We are on the precipice of momentous legal changes for animals that may soon give some of them rights of personhood and citizenship. Companion animals in particular are gaining rights to public representation in government, access to housing, inheritance, and increased protection through the criminal justice system. Nonhuman primates used as research subjects are also gaining limited rights of personhood in some countries. This book examines how zoo animals could benefit from that revolution as well. Reviewing zoo law and politics in the United States, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, scholars and zoo directors grapple with how the current law in those regions of the world impacts zoo animals and how it could be changed to serve them better. They discuss the ways in which zoo animals could benefit from some re-worked companion animal law in the United States; the challenges of reintroductions and their legal barriers; how we can extend ideas of human research subject rights to zoo animal research; the stark problems of too few animal welfare laws in South East Asia; the need for a central governing body focused solely on exotic captive animals in New Zealand; and the need for stricter laws preventing the exotic pet problem that is increasingly affecting both zoos and sanctuaries. The book starts a dialogue that moves the scholarship about zoos beyond a general discussion of ethics to a concrete dialogue and set of suggestions about how to extend legal rights to this group of animals.

Why have elephants-and our preconceptions about them-been central to so much of human thought? From prehistoric cave drawings in Europe and ancient rock art in Africa and India to burning pyres of confiscated tusks, our thoughts about elephants tell a story of human history. In Elephant Trails, Nigel Rothfels argues that, over millennia, we have made elephants into both monsters and miracles as ways to understand them but also as ways to understand ourselves. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including municipal documents, zoo records, museum collections, and encounters with people who have lived with elephants, Rothfels seeks out the origins of our contemporary ideas about an animal that has been central to so much of human thought. He explains how notions that have been associated with elephants for centuries-that they are exceptionally wise, deeply emotional, and have a special understanding of death; that they never forget, are beloved of the gods, and suffer unusually in captivity; and even that they are afraid of mice-all tell part of the story of these amazing beings. Exploring the history of a skull in a museum, a photograph of an elephant walking through the American South in the early twentieth century, the debate about the quality of life of a famous elephant in a zoo, and the accounts of elephant hunters, Rothfels demonstrates that elephants are not what we think they are-and they never have been. Elephant Trails is a compelling portrait of what the author terms "our elephant."

We are on the precipice of momentous legal changes for animals that may soon give some of them rights of personhood and citizenship. Companion animals in particular are gaining rights to public representation in government, access to housing, inheritance, and increased protection through the criminal justice system. Nonhuman primates used as research subjects are also gaining limited rights of personhood in some countries. This book examines how zoo animals could benefit from that revolution as well. Reviewing zoo law and politics in the United States, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, scholars and zoo directors grapple with how the current law in those regions of the world impacts zoo animals and how it could be changed to serve them better. They discuss the ways in which zoo animals could benefit from some re-worked companion animal law in the United States; the challenges of reintroductions and their legal barriers; how we can extend ideas of human research subject rights to zoo animal research; the stark problems of too few animal welfare laws in South East Asia; the need for a central governing body focused solely on exotic captive animals in New Zealand; and the need for stricter laws preventing the exotic pet problem that is increasingly affecting both zoos and sanctuaries. The book starts a dialogue that moves the scholarship about zoos beyond a general discussion of ethics to a concrete dialogue and set of suggestions about how to extend legal rights to this group of animals.

Representing Animals explores the complex and often surprising connections between our imagining of animals and our cultural environment. The contributors historians, literary critics, anthropologists, artists, art historians, and scholars of cultural studies examine the ways we talk, write, photograph, imagine, and otherwise represent animals. The book includes topics such as pet cloning, fox hunting, animatronic characters, and how we displace our fear of aging onto our dogs.

Representing Animals demonstrates the deep connections between the way we think about animals and the way we have thought about ourselves and our cultures in different times and places. Its publication marks a formative moment in the emerging field of animal studies.

Contributors:
Steve Baker, Marcus Bullock, Jane Desmond, Erica Fudge, Andrew Isenberg, Kathleen Kete, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Teresa Mangum, Garry Marvin, Susan McHugh, and Nigel Rothfels."

To modern sensibilities, early zoos seem to have been unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals typically wander in open spaces that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. Savages and Beasts traces the origins of the modern zoo in the efforts of nineteenth-century German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck. How did seemingly enlightened ideas about the role of zoos and the nature of animal captivity develop out of the simple business of placing exotic creatures on public display?

"This is much more than a history of Hagenbeck's many successes. It is an historical explanation for why the environments of zoos today are meant to mask the human character of the places in which animals are forced to live their unnatural lives." -- American Historical Review

"A fine read, in which good use of picture archives has complemented the writer's extensive documentary research." -- New Scientist

"Rothfels is attuned to the ironies pervading zoos' mediation of people and animals and understands that zoos operate according to entrepreneurial rather than environmental principles." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

"Convincingly argues that the image of Hagenbeck as a modern-day Noah, a great animal lover trying to educate the public about the wonders of nature, belies the basic nature of Hagenbeck's enterprise... Rothfels raises questions about past practices of exhibiting animals (and people) and about what zoos of the present are all about." -- Journal of the History of Biology

"A fascinating if disturbing tale of animal and human display." -- German StudiesReview

Nigel Rothfels received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and is the director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the editor of the interdisciplinary collection Representing Animals.