Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

No Going Back: Un-Fixing The Future Of De-Extinction, Jessie L. Beier

Animal Studies Journal

‘Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world’ proclaims the Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences website, adding, ‘And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it’. For Colossal, this involves combining the science of genetics with ‘the business of discovery’ in order to bring back the woolly mammoth, which will not only help ‘rewild’ lost habitats, but also contribute toward ‘making humanity more human’. De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence, often with the goal of reintroducing species to the wild and restoring ecosystems. While still in its nascent state, the science of …

Colonialism, Domestication, & Extinction: A Pre-Mortem For Our Ecological Futures, Darren Chang, Lauren Corman

Animal Studies Journal

This paper engages with Ghassan Hage’s concepts of ‘ungovernable waste’ and ‘generalized domestication’ to think critically about the sociopolitical position and futures of farmed animals in the context of ongoing climate and ecological crises. Against the erasure of farmed animal subjectivities, we posit that there is much to learn by turning to farmed animals as sources of wisdom, as unique knowers with lessons to teach us about extinction. We consider how Andil Gosine’s radical suggestion to embrace animality as a refusal of the civilizing discourses of colonialism, and as an act of solidarity with nonhuman animals, constitutes a critical step …

Introduction: Critical Animal Studies In An Age Of Extinction, Eva Kasprzycka, Chloë Taylor, Kelly Struthers Montford

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(2): Introduction: Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives Of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 Pp. Isbn 9781479815449, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 pp. ISBN 9781479815449

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Contributor Biographies And Editorial – Dedication To Siobhan O’Sullivan (1974-2023), Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial – Dedication to Siobhan O’Sullivan (1974-2023)

'Pooped In My Yard And Ate My Grass Last Night': Wild Burros And Tales Of Belonging In Riverside County, California, Christian Hunold, Jennifer L. Britton

Animal Studies Journal

Riverside County, California is home to several hundred free-roaming burros (donkeys) who frequent the open spaces surrounding and between the cities of Riverside, Moreno Valley, Loma Linda, and Redlands, as well as the public parks, private properties, residential developments and roadsides in these towns. Tales of more-than-human belonging (and not-belonging) in Riverside County render visible how multispecies places are mediated by infrastructures of consumption and infrastructures of reciprocity. Where infrastructures of consumption generate callousness, infrastructures of reciprocity sustain responsibility. We investigate these dynamics by tracing how two geographically close but infrastructurally distinctive spaces frequented by the area’s wild burros are …

The Mouse Colony, Katerina Tsiopos

Animal Studies Journal

The Mouse Colony

Simply Caring, Lisa Kemmerer

Animal Studies Journal

Simply Caring

[Review Essay] Animal Worlds After Uexküll: Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022. 449 Pp., David Herman

Animal Studies Journal

[Review Essay] Animal Worlds after Uexküll: Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022. 449 pp.

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, Editor. Posthumanist Perspectives On Literary And Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning And Teaching: Issues In Literature And Culture. 188 Pp. Isbn 978-3-030-76159-2 (Ebook), Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, editor. Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning and Teaching: Issues in Literature and Culture. 188 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-76159-2 (eBook)

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries Of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal From Plato To Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 Pp. Isbn9780231194730, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 pp. ISBN9780231194730

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 12(2): Cover Page, Table of Contents, and Contributor Biographies.

Not Another Plant-Based Documentary: A Critical Review Of Eating Our Way To Extinction, Melissa Plisic

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting evidence that industrial animal agriculture is a formidable force of climate change and mass extinction, many humans remain impervious to this knowledge. Eating Our Way to Extinction is a timely documentary that takes this issue head on. This film review is guided by Alexandra Juhasz’s explanation of media praxis as ‘an enduring, mutual, and building tradition that theorizes and creates the necessary conditions for media to play an integral role in cultural and individual transformation’ (299). Eating Our Way to Extinction attends to some of the most popular strawman arguments against veganism and is widely accessible. That being …

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech And Poetry: The Art Of Composition In The Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 Pp. Isbn 9781316513712, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. ISBN 9781316513712

Can Animals Contract?, John Enman-Beech

Animal Studies Journal

Animals are, or are like persons, and so should not be treated as mere property. But persons are not just non-property; they are contractors. They interact with property and with other persons. This article analyses the possibilities for a range of animals to fit within market liberal society as contractors from a legal disciplinary perspective. Some animals are capable of contract-like relationships of reciprocal exchange, and can consent, in a certain sense, to parts of such relationships. However, the dangers of the contractual frame, which is used to legitimate exploitation, may exceed the benefits. Some scholars have begun to explore …

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Sally Borrell, Clare Archer-Lean

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 11(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Contributor Biographies.

Mutual Rescue: Disabled Animals And Their Caretakers, Lynda Birke, Lori Gruen

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals.

Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – …

Wild Dogs And Decolonization: Ivan Sen’S Mystery Road And Omar Musa’S Here Come The Dogs, Iris Ralph

Animal Studies Journal

The broad subject of First Nations and decolonial perspectives on animal flourishing is addressed in this paper in a reading of references to canids in Mystery Road (2013), a film by the First Nations-Australian director, Ivan Sen, and Here Come the Dogs (2014), a novel by the Malaysian-Australian author Omar Musa. Dingoes and other wild dogs are a prominent trope in Sen’s film and tie to seemingly perdurable debates about the rights of these animals to flourish in Australia. Dingo advocates argue that dingoes are endemic to Australia, are Australia’s oldest introduced animals, and are a top predator species and …

Snake Church, Sue Hall Pyke

Animal Studies Journal

This paper imagines Snake Church as a post-secular worship practice that reaches with and beyond the vilified serpent held within the limits of Judeo-Christianity. Snake Church offers a devotional practice enlivening enough to shift the languish of a post-secular world where the reasonableness of Enlightenment has crumbled into numbers like 440ppms and 1.5C. The Western empire has been revealed as stark naked, vulnerable, an old skin that cannot hold my world. Snake Church offers me a sacred opiating hope. As I approach a nascent liturgy, here, in the settler-ravaged Stony Rises, home to the Eastern Maar tiger snake and Eastern …

Zoolondopolis, Pablo P. Castelló

Animal Studies Journal

Imagine a future in which animals had fundamental rights to political participation and voting. What would our towns and cities look like? What kind of infrastructure would we need? And what kind of zoodemocracy would we, animals, co-author? As counterintuitive as it might seem, sometimes what is needed is not a minimal agenda. Animal rights theorists and the animal rights movement more generally have focused for decades on abolishing the farming of animals and on one-issue campaigns such as the abolition of the animal fur trade. These are noble and important pursuits, but what if the driving force to produce …

[Review] ‘Every Moving Thing Shall Be Meat For You.’ A Review Of David Brooks. Animal Dreams. Animal Publics Series, Sydney University Press, 2021. 290 Pp., Michelle Hamadache

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] ‘Every Moving Thing Shall Be Meat for You.’ A review of David Brooks. Animal Dreams. Animal Publics series, Sydney University Press, 2021. 290 pp. Animal Dreams is David Brooks’s third book assailing the vast edifice of the human-animal’s obdurate refusal to rethink its relationship with other animals. It is an erudite and searching contribution to the field of animal studies, and a passionate, persuasive appeal to the mind, heart and senses to change the way of human being-in-the-world that is pushing so many species to extinction and exploiting and truncating the lives of individual animals. Brooks is ‘on the …

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’S Bestiary: Medicinal Animals And Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 Pp., Peter J. Li

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic has secured its place as a 21st century global public health disaster. It has killed more than 6.2 million and infected close to 500 million people worldwide (Worldometer). Acknowledging Wuhan’s wildlife market as the ground zero of the pandemic and the devastation caused by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 17 years earlier, China’s Communist authorities made the long overdue decision on February 24, 2020 and outlawed wildlife breeding and trade for the country’s exotic food market (National People’s Congress of …

[Review] Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, And Brett Mizelle, Editors. Handbook Of Historical Animal Studies. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2021. 637 Pp., David Herman

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, and Brett Mizelle, editors. Handbook of Historical Animal Studies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. 637 pp. In their introduction to the volume under review, ‘Writing History after the Animal Turn? An Introduction to Historical Animal Studies’ (1–18), which uses Harriet Ritvo’s 2007 article ‘On the Animal Turn’ as a key reference point, the editors describe as follows the main goal of and broader rationale for the book: "the discourses of human-animal studies and historical animal studies, just like all the other disciplines involved in the reevaluation of the lives of animals and our relationship with …

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 11(2): Cover Page, Table of Contents, and Contributor Biographies.

‘Cultured’ Food Futures? Agricultural Power, New Meat Ontologies, And Law In The Anthropocene, Kelly Struthers Montford

Animal Studies Journal

Animal agriculture in the US and Canada is a colonial geography borne of imported ontologies of property, life, land, and food shaped by and reproducing agricultural power. This article primarily examines the ontologization of in-vitro meat (IVM) and, to a lesser degree, plant-based synthetic meat relative to our current food ontologies. IVM is positioned as the pragmatic solution to food-driven climate catastrophe in that it will supposedly allow consumers to eat meat without the ethical, environmental, safety, or health concerns associated with agriculturally produced meat. I show that arguments for and against new meat technologies pivot on ontological claims about …

Indigenous, Settler, Animal; A Triadic Approach, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Lynette Russell

Animal Studies Journal

In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques …

(Animal) Oppression: Responding To Questions Of Efficacy And (Il)Legitimacy In Animal Advocacy With A New Collective Action/Master Frame, Paula Arcari

Animal Studies Journal

Across the animal activist/academic community, there is an ongoing dissatisfaction with the movement’s achievements to date, or lack thereof – a sense that it has not achieved as much as expected, hoped for, and needed. While there have undoubtedly been positive changes, overall these efforts constitute a Sisyphean task given that nonhuman animals are entering the Animal-Industrial Complex (A-IC) in increasing numbers and faster than others are saved. Lack of unity, common goals, and related questions of (il)legitimacy are among some of the issues identified with ‘the movement’. In response, this paper proposes a new frame for animal advocacy that …

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach And Ron Broglio, Editors. The Edinburgh Companion To Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 Pp., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 pp.

[Review] Tom Tyler. Game: Animals, Video Games, And Humanity. University Of Minnesota Press, 2022. 152 Pp., Michael Swistara

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Tom Tyler. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 152 pp.

[Review] Antoinette Burton And Renisa Mawani, Editors. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary For Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 240pp., Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, editors. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 240pp.