Introduction

This chapter introduces the field of animal studies as an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor to understand the relationship humans have with other animals. That relationship is mapped into five major categories, reflected in the titles of each of the handbook’s five parts: “Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics and Public Policy”; “Animal Intentionality, Agency, and Reflexive Thinking”; “Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle and Sport”; “Animals in Cultural Representations”; and “Animals in Ecosystems.” The chapters in each part are summarized and key issues in the “animal question” are explicated. Chapter topics include animals in research, entertainment, law, political theory, public policy, agency, tourism and ecology. Concluding remarks include an appeal for altruistic coexistence for all beings in the earth’s ecosystem.

History and Animal Agencies

The argument that animals are agents is becoming ever more commonplace and forms part of a wider posthumanist intellectual project that reconsiders the power and role of nonhuman forces in both the past and the present. However, according agency to nonhumans raises significant methodological and theoretical issues. Informed by the approaches of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and others, this chapter offers an overview of the varied ways in which scholars have attributed agency to animals. After considering how animals have historically been denied agency, it explores how animals are agents imbued with a degree of intentionality. It then investigates how animal agents have physically shaped past and present societies and the problematic nonhuman-agency-as-resistance model. This typology is intended to show that animals possess agency, but that claims of animal agency need to be made carefully to better capture the hybrid world we inhabit.

Cetacean Cognition

Cetacean cognition at the level of the individual is complex and highly sophisticated and shares a number of characteristics with human and other great ape cognitive features. At the same time, in the social setting, capacities and propensities appear to emerge that are unique to cetaceans. This chapter explores cetacean cognition at the levels of the individual (language, pointing and reference, self-awareness, innovation and imitation, body image, self-recognition, self-imitation, and metacognition) and the social group (social complexity and networking, culture) and concludes that dolphins can only thrive as reflexive thinkers in a natural social group. Dolphins in captivity often suffer from psychological disturbances and abnormalities, poor health, and, ultimately, high mortality rates.

Animals as Legal Subjects

This chapter contrasts the dominant sense of the phrase “animals as legal subjects,” which minimizes fundamental protections for nonhuman animals, with alternative senses of the same phrase that focus on nonhuman animals’ realities, such as consciousness and intelligence. Support for the alternatives comes from developments within different domains, including legal education and society more broadly, where the meaning of such phrases as “legal person,” “legal personhood,” and “legal rights” is being debated regarding companion animals, wildlife, and many other forms of life. The upshot of the debate taking place over the status of nonhuman animals in law and broader phenomenon of human exceptionalism is a wide-ranging discussion of additional forms of animal protection.

Animals as Sentient Commodities

A discrepancy exists between the legal and perceived status of livestock. Legally, food animals are property, but their thing-like status is unstable and does not determine how they are perceived in practice. The extent to which food animals are regarded as commodities or sentient beings is therefore contextually contingent, oscillates, and is riddled with inconsistency. To understand livestock as a sentient commodity is to attend to, and (re)contextualize, the contradictory and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified animals in food animal productive contexts, and to how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Bringing to the fore the relatively mundane aspect of human-livestock relations not only upsets commonly held assumptions that productive animals are nothing more than mere commodities, it also highlights the non-productive aspects of stockpeople’s roles that have, to date, been typically overlooked or underexplored.

Animal Rights

The term “animal rights” is used broadly and often inconsistently in discussions of animal ethics. This chapter focuses on seven topics: (1) the pre-nineteenth-century view of animals as things and the emergence of the animal welfare position; (2) the work of Lewis Gompertz and of Henry Salt; (3) the Vegan Society, the Oxford Group, and Peter Singer’s animal liberation theory; (4) Tom Regan’s animal rights theory; (5) the abolitionist animal rights theory; (6) animal rights and the law; and (7) animal rights as a social movement. Herein, “rights” describes the protection of interests irrespective of consequences. The chapter’s position that veganism (not consuming any animal products), is a moral baseline follows from the widely-shared recognition that animals have moral value and are not merely things; veganism is the only rational response to that recognition.

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”

Based on case studies of tourism in the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica, this chapter articulates a concept of “extreme animal tourism” as a category of analysis. Suggesting that tourism deserves increased attention in animal studies, the chapter tracks the conditions of possibility for this growing sector of hyperprivileged tourism, as opposed to mass tourism. It is a form of tourism that promises those who can afford to pay for it exceptional proximity and the “glorious indifference” of the animals to human presence. The chapter argues that these animal encounters promote the idea of an “Edenic encounter” of mutual regard between humans and charismatic nonhuman animals. Animals, as avatars of the “wild,” are still largely seen as outside history, and as such are available to the tourist industry to do the continuing work of representing premodernity when encountered in remote locations. Analyzing this ideological work is an essential part of deepening our understanding of human relations with non-human animals

Animals in Political Theory

Western political theorists have largely ignored the animal question, assuming that animals have no place in our theories of democracy, citizenship, membership, sovereignty, and the public good. Conversely, animal ethicists have largely ignored political theory, assuming that we can theorize the moral status and moral rights of animals without drawing on the categories and concepts of political theory. This chapter traces the history of this separation between animals and political theory, examines the resulting intellectual blind spots for animal ethics, and reviews recent attempts to bring the two together. Situating animal rights within political theory has the potential to identify new models of justice in human-animal relations, and to open up new areas of scholarship and research.

Roaming Dogs

This chapter describes an original and much-needed approach to understanding worldwide efforts among disadvantaged communities to deal with roaming and unhealthy dogs. Rather than focus on the ways these efforts impact dogs and public health, as is typical of such interventions, we explore how people, too, are socially, psychologically, and economically affected by the dogs. More specifically, we examine the community impact that roaming or unhealthy dog populations can have, including negative or indifferent human-canine interactions; decreased quality of life because of dog nuisances, lack of safety, and disturbing encounters with injured, dead, or suffering dogs; weakened or fractured social ties; and economic losses from reduced tourism, livestock predation, and disease management. Lastly, we review how dog population management can have residual communitywide impact.

Misothery

Our worldview is made of animals. Our views of animals determine how we see nature—the living world as well as our part in it. Pre-agricultural peoples were intrigued by animals, their behaviors and powers. In these totemic societies, animals were seen as First Beings, ancestors, and there was a sense of kinship and continuity with the living world. Domestication upends that, and reduces animals from souls and powers to tools and commodities. Agrarian societies invented misothery and other cultural devices to give humans a sense of supremacy and a license to exploit animals and nature. Misothery imposes a negativity in our worldview; we despise too much of the living world—including our own animality, our sexuality, and our bodily functions. This is the root of all alienation.