Beastly Natures

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An engaging, thoughtful look at the science and ethics of research into animal behavior.

In Beastly Possessions, Sarah Amato chronicles the unusual ways in which Victorians of every social class brought animals into their daily lives. Captured, bred, exhibited, collected, and sold, ordinary pets and exotic creatures – as well as their representations – became commodities within Victorian Britain's flourishing consumer culture. As a pet, an animal could be a companion, a living parlour decoration, and proof of a household's social and moral status. In the zoo, it could become a public pet, an object of curiosity, a symbol of empire, or even a consumer mascot. Either kind of animal might be painted, photographed, or stuffed as a taxidermic specimen. Using evidence ranging from pet-keeping manuals and scientific treatises to novels, guidebooks, and ephemera, this fascinating, well-illustrated study opens a window into an underexplored aspect of life in Victorian Britain.

This book offers plausible explanations for people’s puzzling unwillingness to address the human-nature interactions that have led us to the precipice that is climate change today. Humanity and nature are at war; the evidence is all around us: catastrophic weather events, rising sea levels, extinction of species, famine, wildfires, melting polar ice, millions of environmental refugees, and toxic pollution of air, water, and soil. The list goes on and on. What is causing this war, and how can it be stopped? Is this war an unintended consequence of economic and environmental imperatives pulling in opposite directions? This book takes the question—and its answer—to a deeper level. It argues that the root cause of our war on nature might be found in the time-honored, historically deep myths, narratives and stories we tell ourselves—and have been telling ourselves for centuries—about humanity’s place in (or out of) the natural world.

Offering a challenge to traditional political theory, this work provides the interpretations of Machiavelli's oeuvre and of Nietzsche's relationship to politics.

The ascendancy of border studies in the last two decades or so, and the burgeoning work on nature and society neither drew attention to ecological theories of borders nor capitalised on nature as a useful avenue through which border research could be advanced. This volume fills this void by engaging with the following key questions: What insights can be drawn from species’ borders to broaden understandings of bordering? What sorts of borders are engendered by various types of conservation areas? What border stories does each of these areas tell us? What do conservation-related borders teach us about multiple lines that divide societies? Answers to these questions help researchers understand a typology of nature-related borders. The primary objectives of this volume are twofold. The first objective is to expand and deepen the links between nature conservation and border studies by bringing species’ borders into conversation with border studies, while at the same time paying attention to diverse conservation areas and conservation practices. The second objective is to highlight forms of borders associated with various types of conservation areas and the protection of certain types of natural resources. The manner in which nature conservation produces borders, and the forms those borders take, has the potential to enrich the conceptualisation of borders. The point of departure in this volume is that conservation practices produce feedback loops on social reality. Authors in the volume variously show that concerns with environmental protection and management offer possibilities for exploring, and even disrupting, borders within society and those between society and nature. Conservation areas in particular are crucial for a meaningful analysis of natures’ borders and the discourses and narratives related to them, and how such discourses influence conservation practice. This volume is an invaluable resource for research and upper-level courses on border studies, political ecology, conservation and biodiversity management, and environmental change and social impact.

Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In Beast and Man Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, Beast and Man has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live.

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.