Human-Animal Relations

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.

In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a consideration of how political economy shapes the conditions for bioethical discourse (Twine Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8(3):285-295, 2005; International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 16(3):1-18, 2007, 2010). Part of my argument around bioethical dualist ontology is to critique the assumption of a division between the “medical” (human) and “agricultural” (nonhuman) and to show various ways in which they are interrelated. I deepen this analysis with a focus on transnational pharmaceutical companies, with specific attention to their role in enhancing agricultural production through animal drug administration. I employ the topical case of antibiotics in order to speak to current debates in not only the interdisciplinary field of bioethics but also that of animal studies. More generally, the animal-industrial complex (Twine Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10(1):12-39, 2012) is underlined as a highly relevant bioethical object that deserves more conceptual and empirical attention.

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This is a draft of the introductory chapter of a book-in-progress entitled Lizard, which has been contracted for publication in the Animal series of Reaktion Books in London. It discusses the changing definitions of "lizard" throughout history, and the  methodological difficulties, together with their philosophical foundation, involved in settling on a single definition today.  These are compared with the problems of settling on a single meaning for "humankind." It concludes that the meaning of "lizard" cannot be fixed, and the animal may only be understood within the context of an evolving tradition. I would be very interested in any comments or suggestions.

Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia inscribed UNESCO world cultural heritage sites in 2008. Under the city's honor, swiftlet farming was one of the trickiest issues in the inner city. The swiftlet is a species of birds that use their saliva to make nests in humans' houses. These birds' nests can be cooked into soup considered a delicacy, making a lucrative business in Chinese food culture. Chinese Malaysian community started swiftlet farming systematically in the 1990s, when new birds' houses appeared across Malaysia, including Georgetown. In 2008, when Georgetown became a cultural heritage, controversies soon arose around bird farming in this city, and swiftlet farming was banned in order to improve the city for locals and tourist, and to preserve the old homes. Using 4 months of fieldwork by tracing these controversies, this study applies animal geography to demonstrate that the binaries of nature and culture, humans and animals, wild and domestication, are blurred, and the two things typically coexist in borderlands. This essay enables researchers to rethink how human-animal borderlands renew the local imagination for world cultural heritage and shape the meaning of heritage construction within daily practice.

Le zoonosi contemporanee ci costringono a porci una domanda che già gli antichi pensatori si erano posti più o meno esplicitamente. Le risposte sono spiazzanti e per molti versi attuali: mangiamo gli animali perché non siamo dèi (e quindi perché non siamo mai stati – o non siamo più – puri) o perché, semplicemente, siamo onnivori. Per Aristotele, nello specifico, mangiamo gli animali perché le tecniche a nostra disposizione ce lo permettono, anche se in ciò che ci viene permesso – secondo lui – dovrebbe sempre esserci una misura.

ABSTRACT

Social relationships guide humans’ and great apes’ behaviors with conspecifics. Inter-individual relationships, based on shared social history, guide behaviors with familiar others; “generalized” relationships, based on the history of interactions with relevant classes of individuals, may guide behavior with unfamiliar others. On that basis, Hosey (2008) proposed that different human-animal relationships (HARs) guide zoo primates’ behaviors with familiar and unfamiliar humans. HARs are characterized as positive, neutral, or negative based on individual primates’ confidence, indifference, or fear with humans and their acceptance, ignoring, or avoidance human proximity and contact. I conducted the first systematic analysis of HARs with orangutans (Pongo abelii) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at Toronto Zoo, Toronto, Canada by studying ape-initiated human-directed behaviors (HDBs). MANOVAs showed that human familiarity, ape age, and ape species each independently predicted affiliative HDBs (aHDBs). aHDB rates and durations were significantly higher for familiar versus unfamiliar humans [Pillai’s Trace = 0.69, F (3,18) = 13.32, p<0.01],  immature versus adult apes [Pillai’s Trace = 0.50, F (3,18) = 5.90, p=0.01], and orangutans versus gorillas [Pillai’s Trace = 0.45, F (3,18) = 4.85, p=0.01]. aHDB patterns suggest that apes used human familiarity to guide ape-human interactions, were consistent with positive and neutral/negative HARs with familiar and unfamiliar humans respectively, and suggest that negative, stressful interactions typically reported in visitor effect studies represent only one aspect of zoo ape-human interaction.

In emphasizing equivalences with conceptions of evil eye, accounts of Ethiopian buda understate the capacity of these beings to transform into hyenas. The case study presented here highlights how this element of the buda belief reveals a social realm that extends beyond the strictly human.

Our storybooks are full of lizards, but we usually call them something else—dragons, serpents, dinosaurs or monsters. These stories vastly increase their size, bestow wings upon them, make them exhale flame, and endow them with magical powers. Lizards stimulate the human imagination unlike most other animals, despite generally being small, soundless, and hidden from sight in burrows, treetops, and crevices. They can blend into a vast range of environments, from rocky coasts to deserts to rain forests. Their fluid motion can make us think of water, while their curvilinear form suggests vegetation. Their stillness suggests death, while their sudden arousal is like resurrection. This delightful book gives lizards their due, demonstrating how the story of lizards is interwoven with the history of human imagination. Boria Sax considers the lizard as a sensual being—a symbol, a myth, a product of evolution and an aesthetic form. He describes the diversity of lizards and traces the representation of the reptile in cultures including those of pre-conquest Australia, the Quiché Maya, Mughal India, and central Africa. Illustrated throughout with beguiling images, Lizard is a unique and often surprising introduction to a popular but little-understood reptile.

Menageries and zoological gardens have always served different publics, often several at once, and have also been places for doing science with animals. This chapter begins by outlining the emergence of modern zoological gardens as living natural history museums and sites of urban popular culture during the nineteenth century. The second section discusses the radical innovation introduced by Carl Hagenbeck around 1900, asking whether and how the open, apparently cage-less design that he patented in 1896 can be regarded as science-based, and what kind of science actually took place in his ‘animal park.’ The third section very briefly surveys continuities and changes in zoos’ cultural funtion, along with the emergence of two new zoo-related disciplines, ethology and zoo biology, during the twentieth century. The final section discusses responses by zoos to the challenges from the environmental and animal rights movements since the last third of the twentieth century.

The greatest cause of human disease is human culture, and the solution is to change that culture and the way we live. It has nothing to do with animals. A medical industry dedicated to animal research is corrupted by cruelty and cannot be a truly healing profession.

This chapter highlights several criticisms of zoos, then provides a vision for new zoos: “nooz.” Offering a new name to these institutions makes a clear break from the old model, which is fundamentally exploitative. The common denominator between zoos and nooz is that both foster nonhumans who are neither domestic pets nor farmed animals—they keep “wild” animals. Nooz are nonexploitative, benevolent, and are designed for nonhumans, to provide safe-haven for those individuals who have been misused by zoos or science, or injured by humans. This essay also explores “benevolent” reasons for keeping nonhuman animals in zoos, such as captive breeding programs and injured wildlife, and acceptable parameters for nooz, including such topics as retribution for previous exploitation and the problem of carnivory.

This paper extends recent work that has called for greater attention to be paid to nonhuman difference. The burgeoning animal geographies literature has been very successful in dissecting the concept of ‘nature’ and in examining the myriad ways in which animal and human lives are intertwined. However, its focus is more often on collectivities, such as species and herds, than on individual animals. Through the brief case study of an octopus in The Deep, an aquarium in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK, the paper draws on and develops recently promoted notions of responsible anthropomorphism. It argues that future work might usefully pay greater attention to the lived experience of individual animals, and that further emphasis should be given to non-mammalian life forms. Doing so might not only shed light on these creatures' encounters with humans, but also help to give a greater sense of their lives beyond these direct encounters, challenging understandings of what it means to be ‘animal’.

This paper advocates a social approach to domestic animals in prehistory, one which situates herding practices in their (human) social context while also recognising the status of animals of social beings in their own right. Domestic animals, it is argued, represent sentient property in the sense that despite being incorporated as ‘objects’ into property relations between humans they remain subjects whose social world overlaps with that of humans. This tension between the status of domestic animals as subject and as object is played out in highly context-specific ways, being linked both to human social organisation and to material/geographical aspects of herding practices. These ideas are used to develop a model for the role of cattle in a process of social change that took place during the later Neolithic Vinča period in the central Balkans.

"KEYWORDS:
non-human animals, speciesism, animal rights, Tom Regan, utilitarianism, consequentialism, Peter Singer, animal liberation.

Abstract::
Este libro milita en el campo de los partidarios de la existencia de deberes hacia los animales no humanos. Ofrécenos una descripción histórica de cómo ha ido evolucionando la actitud de nuestras sociedades con relación al tratamiento de los no humanos. En esa descripción hay referencias al debate filosófico reciente. Desde el punto de vista teorético, el libro es un poco deficiente en su discusión del especismo, pues prefiere no abogar por la existencia de derechos de los animales, optando por una postura intermedia entre aquellos filósofos como Tom Regan que afirman tales derechos y quienes proponen un enfoque utilitarista o al menos consecuencialista, como Peter Singer. Otra debilidad teorética del libro es su abstención de discutir en detalle los argumentos de los adversarios del movimiento de liberación animal."

This work is the result of an ethnographic research made during the period from September 2018 to March 2019 with primatologists, and aims to contribute to the increasing debate about the Anthropology of Science and Human-animal relations. The research was carried out in the Parque Nacional de Brasilia, also known as Água Mineral, which is a unit of conservation  and a place open to visitation that hosts diverse species of the Brazilian Cerrado, including the bearded capuchin monkey (Sapajus libidinosus). The daily encounter between humans (visitors, scientists and servers) and the group of bearded capuchin monkeys already famous for interacting with the people and stealing food from visitors in the park's swimming pool areas allows and promotes the most diverse types of mutual interactions. The contact among the agents of this relationship causes specific behaviors, techniques and procedures to be triggered and constantly transformed with contact, for example, scientific techniques, among scientists; the extreme protection of personal objects and foods, among visitors, and variations in monkey behavior. I also analyze the process of primatological making, the techniques and methodologies in the phases of recognition, naming, habituation, between scientists and the monkey group. In light of the classic debate about nature and culture, I discuss possible approaches between biology and anthropology.

Keywords: Anthropology of Science; Human-animal relations; Parque Nacional de Brasília; Bearded capuchin monkeys; Primatologists.

In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society. I will begin by briefly introducing the study of food in general within the social sciences, setting a framework of reference for the exploration of meat specifically. In
examining meat I will firstly set the context by turning to the global livestock sector and its relationship with the environment, before probing meat’s physical properties and their
ensuing symbolism, which, as we will see, is the basic foundation for meat’s high culinary and dietetic value in our culture. I will then continue to investigate meat’s symbolism by
asking what place, if any, may meat hold within our wider cultural cosmology, within our systems of social and moral ideas, before drawing some conclusions.

In a context of stark opposition between supporters and opponents to the wolf, the extent to which this particular predator is dangerous for humans is still an open question.
What lies beneath the negative perception of the wolf?
What should be the historian's contribution, based on historical sources and historical methods?
Thanks to a database of 4,700 cases of wolf attacks on human having occurred in France between 1580 and 1880, it is now possible to grasp the chronological evolution and spatial evolution of wolf related risks.
Undeniably real, though mostly belonging to a remote past, and statistically rare, though anthropologically intolerable, these attacks point to two opposite groups, predatory wolves occasionally preying on humans on one hand, rabid wolves striking indiscriminately a whole population on the other.
The attacks of the first kind occurred regularly in an unsafe environment, and gave rise to tales of "Ferocious Beasts" in times of dramatic crisis (1594-1600, 1691-1694, 1746-1750, 1764-1767, 1814-1819).
The second kind was spatially and chronologically less widespread, but sowed the seeds of mass hysteria, all the more persistent since the underlying sickness it forebode remained without a cure before the last third of the 20th century.
The conclusion between these two different realities gave Canis Lupus its negative aura, significantly dimmed recently however since it has entirely lost its material basis, at least in France.

With the help of archaeology and archaeozoology, art and image studies and with an analysis of written sources, the history of our domestic animals can be traced from their wild ancestors over their domestication and their further developments. Dogs as the oldest domesticated animals play a particular role: Like no other domesticated animal, they have centred on humans and are able to understand human facial expressions and gestures. The common history of humans and dogs goes back to the Palaeolithic whereas the cat which is the most popular companion animal in many European countries today was domesticated only many thousand years later. The living together of humans and dogs resp. cats in prehistoric and protohistoric times is complex and characterized by adoration as well as rejection, which has an impact on our society even today.

The selkie has enjoyed a revival of interest in popular culture following the release of the 2014 animated film Song of the Sea. This session will focus on David Thomson's neglected but enchanting The People of the Sea (1954), which recounts Thomson's journey around the Scottish Isles and the west of Ireland in search of selkie folklore. Travelling in the late 1940s, Thomson encounters a world in flux, with the arrival of council houses, sanitary officers, television, and, crucially, the new materials of paraffin and rubber rendering the seal-killing trade obsolete. Yet, as Thomson finds, selkie stories quietly persist. This talk examines the insights these stories might offer into economic transitions, understandings of human-nonhuman relationships, and the places of water and water creatures in myth and folklore.

University of Essex Myth Studies Group, February 2019.

Cet article est une invitation à discuter la place de la science dans l'étude des relations anthropozoologiques. Nous soutenons que la « science », en tant qu'elle fait partie du fond culturel commun de l'Occident contemporain, doit être prise en compte par qui-conque prétend documenter ce qui se joue « ici et maintenant » dans nos rapports aux ani-maux. Dans la lignée de la sociologie des sciences, nous suggérons que les manières qu'ont les scientifiques de penser le monde animal, de mobiliser les êtres animaux dans leurs pra-tiques et de produire des énoncés à leur propos, pourraient constituer autant d'objets pour une approche socio-anthropologique de ces rapports. Le propos est illustré par la présen-tation d'un travail bibliographique mené autour des Interactions avec l'Animal à but Thé-rapeutique. À travers l'analyse du développement de ce champ de recherche nouveau, nous avons décelé plusieurs « énoncés animaux » à l'oeuvre en son sein, chacun lié à des cultures épistémiques particulières. Mots clés : sociologie des relations anthropozoologiques, sociologie des sciences, thérapies assistées par l'animal, cultures épistémiques. Abstract : This paper is an invitation to discuss the role of science and scientific work in the studies of human/animal relationships. We argue that " science " , as a part of Western cultural background, has to be taken seriously into account if one wants to deeply understand what is at stake in our " here and now " relationships with animals. With a Science Studies approach, we suggest that the way science and scientists think about animals, use them in their work and write about them, might be explored by sociological animal studies. We illustrate the discussion using the example of Human-Animal Interactions in Health Care practices. Through a bibliographical research, we document the birth and growth of a new scientific field interested in the use of interactions with animals to improve human

New roles for dogs and humans
Based on the archaeological finds during the Neolithic we interpret the relationship between humans and their dogs to have significantly changed. People gained an increased understanding of the dog's different, unique properties. The dogs were stimulated by the work and collaboration, and probably developed mentally. Maybe, dogs specialized in different tasks?
The dogs were adapted to the new activities that occurred during this time. Depending on the daily life and needs, we conclude thus that dogs collaborated in various ways with the people. Certainly, watching dogs were
needed as well as good hunting dogs for different kinds of tracking down and hunting. Field mouses and mice were a constant threat to human storages of both the new, grown corn and gathered plants. The arable fields were fenced during this time and the domesticated animals were held outside. Having herding dogs to collect and keep the livestock assembled did the work for the pastoralists much easier. Hunting dogs were as necessary and important as before.

El texto ofrece una observación sobre la asimilación iconográfica del uso bélico de animales, usando como ejemplo paradigmático el proyecto Bat Bomb (oficialmente X-Ray) desarrollado durante la segunda guerra mundial y que tuvo un cierto efecto en la cultura popular asociado a la iconografía del murciélago y la sombra audiovisual del personaje de Batman creado por Bill Finger y Bob Kane.


The text offers an observation on the iconographic assimilation of the warlike use of animals, using as a paradigmatic example the Bat Bomb project (officially X-Ray) developed during the Second World War and that had a certain effect on the popular culture associated with the iconography of the bat and the audiovisual shadow of the Batman character created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane.