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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Animals & society > General
From fairy tales to photography, nowhere is the complexity of
human-animal relationships more apparent than in the creative arts.
Art illuminates the nature and significance of animals in modern,
Western thought, capturing the complicated union that has long
existed between the animal kingdom and us. In Beauty and the Beast,
authors Arluke and Bogdan explore this relationship through the
unique lens of photo postcards. This visual medium offers an
enormous and relatively untapped archive to document their subject
compellingly. The importance of photo postcards goes beyond their
abundance. Recognized as the "people's photography", photo
postcards were typically taken by photographers who were part of
the community they were photographing. Their intimacy with the
people and places they captured resulted in a vernacular record of
the life and times of the period unavailable in other kinds of
photography. Arluke and Bogdan use these postcards to tell the
story of human-animal relations in the United States from
approximately 1905 to 1935. During these years, Americans
experienced profound changes that altered their connection with
animals and influenced perceptions and treatment of them today.
Wide-ranging in scope, Beauty and the Beast looks at the variety of
roles animals played in society, from pets and laborers to symbols
and prey. The authors discuss the contradictions, dualisms, and
paradoxes of our relationship to animals, illustrating how animals
were distanced and embraced, commoditized and anthropomorphized.
With over 350 illustrations, this book presents a vivid chronicle
of the deep cultural ambivalence that characterized human-animal
relations in the early twentieth century and that continues today.
You might think that the protection of animals' rights is a modern,
Western concern. In fact, people all over the world and down the
ages have cared what happens to animals, and not just the cute
mammals. Today animals need protecting more than ever: their lives
are used and abused in laboratories, zoos and hunts, and they are
reared intensively on farms. And out in the wild, animals are
losing their habitats to logging and oil exploration. This
"No-Nonsense Guide" explains the key issues, charts the growth of
the animal rights movement and looks at welfare and protection
laws. And it includes a practical day to day guide to what you can
do to minimise exploitation.
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