Ethos

Earth Day has come and gone, and nothing much has changed.

As an ethicist and professor of environmental studies, I pay close attention to Earth Day. I have read or heard an abundance of commentaries on how people mistreat our planet. One after another, they rehearse the same statistics, recite the same politics, and offer the same short-term solutions.

Breaking the repetition, however, is the wildly popular film, Avatar, which went on sale to the general public in honor of Earth Day. Since its release in 2009, Avatar has struck a cord with the general public and the environmental community. Students and colleagues alike continue to excitedly discuss its meaning and messages.

So I wonder: what might Avatar teach us about how to celebrate Earth Day next year?

Avatar tells the story of a moral awakening by a former marine, Jake Sully, who is a mercenary for an inter-stellar corporation. He is sent to the world of Pandora to protect a mining operation that threatens the way of life of an indigenous population of humanoids (the Na’vi), as well as the natural world for whom the Na’vi have profound respect.

What Jake and his companions discover is that the Na’vi do not see their environment as a set of resources for them to own and exploit. Rather they see themselves as part of a larger community of life, a moral community where other creatures and the planet Eywa (the Na’vi name for Pandora) have intrinsic value. Value, that is, that exists irrespective of whether the animals or the planet are useful for either humans or Na’vi.

The Na’vi also believe human beings are ignorant of their place in this moral community. This message comes through loud and clear when Jake is upbraided by his Na’vi teacher and eventual mate, Neytiri. Telling him that he and his people ‘should not be here’, she notes that humans are akin to irresponsible children who do no fully ‘see’ (understand). Despite their advanced technology, humans have not yet learned how to respect the natural history, cultural knowledge, and moral standing of the Na’vi themselves, Pandora’s animals, or Pandora itself.

Avatar does take aim at colonialism, racism and militarism as they metaphorically exist on Pandora, as well as literally on Earth. Commentators have praised or condemned the film for these reasons. This has been particularly evident amongst the political right, where claims of paganism, anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism abound.

What has not been discussed is Avatar’s critique of speciesism, or human prejudice against non-human beings.

Avatar is not just a metaphor for how we treat other people on this earth. Nor is it simply an allegory for wide-ranging ecological destruction here and now. It is a cautionary tale about the harm done by our instrumental worldviews of animals and nature. Avatar is pushing the boundary of moral concern, demanding that we consider the well being of creatures and communities that are not human. It offers us a vision of another people, another place, and another way of life with such a profound sense of moral connectedness, that we cannot help but compare it to the situation on our own planet, and find it wanting.

What then does Avatar offer to our understanding of Earth Day?

Earth Day has become a sedate affair, dominated by the posturing of politicians and the decorative art of school children. More distressingly, it has become a self-absorbed event, where we measure humanity’s declining prospects by the steady degradation of nature (e.g., global warming).

If Earth Day is going to fulfill its promise, we need to turn this situation around. Avatar reminds us that we must reconnect with the moral passion that animates environmentalism as one of the great social movements of our time. It teaches us that we need to use this moral commitment to build bridges between those advocating for animal protection, human rights and environmental justice.

We need a day of education and grass-roots politics in service of the Earth itself and all her creatures, not just its most powerful inhabitant. Most of all, we need to stop thinking and talking about sustainability as if it were only for human beings. The well being of the entire community of life is a better base line for sustainable ways of living.

In Avatar, Jake came to understand that the interconnectedness of life is not simply a scientific fact, but a moral value that ought to guide our behavior to others, human and non-human alike. Perhaps in Earth Days to come, we can take this lesson to heart.

Cheers

William Lynn :: May.06.2010 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

I recently had a wonderful visit at Lafayette College.

Lafayette is a highly regarded institution located in Easton, PA. It has a twin-fold emphasis on the liberal arts, as well as engineering and the applied sciences. This creative mix of the arts and sciences is sorely needed in a society like ours that risks loosing sight of larger values amongst technical details. While technology is never a ‘neutral tool’ as some would like to think, our choices to use technologies for good or ill are the more important issue. Bringing the value-relevance of the liberal arts into creative dialogue with the applied sciences seems like a great idea to me.

I was visitng as a keynote speaker for Earth Week. Unlike other speaking engagements, this was not a one-off presentation, but an extended opportunity to engage with the campus community about ethics and sustainability. So alongside my presentation, I had the pleasure of meeting with a wide variety of the college’s faculty and students.

My talk was on ‘Avatars of Sustainability’. I interpreted the movie Avatar as a cultural text, the meanings of which have something important to say about our approach to ethics and sustainability. It was fun to do, and the discussion session afterwards was quite lively. I was peppered with insightful questions about the movie itself, and its implications for the troubled relationship between people, animals and nature. These questions touched on capitalism, militarism, colonialism, patriarchy, race, anthropocentrism, speciesism, power, animal domestication, practical versus analytic ethics, ethics in environmental policy, and the ethical norms of sustainability.

The next day I met with LEAP or Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection. Organized by a core group of environmentally minded students, LEAP is particularly active in the local food movement and the introduction of sustainable practice at Lafayette. Following that I was a guest in Humans and Other Animals in Contemporary Culture, a course instructed by Carrie Rohman of the English department. Students in this class had a wide range of ethics-related thoughts on Avatar, offering many distinctive insights on the movie. Following this, I met with faculty for a wide-ranging and productive discussion about the state of environmental studies programs and curricula.

So a big thank you to all the faculty and students who made my visit such an enjoyable one.

Cheers!

William Lynn :: May.01.2010 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

My friend and former colleague, Paul Waldau, is teaching a religion and animals course at Harvard University this summer.

Paul is a widely noted scholar of both religion and animals, as well as law and animals. He is the Barker Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and I highly recommend him to people interested in these subjects.

In addition, check out his latest book, A Communion of Subjects, coauthored with Kimberly Patton, and you’ll see why this is going to be such a great course.

You can contact Paul about the course at pwaldau@gmail.com

Cheers!

~

Religion and Animals

Harvard Summer Term, 2010

Religion S-1013 : Religion and Animals
Harvard Summer School: 32394
Summer 2010

Class times: Tuesdays, Thursdays, 6:30-9:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit, undergraduate, and graduate credit $2,580.

Paul F. Waldau, DPhil, Barker Lecturer, Harvard Law School.

Students trace the history and shape of this emerging academic field and its relation to other academic disciplines. Students also examine social, public policy, conceptual, environmental, ethical, and philosophical implications of the field. Class sessions are discussion-based, and students undertake both group work and a number of individual writing projects.

The course syllabus is available at the website for the 2010 Summer Term. Go to http://www.summer.harvard.edu/), click on “Search” in the upper right corner, and then enter either “animals” or “religion” and you’ll easily find the course.

Registration is now open, and will close May 17.

William Lynn :: Apr.21.2010 :: Animal Studies, Religion :: Comments Off

We are pleased to invite proposals for a new book series, Critical Animal Studies, to be published by Rodopi Press, one of Europe’s premiere academic presses. The main goals of the series, which differentiates it from the pre-existing series in the field of animal studies, are that we are particularly looking to publish works that:

(a) focus on ethical issues pertinent to actual animals (as opposed to animals as only metaphors, tropes, or philosophical concepts); i.e. work with a certain normative value;

(b) adopt a broad critical orientation to animal studies, including (but not limited to) work that investigates and challenges the complex dynamics of structural, institutional, and discursive power formations that organize life conditions, relations, and experiences of animals, humans, and the environment alike; work that explores diverse forms and sites of human/animal resistance; work that contributes to current global debates by contextualizing critical animal issues within, for instance, processes of globalization, climate change, and biotechnology; work that intervenes in the animal economy of the production, science, service, experience, and culture industries; as well as work that critically analyzes ideologies, practices and effects of the current animal welfare movement;

(c) bridge boundaries between academic/activist knowledge, between theory/practice, as well as between existing disciplines. Based on this commitment to interdisciplinarity, all work published must be in language that is as clear and accessible to as wide an audience as possible;

(d) contribute to creative, bold, innovative, and boundary shifting knowledge development in critical animal studies.

If we can be of any further help or assistance in discussing projects please do not hesitate to contact either of us via email. Further information and submission guidelines are found on the book series website: http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/?page_id=299

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Helena Pedersen
Senior Co-Editor, Submissions and Review Process
Malmö University
helena.pedersen@mah.se

Vasile Stãnescu
Senior Co-Editor, Promotions and Outreach
Stanford University
vts@stanford.edu

William Lynn :: Apr.13.2010 :: Animal Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

The Animals and Society Institute (ASI) is an independent research and education organization dedicated to advancing the status of animals in public policy and promoting the study of human-animal relationships

ASI is one of the few policy think-tanks associated with animal studies. Amongst other activities, the institute publishes the Animals and Society journal, the Human-Animal Studies book series, offers training programs in animal related policy issues, and commissions policy white papers.

ASI also sponsors Human-Animal Studies Fellowship. This interdisciplinary program enables seven fellows to pursue research in residence at a partner college or university, supporting recipients’ individual research through mentorship, guest lectures, and scholarly exchange, as well as contributing to the intellectual life of the host institution. Creating and sustaining fellowships like this is crucial to building a network of scholarship and policy expertise that can speak to the shared well-being of people, animals and nature.

This year, the fellowship is being held at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Host faculty are Jacque (Jody) Emel, Professor of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark and Susan McHugh, Professor of English at University of New England.

I’m pleased to say that I will be participating as one of this year’s fellows, working on proposal for a practical ethics for people, animals and nature. I am both honoured and excited by this opportunity, and look forward to sharing my experience with you.

Cheers!

William Lynn :: Apr.01.2010 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Last Saturday, I saw the movie Avatar.

It is a huge, thrill-ride of a movie. As importantly, it is interlaced with threads of environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, spiritual crisis and personal redemption.

I’ve been asked to give an Earth Week Keynote address at Lafayette College in April. I think I’ll discuss Avatar, and its implications for sustainability, ethics and environmental studies. More on this subject after the talk.

Cheers!

William Lynn :: Mar.07.2010 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is an amazing institution. Holding a wonderful collection of its own, the museum curates temporary exhibitions that are by turns breathtakingly beautiful and profoundly thought-provoking. It also offers an incomparable educational resources to Williams College students and the wider community.

One of WCMA’s more beautiful and though provoking installations is Mocha Dick, a sculpture by Tristin Lowe. Here is how the museum describes it.

Over fifty feet long and ten feet high, artist Tristin Lowe’s sculpture of a white sperm whale sprawls across the museum’s largest gallery. Mocha Dick is a life-sized rendition of the infamous leviathan that once harassed ships near Mocha Island in the South Pacific Ocean.

The exhibition is open 13 March – 08 August 2010. I’ll be sharing comments on ‘Life Boat Ethics’ during an interdisciplinary gallery panel, The Whiteness of the Whale, to be held on Thursday 08 April 2010. Please come join us for this event. Admission is free.

For more information on the WCMA, visit www.wcma.org.

Cheers!

William Lynn :: Mar.01.2010 :: Animal Studies, Art, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Interpretive policy analysis involves a combination of hermeneutics, practical ethics and qualitative methods (or their analogues). It is indispensable for policy makers wanting to understand the ethics and value-laden nature of environmental disputes and resolutions.

Unfortunately, the interpretive approach is frequently ignored, misunderstood, or given short shrift in traditional schools of public policy. So too, many policy courses in animal studies, environmental studies, and the like are unaware of or insufficiently acquainted with interpretive approaches. This is doubly unfortunate. Interpretive and ‘analytic’ (e.g. positivist, quantitative, institutionalist, economist) approaches need not oppose one another, and can be usefully combined. And those making policy, whether in the public, private or non-profit sectors, are denied the benefits of both approaches triangulating on our best understanding of policy problems and their solutions.

The policy arena of wolf recovery is a case in point. Long regarded as a matter for the natural science, wolf recovery is as much or more a matter of cultural norms. With this in mind, I recently published an article entitled Discourse and Wolves: Science, Society and Ethics*. It intentionally tries to clarify some of the terms and methods of interpretive policy approaches by using the concept of discourse. I’ve included the methodology section in this post, and hope you will find it of some use in your own work. You can find the entire article in the journal Society and Animals.

It is ironic as well that the article also illustrates the troubles sometimes faced by those practicing interpretive policy studies. The manuscript for this article was originally invited as a book chapter for a book on wolves and society. It fell victim, however, to the empiricist presuppositions and personal politics of some of the book’s editors. But all is well that ends well. I’m very pleased the article found a perfect home in Society and Animals.

Cheers!

P.S. If you find this approach intriguing, I recommend Dvora Yanow’s Interpretive Policy Analysis (Sage, 1999) as a wonderful and insightful introduction.

* Lynn, William S. 2010. Discourse and Wolves: Science, Society and Ethics. Society & Animals 18 (1): 75-92.

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

~

Methodological Caveat

As you read this article, you will note it does not conform to the usual conventions of the scientific literature. One might expect this, as I do not pretend to be a scientist in the usual sense of the term. But there is more to it than that. The standard conventions of scientific articles – a statement of the research question justified by a literature review of findings to date, a description of the methods and measures used to test a hypothesis, and a discussion of the results followed by their significance and possible avenues for future exploration – are entirely appropriate to research questions amenable to quantitative methods. These conventions were developed in and for the natural sciences, work well within those domains, and overall there is no reason to diminish them (Chalmers 1999; Lindberg 1992; Lynn 2004).

When it comes to explaining human beings and their societies, there was a time when the human sciences sought to ape the natural sciences in theory, method and publishing conventions. This was a dismal failure, and while the struggle to shift gears continues, the positivist turn is long dead. The reason is that human beings do not conform to models of a determinism and/or predictivism that are the hallmark of the physical sciences. The sentience and sapience of people – their awareness and self-awareness – makes their thoughts and actions contingent and creative, transcending the boundary conditions for which the research practices and writing conventions of the natural sciences were devised (Bernstein 1991; Rorty 1979). Yes, there are still people who defend a ‘naturalistic model’ of the human sciences. Yet honestly, it is embarrassing to see an old-school positivist scholar chopped up by their peers because they have not kept up with the history and philosophy of science literature over the last fifty years. E. O. Wilson’s and his acolytes of consilience best represent this yearning for the old ways (Westley and Miller 2003; Wilson 1998). We can do much better than this now.

What is needed in such cases is a methodology adapted to the ‘human sciences’, something capable of causal explanation (the hallmark of science) without the pretense of determinism or predictivism [1]. Various social theories and qualitative methodologies have arisen to fill this need (Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2005; Schwandt 2007). So too have new conventions for publications, specifically around the idea of interpretation and narrative (Fischer and Forester 1996; Roe 1994; Yanow 1999). So for those with an interest in methodological affairs, what follows is an interpretation of several discourses that inform how we think about and act towards wolves. Intentionally broad in scale and scope, it looks for the resonance between our ideas, behaviour and social institutions, or to put the matter in social theoretical language, the interplay of human agency and social structure. The point is not to predict or determinatively explain what people and organizations do. That is not possible with human and some other beings. Rather, the purpose is to reveal the discursive dynamic that constitute, at least in part, our individual and collective stance towards wolves in the world [2].

Discourse

I approach discourse as a hermeneuticist. Hermeneutics is the study of understanding, one of the main perspectives in social theory [3]. The basic idea is that our personal and social lives can only be fully understood when we account for the meaning embedded in our actions and social relations, such as is found in our presuppositions and worldviews. To explain the human world, we therefore have to interpret what people mean when they say or do something, and what significance their words and actions have for the rest of the world.

Engaging in this kind of interpretation might seem trivial to some, as if picking out someone at random on the street and asking them about wolves is going to tell us the truth about wolf biology or ecology. But that would be missing the point. Hermeneuticists are interested in our individual and collective interpretations of wolves. These interpretations are highly significant, if, let us suppose, politically motivated wildlife professionals foster an approach to environmental policy that emphasizes agricultural production, ranching and sport hunting at the expense of predators, ecosystem function and biodiversity. So one cannot understand (as in describe, explain, evaluate or justify) why someone or some group acts as they do without first interpreting what they think and how it informs their actions. It is for this reason that hermeneutics is a keystone tradition of scholarship with respect to the theory and methodology of the human sciences (Bruns 1992; Gadamer 1993; Mueller-Vollmer 1989; Wachterhauser 1994).

To the hermeneuticist, discourse refers to the interconnections between ways of thinking and acting. It is not only a point-of-view that helps direct our actions in the world, it is also the meaning(s) embedded in our actions and social institutions. This approach extends the idea of discourse beyond the expression of an idea or perspective, whether in speech, writing or artistic creation. It focuses on the role of language in the formation of presuppositions, worldviews and ways of life. In this extended version, discourse traces the linguistic connections between several components — thought, action and social institutions. The argument from a discursive perspective is that language interweaves these components in such a manner that they are reciprocally constituted and/or mutually informing. That is to say, there is an inextricable linkage between how individual and collective agents think, speak, act and interact.

I use the term resonance (or resonances) to refer to the linkages between the components of discourse, as well as between different discourses themselves. I say resonance because these linkages are not uniform or static, but plural and shifting. They do not constitute a system of discreet inputs and outputs amenable to modeling and prediction. Rather they are a shifting configuration of meaning and social interaction that must be apprehended for their causal influences.

This contingency between meaning and social interaction arises from the way in which discourse connects intangible and tangible phenomena [4]. There is an ecology of intangible ideas, intentions, worldviews and culture, with more tangible actions, social institutions, and their outcomes (e.g. environmental and social policy). This ecology defies reductionism, and is better understood through a process of interpretation. Discourse is a powerful conceptual tool in the process of social and moral interpretation. It helps us identify and theorize a shifting field of resonances, and thereby understand the context, content and consequences of a discourse. With this in mind, we can better understand why and how an idea, social practice or institution exists, operates and perpetuates itself (Kelly 1990) [5].

Discourse may simultaneously exist at several levels. At one level are ideas, whether expressed in terms of reasons or emotions. At another level are actions. Here, reason and emotion become the motivating factors for acting in the world. At still another level are social institutions such as government agencies, economic and politically based interest groups, or non-profit advocacy organization. These institutions are also part of our discourses, patterns of thinking and acting that, over time, take on concrete and durable form (Ball 1988; Barnes and Duncan 1992; Wolf 2003b). When Stone expressed care for the well-being of abandoned wolf pups, her expression was at the discursive level of ideas. When she took to the field to find and save the pups from starvation, her behaviour was at the action level of discourse. When she went back to work at a NGO that is part of our social system, she was involved at the institutional level of discourse.

If we think of a discourse like a text, such as an essay or a policy statement, then we can ‘read’ these texts for their meaning(s). Like a written or spoken narrative, the meaning of a discourse can be interpreted for its good or ill intentions, content, implications and consequences (Ricoeur 1977; Ricoeur 1991; Ricoeur 1996). Thus when the state of Alaska justifies the aerial gunning of wolves through policy statements of dubious scientific value, we have a discourse we can read like a text and from which we can extract its meaning. So too, when gunners take to the air to kill wolves, we have an equally meaningful action on which to base our interpretations and from which to discern the values and worldviews that inform those actions. When the Alaska Board of Game continues to authorize lethal control measures against wolves, we see a social institution whose members, policies and practices are partaking of a broader anti-wolf discourse.

The interpretations of discourse are never perfect or unequivocal. There is always more to be learned, and multiple meanings are the norm. Nor are the intentions or consequences behind a statement or act always obvious or explicit. They can be concealed, poorly understood or unexpected (Hirsch 1967; Hirschman 1987). Because of this and other contingencies, hermeneuticists are humble about the power of any one interpretation and encourage dialogue to generate a broadly shared horizon of understanding. Moreover, they believe that reason and evidence, along with good will and a skeptical eye, can distinguish better from worse interpretations. In this way, we make progress in finding the truth. Finally, truth is not relative or absolute. In alignment with the best understanding of science, truth is always proximate. While veracity is the goal, verisimilitude is the reality. For hermeneuticists, understanding is always partial and fallible, and it is through dialogue with others that we reach a deeper and better understanding of the presuppositions and worldviews of ourselves and others [6].

Notes

1. The terms human science and natural science are commonly used in social theory, qualitative inquiry and the philosophy of science. The former refers to what others call the behavioural and social sciences, while the later refers to the physical, biological and life sciences. In addition to serving as a way to categorize different forms of scientific knowledge, it also implies a more historically and philosophically reflective posture over the theory, methods and role of science itself (see Ricoeur 1981).

2. Astute readers may recognize that a similar shift is occurring in the field of cognitive ethology. There is a recognition that many kinds of non-human animals think, feel, plan, play, act altruistically and selfishly, have a sense of guilt and wild justice, and transmit cultural traditions. The growth of this theoretical perspective has methodological implications, and represents a turning away from positivist models that frequently misunderstand animals. While using a different language, cognitive ethology is developing its own interpretive theory and qualitative methods. In this sense it is kin to hermeneutic traditions in the human sciences (for examples of such work, see Allen and Bekoff 2007; Bekoff et al. 2002; Bekoff 2005).

3. Hermeneutics is named after Hermes, the Greek god who handled communication between Olympus and the Ecumene — the habitable world of humanity, which for the Greeks was centred on the Mediterranean. Like the coyote, however, Hermes is a trickster, taking pleasure in parsing meaning that leads to misunderstanding. The background idea here is that language is not something we simply use to subjectively describe our feelings or objectively describe the world. Rather language is constitutive of how we experience and conceptualize the world around us.

4. For more on the ‘qualities’ and ‘phenomena’ that distinguish the human and natural sciences, as well as the implications this has for causal explanation, qualitative inquiry and moral reasoning, see (Lynn 2004).

5. When I speak of discourse, I often shift between the singular and plural. This is to denote the scale and specificity of my comments. Thus I may speak of discourse in general, discourses in particular, or a particular discourse in the singular.

6. There are other theories about discourse that emphasize the ideological nature of ‘totalizing’ discourse (e.g. structuralism), the partiality of all discourse (e.g. poststructuralism) and the distorting tendencies of all discourse (e.g. critical theory). The structuralists and poststructuralists tend to see people as subjects of discourse, as in subservient to the discourse(s) that constitute their worldview. Hermeneuticists and critical theorists think otherwise, believing people have agency, that is, they can be self-determining, and are not the pawns of larger social forces. Exercising this agency may not be easy (or possible) for everyone, but it is in the nature of human beings to be agents and interpreters of their own individual and collective lives (for examples of this literature, see Darier 1999; Gare 1995; Habermas 1993; Habermas 1998; Wolf 2003a).

References

Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. 2007. Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology and Ethics. The Journal of Ethics 11: 299-317.

Ball, Terence. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Barnes, Trevor J, and James S Duncan, eds. 1992. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. New York: Routledge.

Bekoff, Marc. 2005. Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bekoff, Mark, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burghardt, eds. 2002. The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bernstein, Richard J. 1991. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bruns, Gerald L. 1992. Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chalmers, Alan. 1999. What is This Thing Called Science? An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and its Methods. Third ed. London: Open University Press.

Darier, Eric. 1999. Discourses of the Environment. New York: Blackwell.

Denzin, Norman K, and Yvonna S Lincoln, eds. 2000. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Second ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Fischer, Frank, and John Forester. 1996. The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Truth and Method. Second, Revised ed. New York: Continuum.

Gare, Arran E. 1995. Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1993. Justification and Application: Remarks On Discourse Ethics. Edited by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: MIT Press.

———. 1998. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, and Patricia Leavy. 2005. The Practice of Qualitative Research: A Primer. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Hirsch, Edward D. 1967. Validity In Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1987. The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding. In Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, eds. P. Rabinow, and William M Sullivan, 177-194. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelly, Michael, ed. 1990. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Lindberg, David C. 1992. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lynn, William S. 2004. The Quality of Ethics: Moral Causation in the Interdisciplinary Science of Geography. In Geographies and Moralities: International Perspectives on Justice, Development and Place, eds. Roger Lee, and David M Smith, 231-244. London: Routledge.

Mueller-Vollmer, K. 1989. The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. New York: Continuum.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text. In Understanding Social Inquiry, eds. F. Dallmayr, and T A McCarthy, 316-344. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

———. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1996. The Hermeneutics of Action. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Roe, Emory. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schwandt, Thomas A. 2007. Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. Third ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Wachterhauser, Brice R, ed. 1994. Hermeneutics and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Westley, Frances, and Philip Miller, eds. 2003. Experiments in Consilience: Integrating Social and Scientific Responses to Save Endangered Species. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Wolf, Cary. 2003a. Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthuman Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolf, Cary, ed. 2003b. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Yanow, Dvora. 1999. Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

William Lynn :: Feb.01.2010 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wolves :: Comments Off

As humans increasingly encroach on non-human habitats, and more and more people use the few natural areas that have been set aside for nature and its enjoyment, human-animal contact is becoming more frequent.

Recently I read about a disturbing account of a young woman being attacked and killed by coyotes. Taylor Mitchell, a 19 years old Canadian folksinger, was reportedly killed in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia.

Whether or not coyotes did kill this woman, her death is a tragedy, and my condolences go out to her family, friends and fans.

At the same time, I’ve heard a great deal of hysterical talk about the dangers of coyotes since this incident. I simply want to urge people to take a deep breath, wait until we find out what happened, and treat coyotes with the respect and distance they deserve.

Cheers

William Lynn :: Dec.01.2009 :: Animal Studies, Coyotes, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured articles on animal studies. Below I link a helpful note from Brett Mizelle, a professor of history and scholar of human-animal studies, with links to relevant content. Enjoy.

Cheers!

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The October 18, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education featured several articles about the growing field of animal studies that you may have missed.

Jennifer Howard’s “Creature Consciousness” addressed how animal studies tests the boundaries between human and animal and between academic and advocate:

http://chronicle.com/article/Creature-Consciousness/48804/

Howard also penned an essay “Presses, Journals, and Meetings Buzz with Animal Studies”:

http://chronicle.com/article/Presses-Journals-and/48805/

Eric Banks’ “Animals Reconsidered” discusses the Reaktion Books “Animal” Series:

http://chronicle.com/article/Animals-Reconsidered/48803/

Other articles in the Chronicle Review included Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff’s “Moral in Tooth and Claw,” which surveys the research into animal morality, and Jeffrey J. Williams’ essay and interview entitled “Donna Haraway’s Creatures.”

http://chronicle.com/article/Moral-in-ToothClaw/48800/

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Theory-of-Critters-/48802/

Please note that while I have attached links to all of these, some Chronicle content is only available on-line to subscribers, so you may not be able to access all of the essays. The only one I was unable to read was the one on animal studies in presses, journals, and meetings. Enjoy!

Brett Mizelle, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of History
Director, American Studies Program
California State University, Long Beach

Editor, H-Animal

http://www.h-net.org/~animal/

William Lynn :: Nov.01.2009 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

The field of animal studies is burgeoning. Kin to environmental studies, animal studies considers the interconnections between people, animals and nature, using animals as its point of departure. The recent journal Humanimalia is one of several recent journals to emerge in this field of scholarship. The journal’s description is below.

Cheers, Bill

~

Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies (http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia ) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal published by DePauw University and edited by Ralph Acampora, Lynda Birke, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Joan Gordon, Tora Holmberg, Susan McHugh, and Sherryl Vint.

Humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human/animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholarship working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields.

William Lynn :: Oct.01.2009 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies :: Comments Off

Feminists have long been interested in the animal and environmental movements. Indeed, one of the main sources of support (and opposition) to animal studies has been those working in Women’s Studies. The connections feminist see between women, animals and the rest of nature are complex. The critique of patriarchy’s cultural dualisms and social hierarchies, a vision of a more-than-human world that honours human and non-human beings, the exploration of how animality resonates with our notions of humanity, are but three of the many subjects that feminists and others in animal studies explore.

So it is especially pleasing that Duke University is sponsoring postdocs focused on the interdisciplinary connections between feminist studies and animal studies. For details, see below.

Cheers, Bill

~

The Duke University Program in Women’s Studies invites applications for two postdoctoral fellows in Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies with a research focus in Human Animal Studies and the Question of Species. We seek candidates with interdisciplinary experience in Women’s Studies. We welcome empirical, textual, and theoretical specialization from a diverse array of academic fields, political and cultural contexts, and historical periods. Postdoctoral fellows will participate in a faculty-graduate seminar on these themes and are expected to be in residence for the academic year. Fellows will teach one course related to their scholarship. The fellowship includes a stipend, health insurance, and office space. Applicants should have the PhD in hand by May 2010.

Applications (including all letters of recommendations) must be received by November 17, 2009. Send C.V., 5-page project proposal, writing sample (25 pages), 1-page course proposal (undergraduate), and 3 letters of recommendation to:

Ranjana Khanna, Director, Women’s Studies, Box 90760, 210 East Duke Building, Durham NC, 27708. Our program information is available at www.duke.edu/womstud. Duke University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

William Lynn :: Sep.01.2009 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Animal Inventory TV is a new video web show (in association with my blog, Animal Inventory) that profiles profound relationships between humans and other animals. Each episode profiles an animal and his or her person, and tells the story of a friendship that is both astonishingly unique, and utterly universal.

Click on the links below to watch the first two episodes.

Episode 1: May & Nebraska

In 2006, May woke up one morning to find that her dog Nebraska couldn’t move his back legs. Two years later, Nebraska is still paralyzed from the waist down, and May has turned her life upside down to accommodate her best friend’s special needs.

Episode 2: Christine & Kelsey and Zoe

In 1992, Christine was struck by two above-ground trains while walking her dog Kelsey in Boston. At the last possible moment, Kelsey pulled Christine out of the direct path of the oncoming trains. Christine was badly injured, but Kelsey’s heroic action likely saved her life. During her lengthy recovery process, Christine decided to devote her life to the welfare of dogs, and co-founded the organization Grey2k. Now, with the help of her greyhound Zoe, Christine is campaigning to end greyhound racing in the state of Massachusetts

Check back in mid-December for episode 3, Angelo & Simon: When Angelo realized he was about to become homeless, he was determined not to let his cat Simon suffer the same fate. With the help of the Boston-based organization Phinney’s Friends, Angelo is able to focus on his own needs, while knowing that Simon is in good hands…

Episodes are available on Animal Inventory TV’s Youtube channel and the show’s website. For more information about the show and upcoming episodes, visit Animal Inventory TV.

Lisa Brown :: Nov.22.2008 :: Animal Studies, Art, Ethics :: Comments Off

I am both honoured and pleased to introduce Lori Marino as a new columnist to Ethos.

cheers, Bill

~

Lori Marino is a senior lecturer in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University and a faculty affiliate of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution in Atlanta.

Lori received her doctorate degree in biopsychology from The State University of New York at Albany in 1995, where she began her work on comparative brain size evolution in cetaceans and primates. Her research expertise includes the evolution of brain size and intelligence in other species, cognitive ethology, and self-awareness, as well as human-nonhuman relationships and welfare issues.

Lori is the author of over eighty scientific papers, book chapters, and popular articles. In 2001 she and Diana Reiss published the first definitive evidence for mirror self-recognition in a non-primate species – the bottlenose dolphin. She also publishes and speaks extensively on ending exploitation of dolphins and whales around the world in the dolphin-assisted therapy (DAT) and marine park industries. She has developed and teaches courses in animal welfare and non-invasive approaches to neuroscience, including Brain Imaging, and is interested in not only training students to be critical thinkers and scientists but also in providing an academic context for the study of non-invasive models of science, animal welfare, advocacy, and ethics.

Lori is the co-founder of the Atlanta Animal Studies Group (http://atlantaanimalstudiesgroup.blogspot.com/), which is focused on exploring the cultural and ethical relationship between humans and non-humans, and is also a staff member at The Kerulos Center (http://www.kerulos.org/) dedicated to the prevention and treatment of human-caused suffering of other animals.

You can contact her at:

Lori Marino, PhD
Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program
Emory University
1462 Clifton Road Suite 304
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
(404) 727-7582lmarino@emory.edu

Selected Publications

Marino L, Lilienfeld S (2007) Dolphin assisted therapy: More flawed data, more flawed conclusions. Anthrozoos. 20: 239 – 249.

Marino L (2007) Animal consciousness. In The Encyclopedia of human-animal relationships, M Bekoff, ed. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 1297-1301.

Marino L (2007) Dolphin mythology. In The Encyclopedia of human-animal relationships, M Bekoff, ed. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 491-495

Marino L (2007) Scala natura. In The Encyclopedia of human-animal relationships. M Bekoff, ed. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 220-224.

Bradshaw G and Marino L (2007) Minds of their own: The exciting new field of trans-species psychology. Best Friends Magazine, November/December: 24-26.

Marino L, Connor RC, Fordyce, RE, Herman LM, Hof PR, Lefebvre L, Lusseau, McCowan B, Nimchinsky EA, Pack AA, Rendell L, Reidenberg JS, Reiss D, Uhen MD ,Van der Gucht E, Whitehead H. (2007) Cetaceans have complex brains for complex cognition. Public Library of Science (PLOS) Biology, 5(5): e139.

Reiss D, Marino L (2001) Self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98 (10): 5937-5942.

Marino L, Lilienfeld S (1998) Dolphin-assisted therapy: flawed data, flawed conclusions. Anthrozoos, 11(4): 194-199.

William Lynn :: Jul.09.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

One of Ethos’ best known editorialists is Marc Bekoff. Marc has been an important part of Ethos from the start, sharing advice as well as content as we found our niche in the virtual Kosmos. Marc’s contributions as an academic and advocate are unsurpassed and deeply admirable. Its time I introduced him properly, a?! The following is from his website.

cheers, Bill

~

Marc Bekoff is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and a former Guggenheim Fellow. In 2000 he was awarded the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society for major long-term contributions to the field of animal behavior.

Marc is also regional coordinator for Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program, in which he works with students of all ages, senior citizens and prisoners, and also is a member of the Ethics Committee of the Jane Goodall Institute. He and Jane co-founded the organization Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: Citizens for Responsible Animal Behavior Studies in 2000. Marc is on the Board of Directors of The Fauna Sanctuary and The Cougar Fund and on the advisory board for Animal Defenders, the Laboratory Primate Advocacy Group, and the conservation organization WildEarth Guardians (also see SINAPU). He has been part of the international program, Science and the Spiritual Quest II and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) program on Science, Ethics, and Religion. Marc is also an honorary member of Animalisti Italiani and Fundacion Altarriba, and on the Scientific Review Board of the Great Ape Trust. In 2006 Marc was named a Fellow of the Dancing Star Foundation, an honorary board member of Captive Animals’ Protection Society. In 2005 Marc was presented with The Bank One Faculty Community Service Award for the work he has done with children, senior citizens, and prisoners.

Marc’s main areas of research include animal behavior, cognitive ethology (the study of animal minds), and behavioral ecology, and he has also published extensively on animal issues. He has published more than 200 papers and 18 books, including Species of mind: The philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology (with Colin Allen, MIT Press, 1997); Nature’s purposes: Analyses of function and design in biology (edited with Colin Allen and George Lauder, MIT Press, 1998), Animal play: Evolutionary, comparative, and ecological perspectives (edited with John Byers, Cambridge University Press, 1998), Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal welfare (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), and a book on the lighter side, Nature’s life lessons: Everyday truths from nature (with Jim Carrier, Fulcrum, 1996). His children’s book, Strolling with our kin was published in Fall 2000 (AAVS/Lantern Books) as was The smile of a dolphin: Remarkable accounts of animal emotions (Random House/Discovery Books). The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition (edited by Marc, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burghardt) appeared in 2002 (MIT Press), as did Minding animals: Awareness, emotions, and heart (Oxford University Press) and Jane Goodall and Marc’s The Ten Trusts: What we must do to care for the animals we love (HarperCollins). Marc has edited a three volume Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), and a collection of his essays titled Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature was published by Temple University Press (2006).

A summary of Marc’s research on animal emotions titled The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy and Why They Matter was published in March 2007 by New World Library and he is currently completing a book on the evolution of moral behavior with Jessica Pierce titled Wild Justice: Reflections on Empathy, Fair Play, and Morality in Animals for the University of Chicago Press. Marc has also edited a four-volume Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of our Connections with Animals for Greenwood Publishing Group (2007) and he and Cara Blessley Lowe have edited a book of readings on cougars titled Listening to Cougar (University Press of Colorado, 2007). Marc’s book Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect was also published in 2007 (Shambhala Publications) and Temple University Press will publish Marc’s children’s book, Animals at Play: Rules of the Game in 2008. He is currently working on a new book titled The Animals’ Manifesto: Ten Reasons Why Animals Are Asking Us To Treat Them Better Or Leave Them Alone (for New World Library) and revising his 1998 Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (for Greenwood Press, 2009).

Marc’s work has been featured on 48 Hours, in Time Magazine, Life Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, New Scientist, BBC Wildlife, Orion, Scientific American, Ranger Rick, National Geographic Kids, on NPR, BBC, Fox, Natur GEO, in a National Geographic Society television special (‘Play: The Nature of the Game’), in Discovery TV’s ‘Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry’, and in Animal Planet’s ‘The Power of Play’ and National Geographic Society’s ‘Hunting in America’. Marc has also appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, and 20/20.

In 1986 Marc became the first American to win his age-class at the Tour du Var bicycle race (also called the Master’s/age-graded Tour de France). Among Marc’s hobbies are cycling, skiing, hiking, and reading spy novels.

William Lynn :: Jul.01.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: Comments Off

Marc Bekoff is a prolific writer and speaker in cognitive ethology and behavioural ecology. In a recent editorial to the Daily Camera, he makes an analogy between the carbon and compassion footprints of humanity.

Compassion is the key for bettering animal and human lives. People all over the globe are talking about ways to lighten our carbon footprint and accrue carbon credits. But what about our compassion footprint and compassion credits?

A good way to make the world a more compassionate and peaceful place for all animals, to increase our compassionate footprint, is to “mind” them. “Minding” animals means that we must “mind” them by recognizing that they have active minds and feelings. We must also “mind” them as their caretakers in a human dominated world in which their interests are continually trumped in deference to ours.

To mind animals it’s essential for people with varied expertise and interests to talk to one another, to share what we know about animals and use this knowledge for bettering their and our lives. There are many ways of knowing and figuring out how science and the humanities, including those interested in animal protection, conservation, and environmentalism (with concerns ranging from individuals to populations, species, and ecosystems), can learn from one another is essential.

You can read the entire essay at www.dailycamera.com.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Jun.30.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: Comments Off

The Spanish parliament’s decision to extend certain political rights to great apes is sparking a renewed debated about the meaning of a mixed community of people, animals and nature.

You can read more about the decision at Reuters.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Jun.27.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: 1 Comment »

Last week I participated in a live broadcast that focused on the ethics and politics of killing some animals for the benefit of others.

For example, should we kill sea lions to save salmon, coyotes to protect sheep, wolves to safeguard cattle, or cats to preserve song-birds? These are the kinds of questions we addressed.

Hosted by Emily Harris and David Miller, ‘Playing God?’ was an episode of Think Out Loud, a fascinating programme of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

You can visit the ‘Playing God?‘ webpage to listen to the show, as well as add your comments to the interactive blog.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Jun.26.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Geography, Wildlife, Wolves :: Comments Off

One of my greatest pleasures on Ethos is introducing new columnists to our readers. Today I want to welcome Jared Milrad.

Jared was born in New York City and raised both in New York and central New Jersey. Vegan since the age of 14, Jared has been intensely interested in animal welfare for most of his life, rescuing everything from finches to feral cats as a teenager. While a freshman at North Carolina State University in 2002, Jared became the first student in the school’s history to publicly challenge its policy on animal dissections, leading to a national outcry of support for his beliefs and a significant revision of the school’s Student Choice policy.

Jared later graduated from N.C. State with a B.S. in Fisheries & Wildlife Sciences and, most recently, from Tufts University with a M.S. in Animals and Public Policy. His thesis at Tufts, entitled A Fundamental Nexus: Animals and Genocide From An International Policy Perspective, advocated for revised genocide prevention and response policies that account for the many complex roles of animals during such crises.

Beyond human-animal studies, Jared has long been interested in finding common ground among people. Having visited four continents and advocated for a variety of groups, Jared is a strong believer in the intersections between social causes. He is the Founder and Editor of a socially conscious blog, Our Common Concern (http://ourcommonconcern.com), which highlights pressing social issues — from human rights to environmental justice to animal protection — in hopes of inspiring a dialogue for change.

Jared is also a long-time organizer for the Obama Campaign, and part of the team organizing New Hampshire for the presidential election in 2008.

You can contact Jared at ourcommonconcern@gmail.com.

William Lynn :: Jun.25.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Justice, Politics :: Comments Off

News is breaking today that Des Moines County sheriffs in Iowa shot about 10-16 pigs who presumably had escaped a factory farm, swam through a massive flood, and found safety atop sandbag levees. County officials feared that the pigs would cut the levees with their hooves or root there.

I am not one to criticize the actions of county officials who, according to their own best judgment, made a difficult decision in an emergency situation. After all, animals are killed in these situations all the time — including a bear who recently strayed into a populated area in Boston. And as one official points out, pigs are killed in slaughterhouses everyday — particularly in Iowa, where there were 15.5 million pigs on over 10,000 farms in 2002.

But the question must be asked: would we have had the same reaction to these animals if they were dogs instead of pigs? What about wolves instead of pigs?

For example, when family pets are shot, county officials often have a different reaction: offer up a reward for the killer. A $4,000 reward is being offered for a dog who was shot to death in Maryland.

In the case of the flooded pigs, what was the true motivation for shooting them? Was it, as one official argued, fear for people’s property? Or was it simply that we value different animals differently?

Some or all of the above may be true. But I for one believe that we should think very, very critically before we take a life, and minimize harm whenever possible. Moreover, while we may value different animals differently, each is still a sentient being who deserves our utmost respect.

We would ask nothing more for our dog, so why not for our pigs?

—–

Our Common Concern :: a socially conscious blog

Jared Milrad :: Jun.19.2008 :: Animal Studies :: 2 Comments »

Have you ever paged (or surfed) through the New York Times and noticed the variety of news stories involving animals? Once you start to notice, it is hard to stop. Indeed, there are moments when I think I could build a career commenting on just these stories!

For instance, over the last several days the New York Times printed a number of stories where animals are a central conccern. The international section reported Korean protests (and broader Asian concerns) over the safety of US beef, and the associated politics of industrial agriculture and animal welfare. Ironically, there is also a dining column with advice on how to cut back one’s use of meat, and cook a more vegetable based (and healthier) diet. If we turn to the Science section, we find that Horseshoe crabs are in decline, and Fisher’s are reinhabiting American suburbs. This does not even begin to touch the steady flow of news articles on global warming and its impact on endangered species, migrating birds, etc. Finally, the editorial page features an essay about the recently adopted national bird of Israel. The Hoopoe, as it turns out, is a creature long associated with cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. If there was ever a time to thinking about the political and cultural symbolism of animals, this would be one of them.

To be sure, these and other stories focus on human concerns — agricultural, economic, gastronomic, environmental, political, etc. And the focus on animals is sometimes inadvertent (they are props in the story) and frequently speciesist — the only moral beings who count are human. Even so, the presence of wild and domestic animals in our everyday life and discourse is ever present.

Watch for it!

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Jun.12.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Wendy Lochner is Senior Executive Editor for Religion, Philosophy and Animal Studies at Columbia University Press (CUP).

Last week she posted a blog reflecting on animal ethics and social change, as well as her intentions to foster interdisciplinary work on human-animal relations.

We recently received permission from Ms Lochner to publish the whole essay here. (Thank you!) You can read Ms Lochner’s essay below, or view it on the CUP Blog.

For a list of related titles from CUP, visit the Animal Studies series. It is a wonderful, diverse and growing body of scholarship, and well represents the emerging discourse of animal studies in the academy.

cheers, Bill

~

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am

Why Animal Studies Now?:
A Short Personal Note from the Editor

The following post is by Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor for Religion, Philosophy, and Animal Studies

Why animal studies now? Like many people who are interested in the fate of animals and of the Earth, I came to this issue from an activist animal-rights perspective. My background is in philosophy, and I eagerly read and absorbed the arguments of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. As I read further I became hungry for approaches that moved even further toward commonality, and I embraced the absolutist views of scholars such as Gary Francione.

But still I was troubled by the indifference of most people to the conditions of animal life. They can know about deplorable factory-farm conditions, for example, and yet not incorporate that knowledge into their behavior or ethical views. A winning argument, I felt, was not rooted in rational discourse alone; it needed to change hearts and minds by appealing to humans’ emotional connections to, love for, and kinship with animals.

I began to read work by Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, John Coetzee, Alice Crary, and others, who convinced me of the power of literature to advance the animal issue. Soon I discovered that many ethologists, religion scholars, and sociologists were also committed to showing the scientific, social-scientific, and humanities bases for a loving involvement with animals as part of a worldview in which the “question of the animal” becomes a fundamental concern of critical inquiry, one in which the terms, concepts, and forms of evidence that we use can themselves be questioned in terms of the presuppositions they make about animals and human—and nonhuman—animal relationships. What is required is no less than a radical rethinking of the nature of humanity itself as inextricably cojoined with our nonhuman kin and in common cause with them.

It is this point of view that I (and many others) call animal studies, and it is my intention as an editor to foster interdisciplinary work from all fields that considers these and many other interrelated questions.

William Lynn :: Jun.09.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

WHAT is human-animal studies (HAS)? This is a question that scholars continue to debate, without much consensus. In my mind, HAS is an interdisciplinary perspective that examines the relationships between humans and other animals. More specifically, it is (ideally) a perspective that values the experiences and intrinsic worth of both humans and animals. HAS embraces art, literature, science, social science, philosophy … all with an eye towards a greater understanding of animals, and our interactions with them.

WHO are animals? Who are we as nonhuman animals? And who are we to each other?

WHERE, WHEN and WHY: One way to begin answering these questions is by exploring the literature that deals with this broad range of topics.

HAS scholar Wendy Lochner (the Columbia University Press animal studies editor) has written a post for the Columbia University Press blog. In it, she briefly explores what HAS means to her, and how the literature she reads deepens her scholarship. An excerpt from her blog entry reads:

I began to read work by Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, John Coetzee, Alice Crary, and others, who convinced me of the power of literature to advance the animal issue. Soon I discovered that many ethologists, religion scholars, and sociologists were also committed to showing the scientific, social-scientific, and humanities bases for a loving involvement with animals as part of a worldview in which the “question of the animal” becomes a fundamental concern of critical inquiry, one in which the terms, concepts, and forms of evidence that we use can themselves be questioned in terms of the presuppositions they make about animals and human—and nonhuman—animal relationships. What is required is no less than a radical rethinking of the nature of humanity itself as inextricably cojoined with our nonhuman kin and in common cause with them.

Lochner’s short essay can be read in full by going to Why Animal Studies Now? A Short Personal Note from the Editor.

A list of animal studies titles available from Columbia University Press can be accessed on their website.

Lisa Brown :: Jun.03.2008 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

One person I have yet to introduce is David Lavigne, a long-time advisor to Practical Ethics, and now a columnist on Ethos. His remarkably impressive biography is below. Please join me in welcoming David to Ethos!

cheers, Bill

~

David Lavigne, PhD
Senior Science Advisor
International Fund for Animal Welfare
1474 Gordon Street
Guelph, Ontario
Canada N1L 1C8
519.767.1948
dlavigne@ifaw.org
http://www.ifaw.org/

David Lavigne is science advisor to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). From 1973-1996, he was a professor in the Department of Zoology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. After receiving his BSc in Zoology from the University of Western Ontario in 1968, he taught high school for one year before entering graduate school at the University of Guelph, completing an MSc in 1972 and a PhD in 1974, both for work on vision in seals. Remaining at Guelph as a faculty member, his research interests shifted to problems of censusing harp seals to estimate annual pup production and population size. By 1975, the focus of his research was pinniped bioenergetics. For the latter work he earned a Dr philos degree from the University of Oslo in 1988. In 1990, he became executive director of the International Marine Mammal Association (IMMA), a not-for-profit organization concerned with the global conservation of marine mammals. Currently, his major interests are in the areas of conservation biology, wildlife management, and natural resources policy.

During his years at the University of Guelph, David taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses including mammalogy, ecology and marine biology, wildlife conservation and management, and natural resources policy. The author of more than 100 papers and technical reports on various aspects of marine mammal biology, wildlife management, and conservation, he is also, co-editor (with J. Beddington and R.J.H. Beverton) of Marine Mammals and Fisheries (George Allen & Unwin, 1985), and co-author (with W.M. Johnston) of The Mediterranean Monk Seal: Conservation Guidelines (IMMA, 1998) and Monk Seals in Antiquity (The Netherlands Commission for International Nature Protection, 1999). From 1988-1992, he served on the editorial advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Zoology.

In addition to his published papers on various aspects of the biology and conservation of harp (and other) seals, he is also the co-author of Harps & Hoods: Ice-breeding Seals of the Northwest Atlantic (University of Waterloo Press, 1988). In the mid-1980s, his laboratory at the University of Guelph submitted a number of briefs to Canada’s Royal Commission on Seals and Sealing and he appeared before the Commission as an expert witness on two occasions. He has also testified as an expert witness before Canada’s Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans (SCOFO), in 1999 and again in 2006. He has made a number of submissions to the Canadian government’s Regulatory Review Process regarding changes to Canada’s Marine Mammal Regulations, and to the Eminent Panel on Seal Management, appointed by the Canadian Government to review Canada’s commercial seal hunt, which reported in 2001. In 1999, 2000, and 2006, he was an invited participant in meetings of the Canadian government’s National Marine Mammal Review Committee.

Over the years, David has been a member of a number of international scientific committees, including: the Seal Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union (IUCN); the Pinniped-Fishery Interaction Task Force on the Sea Lion/Steelhead Conflict at the Ballard Locks, Seattle; the International Scientific Advisory Committee to the Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Mediterranean Monk Seal (HSSPMS, now MOm), the Scientific Advisory Committee of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Marine Mammals Action Plan; and the European Commission/IUCN Steering Committee for the ‘Spanish Monk Seal Project’. He has also appeared before European parliamentary committees on a number of occasions and, in 2005, he testified in the Council of Europe and in the Belgian parliament when both bodies were conducting hearings into animal welfare and other aspects of Canada’s commercial seal hunt. In 2007, he served as a member of the European Food Safety Authority’s Working Group on the Animal Welfare Aspects of Sealing.

In 2001, he presented the invited keynote address – Marine mammals and fisheries: The role of science in the culling debate – at the Southern Hemisphere Marine Mammal Conference 2001, Philip Island, Victoria, Australia. He also was an invited speaker in the University of Guelph’s 2001 The Kenneth Hammond Lectures on Environment, Energy and Resources, entitled “Sustainable Development: Mandate or Mantra.” His lecture, “Ecological footprints, doublespeak, and the evolution of the Machiavellian mind” was broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas in May 2002. In January 2003, he spent a week at the University of Alberta, Edmonton as a “Distinguished Visitor” in the Environmental Research and Studies Centre. He was an invited participant in a consultation on future directions of marine mammal research, organized by the United States Marine Mammal Commission, in collaboration with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which was held in Portland, Oregon, in August 2003. Later that year, he delivered the invited closing lecture to the World Wolf Congress 2003, held in Banff, Alberta. In 2004, he presented invited lectures at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle (on the role of science in the formulation of public policy), and at the annual meeting of the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council (NABC) in Guelph (on reducing the agricultural eco-footprint). On behalf of IFAW, he organized an international forum entitled “Wildlife Conservation: In Pursuit of Ecological Sustainability” at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in June 2004. He also edited the book arising from that conference: Gaining Ground: In Pursuit of Ecological Sustainability (IFAW and the University of Limerick, 2006).

William Lynn :: May.03.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: Comments Off

A 30-year-old dolphin died on Saturday at Sea World’s Discovery Cove after colliding with another dolphin while performing aerial tricks.With visitors watching, two dolphins apparently slammed into one another in mid-air and one of them, Sharky, was killed in the process. SeaWorld spokespeople called it an “unfortunate, random incident.”

Random? Baffling, maybe. I have never heard of dolphins colliding with one another under any circumstances-much less mid-air. To say such a thing is “random” is to imply that it could happen anytime; that it is part of some probability distribution-one of many events in which all outcomes are equally likely. But Sharky was in the process of performing a presumably human-crafted aerial maneuver in a concrete pool for the pleasure of human onlookers.I suppose under these circumstances crashing into your acrobatic colleague isn’t something to be too shocked about, but I can’t help but think about the tremendous athleticism, awareness, grace, intelligence, and agility of free-ranging dolphins in the open sea.I just can’t imagine something like this ever happening there.

Unfortunate? Are they kidding? Unfortunate is locking your keys in your car. Unfortunate is mistakenly hitting the send button before you actually finished typing that email. Or perhaps I’m being to loose with the word. Unfortunate is waking up with a big pimple on your wedding day. Anyway, you get my point. The violent death of a sentient, sapient creature who was kept by humans, for the pleasure of humans, and perished whiled performing tricks for those who were charged with providing his care and safety is nothing less than a tragedy.

Maybe I’m writing this too soon. Like an email dashed off in the heat of disgust, perhaps I’m pushing the send button too soon on this. But I got the news and thought it important that I share it. If I’m not as articulate as I might have been after a cooling off period, that is unfortunate. But Sharky’s death is so much more than that.

Am I making too much of words? I don’t think so. Words are powerful things. "Random and unfortunate" is what you call a paper cut or a big zit. It happens. It’s too bad. It is not this. In my view, SeaWorld screams a callouse disrespect for Sharky, the other animals under its care, and all dolphins with its words as well as its behavior.

Sharky’s death was, at the least, baffling and tragic.

For the CNN story, go to http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/28/dolphin.death/index.html

Kris Stewart :: Apr.28.2008 :: Animal Studies, Ethics :: 4 Comments »

Just in case you missed it, this article on one of our columnist — Lisa Brown — recently appeared in the Boston Globe.

cheers, Bill

~

Monkey in the middle
A love of animals and a desire to understand them is something that hits home for Lisa Brown

By Matthew Shaer, Globe Correspondent | April 19, 2008

Simon is standing in the kitchen sink of his Brighton apartment, taking a bath. It’s a ritual he seems to cherish, more than the evening screenings of “The Daily Show” and “Top Chef,” more than petting Yoshi the cat, more than his fledging career in sketching.

First, one furry paw. Then his head, tipped toward the flood of warm tap water. Soon, Simon, an 8-pound Capuchin monkey, is hunched under the faucet, his arms crossed across his chest, a fat grin spilling across his cheeks.

“He’s a pretty handsome monkey – maybe the George Clooney of monkeys,” suggests his guardian Lisa Brown, hefting Simon out of the sink.

“He has a bit of a belly, though,” says Adam Dardeck, Brown’s husband. From the folds of a big, white towel, Simon extends his stomach obligingly, and smiles again, before catching a visitor staring. It is not, it should be said, an insubstantial belly. He turns away, coquettishly.

In the wild, Capuchin monkeys – a lithe, fast, fiercely intelligent breed – are lovers, not fighters. The rain forest of South and Central America, their native habitat, is a wild, violent place; they survive on plants, bugs, and shellfish, opened with the judicious crack of a stone. Bed is a pronged bough, far from the reach of dangerous predators. A “bath” is a slapdash grooming, at the hands of a friend or a relative.

But Simon has never set foot in the jungle. He was born in captivity and has spent much of his life with Helping Hands, a national nonprofit organization based in Boston. Eventually he will be sent to assist a patient suffering from spinal cord disease or a similarly degenerative muscle disorder.

For now, he is serving an apprenticeship at the center of a decidedly untraditional family: one man, one woman, one cat, one monkey, one small apartment. And the occasional foray into the big, cold world outside.

“So many friends have told me, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted a monkey,’ ” Brown says. “They think of Marcel, for instance.” Marcel, the pet from the television show “Friends,” fetched beer and doughnuts on command.

“I’ve worked around monkeys long enough to know that’s not how it works,” she says. “Monkeys are a hell of a lot of smarter than the dogs and cats in our lives. Having Simon here requires training, and patience – he needs real stimulation.”

Simon’s eagerness to learn makes him a natural fit for Helping Hands, which trains Capuchin monkeys to be live-in companions to people with impaired mobility. Capuchins are “natural tool users,” says Megan Talbert, the organization’s chief operating officer, so they can quickly adapt to a handful of chores, from operating a television, to scratching an itch, to flipping the pages of a book.

“Most of all,” Talbert says, “the number one gift is companionship – the bond they form with humans. It’s real love.”

Family dynamics

Brown, 31, met Simon in the winter of 2002. She’d volunteered at Helping Hands for 10 months, and then, when a position opened up, she transitioned into full-time work. Co-workers remember that Simon and Lisa instantly developed a strong bond, so much so that when Simon went out on an early placement, Lisa became visibly distressed.

“Lisa’s relationship with Simon is very interesting to me,” says Jennifer Novak, a former employee at Helping Hands. “Monkeys don’t decipher the difference between cats, for instance, or dogs. Everyone’s in their troop, and they rank them how they’re going to rank. Lisa’s the same way with animals. She shares that dynamic. Her and Simon? They were simpatico.”

As it turned out, Simon’s initial placement wasn’t a perfect fit, and he was sent back to the Helping Hands center, where Brown was waiting. “It was as if no time had passed,” Novak says. “Simon leapt right into Lisa’s arms. And they just stared at each other – they were just perfectly and totally happy.”

In 2006, Brown began work on a one-year master’s program in animals and public policy at Tufts University. When she left Helping Hands that year, she brought Simon to the Brighton apartment she shares with Dardeck and Yoshi.

The application process at Helping Hands is intense, and it includes background checks and extended training. But for Brown and Dardeck there were more serious obstacles. For one, they would have to find room for an animal that, in Brown’s assessment, is “not like having a cat and maybe not as much work as having a child, but somewhere between that.”

And where would Dardeck, 31, fit into the intense relationship between Brown and Simon? Capuchins are used to ranking large groups of peers into a specific hierarchy, by order of power and respect. There is a king of the heap, and then there is everyone else.

“Of course, I had some reservations,” Dardeck says with a laugh. “It was unclear where I’d fit into the pecking order.” But the day Dardeck agreed to give it a try, Brown says, she was no longer nervous. It was a gift – “there was no greater expression of love, that I can think of,” she explains. A year and a half later, friends say, it is hard to separate Dardeck and Brown and Simon from the small, tightly-knit family they have formed.

“It’s a deeply personal relationship,” says William S. Lynn, the program director for the master’s program in animals and public policy at Tufts. Lynn met Brown when she interviewed for the program, and the two have remained close. “When you see Lisa with Simon, you recognize all the signs of a loving parent from her. And all the signs of a happy sibling from him.”

Soul mates

With Lynn’s help, Brown has spent the past few months transcribing the messy particulars of life with Simon – from cognitive development to diaper training to the place of the monkey in modern culture – into writing, both as a columnist for Ethos, an animal ethics blog (practicalethics.net/blog), and for her own popular project, animalinventory.net.

At Animal Inventory, Brown looks at the larger picture: How do humans understand animal-kind? How do we portray creatures in art, in the movies, in music, and in the press? The blog is busy and bustling, but colored by what Lynn calls “deep moral sensibility.”

“She recognizes there’s a person in those eyes,” he says. “Lisa has arrived at a very complex understanding of the variety of ways we interact with animals, and she expresses it beautifully.”

Brown says she did a good deal of research into other animal-related blogs and found only “bits and pieces of what I’m trying to do with Animal Inventory. Some people have a focus on natural, for instance, or popular culture. I’d like to connect it all.

“That animal on TV is not an abstract thing,” she says. “It’s a symbol, or it’s an accessory, or a representation of something ‘other.’ I’m searching for a kind of perspective, and Simon is a source of inspiration.”

He is also a force unto himself – a pint-size, frizzy-furred tempest of personality. As a visitor watched, Simon created a wild post-impressionistic portrait, pausing occasionally to punctuate a pencil stroke with a low, happy grunt. He likes Jon Stewart, it turns out, and hates violence. (Once, Dardeck says, a “Daily Show” episode turned mock-rough, and Simon rushed to the television, slapping at the screen with both paws.) He loves zippers and shoelaces, which he painstakingly unties.

Sometimes, when he’s feeling affectionate, he’ll pick through Dardeck’s hair, or slip into a sleepy reverie in Brown arms, his belly pointed skyward.

“For a long time, I’ve been trying to formulate a blog entry about soul mates,” Brown says. “No one ever really talks about the possibility that we can develop that connection with animals – a connection where two beings understand each other in a way no one else can.”

She pauses, then adds, “I can have a checklist. I can say, ‘Simon is cuddly. I like that.’ Or, ‘He’s inquisitive, and I like that.’ But it’s not the sort of thing you verbalize. It’s the sort of thing you just know is there. Simon and I have found another way to communicate.”

Source: www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/04/19/monkey_in_the_middle/

William Lynn :: Apr.28.2008 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

Coyotes have become a convenient scapegoat for Maine’s “deer problem.” After all, it’s much easier to point the finger at the big, bad coyote than question current forest management practices that adversely affect the size of the deer herd. Wholesale removal of forest cover by corporate landowners such as Plum Creek, combined with naturally occurring heavy snowstorms, leaves thousands of deer without food and shelter.

Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologists report that many deer have died of starvation. As scavengers, coyotes clean up the remains of road- and winter-killed deer, offering a natural ecological service that keeps the roadsides and woods clean. Unfortunately, coyotes’ efficient, natural-born behavior gives extremists a chance to characterize coyotes as bloodthirsty deer killers.

Bob Grandchamp, in his Op-Ed “Deer herds the victim of a foreign predator” (BDN, April 9), suggests that the state enact a coyote bounty to “clean out this killer … hellbent on exterminating and consuming our native population of deer.” Mr. Grandchamp’s emotional, human-centered view of wild animals and their relationship to each other and the natural environment is shortsighted and unscientific. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, the primary coyote-killing agency, admits that coyote bounties don’t work and are counterproductive.

DIF&W doesn’t offer a bounty but does allow coyotes to be shot, trapped, baited, and hounded year-round in unlimited numbers. Now the DIF&W-sponsored Deer Task Force is advocating for denning, the killing of coyote pups in their dens, and neck snaring, a method that DIF&W acknowledges is inherently indiscriminate that can cause extreme pain and suffering. Not only are such practices ethically repugnant, they don’t work.

Under heavy pressure, coyotes will mate at an earlier age and have larger litters of healthier pups, who will be more likely to survive to breeding age. Beating down the coyote population over the long term would require killing 75 percent of the population every year. Two centuries of persistent persecution has done little to reduce coyote populations or conflicts and has likely selected for a more successful, opportunistic, resilient and adaptable species that some scientists refer to as the supercoyote.

As a top carnivore, coyotes play an undeniably vital role in their ecological communities. They competitively exclude or directly kill foxes, raccoons, skunks and feral cats — smaller predators that affect the number and diversity of ground-nesting birds. They also serve humans by eating rodents in huge numbers and even help keep Canada goose populations down in urban landscapes. Unlike humans, coyotes cull the sick, diseased and weak, thus strengthening the prey gene pool. Human hunters, on the other hand, desire the largest buck with the biggest rack, removing, if at all possible, the strongest and most robust individuals from the gene pool.

Killing coyotes in large numbers can set off ecological chain reactions with profound implications. Yet, even while research continues to highlight the important and complex role coyotes and other top carnivores play in maintaining ecological health and species diversity, many state agencies and extremist sportsmen’s groups continue to promote a view of predators that is stuck in the big-bad-wolf era. In fact, coyotes immigrated into Maine as a direct result of the same anti-predator hysteria — coyotes have successfully filled the niche left open when the wolf was systematically eliminated.

Animals living in the wild operate under their own set of rules governed by the cycles of weather and food availability. Populations fluctuate; predators eat their prey. Unlike deer that, unless culled by predators, generally breed until they exhaust resources and starve, coyotes control their own numbers.

Wild animals shouldn’t be cared for or protected during bad weather or short food years, like cattle and sheep. Imposing human values and emotions on wild animals leads to irrational and misdirected policies. Coyotes are not bad, and deer are not good. They are what they are, and they play important roles in each others’ lives.

We must move beyond the mind-set that views coyotes as evil or unnatural, as Mr. Grandchamp proposes, and recognize that they have much to offer us, not only by keeping ecosystems healthy, but by providing inspiring examples of ingenuity and adaptability in an ever-changing world.

Camilla H. Fox grew up in Maine, holds a master’s degree in wildlife ecology, policy and conservation, and is the co-author of “Coyotes in Our Midst: Learning to Live with an Adaptable & Resilient Carnivore.”

Thursday, April 17, 2008 – Bangor Daily News, http://bangornews.com.

William Lynn :: Apr.19.2008 :: Animal Studies, Coyotes, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: Comments Off

In 2006/07 the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies administered a nationwide survey exploring the perspectives and experiences of cruelty-free consumers. New Zealand is a small country (human population just over 4 million), whose economy since European settlement around 200 years ago, has been heavily reliant on agriculture (and therefore nonhuman animal exploitation). There is a popular saying in New Zealand – it was around when I was a child and is still going strong – that “farming is the backbone of our nation”. It is also considered ‘unpatriotic’ to refuse meat or other animal products in New Zealand: you are not a ‘true kiwi’ if you don’t support the animal farming, meat, dairy and wool industries here. As a vegan kiwi, however, I have been particularly interested in the ways in which subcultural (or non mainstream) identity in New Zealand is linked to ethical consumption and the refusal to eat meat.

While the survey on ethical consumption in New Zealand attracted a few omnivores – who were mainly concerned about intensive farming practices in NZ and/or the use of animals in experimentation here (and it is perhaps not surprising to note that animal experimentation in NZ is linked predominantly to agricultural research) – the majority of respondents were vegetarian or vegan. To download and read the full 108 page report on this study, please refer to the website for the NZ Centre for Human-Animal Studies (http://www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz/news.shtml).

One aspect of this study generated huge media interest, both nationally and internationally around August 2007. This related to the preference of a small number of vegetarian and vegan women to be sexually intimate – or in primary relationships – only with other vegetarians and vegans. This preference, which I term ‘vegansexuality’, pertained to those who refused on ethical grounds to have intimate relations with non-vegetarians. I did not propose vegansexuality as an innate form of sexuality or desire; instead vegansexuality may be understood as a disposition (or inclination, or preference) towards those who also practice a cruelty-free lifestyle. Importantly, it is an embodied ethical form of sexuality.

The connection between food and sex is not a new phenomenon. I would argue that a spectrum exists in relation to cruelty-free consumption and sexual relationships: at one end of the spectrum, vegansexuality entails an increased likelihood of sexual attraction towards those who do not consume animals or animal products. At the other end, it manifests as a strong sexual aversion to the bodies of those who consume animals and animal products; for these people, avoidance of sexual intimacy with omnivorous bodies is manifesting at a much more visceral level.

As a vegan, it makes sense to me that some vegans might experience sexuality on a fundamentally ethical level. A person who is dedicated to cruelty-free living may well extend this ethical commitment beyond consumption of food into other aspects of their life, and especially into such an important arena as intimate relationships. It is not surprising, or extreme (as has been suggested), when considered according to such rationale. What astounded me more was the way in which mainstream and some alternative media across the world picked up on the identification of this phenomenon; and also the ferociousness of the public backlash against those vegans who stated they preferred intimate relationships with non-meat eaters (this backlash was prompted by the extensive media coverage). Overnight there were hundreds of responses posted on blogs and elsewhere, the majority of these postings were immensely negative and/or derogatory towards ‘vegansexuals’.

While there may be several reasons for such an immediate and outraged reaction from meat-eaters discovering they are off the sexual/pleasure menu for strict vegetarians (and I am currently analyzing hundreds of these disparaging responses to see what factors motivated such a reaction), it is the vehement opposition voiced by some vegans that interests me most. For example, PETA was soon brought into the picture, and asked to comment on vegans who preferred sexual relationships with non-meat eaters. A prominent PETA spokesperson declared that vegans who chose other vegans for partners were unhelpful because sex was an important strategy in the conversion of meat-eaters to veganism!

I wonder if one of the reasons some vegans were challenged by vegansexuality is that they were concerned this would become a new kind of sexual imperative: in order to be ‘truly’ vegan it would be necessary to expand their commitment to cruelty-free living to the bedroom. This kind of dilemma ultimately rests with oneself, however. As someone who is personally critical of sexual and other ‘imperatives’, it was not my intention in proposing the existence of this ethical form of sexuality that it should be viewed as, or become, a new demand on vegans; nor that all vegans should feel this way or be ultimately moving towards vegansexuality, or that vegans who are in relationships with omnivores are somehow not vegan enough! Highlighting the existence of ethical intimacy of this nature was more about allowing those participants in the New Zealand study who felt strongly about their own relationships to express their preferences for practicing cruelty-free sex as well as cruelty-free consumption. In my opinion, those who were frank and courageous in voicing their unconventional approaches to intimate relationships certainly did not deserve the malice this provoked from omnivores or other vegans.

Annie Potts :: Mar.09.2008 :: Animal Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood passed away last week. Her major theoretical works that influenced me include Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002). They think she died from a snakebite. This, after having survived a crocodile wrenching her from a tree and pulling her into a death roll in 1985. I can’t help be angry with the snake that took this brilliant mind from us-imagining the cold-blooded creature lashing out against Dr. Plumwood in some expression of biblical conniving and wickedness. What did the reptiles have against her? But I wouldn’t dare admit these musings, else I be the one committing the sin-anthropomorphism.

For many scientists, anthropomorphism is one of the scientific mortal sins. It should be avoided at all costs, as it reflects a failure to attain adequate standards of holy objectivity. For a few of us scholars of human-animal interactions though, anthropomorphism is valid, ethical, and an interpretive filter that can be productively engaging.

I can hear them now: “Heresy!” They proclaim that ascribing human traits to animals is nothing more than a mode of narration that causes misconceptions in science and literature, reducing humanity to animality and rationality to instinct, or worse–elevating brutes to human status!

Of course I’m kidding about the scheming reptiles plotting the demise of Val Plumwood. But let’s take a moment and consider this thing that scientists reject so completely. Just exactly what is meant by anthropomorphism, anyway? Val Plumwood suggested that there are various senses of anthropomorphism, both general and specific cases. In one definition, it means attributing to nonhumans characteristics that humans have; in another definition it means attributing to nonhumans characteristics that only humans have. A broader definition claims anthropomorphism anytime animals are represented in intentional or communicative terms. If we go with that sort of catch-all definition of anthropomorphism, what Plumwood called “weak anthropomorphism,” it makes it very hard (if not impossible) for any representations of nonhumans to avoid being labeled anthropomorphic.

The weak anthropomorphism argument contends that, because we are human, we must filter all of our observations of nonhuman behavior through our thoroughly human conceptual apparatus; because any interpretation of a nonhuman animal-indeed, all interpretations-will necessarily be shrouded in human concepts, resulting in some measure of anthropomorphism. Given that definition of anthropomorphism, it is clear that when we consider animal experiences, we just can’t avoid it. What is less obvious to me is how this is necessarily harmful or invalidating (or that there are no practices to ameliorate or counter any negative consequence).

Like Plumwood, I think there is no good (or logical) reason why we should not speak of the nonhuman sphere in intentional and “mentalistic” terms. We do it constantly in everyday parlance, and would hardly be able to avoid it. But is it irrational, hopelessly romantic, and unscientific to talk of anything nonhuman in this way-as having agency, communication, sapience, emotions, and so on? Or could it be that the scientific resistance to all anthropomorphism is simply an exercise of hegemonic discourse intent on retaining the order of society it established in the first place? Val Plumwood saw it this way: "A time-tested strategy for projects of mastery is the normalization and enforcement of impoverishing, pacifying and deadening vocabularies for what is to be reduced and ruthlessly consumed. This seems to be the main contemporary function of the concept of anthropomorphism, especially to the extent that it aims to delegitimate intentional description of non-human others." (from Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason, p. 56).

So, should we all embrace anthropomorphism willy-nilly in our explorations of human-animal interactions? No, of course not. Plumwood didn’t think so either. For her, the question wasn’t whether or not some degree of humanization of perspective is present (she thought it always will be at the background level); what’s important is how damaging that perspective is, what its meaning is, and what practices could be used to counter the damage if necessary.

Indeed, the potential issues when considering animals are actually no different (in form) from the case of representing human cultural difference. There are many well-known traps and difficulties in such representations. There can likewise be problems in representing another species’ communicative powers or subjectivities, but that doesn’t mean such representation is impossible. To be sure, careful attention should be paid to the content and context of any social or scientific inquiry.

Anthropomorphism can also be misplaced (and even become harmful) when it leads to a complete obliteration to difference between humans and animals. Denial of difference is a key part of the structures of subordination and colonization to which animals are subject. In these cases, an indictment of anthropomorphism may legitimately draw our attention to a loss of sensitivity to and respect for animal difference. For example, when out of control, idiotic co-workers are represented in print and television advertisements as chimpanzees dressed in human business attire (as in the TV and print ads for careerbuilder.com), they are ridiculed as degenerate forms of humans while, at the same time, the animals’ own differences and excellences are denied or neglected. This form of anthropomorphism deserves a loud “Boo!"

All of that said, we must be careful not to collapse human into animal or vise versa. In my view, the human-animal divide must be diminished, but the recognition of an animal continuum is equally important to maintain respect for animality, else we revert back to yet another form of anthropocentrism. But that, my friends, is a topic for another day.

Read the story of Val Plumwood’s encounter with the crocrodile: http://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM30/ValPlumwood.html

Postscript (3/6/2008) Not a snakebite afterall? http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23332288-2,00.html

Kris Stewart :: Mar.05.2008 :: Animal Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

When we talk about the recovery of wolves, what do we really mean? By reading the literature and listening to people talk, I hear several distinct meanings. You may have heard others as well.

To my ear, the first meaning has to do with conservation, by which is meant the government regulating whether and how people hunt, trap and kill wolves. The background idea here is that wolves are an agricultural crop to be culled, or a pest to be exterminated. Natural recolonization is the second meaning. Here wolves recolonize an area of their former range by way of out-migration from the places they already inhabit. The idea here is that by successfully establishing themselves in new habitats, wolves demonstrate their fitness to inhabit those landscapes, and side-step political controversies over human intervention. Finally, there is restoration, a process where humans intervene to help a population of wolves take root and grow. This usually involves captive breeding, capture and release. In restoration the idea is to help wolves over geographic hurdles so they can return to an area that they would recolonize if human development were not in the way.

Opponents of wolves often talk in public of their commitment to wolf recovery, by which they really mean ‘conserving’ the least number of wolves in the smallest possible area for the shortest period of time. Proponents of wolf recovery tend to focus on the recolonization or restoration of wolves in areas outside their current haunts. Even so, both opponents and proponents often agree to restrict wolves within the borders of predefined recovery zones. These are not natural borders based on ecological criteria, but barriers to recovery imposed by partisan politics.

You can distinguish the various meanings of recovery by listening for the unarticulated moral sensibilities behind what advocates, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians are saying. If their sensibilities are hostile to wolves, then whatever the rhetoric, you can bet their idea of recovery has less to do with expanding the range of wolves, than it does with getting these canids within the range of a gun. If their ideas are benign, they often favour one kind of recovery over another depending on two factors – the prospects for recolonization and the degree of political opposition to wolves.

For instance, there are many places in North America where wolves would thrive. Geographic barriers and human depredation, however, prevent wolves from recolonizing on their own. Examples include the northern forests of New York and New England, and the Grand Canyon ecoregion in the southwest. Advocates, ethicists and scientists have proposed restoring wolves in these places. A vocal minority of residents, special interests and government officials have stymied such efforts.

Some of this opposition is rooted in a direct antipathy to wolves. The local bumper sticker ‘ Wolves – Government-Sponsored Terrorists’ encapsulates this view rather nicely. Other elements of the opposition are evasive. Special interests and politicians often ‘support’ recolonization but not restoration. This allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They can speak as if they support recovery, but in practice they undermine it.

There is sometimes a strange moral argument made by the opposition as well. It runs something like this. Extinction for natural reasons has always occurred throughout history. Humanity is simply another force of local or complete extinction. If wolves cannot survive in human-dominated landscapes by adapting their way of life to ours, then extinction is the natural result. We are under no moral obligation to help wolves, and further, it might even be immoral to help an evolutionarily ‘unfit’ species continue to survive.

This argument has two basic flaws. It assumes that humans are a ‘natural’ force of extinction, and fails to distinguish natural from anthropogenic sources of environmental change. Second, it justifies a moral claim with an uncritical appeal to humanity as a natural force of extinction. It is not an argument that holds water in the sense of corresponding to the facts, or making a reasoned claim. In this sense, it is really a set of ad hoc justifications for refusing to share the landscape with wolves.

Were we all to agree that recovery is a good idea in general, there are still a host of other questions to answer. Should we have wolves in our area? If so, where? Do wolves belong only in the most remote corners of a wilderness, or over that hill about half an hour’s walk from here? Should wolves be kept away from people, pets and farm animals? Or should we adapt to the presence of wolves in our everyday lives? How might the predation of wolves alter the landscape or impact local economies? Who will resolve the run of the mill conflicts between humans and wolves?

To answer these and other practical questions, we must address the ethical reasons, ecological impact and social aspects of wolf recovery. Others have discussed the ecological and social dimensions at some length. What they have to say generally boils down to a discussion of habitat suitability and human tolerance.

I want to address the ethical reasons by sharing five ideas to help guide our thinking. You can use these ideas to ferret out the moral assumptions behind the rhetoric of wolf recovery. You can also use them to evaluate whether current or proposed policies or management practices are justified. As you come across ethically problematic issues in wolf recovery, please do share them with us. If you have a question or concern, you can bet that someone else has something similar as well. And when we share these experience and thoughts, we deepen our collective understanding.

1. Ethics can help us heal our troubled world and our troubles with wolves.
Make no mistake about it, ours is a troubled world. A partial list of our troubles includes war, poverty, injustice, the neglect of children, and the abuse of animals. Globalization makes these problems increasingly complex. Terrorism – especially the prospect of bioterrorism – adds yet another illness to burden our social and environmental health. What some have called the ‘war against wolves’ is one symptom of this troubled world. What are we to do about all this?

One answer is to look to our deepest moral values, which is to say, the ethics that guide our individual and collective lives. In the words of Socrates, ethics envisions ‘how we ought to live’. Put into practice, ethics outlines moral principles to guide our thought and action. When used properly, ethics can help improve the well-being of ourselves and others – human and non-human. By clarifying what our world ought to be like, ethics helps us make better personal and social decisions, distinguish better from worse interpretations and actions, and reveal the values that are at stake — or should be at stake — in debates over nature and society, animals and people, wolves and humanity.

Using ethics to help us make better policy choices is at the heart of wolf recovery. The political hackles that talk of wolf recovery can raise are symptoms of a moral conflict over whether or not to coexist with large predators. And this is related to our coexistence with the natural world, and whether we see ourselves apart from or part of a wider fellowship of life.

This moral conflict is akin to humanity’s struggle for human rights and justice. Our societies have and continue to struggle with questions of race, class, gender and ethnicity in the political and social spheres. While we have made much progress, there remains much to be done. Yet the basic idea that there are morally right and wrong ways in which to treat people and their communities is beyond dispute. So too, we are struggling with questions of species, and what moral responsibilities we owe the non-human world.

The natural and social sciences cannot answer these questions for us, for moral conflicts cannot be understood or solved by gathering empirical data, or developing a better quantitative model, or practicing an innovative management technique. To solve our moral conflicts we need to face them for what they are – differences over ethical values and worldviews. Only then can we reveal the values at stake, and sort out better from worse ideas about wolf recovery.

2. Wolves have moral value.
When people say wolves have moral value, what does this mean? Generally it means that wolves have intrinsic value in and of themselves, and should have moral standing in our community. This does not mean that wolves are human beings. Rather it emphasizes that both people and wolves are creatures worthy of care and respect. We can see how this thinking works by using an analogy between people and wolves.

Human beings are intelligent and social creatures – we think, we feel, we relate. We are aware of ourselves, of others and our environment. This kind of awareness is why we are termed Homo sapiens, literally the ‘wise earthly ones’. Because of our self-awareness, we have an individual worth independent of the use anyone has for us. Ethicists term this ‘intrinsic value’. Intrinsic value is the core reason why we should treat people with care and respect. It is also why love and friendship and democracy and justice are so important. They are ethical principles, dispositions and practices that help us ‘do right’ by individuals and communities. Because of our intrinsic value, humans are therefore part of a moral community.

Wolves are intelligent and social creatures too. Like us, they think, feel and relate. Not in exactly the same manner as we, but in a way appropriate to their kind. So like human beings, wolves have a well-being of their own to care about. Such ideas about the moral value of wolves are part of a larger sensibility that animals are not simply property. Wolves and other animals have their own intrinsic value, quite apart from the instrumental purposes that humans may have for them. This does not mean that we treat people and wolves in the same way. For instance, wolves have no political right to vote – nor should they: they are not the kinds of creatures who can do so. But what it does mean is that we ought to take the welfare of wolves into account whether in the outback or in our backyard. Wolves are thus part of the moral community along with human beings.

3. Wolf management is an ethical concern.
If wolves have moral value, then our choices in wolf management are moral decisions.

Biologists have noted time and again that the recovery of wolves is not so much an ecological as it is a social issue. We have only to keep the human killers of wolves at bay, and wolves will thrive wherever there is sufficient prey and habitat. This is an insightful point. It becomes more powerful when we recall how ethical norms condition our willingness to live with wolves.

The vilification of wolves in Europe and North America are cases in point. Historically, anti-wolf sentiment took on the form of a moral argument against wolves. Wolves were considered villains, varmints and vermin. They were criminals preying on innocent victims like deer, cattle and sheep. They were the spawn of Satan – even Satan himself – despoiling the landscape. Today they are compared to terrorists threatening human communities. As a consequence of this reasoning, our societies killed wolves with a vengeance.

Over the last century, this caricature of wolves has been debunked. Ethicists have argued for the moral value of wolves. Scientists have demonstrated the importance of predation in the natural world. Environmentalists have mobilized broad public support for the conservation of biodiversity. These and other groups have upended the moral arguments against wolves.

In so doing, these groups have also cleared the way for a reevaluation of wolves. We are beginning to ask ethical questions that go beyond biological suitability or social carrying capacity. We are asking how we ‘ought’ to live with wolves, and what our responsibilities are to wolves themselves. Please do not miss the significance of this. The ethics of wolf recovery has been ignored in public deliberation for decades. This has impoverished our policy options regarding wolf recovery. Attending to the ethical questions promises a better approach to wolf recovery in Europe, North America and elsewhere.

4. A sound science requires a sound ethics.
In my travels and public speaking, I have said this time and again, but it bears repeating. A sound science requires a sound ethics.

When discussing predator management, we are likely to hear praises of ‘sound science’. Sound science is supposed to be the evidence-based, theory-rich baseline for managing wolves. Yet as previously noted, humanity’s trouble with wolves is really a moral conflict.

Science can provide us important information about our ethical and social choices, but it cannot make those choices for us. So what we need is a sound ethics to complement the science of wolf recovery, and guide our policy choices. What would this ethic look like? To my mind, it must meet three criteria.
o A sound ethics must recognize the moral value of wolves.
o A sound ethics must highlight the moral significance of wildlife advocacy, management and science.
o A sound ethics must emphasize the practical value of ethics in the recovery of wolves.

Human action has always had a real and frequently tragic impact on the well-being wolves. Whether intentional or not, wolf management is always laden with ethical motivations and consequences. Paying attention to the criteria above will help us identify the moral assumptions at work in diverse visions and practices of wolf recovery.

My sense is that wildlife professionals are beginning to appreciate the moral dimensions of their work. I have talked with hundreds of students, advocates, scientists, government officials and the like about the ethics of wolf recovery. Most of them care deeply about the well-being of people, animals and the places they inhabit. It is this caring that forms the foundation for their moral sensibilities, and their longing to bring ethical criteria into their work.

What I find tragic is how graduate education and professional training often beat these sensibilities into a submission to some illusory ‘value-free’ science. Equally heartbreaking is that many individuals are forbidden to express these moral sensibilities by the agencies, corporations or non-profits for which they work. I hope it is obvious by now that this silence must be broken.

5. The recovery of wolves will help restore our relationship to nature.
Wolf recovery is important to the well-being of wolves. Arguably that is moral reason enough for our participation in robust recovery efforts. But it may also be important to us as a step in restoring our broken relationship with nature.

Just as our world is deeply troubled, our relationship to nature is broken. The scale of human-induced environmental problems is too massive to deny, e.g. global warming, deforestation, desertification, extinction, invasive species, over-population, over-consumption and pollution. Yet there is still time to acknowledge our responsibilities, space to restore the natural world, and a place for a nature-friendly culture. Wolves can help us in this regard.

Humanity has a special history and relationship with wolves. Despite the differences, Canis lupus and Homo sapiens readily communicate, so much so, that wolves were the first large mammal to coevolve with humans. Some prehistoric peoples modeled their societies after wolf packs, and some wolves were domesticated to become the dogs of today. Indeed, wolves and dogs have been so important to the development of human culture that some scholars joke about reclassifying humanity as Homo lupus! This relationship is amongst the best places to redefine our place in the natural world.

The recovery of wolves across the world would be a major step forward. In the first place, it would require that we cultivate a respect for the intrinsic value and well-being of wolves and their habitats. This will have obvious benefits for other animals and natural communities. In the second place, it would promote the ecological health of the landscape. Wolves are top carnivores that help maintain biodiversity and ecological function with respect to everything from forest ground cover, to the incidence of song birds, to the control of deer populations, to the spread of Lyme’s disease. In the third place, a broad recovery of wolves would be evidence of our moral health. If our societies can learn to live alongside wolves, we are one step closer to living in sympathy and sustainably with the rest of the natural world.

Conclusion
I have no doubt we will face hard choices about wolf recovery. While human interests should not trump the welfare of wolves, the needs of wolves do not automatically override the well-being of people. Remember that both people and wolves have moral value. There must be a dynamic synthesis of the two. This synthesis is best reached through win-win solutions that protect ethical, ecological and social values. Sometimes, however, we are faced with situations on the ground that require choosing the well-being of one over the other. These are the hard cases of ethics and policy. We should not deny they exist, nor should we overstate their importance.

If we want free-roaming wolves to survive this millennium, we will have to make better policy choices about ‘how we ought to live’ with predators and other wild animals. We will have to accept our moral responsibilities to a mixed community that includes both humanity and wolves. And if we proactively act with ethical concern for the wolves that can recolonize or be restored across the landscapes of this planet, we may even cultivate a culture that honours and celebrates people, animals and the rest of nature.

Cheers, Bill

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

William Lynn :: Mar.02.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wolves :: Comments Off

I have updated the Practical Ethics Gallery with fresh images from the work of Rob Hite. Here is an extract from the gallery text. Please stop in and see his wonderful work by clicking here.

cheers, Bill

~~~

Rob’s early work routinely depicts people and animals through painting. The people are physically invisible in our field of view but are nonetheless manifest through their constructions. And the constructions are almost always juxtaposed and integrated into a landscape of animals and wildish nature. In my previous introduction to Rob’s gallery, I described this as a theme of ‘dwelling in mixed communities’. For Rob, dwelling is about people and animals living in natural and cultural landscapes. His art prefigures a vibrant vision of a mixed community of beings who are human and non-human, wild and domestic.

I think much of his latter work manifests this same vision, if in a different way. Take for example the sculpture and photography project, ‘Imagined Histories’. Here Rob creates sculptures of dwellings with a mythical sensibility, installs them in the landscape of the Hudson River Valley, and photographs the result. Displays of both the sculptures and photos are then shown in galleries around the Northeast. It is a beautiful body of art, some of which is shown here.

These sculptures and photographs are not adequately interpreted in terms of landscape art or sustainability alone. Rather Rob visually resituates human endeavours as part of a more than human world. He depicts humans as the animals we are, embedded in all we do in the natural world, dwelling amongst and with other creatures. He implies this through the scale of the sculptures, and the wildish looking locales in which they are photographed. His whimsical, mythological forms allow us to step back from current architecture and landscape development. To remember bedtime stories and ethnographic traditions of animal-friendly cultures, real or imagined. To envision other possibilities for living on earth.

Rob scales us down to size, visually, aesthetically and morally. He envisions a more humble humanity. And in so doing, he reveals an aesthetic and ethical landscape where we might live in a truly mixed community of people, animals and nature.

Image: Robert Hite. Bird Trap. 2006. Wood construction.

William Lynn :: Feb.03.2008 :: Animal Studies, Art, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

For writers, tone is a subtle but powerful tool that can be used to manipulate an audience. Slight shifts in language can indicate mockery or sympathy, humor or disdain. Careful word choice enables a writer to provide vital clues about how a piece should be read and how an issue should be viewed. Tone plays a particularly significant role in writings about animals, because animals are often portrayed in very limited ways: as sympathetic companions, humorous clowns, symbols of nature, villainous predators, or as food. The media rarely deviates from these five strict categories and the writer’s tone can immediately locate which caricature is being depicted.

Today, the msnbc.com science section led with a story entitled, “It’s official: In Austria, a chimp is not a person.” The story explains that Matthew Hiasl Pan, a 25-year old chimp in Austria, is about to lose his home because the sanctuary where he resides is going bankrupt. Advocates fear he could be sold into untenable circumstances, so they petitioned the Austrian courts for guardianship of the chimp. They argue that he is a person whose rights would be violated if he does not have a guardian to speak on his behalf. The advocates most likely cited laws about child guardianship and the custodial laws protecting the mentally disabled to make their case. As the article reports, Austria has denied Matthew’s claim of personhood, and therefore any right to guardianship.

But what is this article really saying about Matthew and the quest for ape rights? Beneath the veneer of journalistic impartiality, what does the Associated Press really think? Or, more accurately phrased, what does the AP want its audience to think?

The animal rights/animal welfare community has been waiting with baited breath for the Austrian courts to make their ruling on this case. Animal activists are intimately familiar with the idea of animals, apes in particular, being thought of as persons. Though this concept may appear revolutionary to the lay person (indeed, it is) animal activists have been discussing the theories, philosophies and implications of animal personhood for years. However, the fact remains that ape personhood is a new concept for the general public, one that is often met with confusion and disbelief. For me, reading the headline, “a chimp is not a person,” was a moment of extreme disappointment and sadness. By contrast, a general audience would read the headline as an oxymoronic play on words: of course a chimp is not a person … just as a human is not a fish! Here is where tone and word choice provide a glimpse into under-the-surface meanings. Already, the reader expects to be amused by the article that follows. The reader assumes that the title is phrased this way to indicate that the issue should not be taken seriously.

The body of the article primarily describes ‘personhood‘ as a vehicle by which the advocates seek guardianship of Matthew. This is problematic for a couple of reasons: the issue of personhood goes much deeper than a simple legal maneuver. Additionally, many people strongly associate the term ‘person’ with the word ‘human’ and may even use the words as synonyms when, in fact, they are not. ‘Human’ is a quasi-biological term that identifies a particular species. Person is a philosophical term that implies a state of mind; that is, individuality, personal identity and self awareness that are normally associated with humans but are not tied to any biological definition of humans. Without explicit clarifications of these distinctions, readers are set up to dismiss advocates as irrational extremists.

Certain humans have been considered nonpersons (women, slaves, children, the severely disabled, minorities) and were denied all the rights and privileges afforded to persons. Even if it is a stretch for people to agree that apes are persons, surely our own controversial American history should demonstrate the significant cultural influence on personhood. Clearly, malleable elements of social structure have a tremendous impact on the defining traits of personhood. At the very least, this indicates that personhood has tremendous potential flexibility.

The point is, there have been books, movies, articles and deeply complicated debates about the issue of personhood. In the span of a single sentence, the AP rendered the question irrelevant… even laughable. Matthew has been turned into a punchline — a fate that animals (particularly primates) often suffer. Without properly educating its readership about the dynamic and legitimate questions raised by Matthew’s advocates, the AP has ensured that animal personhood will continue to be misunderstood by the public. They perpetuate the stereotype that only humans can be persons. And they deny Matthew the outrage that is warranted on his behalf.

Lisa Brown :: Jan.16.2008 :: Animal Studies :: 1 Comment »

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I wanted to let you know about a wonderful new film that “explores the complexity, conflicts, and richness of the fertile interface between urban life and wild nature” with a focus on coyotes. While the film focuses on coyotes re-colonizing San Francisco and “how we can coexist safely with this resilient top carnivore,” it also addresses national coyote ecology issues and includes interviews with a number of coyote experts including Dr. Stanley Gehrt, lead researcher behind a long-term coyote study in the Chicago metropolitan region. The film also covers general urban ecology issues and an innovative non-lethal livestock and predator protection program developed in Marin County, California.

For more information about the film or to purchase DVDs, contact the film’s director, Melissa Peabody, at 415.533.0349, or mpeabody@pacbell.net.

Camilla

Camilla Fox :: Jan.13.2008 :: Animal Studies, Coyotes, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Wildlife :: Comments Off

Animals & Society Institute Fellowship Program 2008

The Animals & Society Institute invites applications for its second annual summer fellowship program for scholars pursuing research in Human-Animal Studies. In the summer of 2008, this interdisciplinary program will enable 7-8 fellows to pursue research in residence at Michigan State University. Host faculty at MSU are Linda Kalof, Department of Sociology; David Favre, College of Law; and Thomas Dietz, Environmental Science and Policy Program.

ASI is grateful to the American Humane Association for its major sponsorship of the fellowship in both 2007 and 2008.

The fellowship is designed to support recipients’ individual research through mentorship, guest lectures, and scholarly exchange among fellows and opportunities to contribute to the intellectual life of the host institution. All fellows must be in continuous residence for the duration of the six week program, June 2-July 11, 2008 (tentative dates).

The fellowships are open to scholars from any discipline investigating a topic related to human-animal relationships. Topics of particular interest for this year’s program include:

human-animal relationships in science and technology
animal issues in legal studies
the relation between human violence and animal abuse
human-animal relationships in agriculture
the role of the community in companion animal overpopulation
the history and regulation of “puppy mills.”

Topics from the 2007 program included:

Shifting Perceptions of Captive Elephants in the United States
Animals, Colonialism, and the Atlantic World
Place, Power and Primates: Human/Animal Relationships in Field Primatology
The Regulation of Emerging Breeding Technologies in Animal Agriculture: A Comparison between the UK and the USA
Animal Research in Theory and Practice
A Dog’s Life: Inter-species Identity and Alterity in a Video Game
Cultural Structures and Tactical Repertoires: The Animal Rights Movements in France and the United States
Application deadline: January 31, 2008

Amount of Award
Scholars selected to participate in the fellowship program will be awarded a stipend of $3,000. to help cover travel costs, housing, living expenses, books and other research expenses.

Eligibility
Applicants must (1) possess a Ph.D., J.D., or equivalent, or be a doctoral student at the dissertation stage; (2) have a commitment to advancing research in Human-Animal Studies; (3) be actively engaged, during the fellowship program, in a research project that culminates in a journal article, book, or other scholarly presentation, and (4) submit a follow-up report six months after the fellowship’s completion.

Application
Applicants should email electronic copies of the following items to fellowshipapplication@animalsandsociety.org:

Cover sheet with the applicant’s name, mailing address to be used for future correspondence, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address, present rank and institution name, date Ph.D. or J.D. received or expected, citizenship status, title of project, history of fellowships and grants received during the past five years.

Project proposal of up to three pages (single-spaced) that describes the project and indicates work completed on the project to date. As the description will be considered by a panel of scholars from a variety of disciplines, it should be written for non-specialists.

Curriculum vitae of up to three pages.

In addition, applicants must also send two letters of recommendation to:

Committee on Fellowships, Animals & Society Institute, 403 McCauley Street, PO Box 1297, Washington Grove MD 20880.

Applicants are responsible for contacting referees and supplying them with a description of the project.

Selection Process
The selection committee will include members from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Applications will be evaluated on the contribution that the completed project will make to Human-Animal studies, the qualifications of the applicant to complete the research, and how well the applicant’s project complements the other projects.

Applicants will be notified by e-mail and letter March 2008.

The fellowship program will be directed by Ken Shapiro, executive director of Animals and Society Institute. Please address all correspondence to him at the following address:

Committee on Fellowships
Animals & Society Institute
403 McCauley Street
Washington Grove MD 20880
ken.shapiro@animalsandsociety.org
(301) 963-4751
www.animalsandsociety.org

William Lynn :: Jan.12.2008 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

I have the honour and delight of introducing Philip Armstrong as an Advisor on Practical Ethics, and a contributing author to the Practical Ethics Blog. I met Philip at a recent conference on human-animal studies. Along with Annie Potts (also an advisor on Practical Ethics), Philip founded the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies.

Philip Armstrong is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He teaches literature, cultural studies and human-animal studies at undergraduate and graduate levels, and supervises a number of research students who are exploring the representation of animality in literature and other cultural forms.

In 2007, Philip Armstrong and Annie Potts co-founded the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz), which seeks to promote collaboration amongst a network of researchers throughout the globe. NZCHAS aims especially to raise the profile of critical discourse about human-animal relations in New Zealand and Australia.

Philip’s main research interests include representations of animals in the 18th, 19th and 20th century novel; human-animal relations in New Zealand; cetaceans in literature and history; and animals and postcolonial theory. With Annie Potts, Philip is a co-principal investigator for the multidisciplinary research project “Kararehe: Animals in Art, Literature and Everyday Culture in Aotearoa New Zealand”.

You can contact him at:

Philip Armstrong, MA, PhD
New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies
University of Canterbury Te Whare W?nanga o Waitaha
PO Box 4800
Christchurch 8082
Aotearoa New Zealand
http://www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz/people/armstrong.shtml
philip.armstrong@canterbury.ac.nz

Selected Publications

Armstrong, P. (2002) “The Postcolonial Animal”. Society and Animals 10.4: 413-19.

Armstrong, P. (2004) “Moby-Dick and Compassion”. Society and Animals 12.1: 19-38.

Armstrong, P. (2004) “‘Leviathan is a Skein of Networks’: Translating Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick”. English Literary History 71: 1039-63.

Armstrong, P., and A. Potts (2004) “Serving the Wild”. In Anna Smith and Lydia Wevers (ed.), On Display: New Essays in Cultural Tourism. Wellington: University of Victoria Press, 15-40.

Armstrong, P. (2005) “What Animals Mean, in Moby-Dick, for Example”. Textual Practice 19.1 (Spring): 93-111.

Armstrong, P. (2006) “Sympathy”. Satya magazine. June/July issue. New York: 51-3.

Armstrong, P. (2007) “Farming Images: Animal Rights and Agribusiness in the Field of Vision”. In Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (ed.), Knowing Animals. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 105-130.

Armstrong, P., and L. Simmons (2007) “Bestiary: An Introduction”. In Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (ed.), Knowing Animals. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1-26.

Simmons, L., and P. Armstrong (ed.) (2007) Knowing Animals. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Armstrong, P. (2008) What Animals Mean in the Fictions of Modernity, London and New York: Routledge.

William Lynn :: Jan.11.2008 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

I have the honour and delight of introducing Annie Potts as an Advisor on Practical Ethics, and a contributing author to the Practical Ethics Blog. I met Annie at a recent conference for human-animal studies, having admired from afar the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies that she founded with Philip Armstrong.

Annie teaches Human-Animal Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, also based at the University of Canterbury (www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz).

Annie specializes in the study of everyday culture (and popular culture). As well as lecturing on the representation of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations in Hollywood cinema, she teaches critical sexuality studies, and a course on depictions of the supernatural and occult in post-1960s American film.

Her main research interests at present include: the natural and cultural history of the chicken; the representation of nonhuman animals in horror and science-fiction genres; constructions of ‘pests’ in scientific and popular discourses; ethical consumption and subcultural identity; vegansexuality. Previous projects have included qualitative (interview-based) research on the social impact of Viagra, as well as cultural assumptions about normative sexuality, gender, and ‘sexual dysfunction’.

Along with Philip Armstrong and Deidre Brown, Annie Potts is currently the Co-Investigator of a major, funded study on historical and contemporary constructions of nonhuman animals in New Zealand art, literature and everyday culture.

In 2008, Annie will be completing Chicken for the Reaktion Animal Series.

You can contact her at:

Annie Potts, Bsc, PhD
New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies
University of Canterbury/ Te Whare W?nanga o Waitaha
PO Box 4800
Christchurch 8082
Aotearoa New Zealand
www.amst.canterbury.ac.nz/people/potts.shtml
annie.potts@canterbury.ac.nz

Selected Publications

Potts, A. (2002). The Science/Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex. London & New York: Routledge.

Potts, A., Gavey, N., & Weatherall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Sex and the Body. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press/Thomson Learning.

Armstrong, P., & Potts, A. (2004). Serving the wild. In A. Smith & L. Wevers (Eds.), On Display: New Essays in Cultural Tourism. Wellington: University of Victoria Press, pp. 15-40.

Potts, A., & Tiefer, L. (Eds.). (2006). Viagra culture. Sexualities, 9(3).

Potts, A. (2007). The mark of the beast: Inscribing animality through extreme body modification. In L. Simmons & P. Armstrong (Eds.), Knowing Animals. Leiden & Boston: Brill, pp. 131-154.

Potts, A., & White, M. (2007). Cruelty-free Consumption in New Zealand: A National Report on the Perspectives and Experiences of Vegetarians and Other Ethical Consumers. Christchurch: NZCHAS.
(see http://www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz/news.shtml)

Potts, A., Armstrong, P., & Brown, D. (forthcoming). Kararehe: Animals in New Zealand Art, Literature and Everyday Culture. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

William Lynn :: Jan.10.2008 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

On 09 December the “Ideas” programme on New Zealand’s National Radio prodcast a programme focussed on Animal Welfare, including interviews with NZCHAS (New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies) International Associate Jonathan Balcombe and NZCHAS co-directors Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong. You can download the podcast at http://www.radionz.co.nz/podcasts/ideas.rss.

Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong are the newest members of the Practical Ethics family, and will soon be joining the Practical Ethics Blog. I will post their biographies shortly. In the meantime, enjoying the program as summarized below. Thank you Annie and Philip for this summary.

Cheers, Bill

_______________________________

9 December 2007 – Get Out of It, Trevor!

A Radio New Zealand National programme about Human-Animal Relations.

Inarguably, New Zealand’s identity and economy owes much to our agricultural background. As the saying goes, this country’s prosperity was built “off the sheep’s back”. And of late, New Zealand has acquired a reputation as a country that works hard to save its endangered animal species, and supports moves to protect similarly endangered animals overseas. But as our environmental awareness has changed over time, is it correct to assume that our treatment of our less exotic animals has changed as well? Agriculture, which continues to be hugely important in our economy and culture, also accounts for the majority of all animal testing in New Zealand. And while we are enthusiastic pet-owners, our record of cruelty towards them is the equal of anywhere in the Western World.

This contradiction in our attitudes has been charted in a recent study conducted by the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at Canterbury University. The study records the emergence of a group of people who identify themselves as cruelty-free consumers. They reject the picture of intensive farming, meat-eating and wearing animal products, and what they consider to be the false image of New Zealand as a “clean, green” paradise, and significantly, they are spending their money elsewhere.

Is this growing sense of disquiet highlighting a division in this country between traditional values and an emerging culture of animal ethicists? Could our treatment of animals have wider implications for the nature of our society? Why have some of us stopped riding on the sheep’s back?

Part One:

Producer Justin Gregory meets Hugo and Hades, two reluctant stars of the SPCA’s <http://www.spca.org.nz/general/home.htm> annual List of Shame.

Part Two:

Animal Behaviour Researcher Jonathan Balcombe <http:// www.pleasurablekingdom.com/> says our attitudes toward animals formed a long time ago.

Part Three:

Cruelty-free consumption is an emerging cultural force in New Zealand, according to Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong from the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies <http:// www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz/> .

Part Four:

Psychologist Rob Hughes is the winner of the 2007 Three R’s Award for Humane Animal Research http://www.rsnz.org/news/releases/scihonours2007.php .

Part Five:

Peter O’Hara is the chairman of the National Animal Welfare Committee http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/animal-welfare/overview/advisory/nawac .

Produced by Justin Gregory.

William Lynn :: Jan.08.2008 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Here is a very interesting exchange about practical ethics and animal agriculture from the website, Eating Liberally. It features our contributing author Karin Lauria.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Dec.27.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Marc Bekoff has another book out!

Marc Bekoff, 2007, Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect, Shambhala Publications.

The book description from Amazon.com is below.

‘Animal behaviorist and biologist Bekoff follows his most recent in-depth work, The Emotional Life of Animals, with another well-written, more generalist argument for responsible behavior toward animals of all kinds. A revised and updated edition of his 2000 Strolling with Our Kin, an introduction for young readers to ethical issues relating to the use of animals, the writing still feels aimed at younger readers, but the new elements include an excellent review of current debates regarding animal sentience, animal relocation efforts and medical school dissection and vivisection.

….

Nonhuman animals have many of the same feelings we do. They get hurt, they suffer, they are happy, and they take care of each other. Marc Bekoff, a renowned biologist specializing in animal minds and emotions, guides readers from high school age up-including older adults who want a basic introduction to the topic-in looking at scientific research, philosophical ideas, and humane values that argue for the ethical and compassionate treatment of animals. Citing the latest scientific studies and tackling controversies with conviction, he zeroes in on the important questions, inviting reader participation with “thought experiments” and ideas for action. Among the questions considered: Are some species more valuable or more important than others? Do some animals feel pain and suffering and not others? Do animals feel emotions? Should endangered animals be reintroduced to places where they originally lived? Should animals be kept in captivity? Are there alternatives to using animals for food, clothing, cosmetic testing, and dissection in the science classroom? What can we learn by imagining what it feels like to be a dog or a cat or a mouse or an ant? What can we do to make a difference in animals’ quality of life? Bekoff urges us not only to understand and protect animals-especially those whose help we want for our research and other human needs-but to love and respect them as our fellow beings on this planet that we all want to share in peace’.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Dec.03.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Who’s Looking?

A collaborative, multi-disciplinary investigation of human relations to chimpanzees.

The exhibition is open to the public from 1200 to Saturday, November 3rd through Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery (South Gallery)
Center for the Arts
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00 to 4:00 pm.
Directions: www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/directions.html.

‘Chimpanzees, more than any other non-human animal, stir something deep and conflicted within us. This appears to be the case whether the encounter is live or whether it is mediated through representations. During the month of November 2007, Who’s Looking? will provide the Wesleyan community with opportunities to explore our complex relations to our next of kin through photographs, film, theater and words’

The exhibition includes photographs by Frank Noelker Chimp Portraits 2002-2006, and a photo installation by Lori Gruen A Family Portrait 1920-2007.

Panel Discussion: Friday, 03 November 2007, 1130-1330. .
‘Re/Presenting Animals’ with Kari Weil, Cynthia Freeland, Frank Noelker, Allison Argo
Usdan University Center, Room 108

Please visit the Who’s Looking website and have a look. See too the article on Who’s Looking, ‘Emotions Stirred at Multi-Disciplinary Investigation of Human Relations to Chimpanzees’, in the Wesleyan Connection. In addition, Lori Gruen and Frank Noelker have related websites at http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu, and www.franknoelker.com.

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Nov.21.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art, Ethics :: Comments Off

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture is a wonderful, online journal from the UK that routinely publishes work from the animal humanities. Do check it out!

cheers, Bill

---

Antennae is currently accepting submissions for publication over the year 2008. We are looking for work fitting the following topics:

Mechanical Animals
Death and Decay (also including plants)
Animals: The Beautiful and the Ugly
Metamorphosis
Intelligent Design?

Submissions are open to visual arts, academic and non academic text. We are also very interested in receiving suggestions on other topics that may be of interest to our readers.

All the very best,

Giovanni Aloi
Editor of Antennae Project
Lecturer in History of Art and Media Studies
www.antennae.org.uk

William Lynn :: Nov.19.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art, Environmental Studies :: Comments Off

Animal and Earth Advocacy: Links of Life

Saturday

February 23, 2008

Montana State University Billings SUB

Sponsored by

International Conference for Critical Animal Studies (6th annual)
Green Theory and Praxis
MSU-B Philosophy Faculty

Organized by: Dr. Lisa Kemmerer (MSU-B), lkemmerer@msubillings.edu

Just out of the starting gates of the 21st century, the world is experiencing tremendous change. From devastating hurricanes and earthquakes to an increase in endangered species, from severe drought to diminished and depleted forests, from the collapse of fisheries to global warming. What specific problems face nonhuman animals and the earth? How are environmental problems linked to animal exploitation? What shared issues unite environmental and nonhuman animal advocacy? How might animal and earth advocates address these shared global concerns through education, the arts, ethics, justice, culture, science, history, technology, policy, media, economics, and spirituality?

We invite proposals from all community members, including but not limited to nonprofit organizations, political leaders, activists, professors, and students. We are especially interested in topics reaching across the disciplines of environmental and animal advocacy. Paper presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes in length.

Deadline for proposals: January 1, 2008. Please send no more than 500 words.

We are receptive to different and innovative formats, including, but not limited to roundtables, panels, community dialogues, theatre, and workshops. You may propose individual or group ‘panel’ presentations, but please clearly specify the structure of your proposal. Preference will be given to papers focusing on links between environmental and nonhuman animal advocacy (the program theme).

Accepted presenters will be notified (by email) January 15, 2008.

Please send proposals, abstracts, and biographies electronically to Dr. L. Kemmerer at lkemmerer@msubillings.

William Lynn :: Nov.12.2007 :: Animal Studies :: Comments Off

This past weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Portland, Maine. The theme of the conference was “coding” and I spoke on a panel with Ronnie Copeland and Bill Lynn. Ronnie presented, “What’s in a Name? Animal Fantasies and Animal Autobiographies or Blatant Anthropomorphism? Naturalist Novels of Nature Fakers? Sentimental or Subversive?” Bill presented a paper entitled, “Coding Wolves.” I presented my paper, entitled, “The Speaking Animal: Graphic Novels and the Voices of Nonhumans.” (An abstract of each paper is available on the SLSA website, along with a full program of the weekend’s events.)

Our presentations generated a dynamic and spirited discussion about the authenticity of the animal voice in fiction. Some audience members clung to the notion that anthropomorphism is a dirty word. This perspective is not uncommon, so while it was frustrating to have to defend the concept of inhabiting the mind of an animal, it was also useful to be reminded that anthropomorphism is a tool which meets resistance, even within the animal studies community. Those voices of dissent against our panel represented people who believe that the nonhuman experience of life is so foreign to our own that it is impossible for us to relate to them in any genuine way. I find this perspective very limiting, both artistically and politically. The audience members seemed to suggest we don’t have the imagination to explore what it might be like to be a nonhuman. I agree that a dog has a very unique way of seeing the world because of his or her reliance on olfactory sensations, but it would be sad to think we couldn’t even imagine such a unique way of seeing. The disquieting perspective of our human audience members relied very heavily on the differences between humans and nonhumans, and all but extinguished the similarities. This world view has the potential to extend beyond the creative realm and enter into very real policy concerns. How could we pretend to make laws, policies or decisions that claim to be in the animals’ best interests, if we cannot imagine what those interests might be? This is a circular and dangerous form of logic that can potentially threaten the limited progress we’ve made on behalf of animals.

Nevertheless, this discussion was just the start of a compelling weekend which brought together scholars from many different disciplines. With many thanks to conference organizer Susan McHugh (University of New England), animals played a significant role in panels and presentations throughout the conference.

Lisa Brown :: Nov.10.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art :: Comments Off

Is it possible to use theory and intellect to draw deeply complicated conclusions about silly, simple pop culture art? I faced this question in the writing of my Master’s thesis, in which I used such illustrious examples of animal imagery as Mr. Winkle (see photo, right). For many reasons, my answer to this question is a resounding yes, but it is difficult to convince scholars that there is academic and cultural value in guilty pleasures.

I’m raising this point because of a Very Special Episode of Grey’s Anatomy the other week, in which one of the doctors (an MD for humans) saves a deer. The episode addresses the issue of childhood attachment to animals. It can potentially be read for its commentary on the legitimacy of adult empathy for nonhumans. However, in discussing the episode with my husband, I realized that the more interesting issue at hand was expressed in a question I posed: Would people stop taking me seriously as a writer and animal advocate if I wrote about a trashy soap-opera like Grey’s Anatomy? It seemed to me that the answer, yet again, was a resounding yes.

So here is the dilemma: latent and explicit meanings embedded in pop culture can reveal societal paradigms in their purest form, yet pop culture is often viewed as mindless entertainment that is devoid of greater worth. How can these intertwined and opposing viewpoints be resolved? To start with, by establishing why pop culture is worthwhile.

In the book From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (1995), author Murray Edelman explains how and why art and popular culture can provide insight into every day life. Edelman says that “part of the meaning of artistic talent is the ability to sense feelings, ideas, and beliefs that are widespread in society in some latent form, perhaps as deep structures or perhaps as unconscious feelings, and to objectify them in a compelling way (p 52).” If art synthesizes basic beliefs, then scholars ought to be able to learn a great deal from studying art.

To summarize some of Edelman’s relevant points, what we see and hear is constructed and influenced by imagery that we all have acess to. This means that in addition to personal interpretations of art, our culture has a collective understanding of images as well. This is what makes art an integral part of political behavior, attitudes, virtues and vices. When art and the mind are applied to real world situations, they can influence and transform beliefs about the social world, problems, solutions, hopes, fears, past, present, and future. Kitsch art, “art that sentimentalizes everyday experiences (p. 29),” has just as profound an impact on the social and political world as any other form of art. And kitsch art, more than any other form of art, leads to a unique dilemma.

The study of popular culture (kitsch in particular) suffers from an unusual problem. A lot of pop culture art — not all, but a lot — lacks quality. It is not often that a field of study is generated from lackluster product. In the study of popular culture, scholars ask their audience to accept the intellectual rigor of their research, even though the topic of their study may have none. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many critics, the scholar’s ranking as a legitimate academic is only justified by the quality of his subject of study. For instance, an academic who writes about the Sopranos might be warmly received because of the artistic merit of the TV show, whereas an academic who writes about Grey’s Anatomy would get the cold shoulder because the show’s ambitions go no further than entertainment. And yet, there might be as much useful commentary generated from fluff about Meredith and McDreamy as there is from Tony and his gang. Again, it’s the integrity of the analysis, not the quality of the art being viewed, that ought to determine academic worth.

It is dangerous when scholarship is judged by the subject or topic being studied, and not by the academic rigor of the research. Yet, this does happen, and anyone in the field of human-animal studies has intimate knowledge of this idiosyncrasy. Because animals are not taken seriously as a worthwhile academic interest (aside from biological) many scholars in human-animal studies experience a lack of respect for their work — even if the quality of their studies are stellar. When the study of animals is combined with the study of popular culture, scholars may be digging themselves into an academic grave.

Steve Baker, author of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (2001) offers a perspective that compliments Edelman’s theories about pop culture. Baker asserts, “much of our understanding of human identity and our thinking about the living animal reflects — and may even be the rather direct result of — the diverse uses to which the concept of the animal is put in popular culture, regardless of how bizarre or banal some of those uses may seem (p. 4).” Like Edelman, Baker places value in even the most frivolous imagery of popular culture representations. Using a butter TV commercial and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as examples, he explains that any understanding of animals is reliant on our understanding of their cultural representations. Baker explains that animal imagery is purely a human construction and is not an accessible reality. Thus, understanding greater cultural mentality about animals will come from exploring the meaning, both latent and explicit, in these manufactured representations.

Without placing judgments on either the symbolic animal or the real animal, it is possible to recognize value in exploring their qualities as mutually informing influences. For example, it is almost impossible to interact with a live pig without thinking (consciously or not) of the charming personality of Babe, Wilbur or Gordy. The childish voice and do-gooder nature of these pigs have created a lasting mythology around the innocent kindness of an entire species. This symbolism is based on fictitious human-made creatures, but the influence on the real is undeniable. The artistic quality of the films from which these pigs came is subject to debate. But the truth is, Babe, Wilbur and Gordy do not have to come from artistic masterpieces in order to generate, influence or reflect cultural attitudes towards animals. It is for this reason that scholars ought spend time evaluating and theorizing about popular culture and, in particular, instances of animals in popular culture — even if such studies are tantamount to academic suicide.

To return to the question with which I began this essay: Is it possible to use theory and intellect to draw deeply complicated conclusions about silly, simply pop culture art? I’ll reiterate again, yes. I’ve outlined here some of the many reasons why. But finally, let’s return to the question that began my thoughts on this subject: Would people stop taking me seriously as a writer and animal advocate if I wrote about a trashy soap-opera like Grey’s Anatomy? Unfortunately, I think the answer is still yes, but perhaps with room for change.

Citations:
Baker, S. (2001). Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Edelman, M.J. (1995) From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Regan, L.J. (2001). What is Mr. Winkle? New York: Random House.

Lisa Brown :: Oct.17.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art :: Comments Off

Late last year I participated in a roundtable discussion on human-wildlife conflict. The panel included Jan Dizard, a prominent environmental sociologist from Amherst College. You can read the article based on this roundtable by downloading the pdf. The article itself was written by Lesley Limon and published in the Tufts Veterinary Medicine magazine.

Citation: Limon, Lesley (2006) How Close? How Personal?, Tufts Veterinary Medicine 7 (3), 12-16.

William Lynn :: Oct.14.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off

Marc Bekoff and Cara Lowe have a new book out. You can read the publishers blurb below. (Does this guy every sleep?)

cheers, Bill

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Marc Bekoff and Cara Blessley Lowe. 2007. Listening to Cougar, University of Oklahoma Press.Edited by Marc Bekoff and Cara Blessley Lowe with a foreword by Jane Goodall, this spellbinding tribute to Puma concolor honors the big cat’s presence on the land and in our psyches. In some essays, the puma appears front and center: a lion leaps over Rick Bass’s feet, hurtles off a cliff in front of J. Frank Dobie, gazes at Julia Corbett when she opens her eyes after an outdoor meditation, emerges from the fog close enough for poet Gary Gildner touch. Marc Bekoff opens his car door for a dog that turns to be a lion. Other works evoke lions indirectly. Biologists describe aspects of cougar ecology, such as its rugged habitat and how males struggle to claim territory. Conservationists relate the political history of America’s greatest cat. Short stories and essays consider lions’ significance to people, reflecting on accidental encounters, dreams, Navajo beliefs, guided hunts, and how vital mountain lions are to people as symbols power and wildness. Marc Bekoff has published twenty books, including The Emotional Lives of Animals, and is a professor emeritus of ecology evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Writer and photographer Cara Blessley Lowe is author Spirit of the Rockies and co-founder of The Cougar Fund.

William Lynn :: Oct.14.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies :: Comments Off

The cover story of this month’s American Photo is about the intersection of public policy, activism and art. More specifically, it’s about the role that photography plays in the conservation movement. Read the fantastic introductory article by going to American Photo. Then peruse the beautiful work of the photographers they highlight like Xi Zhinong, whose images of the extremely rare snub-nosed monkeys (above) “precipitated a logging ban by the [Chinese] national government.”

Enjoy!

–Lisa

Lisa Brown :: Oct.07.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art :: Comments Off

An atheist was walking through the woods.

“What majestic trees”!

“What powerful rivers”!

“What beautiful animals”!

He said to himself.

As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7-foot grizzly charge towards him. He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing In on him.

He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him. At that instant the Atheist cried out, “Oh my God!”

Time Stopped.

The bear froze.

The forest was silent.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky. “You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don’t exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident.” “Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer”? The atheist looked directly into the light, “It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask You to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps You could make the BEAR a Christian”?

“Very Well,” said the voice.

The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head and spoke:

“Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

William Lynn :: Sep.28.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies :: Comments Off

Practical Ethics just keeps getting better and better. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Brown as a contributing author on the blog. Lisa completed her Masters of Science at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University. Her thesis was the development of a university-level course curriculum entitled Animalities: Animals, Art and Public Policy. The course is a reflection of Lisa’s passion for exploring animals in film, television, photography, comic books, advertising and other art forms. These underrated and undervalued topics offer a unique perspective on the significance of the represented animal and give scholars the opportunity to uncover both latent and explicit views on animals. One of the aims of the course is to establish the study of pop culture as a legitimate policy tool.

Lisa received her undergraduate degree in political autobiography from Hampshire College. This academic foundation in writing and women’s studies led to active participation in the reproductive rights movement as a freelance writer. However, Lisa found her real passion when she discovered her interest in nonhuman primate welfare, cognition and rights. She is fascinated by the cultural boundary between nonhuman apes and humans, a boundary that has profound legal ramifications for all animals.This focus on nonhuman primates began in 2001 when Lisa started working at Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled. This is an organization which breeds, raises and trains capuchin monkeys to help severely disabled individuals. Despite leaving the organization in 2006 to pursue her master’s degree, she maintains a close relationship with the non-profit and has taken on the role of foster mom to a monkey. Her personal relationship with this monkey (and all monkeys she has befriended) has an ongoing influence on all her pursuits in human-animal studies.

Lisa’s musings on animals in art and popular culture can be found here on Practical Ethics, as well as her blog Animal Inventory, http://animalinventory.net/.

You can contact Lisa at 617-750-5611 or via email at lisabrown@animalinventory.net.

(Photo by Nicole V. Hill)

Lisa Brown :: Sep.22.2007 :: Animal Studies, Art :: 1 Comment »

It is a real pleasure to join the Practical Ethics blog, and to be part of a community delving into myriad human-animal relationships.

I would like to invite those of you familiar with geography to attend the 2008 AAG meeting in Boston, and to consider submitting a paper for our session on Animal Geographies. We will have sponsorship from the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights specialty group and Practical Ethics. Please see the CFP below for guidelines and contact information.

For those unfamiliar with the growing research into animal geographies, I would like to take a moment to provide an overview of this developing disciplinary area. Geographers have always had as one of their main focal interests a curiosity about how humans interact with the natural world – what constitutes these interactions, how they vary across time and space, and how specific interactions are contested within societies. The interactions between humans and nonhumans are one huge piece of this puzzle, and over the past ten years geographers have produced a significant body of literature on animal geographies. Examining human-animal relationships in agriculture, the ‘wild’, captive and companion situations, researchers have questioned where and how boundaries between humans and animals have been defined (e.g., research laboratory), how specific places and cultures have shaped interactions (e.g., the connections between heritage livestock breeds and local identities/economies), and the relationship between ethics and animal subjectivities (e.g., what constitutes ethical practices towards nonhumans, how does that vary from place to place, how can the animal as subject be ‘heard’?). Two excellent places to start looking into what animal geography has to offer are: Animal Geographies edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel and Animal Spaces, Beastly Spaces edited by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. I would be happy to provide additional citations to anyone who is interested.

AAG 2008 Call for Papers on Animal Geographies: Current and Future Research Trajectories

As interest in human-animal studies continues to develop within geography, researchers are moving in a variety of novel directions. We are soliciting papers for a session (or sessions) on current research in animal geographies for the 2008 AAG meeting April 15-19 in Boston. Papers may be from any geographic perspective and may address topics such as (but not limited to) technologies, law and policy, ethics, historical geographies, social theory, agriculture, methodologies, animal subjectivities, and human-animal boundary making.

Constraints of the AAG meeting format: Please note that in order to participate in this AAG session, you will have to first register for the conference on the website to obtain a PIN number and then you will need to submit your abstract and PIN number to us and we will formally submit the session. The deadline for session submissions is October 31, 2007. To that end, we ask all interested participants to register and submit their materials to us by October 1st so that we have adequate time to prepare the submission.

Please submit your materials and/or questions to

Julie Urbanik, Ph.D., julie.urbanik@gmail.com, and
Kristin Stewart, Ph.D., kristinlstewart@yahoo.com.

William Lynn :: Sep.08.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Geography :: Comments Off