Encounters with Animals

by Gerald Durrell
Encounters with Animals
Author: Gerald Durrell
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0141971304
GET BOOK

'I once travelled back from Africa on a ship with an Irish captain who did not like animals. This was unfortunate, because most of my luggage consisted of about two hundred odd cages of assorted wildlife . . .' Gerald Durrell's accounts of the animals he encountered on his travels were some of the first widely shared descriptions of the world's most extraordinary animals. Moving from the West Coast of Africa to the northern tip of South America - and elsewhere - Durrell observes the courtships, wars and characters of a variety of creatures, from birds of paradise, to ants and anteaters, among others. Told with his trademark charm and humour, Gerald Durrell's Encounters with Animals is a uniquely entertaining exploration of some of the world's most striking landscapes and the wildlife it is home to.

Exploring Animal Encounters

by Dominik Ohrem
Exploring Animal Encounters
Author: Dominik Ohrem
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319925040
GET BOOK

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

Experiencing Animal Minds

by Julie A. Smith
Experiencing Animal Minds
Author: Julie A. Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0231530765
GET BOOK

In these multidisciplinary essays, academic scholars and animal experts explore the nature of animal minds and the methods humans conventionally and unconventionally use to understand them. The collection features chapters by scholars working in psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, literary studies, and art, as well as chapters by and about people who live and work with animals, including the founder of a sanctuary for chickens, a fur trapper, a popular canine psychologist, a horse trainer, and an art photographer who captures everyday contact between humans and their animal companions. Divided into five sections, the collection first considers the ways that humans live with animals and the influence of cohabitation on their perceptions of animals' minds. It follows with an examination of anthropomorphism as both a guide and hindrance to mapping animal consciousness. Chapters next examine the effects of embodiment on animals' minds and the role of animal-human interembodiment on humans' understandings of animals' minds. Final sections identify historical representations of difference between human and animal consciousness and their relevance to pre-established cultural attitudes, as well as the ways that representations of animals' minds target particular audiences and sometimes produce problematic outcomes. The editors conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the book's chapters and two pressing themes: the connection between human beliefs about animals' minds and human ethical behavior, and the challenges and conditions for knowing the minds of animals. By inviting readers to compare and contrast multiple, uncommon points of view, this collection offers a unique encounter with the diverse perspectives and theories now shaping animal studies.

Animal Ethos

by Lesley A. Sharp
Animal Ethos
Author: Lesley A. Sharp
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520299256
GET BOOK

What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel’s quotidian and unscripted responses to animals. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.

Animal Encounters

by Susan Crane
Animal Encounters
Author: Susan Crane
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780812244588
GET BOOK

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

Animal Encounters

by Susan Crane
Animal Encounters
Author: Susan Crane
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812206304
GET BOOK

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters

by Claire Parkinson
Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters
Author: Claire Parkinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429515251
GET BOOK

This book critically investigates the pervasiveness of anthropomorphised animals in popular culture. Anthropomorphism in popular visual media has long been denounced for being unsophisticated or emotionally manipulative. It is often criticised for over-expressing similarities between humans and other animals. This book focuses on everyday encounters with visual representations of anthropomorphised animals and considers how attributing other animals with humanlike qualities speaks to a complex set of power relations. Through a series of case studies, it explores how anthropomorphism is produced and circulated and proposes that it can serve to create both misunderstandings and empathetic connections between humans and other animals. This book will appeal to academics and students interested in visual media, animal studies, sociology and cultural studies.

Animal Encounters

by Tom Tyler
Animal Encounters
Author: Tom Tyler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004168672
GET BOOK

The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, a ~the animala (TM). These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

The Animal Dialogues

by Craig Childs
The Animal Dialogues
Author: Craig Childs
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2007-12-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0316024333
GET BOOK

From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals. Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots. Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in The Animal Dialogs focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom