The historical horse is at once material and abstract, as is the notion of the border. Borders and frontiers are not only markers delineating geographical spaces but also mental constructs: there are borders between order and disorder, between what is permitted and what is prohibited. Boundaries and liminal spaces also exist in the material, economic, political, moral, legal and religious spheres. In this volume, the contributing authors explore the theme of the liminality of the horse in all of these historical arenas, asking how one reconciles the very different roles played by the horse in human history.

Humans and nonhuman animals engage with each other in a multitude of fascinating ways. They have always done so, motivated by both necessity and choice. Yet, as human population numbers increase and our impact on the planet expands, this engagement takes on new meanings and requires new understanding.In Engaging with Animals: Interpretations of a Shared Existence experts in the field of human-animal studies investigate, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the ways in which humans and other animals interact. Grouped into three broad sections, the chapters focus on themes ranging from attitudes, ethics and interactions to history, art and literature, and finally animal welfare outcomes. While offering different interpretations of human-non-human interactions, they share a common goal in attempting to find pathways leading to a mutually beneficial and shared co-existence.

What's the difference between owning a painting, a dog, or a young child? For starters, you can't own a child, but you are legally responsible for their care. You can own a painting and a dog; both fall under the jurisdiction of the law and in particular, property rights. But why should a dog, man's best friend, an animal with a mind and emotions, fall under the same general category as a painting? Juxtaposed in this way, the question seems silly. How could the law be so foolish? Can't lawyers see the difference? Why shouldn't dogs end up in the same category as young children, a category of living things that require our care? If the law recognized dogs, along with cats, cows, mice, monkeys, birds, and files as requiring legal guardianship, this would have radical consequences for how we live our lives. We couldn't keep animals in zoos, couldn't eat them, use their fur to keep warm, or test them with drugs to improve our own health. Their lives would be different, and so would ours. This book explores these issues, but does so in a fresh new way. combination of voices from different experts, we present a set of essays from a lawyer philosopher, biochemist, psychologist, and animal scientist, together with a group of educated students engaged in the debate. The essays are set up to present both sides, some adopting arguments in favor of a shift to legal guardianship, while others support their status as property. Experts in the field will be engaged by the subtle issues surrounding this debate, while educators will find the student essays refreshing and of interest in classroom seminars.

Animal rights is an important social justice movement, and the animal rights movement presents ethical and political challenges to deeply rooted structures of violence and exploitation, challenging ideologies of capitalism and speciesism. Corporate interests that form the animal industrial complex understand the animal rights movement as a threat to their profits and have mobilized to undermine it. Informed by both critical animal studies and critical terrorism studies, John Sorenson analyzes ecoterrorism as a social construction. He examines how corporations that profit from animal exploitation fund and produce propaganda to portray the compassionate goals and nonviolent practices of animal activists as outlandish, anti-human campaigns that operate by violent means not only to destroy Western civilization but also to create actual genocide. The idea of concern for others is itself a dangerous one, and capitalism works by keeping people focused on individual interests and discouraging compassion and commitment to others. Driven by powerful and wealthy industries founded upon the exploitation of nonhuman animals and the extraction of natural resources, the discourse of ecoterrorism is a useful mechanism to repress criticism of the institutionalized violence and cruelty of these industries as well as their destructive impact on the environment, their major contribution to global warming and ecological disaster, and their negative impacts on human health. Further, by deliberately constructing an image of activists as dangerous and violent terrorists, these corporations and their representatives in government have created a widespread climate of fear that is very useful in legitimizing calls for more policing and more repressive legislation, such as Bill C-51 in Canada.

Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka's animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka's animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka's commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka's entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka's Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka's animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in "The Metamorphosis"), an ape turned into a human being (in "A Report to an Academy"), talking jackals (in "Jackals and Arabs"), a philosophical dog (in "Researches of a Dog"), a contemplative mole-like creature (in "The Burrow"), and indiscernible beings (in "Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People"). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as "humanimal." The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

The Carol J. Adams Reader gathers together Adams's foundational and recent articles in the fields of critical studies, animal studies, media studies, vegan studies, ecofeminism and feminism, as well as relevant interviews and conversations in which Adams identifies key concepts and new developments in her decades-long work. This volume, a companion to The Sexual Politics of Meat (Bloomsbury Revelations), offers insight into a variety of urgent issues for our contemporary world: Why do batterers harm animals? What is the relationship between genocide and attitudes toward other animals? How do activism and theory feed each other? How do race, gender, and species categories interact in strengthening oppressive attitudes? In clear language, Adams identifies the often hidden aspects of cultural presumptions. The essays and conversations found here capture the decades-long energy and vision that continue to shape new ways of thinking about and responding to oppression.

Each autumn, millions of men and increasing numbers of women don camouflage or blaze orange outfits and go afield in pursuit of game. For much of American history, there was no need to explain why they did this. Hunting was simply another aspect of the annual cycle of planting, breeding, and harvesting. But modern hunting began separating from its agrarian roots well over a century ago, and although it has retained its connection to the metaphor of the harvest, the self-perceptions and motives of hunters today are no longer transparent, especially to nonhunters. Indeed, hunting -- and those who hunt -- have become targets of a vocal and growing array of critics.

In Mortal Stakes, Jan E. Dizard examines the place of hunting in contemporary America. Drawing on detailed interviews with hunters as well as opinion surveys and demographic statistics, he analyzes the meanings these men and women attach to hunting and situates this traditional activity in its current setting. He looks at who hunts, how they compare socially and politically with nonhunters, and how they see themselves and are seen by others.

With fewer and fewer Americans closely linked to the land, hunting seems less ordinary and less necessary. As the gulf between hunters and nonhunters widens, hunters have begun to think of themselves as a minority group which, like other minorities, suffers from prejudice and stereotyping. As a result, Dizard argues, hunting is fast becoming one more front in an expanding "culture war" over what it means to be an American.

This accessible and cutting-edge work offers a new look at the history of western 'civilization,' one that brings into focus the interrelated suffering of oppressed humans and other animals. Nibert argues persuasively that throughout history the exploitation of other animals has gone hand in hand with the oppression of women, people of color, and other oppressed groups. He maintains that the oppression both of humans and of other species of animals is inextricably tangled within the structure of social arrangements. Nibert asserts that human use and mistreatment of other animals are not natural and do little to further the human condition. Nibert's analysis emphasizes the economic and elite-driven character of prejudice, discrimination, and institutionalized repression of humans and other animals. His examination of the economic entanglements of the oppression of human and other animals is supplemented with an analysis of ideological forces and the use of state power in this sociological expose of the grotesque uses of the oppressed, past and present. Nibert suggests that the liberation of devalued groups of humans is unlikely in a world that uses other animals as fodder for the continual growth and expansion of transnational corporations and, conversely, that animal liberation cannot take place when humans continue to be exploited and oppressed.

Given their tendency to splinter over tactics and goals, social movements are rarely unified. Following the modern Western animal rights movement over thirty years, Corey Lee Wrennapplies the sociological theory of Bourdieu, Goffman, Weber, and contemporary social movement researchers to examine structural conditions in the animal rights movement, facilitating factionalism in today's era of professionalized advocacy. Modern social movements are dominated by bureaucratically oriented nonprofits, a special arrangement that creates tension between activists and movement elites who compete for success in a corporate political arena. Piecemeal Protest examines the impact of nonprofitization on factionalism and a movement's ability to mobilize, resonate, and succeed. Wrenn'sexhaustive analysis of archival movement literature and exclusive interviews with movement leaders illustrate how entities with greater symbolic capital are positioned to monopolize claims-making, disempower competitors, and replicate hegemonic power, eroding democratic access to dialogue and decision-making essential for movement health. Piecemeal Protest examines social movement behavior shaped by capitalist ideologies and state interests. As power concentrates to the disadvantage of marginalized factions in the modern social movement arena, Piecemeal Protest shines light on processes of factionalism and considers how, in the age of nonprofits, intra-movement inequality could stifle social progress.

This volume is a collection of chapters all contributed by individuals who have presented their ideas at conferences and who take moderate stands with the use of animals in research. Specifically the chapters bear of the issues of: notions of the moral standings of animals, history of the methods of argumentation, knowledge of the animal mind, nature and value of regulatory structures, how respect for animals can be converted from theory to action in the laboratory. The chapters have been tempered by open discussion with individuals with different opinions and not audiences of true believers. It is the hope of all, that careful consideration of the positions in these chapters will leave reader with a deepened understanding--not necessarily a hardened position.

Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London tells the remarkable story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first 'star' animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo. In 1850, a baby hippopotamus arrived in England, thought to be the first in Europe since the Roman Empire, and almost certainly the first in Britain since prehistoric times. Captured near an island in the White Nile, Obaysch was donated by the viceroy of Egypt in exchange for greyhounds and deerhounds. His arrival in London was greeted with a wave of 'hippomania', doubling the number of visitors to the Zoological Gardens almost overnight. Delving into the circumstances of Obaysch's capture and exhibition, John Simons investigates the phenomenon of 'star' animals in Victorian Britain against the backdrop of an expanding British Empire. He shows how the entangled aims of scientific exploration, commercial ambition, and imperial expansion shaped the treatment of exotic animals throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along the way, he uncovers the strange and moving stories of Obaysch and the other hippos who joined him in Europe as the trade in zoo animals grew. 'A fascinating microscopic and telescopic look at the life of Victorian England's most famous animal. John Simons' richly exhaustive account of nineteenth-century hippomania engages with imperialism, Orientalism, progress, and the cultural history of Europe where Obaysch, captured from an island in the Nile River, had the misfortune to spend his life as a blockbuster attraction at the London Zoo. Poignant and empathetic, this account of an animal's appropriation and exploitation is one of those books that unfurls more about its moment in time than you could have imagined when you picked it up.' Professor Randy Malamud, Georgia State University