Animal Places

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our ‘human’ societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the ‘wilderness’; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations. This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research on space and place that currently informs the humanities and the social sciences.

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places examines how animals interact and relate with people in different ways. Using a comprehensive range of examples, which include feral cats and wild wolves, to domestic animals and intensively farmed cattle, the contributors explore the complex relations in which humans and non-human animals are mixed together. Our emotions involving animals range from those of love and compassion to untold cruelty, force, violence and power. As humans we have placed different animals into different categories, according to some notion of species, usefulness, domesticity or wildness. As a result of these varying and often contested orderings, animals are assigned to particular places and spaces. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places shows us that there are many exceptions and variations on the spatiality of human-animal spatial orderings, within and across cultures, and over time. It develops new ways of thinking about human animal interactions and encourages us to find better ways for humans and animals to live together.

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed.

A "passionate amalgam of science and autobiography" that will leave you hearing -- and seeing -- nature as never before (New York Times Book Review). Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth. Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren't vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged. From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales -- whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours -- to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm. The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

Animal maltreatment includes physical or sexual abuse, neglect, or hoarding of animals, and all states have laws prohibiting various forms of animal maltreatment. About one-half have statutory provisions mandating or allowing courts to order forensic mental health assessments of individuals convicted of animal maltreatment offenses. Yet there are few resources on this topic for mental health and legal professionals and none that offer guidance for evaluations in animal maltreatment cases. Animal Maltreatment is the first book to provide an overview of animal maltreatment as a legal, clinical, and forensic issue. It offers guidance for mental health and legal professionals involved in the adjudication of animal maltreatment offenses, with a special focus on forensic mental health assessments in such cases. The book reviews the legal and social contexts of animal maltreatment and then describes research-based and clinical knowledge within the area. It offers perspectives on social and clinical responses in animal maltreatment cases and describes prospects for an area of forensic mental health assessment focused specifically on the forensic evaluation in cases of animal maltreatment. This is the first book that brings together descriptions of the characteristics of those who maltreat animals, factors associated with animal maltreatment behaviors, information about the impact on the animals themselves, and evaluations of offenders to assist courts in decisions about their rehabilitation. Animal Maltreatment will be of great benefit and interest to general and forensic psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, as well as lawyers, legal scholars and students, veterinarians, humane law enforcement professionals, and others involved in animal welfare advocacy.

Each year, billions of animals are poisoned, dissected, displaced, killed for consumption, or held in captivity to be discarded as soon as their utility to humans has waned. The animal world has never been under greater peril. A broad-ranging collection of essays, this publication contributes to a re-thinking about humans' relation to animals.