Animal Ethos

What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel’s quotidian and unscripted responses to animals. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.

What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel’s quotidian and unscripted responses to animals. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.

People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward. Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.

Animal testing is a controversy that has raged for hundreds of years. Some people view experiments on dogs as necessary for human medical progress, while others argue that the practice is barbaric. When the author adopted Marty--a beagle rescued from a research laboratory--she found herself rehabilitating a terrified dog with a traumatic past. She soon discovered the well-kept secret of painful and often fatal testing on dogs. This book details what the author has learned about the past and present of laboratory testing on dogs, life after laboratories and the hope for a future without animal testing. Interviews with rescue organizers and adoptive families reveal the struggles of removing dogs from laboratories and acclimating them to daily life. Scientists discuss the ethics of dog research and advocate for new biomedical technologies. Fundamental change is brewing, with the public, scientists and governments urging the use of new technologies that can replace testing on animals and yield better results.

Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the "trial communities" produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.

Illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. This ethnographic study explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning.

From factory farming to invasive experimentation to the use of animals in the entertainment industry, human interactions with animals frequently involve unjustifiable forms of exploitation, violence, and death. Activists have put significant effort into limiting or abolishing such problematic forms of human-animal interactions. For philosopher Matthew Calarco, this critical focus on restrictions, while vitally important, does not go far enough in reforming our relationships with animals. Instead, we need to interrogate the values that structure our lives as a whole to ask: What might a good life in common with animals look like. The Three Ethologies articulates positive ideals of human interactions with animals and offers an affirmative approach to constructing human-animal relations anew. Calarco develops three distinct but interrelated ethological lenses to this end: 1 ethos as individual character-the self; 2 ethos as shared practices and relations-the social; and 3 ethos as the typical dwelling places of animals and human beings-the environment. This three-pronged framework leads us to an inspiring vision of how ethological living can help us to reimagine philosophical ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty

Casting a critical gaze over the exploitation of animals in agriculture, fashion, and entertainment, this manifesto investigates Canada's antiquated laws for such industries as the fur trade, seal hunting, the Calgary Stampede, puppy mills, horse slaughter, and the virtually unregulated vivisection industry. The book advocates an abolitionist agenda; promotes veganism as a personal and political commitment; shows the economic, environmental, and health costs of animal exploitation; and presents animal rights as a social justice issue.