Those who support animal testing are routinely dismissed as mad scientists, emotionless logicians, or sadists with little regard for nonhuman creatures, while animal protection activists are dismissed as hysterics, antisocial radicals, or simple folk who prize rabbits and rats over human beings. This book looks at the arguments.

Seeing a cat rubbing against a person, Charles Darwin described her as in an affectionate frame of mind; for Samuel Barnett, a behavioralist, the mental realm is beyond the grasp of scientists andbehavior must be described technically, as a physical action only. What difference does this difference make? In Eileen Crist's analysis of the language used to portray animal behavior, the difference is that in the reader's mind the very image of the cat's 'body' is transfigured...from an experiencing subject...into a vacant object.
"Images of Animals" examines the literature of behavioral...

Explores the day-to-day experiences of living and working with domestic dogs. This title examines how everyday dog owners come to know their animal companions as thinking, emotional, and responsive individuals. It views human and animal efforts to understand, manipulate, care for, and interact with each other.

This text offers different ways for regarding human interactions with other species, from appealing ones like wolves to less popular ones like snail darters. Society struggles to decide what parts of nature matter and why. Ultimately, it argues, nature is a social product: what shall we make of it?

Examines the literature of behavioral science, revealing how works with the common aim of documenting animal lives, habits, and instincts describe i 1/2realities that are world's aparti 1/2'. This title explains the Cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable chasm between animals and humans and the Darwinian panorama of evolutionary continuity."

This work contends that the anti-social cat is a myth; cats form close bonds with humans and with each other. In the potentially chaotic environment of a shelter than houses dozens of uncaged cats, this work reveals a sense of self and the build of a culture - a shared set of rules, roles, and expectations that organizes their world and assimilates newcomers. As volunteers in a local cat shelter for 11 years, Janet and Steven Alger came to realize that despite the frequency of new arrivals and adoptions, the social world of the shelter remained quite stable and pacific. They saw even feral...

Nearly everyone who cares about them knows that dogs and cats have a sense of self that renders them unique. Traditional science and philosophy declare such notions about pets to be irrational and anthropomorphic, stating that animals have only the crudest form of thought and no sense of self at all. "If You Tame Me" challenges these entrenched views by demonstrating that the human experience with animals tells a different story.

Observations of animals playing, solving problems, and behaving fairly toward each other reveal a range of animal behaviors and show that the ethical treatment of animals is a significant issue.

In "Just a Dog", Arnold Arluke argues that animal cruelty must be understood in terms of social relationships rather than an individual's psychological problem or personality disorder. Arluke situates cruelty in actual situations where groups of people decide, on their own terms, what constitutes the wrongful harm of animals and how best to communicate their understanding to others. He captures how law enforcement agents, shelter workers, humane marketers, the general public, and animal abusers (or neglecters), make sense of animal cruelty. In each case, cruelty's meaning reflects the...

Argues that animal cruelty must be understood in terms of social relationships, as actively used by social groups to achieve sought-after identities. The author situates cruelty in situations where groups of people decide, on their own terms, what constitutes the wrongful harm of animals and how best to communicate their understanding to others.