"Confronting Cruelty" is a sociological study of the animal rights movement in the United States, England and Australia. Social movement theory is used to analyse animal cruelty and how and why activists seek to end it in their various campaigns.

This edited volume documents the presence and types of Nature discourse that emerge during conflicts between people over wildlife. This collection of qualitative case studies demonstrates how social groups create opposing symbolic meanings of Nature and highlights the way in which the successful imposition of those meanings affects wildlife, people generally, and management professionals. Together, the chapters illustrate the significant, untapped utility of constructionist approaches for understanding social conflict over wildlife issues and for managing natural resources in a way that...

In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an 'animal turn', an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals showcases original explorations of the 'animal turn' by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at...

This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society." The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradation through greyhound gambling, to anxieties over social status reflected through breed classifications, to social rebellion through resistance to the...

The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history...

This volume introduces the most important ideas in animal ethics and builds on a critical dialogue emerging at the intersection of animal rights, environmental ethics, and religious studies. In search of Consistency examines the work of influential scholars Tom Regan (animal rights), Peter Singer (utilitarian ethics), Andrew Linzey (theologian), and Paul Taylor (environmental ethics), and explores ethics and animals across six world religions (Indigenous faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). In Search of Consistency sheds light on 'the sanctity of life'...

Speaking of Animals consists of a linked series of thirteen essays about subjects ranging from deciding to castrate a dog, evaluating recent dog memoirs, observing animals in Spain, reading about the training of big cats, watching Animal Planet, and being unable to kill a racoon in Texas. So often personal, even while analyzing novels such as Water for Elephants or movies such as Giant or Into the Wild, the essays offer both an implicit critique and a continuation of recent discursive trends in animal studies, whose language is too haplessly abstracted from the...

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of animal resistance to human behaviors, and considering the ways the presence of animals refracts human notions like agency and species.

Drawing on current trends in post-modernism and post-humanism this books offers a challenge to current ways of thinking, theorising and talking about animals and humanimal relations

Writings from 1492 to 1826 reveal that the history of animals in the Spanish empire transcended the bullfight. The early modern Spanish empire was shaped by its animal actors, and authors from Cervantes to the local officials who wrote the relaciones geograficas were aware of this. Nonhuman animals provided food, clothing, labor, entertainment and companionship. Functioning as allegories of human behavior, nonhuman animals were perceived by Spanish and Amerindian authors alike as bearing some relationship to humans. On occasion, they even were appreciated as unique and fascinating beings....