Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture
Focuses on junctures of animals and humans where the former become objects of the latter's popular conception, scientific study, and economic exchange. But the object of this study is less the animal than the human, a means to flesh out the picture of humanity's treatment of other living beings.
Attitudes to Animals: Views in Animal Welfare:
This book asks what it is to be human, what to be animal, and what is the nature of the relationship between them. These questions are addressed through philosophical and ethical discussions, scientific evidence and dynamic theoretical approaches.
Attitudes to Animals: Views in Animal Welfare
Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
An indispensable work of scholarship on the cultural, political, scientific, social, and literary responses to the animal in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Byronists will discover that the noble lord had many things to say on this subject. A pleasure to read.
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol: A Study in Human-Animal Relationships:
A bird ordinarily revered and protected for most of the year was killed around the time of the annual solstice. Lawrence draws on her training in cultural anthropology and biology to cast a fresh light on the complexities of human-animal relationships.
Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol; A Study in Human-Animal Relationships
Sex: A Natural History:
Looks at the science behind the behavior. Sex is an intricate combination of chemistry, genetics, biology, and psychology. By studying other species, scientists have discovered that humans are not unique. Attraction, arousal, courtship, and orgasm occur even in insects. Well researched and written with clarity and wit, Rodgers's book explains how and why sexual behavior evolved.
Sex: A Natural History
When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand
Two Russian artists set out to open an art school for overworked elephants in Thailand, with the sale of the paintings going toward the elephants' proper food and care. Believe it or not, the scheme worked—as demonstrated in this breathtakingly beautiful, riotously whimsical book that takes readers through the lush jungles, and chaotic cities of Thailand while offering a valuable lesson in conservation and startling revelations about the nature of art itself.
Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841
Before Euro-American contact, the native peoples of the Northwest Coast had traded amongst themselves and with other indigenous people farther inland, but by the end of the 1780s the Tlingit, Chinook and other tribes spent much of their time hunting fur-bearing animals and trading their pelts - especially the highly prized "black skins" of sea otters - to Russian, British, Spanish, and American traders. The Euro-Americans traded their skins at Canton for tea, silk, and porcelain which they then sold in Europe and America. This traffic continued for more than half a century until, in the early 1840s, the Northwest trade declined significantly with depletion of the fur-bearing animals due to overhunting, depopulatlon of the Natives by disease and warfare, and depression of the market for furs. The author uses Western primary sources, largely ignored in previous studies.
Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World of Industrial Farming:
A devastating portrait of modern farming practices, and of what they are doing to our food and to farmers. Many farmers, skilled at growing a variety of crops, now grow a single genetically modified food in soil saturated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Laidlaw uncovers many shocking practices, from pesticide use so severe it causes massive fish kills in P.E.I. rivers to the transformation of small prairie abattoirs into vast slaughterhouses, with no sewage system and overcrowded, dependent on minimum-wage immigrant workers. "Secret Ingredients" brings a whole new dimension to the age-old question of what to have for dinner.
Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World of Industrial Farming
The Future of Life
Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson has long been one of the most prominent scientific voices to speak out about the crisis of species extinction that has engulfed the earth in the past half century. In this eloquent and readable book, Wilson unstintingly portrays the nightmarish scenario into which we are passing but also offers constructive ideas on how it might still be averted. It is a bracing wake-up call about the ecological catastrophe that is looming on our horizon, an inspiring exhortation to accept our responsibility as nature's stewards and a realistic blueprint for reversing the current extinction trend—that is, saving species and ecosystems in ways that generate, rather than impede, economic growth. The future of life may be bleak, Wilson warns, but it remains in our hands to save it.
An exploration of how people viewed and used animals from the fourth to the 14th centuries A.D. Clear categories separating humans and animals were established in the early Middle Ages, resulting in a definition of the uniqueness of humans as rational beings. However, through the use of animals as property, food, and sexual objects, human-animal distinctions began to break down. When animals served as sexual objects for humans, much reflection, debate and even legislation was the result. Anyone interested in animal rights will find this book informative.
ANIMAL LINKS, RESOURCES AND INFO
