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
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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.

Our Wild Calling

by Richard Louv
Our Wild Calling
Author: Richard Louv
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1643750844
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“A book that offers hope.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wondrous tapestry.” —Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel Audubon Medal winner Richard Louv’s landmark book Last Child in the Woods inspired an international movement to connect children and nature. Now he redefines the future of human-animal coexistence. In Our Wild Calling, Louv interviews researchers, theologians, wildlife experts, indigenous healers, psychologists, and others to show how people are connecting with animals in ancient and new ways, and how this serves as an antidote to the growing epidemic of human loneliness; how dogs can teach children ethical behavior; how animal-assisted therapy may yet transform the mental health field; and what role the human-animal relationship plays in our spiritual health. He reports on wildlife relocation and on how the growing populations of wild species in urban areas are blurring the lines between domestic and wild animals. Our Wild Calling makes the case for protecting, promoting, and creating a sustainable and shared habitat for all creatures—not out of fear, but out of love. Includes a new interview with the author, discussion questions, and a resource guide.

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
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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.

Metamorphoses of the Zoo

by Ralph R. Acampora
Metamorphoses of the Zoo
Author: Ralph R. Acampora
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2010-06-14
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0739134566
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Metamorphoses of the Zoo marshals a unique compendium of critical interventions that envision novel modes of authentic encounter that cultivate humanity's biophilic tendencies without abusing or degrading other animals. These take the form of radical restructurings of what were formerly zoos or map out entirely new, post-zoo sites or experiences. The result is a volume that contributes to moral progress on the inter-species front and eco-psychological health for a humankind whose habitats are now mostly citified or urbanizing.

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
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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 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
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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.

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
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'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.

The Human–Animal Boundary

by Mario Wenning
The Human–Animal Boundary
Author: Mario Wenning
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149855783X
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Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

The Historical Animal

by Susan Nance
The Historical Animal
Author: Susan Nance
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0815653395
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The conventional history of animals could be more accurately described as the history of human ideas about animals. Only in the last few decades have scholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives of historical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings with complex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us to examine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover how animals have altered the course of our collective past. The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the Pacific Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillas and horses to salamanders and orcas. Together they seek out new methodologies, questions, and stories that challenge accepted historical assumptions and structures. Drawing upon environmental, social, and political history, the contributors employ research from such wide-ranging fields as philosophy and veterinary medicine, embracing a radical interdisciplinarity that is crucial to understanding our nonhuman past. Grounded in the knowledge that there has never been a purely human time in world history, this collection asks and answers an incredibly urgent question for historians and others interested in the nonhuman past: in an age of mass extinctions, mass animal captivity, and climate change, when we know much of what animals have done in the past, which of our activities will we want to change in the future?