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Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde Jan 2019

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors.


Provocations From The Field - Derangement And Resistance: Reflections From Under The Glare Of An Angry Emu, Pattrice Jones Jan 2019

Provocations From The Field - Derangement And Resistance: Reflections From Under The Glare Of An Angry Emu, Pattrice Jones

Animal Studies Journal

The situations of emus may illuminate the maladies of human societies. From the colonialism that led Europeans to tamper with Australian ecosystems through the militarism that mandated the Great Emu War of 1932 to the consumer capitalism that sparked a global market for ‘exotic’ emus and their products, habits of belief and behaviour that hurt humans have wreaked havoc on emus. Literally de-ranged, emus abroad today endure all of the estrangements of émigrés in addition to the frustrations and sorrows of captivity. In Australia, free emus struggle to survive as climate change parches already diminished and polluted habitats. We have …


Is There A Turtle In This Text? Animals In The Internet Of Robots And Things, Nicola J. Evans, Alison Rotha Moore Jan 2019

Is There A Turtle In This Text? Animals In The Internet Of Robots And Things, Nicola J. Evans, Alison Rotha Moore

Animal Studies Journal

This essay looks at the paradigm shift underway in human relations with artefacts from an animal studies perspective. As the Internet of Things (IoT) produces objects that are smart, sensate and agentive, how does this impact the continuing struggle for recognition of these same qualities in nonhuman animals? As humans acquire new digital companions in the form of therapeutic robots, what happens to perceptions of other ‘companion species’? Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous in IoT discourse as researchers draw on animal metaphors, models and analogies to think through the social and ethical implications of these new technologies. Focusing on representative texts …


Kaimangatanga: Maori Perspectives On Veganism And Plant-Based Kai, Kirsty Dunn Jan 2019

Kaimangatanga: Maori Perspectives On Veganism And Plant-Based Kai, Kirsty Dunn

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper – drawing from a range of food blogs and social media pages – I consider both the ways in which Māori writers discuss some of the barriers and cultural conflicts experienced within the realm of vegan ethics, as well as their perspectives on various facets of Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) such as kaitiakitanga (guardianship), hauora (holistic health and wellbeing), and rangatiratanga (sovereignty) which have influenced their attitudes and approaches towards veganism and plant-based diets. I argue that these diverse perspectives provide a valuable means of analysing and critiquing both the dominant ethics and attitudes which …


Remembering The Huia: Extinction And Nostalgia In A Bird World, Cameron Boyle Jan 2019

Remembering The Huia: Extinction And Nostalgia In A Bird World, Cameron Boyle

Animal Studies Journal

This paper examines the role of nostalgia in practices of remembering the Huia, an extinct bird endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. It suggests that nostalgia for the Huia specifically, and New Zealand's indigenous birds more generally, has occurred as both restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. It argues that the former problematically looks to recreate a past world in which birds flourished. In contrast, the paintings of Bill Hammond and the sound art of Sally Ann McIntyre are drawn on to explore the potential of reflective nostalgia for remembering the Huia, and New Zealand's extinct indigenous birds more generally, in a …


Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait Jan 2019

Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

Space on Par is a short performance text that uses gentle humour to communicate an alternative perspective on how open space is used by humans and nonhuman animals, in this instance a golf course. If playing golf for enjoyment is puzzling behaviour for a nonhuman observer, it can emphasise human refusal to recognise the physical and spatial rights of other species and their needs for survival. The effort to educate about the treatment of animals can include theatrical characters who blur the species identities to make a point, and Space on Par inverts the invisibility of the gaze of the …


Greyhounds And Racing Industry Participants: A Look At The New South Wales Greyhound Racing Community, Justine Groizard Jan 2019

Greyhounds And Racing Industry Participants: A Look At The New South Wales Greyhound Racing Community, Justine Groizard

Animal Studies Journal

Subsequent to the exposure of live baiting and animal cruelty within the NSW greyhound racing industry in 2015, a public debate emerged about animal welfare, oppression and exploitation. It resulted in a community outcry, an inquiry into live baiting and animal welfare within the industry and a proposed ban of greyhound racing in the state of NSW. Whilst the proposed ban of greyhound racing was celebrated amongst animal activists, it was met with a mixture of sadness, shock and animosity from people from within the industry. Many of the people within the greyhound racing community felt stigmatised and discriminated against, …


If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina Jan 2019

If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores how concern about animal welfare and animal rights relates to ecological citizenship by discussing student assignments written about the Dutch Party for Animals or PvdD. ‘Animal welfare’, ‘animal rights’, and ‘ecological citizenship’ perspectives offer insights into strategic choices of eco-representatives and animal rights/welfare advocates as well as educators. The assignments balance animal issues with socio-economic ones, explore the relationship between sustainability and ethics, and attribute responsibility for unsustainable or unethical practices. Analysis of student assignments reveals nuanced positions on the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism continuum, showing students’ ability to critically rethink their place within larger environmental systems. Some students demonstrated …


‘Animals Are Their Best Advocates’: Interspecies Relations, Embodied Actions, And Entangled Activism, Gonzalo Villanueva Jan 2019

‘Animals Are Their Best Advocates’: Interspecies Relations, Embodied Actions, And Entangled Activism, Gonzalo Villanueva

Animal Studies Journal

Since 1986, the Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) has sought to ban the practice of recreational duck hunting across Australia. Campaigners have developed techniques to disrupt shooters, rescue injured water birds, and gain media coverage. The campaign is underpinned by embodied processes that engage empathy, emotion, affect, and cognition. Seeking to understand human-animal interrelations, I conducted multispecies autoethnographic research, during which I participated as an activist-scholar in the anti-duck shooting campaign for nearly three months. Drawing on feminist philosopher Lori Gruen and others, this article conceptualises ‘entangled activism’ and argues that embodied actions arise from interspecies interrelations. This article demonstrates …


[Review] Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg And Cecilia Åsberg, Editors, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies Of Human-Animal Relations. Routledge, 2018. 276pp, Zoei Sutton Jan 2019

[Review] Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg And Cecilia Åsberg, Editors, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies Of Human-Animal Relations. Routledge, 2018. 276pp, Zoei Sutton

Animal Studies Journal

It’s 2016 and rats are ‘taking over’ in Malmö, Sweden. Forced out of the sewers by flooding, the sight of usually-hidden rats now visible on streets and playgrounds (not to mention their dead bodies in the river) has humans calling for sanitation through eradication to ‘restore’ social order. In daring to exist ‘out of place’ in their search for food the rats ‘turn from tolerated, illegitimate, but invisible waste-workers, to ‘trash animals’ (1). This dramatic scene which opens Animal Places ‘shows how space, place and human-animal relations intersect, thereby producing diversity of effect, boundary work and political action’ (1). Building …


[Review] James Hevia, Animal Labor And Colonial Warfare. Chicago University Press, 2018. 328pp, Peta Tait Jan 2019

[Review] James Hevia, Animal Labor And Colonial Warfare. Chicago University Press, 2018. 328pp, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

James Hevia’s very accomplished history, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare, actually contains more than one history. A history of the military’s reliance on nonhuman animal (animal) labour emerges from a history of the administrative procedures of a British colonial regime. Some years ago, I went searching for this type of animal history to contextualize colonial war re-enactments with circus and menagerie animals. Hevia provides statistical information about the animals involved in colonial military ventures, breaking down the figures by species and compiling total numbers and percentages. He develops an in-depth analysis of the monumental scale of animal deployment – the …


Many Happy Returns: Eradication, Re-Wilding And The Case Of Lord Howe Island, Helen Tiffin Jan 2019

Many Happy Returns: Eradication, Re-Wilding And The Case Of Lord Howe Island, Helen Tiffin

Animal Studies Journal

Colonialist concepts continue to drive Parks and Wildlife/ Conservation Department policies and practices in Australia and other settler colonies. In the case of Australia, returning the country to its pre- European invasion (pristine) condition becomes policy dictate, even where the often draconian implementations of these parameters prove unsuitable or even dangerous. And the notion of restoring Australian ecosystems to their pre-1788 condition is closely linked to the fetishisation of species purity. Australia has one of the world's highest extinction rates, and conservation of what remains is obviously of paramount importance. But the emphasis on eradication of so-called ‘pest’ species can …


Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde Jan 2019

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors.


Introduction: New Directions In Animal Advocacy, Dinesh Wadiwel, Peter Chen Jan 2019

Introduction: New Directions In Animal Advocacy, Dinesh Wadiwel, Peter Chen

Animal Studies Journal

The ‘political turn’ in animal studies (see Milligan, Boyer et al.; Garner and O’Sullivan; Cavalieri ‘Animal Liberation: A Political Perspective’) has offered some unique trajectories for realising improvements for animals. Where traditional animal ethics was dominated by a focus on normative concerns for how humans should act with respect to animals, the recent movement towards politics has effected a shift in favour of thinking about how human-animal relations are shaped by institutions, political structures and actors, the role of the state and private governance, power relations and problems of strategy. At least one benefit of this analysis is that it …


Provocations From The Field: Animals And The War On Drugs, C. Lou Hamilton Jan 2019

Provocations From The Field: Animals And The War On Drugs, C. Lou Hamilton

Animal Studies Journal

The international war on drugs has been roundly criticised by drug reformers as economically costly, ineffective and catastrophic for human rights and communities. This essay reflects on some of the interconnections between the war on drugs’ attacks on vulnerable people and environments, and the vulnerability of other species. I argue that ending the war on drugs is an animal justice issue due to the direct and indirect (but not unforeseeable) impacts of ‘narco’ economics and militarised responses to the production and distribution of illegal drugs.


Animal Liberation: Pathways To Politics, Paola Cavalieri Jan 2019

Animal Liberation: Pathways To Politics, Paola Cavalieri

Animal Studies Journal

After making its appearance in analytic moral philosophy at the beginning the 1970s, the animal cause in its modern form – that is, as a challenge to human supremacism and as a defense of interspecies egalitarianism – is recently undergoing a profound change thanks to the advent of new political approaches. Politics now dominates the intellectual scene in at least three main forms: as the devising of new social arrangements, as a critique of the prevailing order, and as an emancipatory project. It will lie with the contemporary animal liberation movement to explore these alternatives in order to definitely assert …


On The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Alliance Politics For Animal Liberation: A Response To Paola Cavalieri, Matthew Calarco Jan 2019

On The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Alliance Politics For Animal Liberation: A Response To Paola Cavalieri, Matthew Calarco

Animal Studies Journal

Paola Cavalieri’s article provides an incisive account of the current state of affairs in pro-animal discourse and activism. Taking her bearings from a radical pro-animal commitment to interspecies egalitarianism, Cavalieri expertly describes the shift that has taken place over the past decade from a focus on an ethics of personal purity to a politics of structural change. She correctly underscores the point that an individualistic ethic that prioritizes changes in personal consumption is ultimately unable to effect the kinds of widespread institutional change necessary to address and ameliorate the currently intolerable situation faced by billions of domesticated and wild animals. …


Animal Abuse And Advocating For The Carceral: Critiquing Animal Abuse Registries, Jessica Ison Jan 2019

Animal Abuse And Advocating For The Carceral: Critiquing Animal Abuse Registries, Jessica Ison

Animal Studies Journal

Animal activism has an increasing focus on carceral based punishment that argues for animal abuse to be harshly prosecuted. One of the emerging trends is advocating for Animal Abuse Registries similar to the US-style of Sex Offender Registry. This paper challenges the effectiveness and suitability of these Animal Abuse Registries through a critical reflection on Sex Offender Registries. As a result of this, Animal Abuse Registries are extrapolated to be ineffective and perhaps damaging to animals and animal advocacy. The contention that arises from this paper is what constitutes animal cruelty in a society that has industrial slaughter? Further, the …


The Cow Project: Analytical And Representational Dilemmas Of Dairy Farmers’ Conceptions Of Cruelty And Kindness, Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser Jan 2019

The Cow Project: Analytical And Representational Dilemmas Of Dairy Farmers’ Conceptions Of Cruelty And Kindness, Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser

Animal Studies Journal

This paper explores different conceptions of cruelty and kindness as they relate to the Australian dairy industry. Findings are drawn from the Dairy Farming Wellbeing Project: 2017- 18, which we affectionately call The Cow Project (also see thecowproject.com.au).1 Funded by Animals Australia, this study was designed to consider the many issues affecting the health and wellbeing of dairy farmers, their families, cows, calves, and to a more limited extent, bulls. The primary objective was to investigate whether farmers themselves identified (potential) links between their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their farmed animals. A total of 29 qualitative interviews were …


Disturbing Animals In A Christian Perspective: Re/Considering Sacrifice, Incarnation And Divine Animality, Nekeisha Alayna Alexis Jan 2019

Disturbing Animals In A Christian Perspective: Re/Considering Sacrifice, Incarnation And Divine Animality, Nekeisha Alayna Alexis

Animal Studies Journal

What does Christianity say about other animals? For many people, Jesus-followers and others alike, this is a settled question. The tradition’s long and ongoing history of justifying, participating in and even encouraging indiscriminate violence against other animals makes it one of, if not the most, anti-animal religions. But is it the case that Christianity has little to no intrinsic resources to denounce and dismantle systemic and individual cruelty toward other creatures? Is a biblically grounded approach to other animals’ self-determination and thriving really a lost cause? This essay argues from an Anabaptist/Mennonite theological orientation influenced by various anti-oppression politics that …


‘Fishing For Fun’: The Politics Of Recreational Fishing, Dinesh Wadiwel Jan 2019

‘Fishing For Fun’: The Politics Of Recreational Fishing, Dinesh Wadiwel

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, I will seek to understand the peculiar politics of recreational fishing. While I will draw from international research, my focus here will be the problem as it is understood within Australia, a wealthy nation with high standards of living and relatively high participation rates in recreational fishing. The paper explores the conceptual issues that surround how we understand and frame recreational fishing as a form of hunting, drawing on Australian research to understand the extent and characteristics of this enterprise. The second section explores the institutional and epistemic dimensions of recreational fishing. I finally examine how animal …


The Fate Of The Illegible Animal: The Case Of The Australian Wild Donkey, Danielle Celermajer, Arian Wallach Jan 2019

The Fate Of The Illegible Animal: The Case Of The Australian Wild Donkey, Danielle Celermajer, Arian Wallach

Animal Studies Journal

The entanglement of donkey and human lives is both long and multidimensional, woven with the threads of economic inter-dependence, cultural and religious significance, militarism, friendship, ideas about and programs of conservation, and traditional Chinese medicine turned into a global industry. In this paper, we discuss four eras of entanglement of wild donkeys in Australia. During the first, now past, domesticated donkeys were exploited workers in the colonial project. In the second, present era, most Australian donkeys are unwanted wild animals, declared wildlife pests subject to mass eradication for conservation and livestock production. In the third emerging era donkeys are positioned …


[Review] Vicki Hutton, A Reason To Live: Hiv And Animal Companions. Purdue University Press, 2019. 257pp, Wendy Woodward Jan 2019

[Review] Vicki Hutton, A Reason To Live: Hiv And Animal Companions. Purdue University Press, 2019. 257pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

In 2012, Vicki Hutton interviewed eleven men in Australia who had contracted HIV. The interviews focused on the healing effects of living with ‘companion animals’, some of whom attended the interviews. Hutton illustrates repeatedly how these animals embodied a reason for HIV survivors to live in spite of the repercussions of the disease they suffered – stigma, social alienation and often traumatic treatments. Caring for an animal inspired the human to choose life over succumbing to death. Statistics can only overwhelm but meeting these men and their animals personalises the tragedies of contracting HIV – particularly for those who became …


[Review] Dan Wylie, Death And Compassion: The Elephant In Southern African Literature, Wits University Press, 2018. Ix + 267, John Simons Jan 2019

[Review] Dan Wylie, Death And Compassion: The Elephant In Southern African Literature, Wits University Press, 2018. Ix + 267, John Simons

Animal Studies Journal

Thirty-seven years ago, I was doing what many young university lecturers did at the time: supplementing my income by moonlighting during the summer vacation. The work in this case was a contract from the British Council to run creative writing workshops for trainee teachers in various colleges around the recently minted but already unhappy state of Zimbabwe. In one of these places there was a waterhole not far from where I was staying and I was able to wander out during the brief African twilight, before the swift onset of a night so dark it was actually impossible to see …


First Dog, Last Dog: New Intertextual Short Fictions About Canis Lupus Familiaris, A. Frances Johnson Jan 2019

First Dog, Last Dog: New Intertextual Short Fictions About Canis Lupus Familiaris, A. Frances Johnson

Animal Studies Journal

The double short story sequence ‘First Dog, Last Dog’ explores interdependencies between domesticated animals and humans. The first story, ‘The Death of the First Dog’, re-reads and quotes from Homer’s The Odyssey and the encounter between Odysseus and his aged hunting dog Argos. Its companion piece, ‘The Carrying’, is set in a speculative future. Exploiting qualities of the Borghesian fable, both tales are interspecies tales of love and loss. This work was read at the 2018 Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Animal Church’ event curated by Dr Laura McKay.


Life And Death With Horses: Gillian Mears’ Novel Foal’S Bread, Deborah Wardle Jan 2019

Life And Death With Horses: Gillian Mears’ Novel Foal’S Bread, Deborah Wardle

Animal Studies Journal

Gillian Mears’ novel Foal’s Bread (2011) invites an examination of horses in fiction, opening a platform for exploring the horse in Australian literature from a zoocritical perspective. This paper argues that writing horses into stories involves addressing, indeed flouting the ‘sin’ of anthropomorphism. The problems and paradoxes of ascribing subjectivity to fictional equine characters are discussed. The death of the main equine character, Magpie, is framed as a site of disregard, an example of human disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals. Using excerpts from the award-wining novel, Foal’s Bread, as well as examples from other equine literature, the …


[Review] Joshua Lobb, The Flight Of Birds. Sydney University Press, 2019. 322pp, Alex Lockwood Jan 2019

[Review] Joshua Lobb, The Flight Of Birds. Sydney University Press, 2019. 322pp, Alex Lockwood

Animal Studies Journal

Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published literary and creative prose, which choose to engage with climate change, environmental shock, biodiversity crises, and extinction risks – the existential threats we face as a global multispecies population – all tell stories with and of nonhuman animals? My theory, one shared by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (although with differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ …


[Review] Sue Coe, Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition. With An Essay By Stephen F. Eisenman Ak Press, 2018. 128pp, Wendy Woodward Jan 2019

[Review] Sue Coe, Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition. With An Essay By Stephen F. Eisenman Ak Press, 2018. 128pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Eisenman imagines, in 2050, in a scenario devoutly to be wished and striven for, that animals are no longer ill-treated in zoos, factory farms or laboratories. His informative essay substantiates debates in animal ethics, historically and in art, relating the ‘thingification’ of animals to colonial notions of ‘racial’ superiority. Sue Coe’s work, he demonstrates, comes from a long history of protest against the treatment of animals in zoos and menageries. Like John Berger in Why Look at Animals? (Penguin, 2009), he connects zoos with money-making, dismissing the claims that zoos are geared for conservation. Eisenman regards Sue Coe as the …


[Review] Lesley A. Sharp, Animal Ethos: The Morality Of Human-Animal Encounters In Experimental Lab Science. University Of California Press, 2018. 312pp, Denise Russell Jan 2019

[Review] Lesley A. Sharp, Animal Ethos: The Morality Of Human-Animal Encounters In Experimental Lab Science. University Of California Press, 2018. 312pp, Denise Russell

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Ethos. What is that? This heading on its own is a puzzle. Taken together with the subheading and reading the book it seems that ‘Animal Ethos’ means the customary way of interacting with animals in lab settings. The sub-heading led me to believe that the book would be not just about the ethos in the sense just described but about what is right and what is wrong in the human-animal encounters in animal experiments. Lesley Sharp coming from the discipline of anthropology shies away from making such judgements with some very rare exceptions, for example, when describing the abhorrent …


How Shall We Live Together? A Response To Paola Cavalieri, Sue Donaldson Jan 2019

How Shall We Live Together? A Response To Paola Cavalieri, Sue Donaldson

Animal Studies Journal

Paola Cavalieri asks whether the animal rights/liberation (AR/L) movement should be ‘selfsufficient and self-reliant’,2 and develop ‘an autonomous presence both in the political arena and in the electoral process’3 rather than focusing on alliance building with the broader Left. Cavalieri’s hesitation about alliance-building is motivated by worries about diffusion and loss of focus, but also by the thought that ‘humanism leads the worse-off to cling to their humanity to the detriment of animals’. Thus, acting ‘as a full member of the family of social justice struggles’ will lead either to wasting energy on alliances that never materialize, or to watering …