between how we re-present animals and the impact on their lived experiences in terms of distancing, generating a false sense of intimacy, and stereotyping. Re-presentations of animals are discussed in terms of the role the media do or do not play in perpetuating status quo beliefs about them and their relationship with humans. This includes theories and methods such as phenomenology, semiotics, textual analysis, and pragmatism, with the goal of unpacking re-presentations of animals in order to learn not only what they say about human beings but also how we regard members of other species.

Animals are everywhere. They inhabit our forests, our fields, our imaginations, our dreams, and our stories. Making appearances in advertisements, television programs, movies, books, Internet memes, and art, symbolic animals do tremendous work for us selling goods, services, and ideas, as well as acting as stand-ins for our interests and ideas. Yet, does knowing animals only symbolically impact their lived experiences? Seeing Species: Re-presentations of Animals in Media & Popular Culture examines the use of animals in media, tracking species from appearances in rock art and picture books to contemporary portrayals in television programs and movies. Primary questions explored include: Where does thinking of other beings in a detached, impersonal, and objectified way come from? Do the mass media contribute to this distancing? When did humans first think about animals as other others? Main themes include examining the persistence of the human-animal divide, parallels in the treatment of otherized human beings and animals, and the role of media in either liberating or limiting real animals. This book brings together sociological, psychological, historical, cultural, and environmental ways of thinking about nonhuman animals and our relationships with them. In particular, ecopsychological thinking locates and identifies the connections between how we re-present animals and the impact on their lived experiences in terms of distancing, generating a false sense of intimacy, and stereotyping. Re-presentations of animals are discussed in terms of the role the media do or do not play in perpetuating status quo beliefs about them and their relationship with humans. This includes theories and methods such as phenomenology, semiotics, textual analysis, and pragmatism, with the goal of unpacking re-presentations of animals in order to learn not only what they say about human beings but also how we regard members of other species.

This important book charts new territory by showcasing some of the newest developments in the rapidly-growing field of Critical Animal Studies. Critical Animal Studies presents a radical ethical and normative challenge to existing systems of power in the context of neoliberal capitalism and to the existential structure of speciesism. The essays in this book link activist and academic approaches to dismantle the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals. Featuring an international team of contributors, the book reflects the transdisciplinary character of Critical Animal Studies, with chapters by activists and academics from disciplines across the social sciences, including historical archaeology, political science, psychology, geography, law, social work and philosophy. The book provides advanced-level students with an ideal introduction to a wide range of perspectives on Critical Animal Studies, amongst other things proposing new ways of considering animal advocacy, decolonization and liberation.

[A] deservedly award-studded delight Strong Words Magazine 'A smart, scathing and bleakly funny cross of folk horror, satire and historical fiction' Toronto Star 'Reads like a modern fairy tale' New York Journal of Books 'Eerie and sensual' The Guardian 'So original, so beautifully done, and sinister and savage. I didn't want it to end' Chris Whitaker Franck and Lise, a French couple in the film industry, rent a cottage in the quiet hills of the French Lot to get away from the stresses of modern life. In this remote corner of the world, there is no phone signal. A mysterious dog emerges, looking for a new master. Ghosts of a dark past run wild in these hills, where a German lion tamer took refuge in the First World War ... Franck and Lise are confronted with nature at its most brutal. And they are about to discover that man and beast have more in common than they think. A literary sensation in France, Wild Dog is a dark, menacing tale of isolation, human nature and the infinite savagery of the wild.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 The period of the Enlightenment saw great changes in the way animals were seen. The codifying and categorising impulse of the age of reason saw sharp lines drawn between different animal species and between animals and humans. In 1600, "beasts" were still seen as the foils and adversaries of human reason, By 1800, animals had become exemplars of sentiment and compassion, the new standards of truth and morals. A new age had dawned, a time when humans admired animals and sought to recover their own animality. 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 4 in the Cultural History of Animals edited by Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches' application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.

This original and insightful book explores how horses can be considered as social actors within shared interspecies networks. It examines what we know about how horses understand us and how we perceive them, as well as the implications of actively recognising other animals as actors within shared social lives. This book explores how interspecies relationships work, using a variety of examples to demonstrate how horses and people build social lives. Considering horses as social actors presents new possibilities for improving the quality of animal lives, the human condition and human-horse relations.

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our 'human' societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the 'wilderness'; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations. This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research on space and place that currently informs the humanities and the social sciences.

Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson alongside slaughterhouse lithographs, hunting photography, and sheep "husbandry" manuals, Lindgren Johnson argues instead for a critical African American tradition that at pivotal moments reconsiders and recuperates discourses of animality weaponized against both African Americans and animals. Johnson articulates a theory of "fugitive humanism" in which these texts fl ee both white and human exceptionalism, even as they move within and seek out a (revised) humanist space. The focus, for example, is not on how African Americans shake off animal associations in demanding recognition of their humanity, but on how they hold fast to animality and animals in making such a move, revising "the human" itself as they go and undermining the binaries that helped to produce racial and animal injustices. Fugitive humanism reveals how an interspecies ethics develops in these African American responses to violent dehumanization. Illuminating those moments in which the African American canon exceeds human exceptionalism, Race Matters, Animal Matters ultimately shows how these black engagements with animals and animality are not subsequent to efforts for racial justice - a mere extension of the abolitionist or antilynching movements- but, to the contrary, are integral to those efforts. This black- authored temporality challenges widely accepted humanist approaches to the relationship between racial and animal justice as it anticipates and even critiques the valuable insights that animal studies and posthumanism have to offer in our current moment.

While previous studies of dogs in human history have focused on how people have changed the species through domestication, this volume offers a rich archaeological portrait of the human-canine connection. Contributors investigate the ways people have viewed and valued dogs in different cultures around the world and across the ages. Case studies from North and South America, the Arctic, Australia, and Eurasia present evidence for dogs in roles including pets, guards, hunters, and herders. In these chapters, faunal analysis of gnawed and digested bones from the Ancient Near East suggests that dogs contributed to public health by scavenging garbage, and remains from a Roman temple indicate that dogs were offered as sacrifices in purification rites. Essays also chronicle the complex partnership between Aboriginal peoples and the dingo and describe how the hunting abilities of dogs made them valuable assets for tribes in the Amazon rainforest. The volume draws on multidisciplinary methods that include zooarchaeological analysis; scientific techniques such as isotopic, DNA, and chemical residue analyses; and the integration of history, ethnography, multispecies scholarship, and traditional cultural knowledge to provide an in-depth account of dogs' lives. Showing that dogs have been a critical ally for humankind through cooperation and companionship over thousands of years, this volume broadens discussions about how relationships between people and animals have shaped worldviews and civilizations.

Interspecies Interactions surveys the rapidly developing field of human-animal relations from the late medieval and early modern eras through to the mid-Victorian period. By viewing animals as authentic and autonomous historical agents who had a real impact on the world around them, this book concentrates on an under-examined but crucial aspect of the human-animal relationship: interaction. Each chapter provides scholarly debate on the methods and challenges of the study of interspecies interactions, and together they offer an insight into the part that humans and animals have played in shaping each other's lives, as well as encouraging reflection on the directions that human-animal relations may yet take. Beginning with an exploration of Samuel Pepys' often emotional relationships with the many animals that he knew, the chapters cover a wide range of domestic, working, and wild animals and include case studies on carnival animals, cattle, dogs, horses, apes, snakes, sharks, and invertebrates. These case studies of human-animal interactions are further brought to life through visual representation, by the inclusion of over 20 images within the book. From 'sleeve cats' to lion fights, Interspecies Interactions encompasses a broad spectrum of relationships between humans and animals. Covering topics such as use, emotion, cognition, empire, status, and performance across several centuries and continents, it is essential reading for all students and scholars of historical animal studies.

What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possibly even the phrase 'swan song'. This book explores the emergence of each of these ideas, starting with an examination of the medieval swan in natural history, exploring classical writings and their medieval interpretations and demonstrating how the idea of a swan's song developed. The book then proceeds to consider literary motifs of swan-to-human transformation, particularly the legend of the Knight of the Swan. Although this legend is known today largely through Wagner's opera, it was a best-seller in the Middle Ages, and courts throughout Europe strove to be associated as descendants of this Swan Knight. Consequently, the swan was projected as an icon of courtly and eventual royal status. The book's third chapter looks at the swan as icon of the Lancasters, particularly important during the reign of Richard II and the War of the Roses, and the final chapter examines the swan as an important item of feasting, focusing on cookery and husbandry to argue that over time the right to keep swans became an increasingly restricted right controlled by the English crown. Each of the swan's medieval associations are explored as they developed over time to the modern day.

This book critically examines how Walt Disney Animation Studios has depicted - and sometimes failed to depict - different forms of harming and objectifying non-human animals in their films. Each chapter addresses a different form of animal harm and objectification through the theories of speciesism, romanticism, and the 'collapse of compassion' effect, from farming, hunting and fishing, to clothing, work, and entertainment. Stanton lucidly presents the dichotomy between depictions of higher order, anthropomorphised and neotonised animal characters and that of lower-order species, showing furthermore how these depictions are closely linked to changing social attitudes about acceptable forms of animal harm. An engaging and novel contribution to the field of Critical Animal Studies, this book explores the use of animals not only in Disney's best known animated films such as 101 Dalmatians, but also lesser known features including Home on the Range and Fun and Fancy Free. A quantitative appendix supplying data on how often each animal species appears and the amount of times animal harm or objectification is depicted in over fifty films provides an invaluable resource and addition to scholars working in both Disney and animal studies.

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book's novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics' aesthetic views of animality influenced-and were influenced by-their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

Typically, the legal investigation of nonhuman life, and of animal life in particular, is conducted through the discourse of animal rights. Within this discourse, legal rights are extended to certain nonhuman animals through the same liberal framework that has afforded human rights before it. Animals, Biopolitics, Law envisions the possibility of lively legalities that move beyond the humanist perspective. Drawing on an array of expertise-from law, geography, and anthropology, through animal studies and posthumanism, to science and technology studies-this interdisciplinary collection asks what, in legal terms, it means to be human and nonhuman, what it means to govern and to be governed, and what are the ethical and political concerns that emerge in the project of governing not only human but also more-than-human life.

Bringing together new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book is the first collection to critically address the manifold alignments and frequent co-constitutions of children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies. The cultural politics of power shaping relationships between children, pets, and adults inform the wide range of essays included in this collection, as they explore issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. The volume use the frequent social and cultural intersections between children and pets as an opportunity to analyze institutions that create pet and child subjectivity, from education and training to putting children and pets on display for entertainment purposes. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. Examining childhood and pethood in America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, this collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures. By presenting innovative approaches to the child and the pet, the book brings to light alternative paths toward understanding these figures, leading to new openings and questions about kinship, agency, and the power of care that so often shapes our relationships with children and animals. This will be an important volume for scholars of animal studies, childhood studies, children's literature, cultural studies, political theory, education, art history, and sociology.

How Animals Help Students Learn summarizes what we know about the impact of animals in education and synthesizes the thinking of prominent leaders in research and practice. It's a much-needed resource for mental-health and education professionals interested in incorporating animals in school-based environments, one that evaluates the efficacy of existing programs and helps move the field toward evidence-based practice. Experts from around the world provide concrete examples of how animals have been successfully incorporated into classroom settings to achieve the highest level of benefit while also ensuring the health and welfare of the students and animals involved.

The Animal Ethics Reader is an acclaimed anthology containing both classic and contemporary readings, making it ideal for anyone coming to the subject for the first time. It provides a thorough introduction to the central topics, controversies and ethical dilemmas surrounding the treatment of animals, covering a wide range of contemporary issues, such as animal activism, genetic engineering, and environmental ethics. The extracts are arranged thematically under the following clear headings: Theories of Animal Ethics Nonhuman Animal Experiences Primates and Cetaceans Animals for Food Animal Experimentation Animals and Biotechnology Ethics and Wildlife Zoos and Aquariums Animal Companions Animal Law and Animal Activism Readings from leading experts in the field including Peter Singer, Bernard E. Rollin and Jane Goodall are featured, as well as selections from Tom Regan, Jane Goodall, Donald Griffin, Temple Grandin, Ben A. Minteer, Christine Korsgaard and Mark Rowlands. Classic extracts are well balanced with contemporary selections, helping to present the latest developments in the field. This revised and updated Third Edition includes 31 new readings on a range of subjects, including animal rights, captive chimpanzees, industrial farm animal production, genetic engineering, keeping cetaceans in captivity, animal cruelty, and animal activism. The Third Edition also is printed with a slightly larger page format and in an easier-to-read typeface. Featuring contextualizing introductions by the editors, study questions and further reading suggestions as the end of each chapter, this will be essential reading for any student taking a course in the subject. With a new foreword by Bernard E. Rollin.