Focusing on the history of one medical field--rehabilitation medicine--this book provides the first systematic analysis of the underlying forces that shape medical specialization, challenging traditional explanations of occupational specialization.

The Sacrifice provides a uniquely detailed account of the sociological context of animal experimentation. The authors provide a rich analysis of complex and changing role of the laboratory animal in the political and scientific culture of the United States and the United Kingdom. By understanding the interplay of the groups, the authors view the experimental controversy as an ongoing and constantly recreated set of social processes, not just a problem of morality.

Brute Force looks at people having the most contact with everyday animal abuse- humane law enforcement officers who are charged with enforcing anti-cruelty statutes. The author spent one year studying 30 animal cops and dispatchers in two large cities. They see themselves as a power for the helpless, a voice for the mute. On-the-job experience changes this view. Rather than fighting the good fight against egregious cases of cruelty, they are overwhelmed with complaints that are ambiguous and must be stretched to qualify as legally defined abuse or with complaints barking dogs or thin pets...

What is it about Western society, ask the authors, that makes it possible for people to express great affection for animals as sentient creatures and simultaneously turn a blind eye to the most callous behavior toward them? Animals are sold as expensive commodities, used as food and clothing, killed as vermin and hunted for sport. But they also are treated as members of the family, used as the cause celebre of social movements, and made the subject of art, film and poetry. In this book, the people who work with the animals and live through them talk to the authors about the strategies they...

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.

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.

From fairy tales to photography, nowhere is the complexity of human-animal relationships more apparent than in the creative arts. Art illuminates the nature and significance of animals in modern, Western thought, capturing the complicated union that has long existed between the animal kingdom and us. In Beauty and the Beast, authors Arluke and Bogdan explore this relationship through the unique lens of photo postcards. This visual medium offers an enormous and relatively untapped archive to compelling document their subject."

The Photographed Cat presents readers with an examination of how human-cat relationships are depicted in early twentieth-century photography. Examining this relationship from the perspective of the photographer and the human subjects who made or appear in these photographs, Arluke and Rolfe show that the cat photographs are valuable windows into sets of cultural values that may have existed at the time.