Animal Studies Commons^™

Dog Movie Stars And Dog Breed Popularity: A Case Study In Media Influence On Choice, Stefano Ghirlanda, Alberto Acerbi, Harold A. Herzog

Entertainment Collection

Fashions and fads are important phenomena that influence many individual choices. They are ubiquitous in human societies, and have recently been used as a source of data to test models of cultural dynamics. Although a few statistical regularities have been observed in fashion cycles, their empirical characterization is still incomplete. Here we consider the impact of mass media on popular culture, showing that the release of movies featuring dogs is often associated with an increase in the popularity of featured breeds, for up to 10 years after movie release. We also find that a movie’s impact on breed popularity correlates …

The Need To Include Animal Protection In Public Health Policies, Aysha Akhtar

Animal Welfare Collection

Many critical public health issues require non-traditional approaches. Although many novel strategies are used, one approach not widely applied involves improving the treatment of animals. Emerging infectious diseases are pressing public health challenges that could benefit from improving the treatment of animals. Other human health issues, that overlap with animal treatment issues, and that warrant further exploration, are medical research and domestic violence. The diverse nature of these health issues and their connection with animal treatment suggest that there may be other similar intersections. Public health would benefit by including the treatment of animals as a topic of study and …

Science, Sentience, And Animal Welfare, Robert C. Jones

Ethics and Animal Welfare Collection

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on …

A ‘‘Practical’’ Ethic For Animals, David Fraser

Ethics and Animal Welfare Collection

Drawing on the features of ‘‘practical philosophy’’ described by Toulmin (1990), a ‘‘practical’’ ethic for animals would be rooted in knowledge of how people affect animals, and would provide guidance on the diverse ethical concerns that arise. Human activities affect animals in four broad ways: (1) keeping animals, for example, on farms and as companions, (2) causing intentional harm to animals, for example through slaughter and hunting, (3) causing direct but unintended harm to animals, for example by cropping practices and vehicle collisions, and (4) harming animals indirectly by disturbing life-sustaining processes and balances of nature, for example by habitat …

Taking The “Pest” Out Of Pest Control: Humaneness And Wildlife Damage Management, John Hadidian

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Humans have been in the pest control business for a long time. At least 3 major foci of pest control activity currently can be found in governmental and private sectors, with private services focused on both traditional commensal rodent work as well as the more recent control of “nuisance” wildlife in cities and towns. Beyond the traditional approaches and techniques historically employed, animal damage managers are increasingly faced with the challenge of addressing the social context within which their work occurs. An ever-increasing variety of stakeholders have brought new concerns, new thinking, and new approaches to the table in a …

Cognitive Relatives Yet Moral Strangers?, Judith Benz-Scharzberg, Andrew Knight

Animal Welfare Collection

This article provides an empirically based, interdisciplinary approach to the following two questions: Do animals possess behavioral and cognitive characteristics such as culture, language, and a theory of mind? And if so, what are the implications, when long-standing criteria used to justify differences in moral consideration between humans and animals are no longer considered indisputable? One basic implication is that the psychological needs of captive animals should be adequately catered for. However, for species such as great apes and dolphins with whom we share major characteristics of personhood, welfare considerations alone may not suffice, and consideration of basic rights may …

Environmental Challenge And Animal Agency, Marek Špinka, Françoise Wemelsfelder

Sentience Collection

Challenges are there to be overcome – seen usually as problems to avoid rather than as opportunities to enjoy. However, for humans a life without challenge would be likely to be dull and boring, lacking the enthusiasm and satisfaction that come with individual development. Could this also be true for animals? This chapter looks at the positive value of engaging with environmental challenges for animal welfare, proposing that this value lies in an animal’s expression of agency and the enhanced functional competence that it gains through this. It explores the different facets of agency, and provides more detailed discussion of …

Animal Cognition, Kristin Andrews, Ljiljana Radenovic

Sentience Collection

Debates in applied ethics about the proper treatment of animals often refer to empirical data about animal cognition, emotion, and behavior. In addition, there is increasing interest in the question of whether any nonhuman animal could be something like a moral agent.

Reasonable Partiality And Animal Ethics, Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship -philia in Aristotle's term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia - companion animals - can be treated with unrestricted moral …

A Model Of Animal Selfhood: Expanding Interactionist Possibilities, Leslie Irvine

Human and Animal Bonding Collection

Interaction between people and companion animals provides the basis for a model of the self that does not depend on spoken language. Drawing on ethnographic research in an animal shelter as well as interviews and autoethnography, this article argues that interaction between people and animals contributes to human selfhood. In order for animals to contribute to selfhood in the ways that they do, they must be subjective others and not just the objects of anthropomorphic projection. Several dimensions of subjectivity appear among dogs and cats, constituting a “core” self consisting of agency, coherence, affectivity, and history. Conceptualizing selfhood in this …

Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History Of The Humane Society Of The United States, Bernard Unti

eBooks

In 1954, when The Humane Society of the United States was founded by a small handful of dedicated visionaries, the modern concept of "animal welfare" barely existed. Fifty years later, The HSUS is the nation's largest animal protection organization, with a constituency of more than 8 million people, and a leader in the parallel rise of the modern animal welfare movement. Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States is more than a chronicle of one organization; it is the saga of the journey toward a truly humane society.

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Animal Welfare Collection

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

Religion And Animals: A Changing Scene, Paul Waldau

State of the Animals 2003

For protections to evolve to include nonhuman species, religions— through their leaders, their institutions, and above all their believers— must take seriously the important role that they have played, and certainly will continue to play, in humans’ engagement with the lives beyond our species line. Religions have such a central role in the transmission of basic images and values regarding living beings that, without their help, the problem of the species line will not be solved in this century. A central question for this century is whether influential religious institutions will continue to convey images that radically and absolutely dismiss …

The Status Of Animals In Biblical And Christian Thought: A Study In Colliding Values, Rod Preece, David Fraser

Morality and Religious Philosophy Collection

A common contemporary view is that the Bible and subsequent Christian thought authorize humans to exploit animals purely as means to human ends. This paper argues that Biblical and Christian thought have given rise to a more complex ethic of animal use informed by its pastoralist origins, Biblical pronouncements that permit different interpretations, and competing ideas and doctrines that arose during its development, and influenced by the rich and often contradictory features of ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman traditions. The result is not a uniform ethic but a tradition of unresolved debate. Differing interpretations of the Great Chain of Being and …

Animals, Ethics And Geography, William S. Lynn

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

No abstract provided.

Contested Moralities: Animals And Moral Value In The Dear/Symanski Debate, William S. Lynn

Human and Animal Bonding Collection

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear …

Collecting Birds: The Importance Of Moral Debate, Marc Bekoff, Andrzej Elzanowski

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

No abstract provided.

A Scientific Conception Of Animal Welfare That Reflects Ethical Concerns, D. Fraser, D. M. Weary, E. A. Pajor, B. N. Milligan

Ethics and Animal Welfare Collection

Scientific research on 'animal welfare' began because of ethical concerns over the quality of life of animals, and the public looks to animal welfare research for guidance regarding these concerns. The conception of animal welfare used by scientists must relate closely to these ethical concerns if the orientation of the research and the interpretation of the findings is to address them successfully.

At least three overlapping ethical concerns are commonly expressed regarding the quality of life of animals: (1) that animals should lead natural lives through the development and use of their natural adaptations and capabilities, (2) that animals should …

Animal Issues In The Media: A Groundbreaking Report, George Gerbner

Film and Television Production Collection

What kinds of animals do we see on television and in print media? What are the trends, themes, scenes, and contexts in which animals appear? How are they treated? What are the roles for which they are cast and the fate for which they are destined? What issues drive press and magazine coverage, and how do animal activism, legislation, science and other issues play out in the coverage? Finally, what are some implications for further research, activity, and policy?

These are questions we shall address in this report. The report presents the findings of a benchmark study that begins the …

Towards A Boundless Ethic, Henry Spira

Commentaries and Editorials

No abstract provided.

Gender, Sex Role Orientation, And Attitudes Toward Animals, Harold A. Herzog Jr., Nancy S. Betchart, Robert B. Pittman

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

To examine the relationship among gender, sex role orientation, and attitudes toward the treatment of animals, 144 male and 222 female college students were administered the Bem Sex Role Inventory, a Likert-scale questionnaire designed to assess attitudes toward animal welfare issues, and a measure of perceived comfort touching animals of a variety of species. There were significant gender differences on all of the animal-related measures with the exception of self-reported comfort touching positively perceived animals. Gender and the expressive (feminine) dimension of sex role orientation accounted for a significant proportion of the variation in attitudes toward animal welfare issues and …

A Case Against Animal Rights, Jan Narveson

Animal Welfare Collection

Down through the past decade and more, no philosophical writer has taken a greater interest in the issues of how we ought to act in relation to animals, nor pressed more strongly the case for according them rights, than has Tom Regan, in many articles, reviews, and exchanges at scholarly conferences and in print. It is a pleasure to join him on this symposium, to explore this interesting and important set of issues.

I shall begin by outlining, as fairly as I can, Regan's view of the matter, and then sketch my alternative. Regan has in fact criticized certain aspects …

Humans And Other Animals: A Biological And Ethical Perspective, Ashley Montagu

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

What I have been hoping to do in this talk is to provide the scientific basis for the biological kinship of humans with other animals in particular and the whole of nature in general, and to show that the ethical perspective to which such a demonstration leads is inherent in the very nature of nature, that cooperation, love, not conflict and aggression, as we have long been led to believe, is the dominant principle by which living creatures are designed to live with each other. It was not Darwin, but the muscular Darwinists, like Herbert Spencer, who wasn't a biologist …

The Case For Animal Rights, Tom Regan

Animal Welfare Collection

In the space I have at my disposal here I can only sketch, in the barest outline, some of the main features of the book Its main themes-and we should not be surprised by this-involve asking and answering deep, foundational moral questions about what morality is, how it should be understood, and what is the best moral theory, all considered. I hope I can convey something of the shape I think this theory takes. The attempt to do this will be (to use a word a friendly critic once used to describe my work) cerebral, perhaps too cerebral. But this …

Human Perceptions Of Animals And Animal Awareness: The Cultural Dimension, Elizabeth A. Lawrence

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Culture is generally a powerful determinant of human perceptions of animals and the treatment animals receive in a given society. Fbr example, Plains Indians' views of the status of animals-their capacities, their awareness, and their place in the world relative to mankind-differ radically from those characteristic ofWestern thought. Many of the contemporary Crow Indians, a group of native Americans among which I have recently carried out anthropological field research, continue to look upon their horses according to traditional tribal belief. Their particular attitude toward horses conflicts with that of the dominant white society with which the Indians and their horses …

Is Man's Infliction Of Suffering On Animals Immoral?, Robert Welborn

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

If it is believed that man is properly in dominion over the earth and that he may do with it and all things on it as he will, then the first definition is sufficient. If generally accepted ideas in man's community are to the effect that man's infliction of suffering on animals is right, then such is not immoral.

If it is believed, however, that life, all life, as it has evolved in its beauty and complexity is the consideration upon which conduct should be judged, then the second definition must apply. Man being the dominant species that consciously and …

Historical Trends In American Animal Use And Perception, Stephen R. Kellert, Miriam O. Westervelt

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Changes in American attitudes and behaviors toward animals from 1900-1976 will be examined. The data are derived from an empirical analysis of 4,873 animalrelated newspaper articles. Four newspapers were used in this analysis- the Los Angeles Times; Hartford Courant; Buffalo, Wyoming Bulletin; and the Dawson, Georgia News. A content analysis procedure was employed to record animal-related information in the articles, and these data were subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. A comparison of the results with a 1978 national survey of American attitudes and behaviors is briefly attempted. Finally, some policy implications of the data are considered.

Humane Ethics And Animal Rights, Michael W. Fox

Animal Welfare Collection

While the primary goal of the animal welfare movement is to eliminate suffering in those animal species that are exploited by humans, this goal, although exemplary, is narrow sighted. Notwithstanding the practical difficulties of proving animal suffering, especially psychological, suffering could conceivably be eliminated, as in confined farm animals, through the use of tranquilizers, or even brain surgery. A goose being made to eat compulsively, following selective partial destruction or stimulation of its brain to cause hypertrophy of its liver for the liver pate trade, may not suffer. But it is being harmed. Likewise, to selective breed a farm animal, …

The Question Of Atheism And Communism In The Animal Welfare/Rights Movement, Michael W. Fox

Animal Welfare Collection

Just as economics has increasingly been employed as a political weapon, so religion is now being used to further self-serving goals. Agribusiness spokespersons not only use fallacious economic arguments to justify the "factory" farming of animals; they have also stated that any questioning about man's Godgiven right to exploit animals is atheistic, and perhaps an actual affront to God's will. Furthermore, taking an egalitarian attitude toward animals, and proposing that they have rights or should be given equal and fair consideration, is regarded as the inspiration of some covert communist conspiracy that is constantly working to restructure and thereby destroy …

Sex Roles, Companion Animals--And Something More, D. H. Murphy

Pets Collection

As a case in point, several recent articles about how men and women relate to dogs and cats furnish us with some basic lessons about how we interact with our animal companions. But, in the process, they also shed some interesting light on the precariousness of our beliefs about differences in the sexes. Finally, they provide vital instruction concerning some of the classic foibles that are inherent in the use of some kinds of scientific methods.