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It is no secret that we humans have a special relationship with the animal world. According to statistics, 63 per cent of all households have at least one pet. In 2004 alone American pet-owners plunked down $36 billion worth of pet product expenditures. More money was spent in 2004 on pet food than on baby food. In a recent survey about attitudes fully 70 per cent of respondents identified the family pet as a “member of the family.†On the other hand, millions of cows and chickens are unceremoniously slaughtered each year to feed our unappeasable lust for "Whoppers" and "McNuggets." The world waits breathlessly transfixed on the latest news of a single whale foundering in the surf. Meanwhile millions of tons of fish are hauled from the ocean by commercial fishermen. As Erika Ritter explores in this fresh, fascinating and eye-opening new book, at the heart of this relationship is a paradox—a relationship that is almost schizophrenic in its absurdity: we humans are animals, too. How to account for how and why we have developed this odd relationship with our “fellow†animals. Through interviews conducted around the world with philosophers, scientists, farmers, poets, pundits and commentators, Ritter makes her way through this strange maze of human contractions about our animal brethren to produce a work that reveals as much about “us†as about “them.â€
When Homo sapiens sapiens met Canis lupus lupus millennia ago, the result was Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog. Since that fateful encounter, the dog has become, arguably, humankind’s greatest creation. The domestic dog is the most widely distributed species (other than ourselves) in the world, being found virtually wherever people live, and is also the most diversified of species, with literally hundreds of recognized breeds. While we have shaped the dog, it, too, has helped shape human history in innumerable ways. Our Debt to the Dog is a critical historical and cross-cultural examination, through the use of case studies, of this most improbable 15,000-year relationship and an exploration of how this relationship shaped the history of the world. It is also very much an apology to the dog because over the course of the partnership horrific acts were perpetrated against it intentionally and otherwise. Our Debt to the Dog enriches our understanding of the dog and extends our appreciation for the profound complexity of past and present human-canine relationships and the dog’s contributions to our lives and our world.
Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. `Liminal' animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.
Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers—including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum—with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.
In the future, contact between people and animals is forbidden. Because interaction between people and animals leads to pain and suffering, eliminating contact has the highest priority. Eating animal meat--animeat--is a heinous crime and punished severely. Everyone is vegan. The Order of the Prelate teaches Noameran citizens to reject human dominion over the animal world. Christianity and other religious traditions that had empowered people to believe they could use animals for whatever purposes they chose have been disbanded. Pet ownership has also been banned. The hypocrisy that had allowed people to kill some animals for food while saving others to be loved as pets no longer exists. Welcome to the moral order of 22d century Noamera. When Will'm Ashbee violates this moral order, can a defense for his actions be found in the annals of human-animal interactions?
The fields of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Composed of thirteen chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes: Intersections of Ableism and Speciesism Thinking Animality and Disability together in Political and Moral Theory Neurodiversity and Critical Animals Studies Melancholy, Madness, and Misfits. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in Animal Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.
From pet keeping to sky burials, a posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of and challenge to human particularity in medieval texts Mainstream medieval thought, like much of mainstream modern thought, habitually argued that because humans alone had language, reason, and immortal souls, all other life was simply theirs for the taking. But outside this scholarly consensus teemed a host of other ways to imagine the shared worlds of humans and nonhumans. How Not to Make a Human engages with these nonsystematic practices and thought to challenge both human particularity and the notion that agency, free will, and rationality are the defining characteristics of being human. Recuperating the Middle Ages as a lost opportunity for decentering humanity, Karl Steel provides a posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of a wide range of medieval texts. Exploring such diverse topics as medieval pet keeping, stories of feral and isolated children, the ecological implications of funeral practices, and the “bare life” of oysters from a variety of disanthropic perspectives, Steel furnishes contemporary posthumanists with overlooked cultural models to challenge human and other supremacies at their roots. By collecting beliefs and practices outside the mainstream of medieval thought, How Not to Make a Human connects contemporary concerns with ecology, animal life, and rethinkings of what it means to be human to uncanny materials that emphasize matters of death, violence, edibility, and vulnerability.
This textbook provides a full overview of human-animal studies. It focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted in racism, sexism, and class privilege.
This book is a collection of essays about the interaction between God, humans, and nature in the context of the environmental challenges and Biblical studies. Chapters include topics on creation care and Sabbath, sacramental approaches to earth care, classical and medieval cosmologies, ecotheodicy, how we understand the problem of nonhuman suffering in a world controlled by a good God, ecojustice, and how humans help to alleviate nonhuman suffering. The book seeks to provide a way to understand Judeo-Christian perspectives on human-to-nonhuman interaction through Biblical, literary, cultural, film, and music studies, and as such, offers an interdisciplinary approach with emphasis on the humanities, which provides a broader platform for ecotheology.
The 1805 New York foxhunting case Pierson v. Post has long been used in American property law classrooms to introduce law students to the concept of first possession by asking how one establishes possession of a wild animal. In this book, Angela Fernandez retells the history of the famous fox case, from its origins as a squabble between two wealthy young men on the South Fork of Long Island through its appeal to the New York Supreme Court and entry into legal treatises, law school casebooks, and law journal articles, where it still occupies a central place. Fernandez argues that the dissent is best understood as an example of legal solemn foolery. Yet it has been treated by legal professionals, the lawyers of its day, and subsequent legal academics in such a serious way, demonstrating how the solemn and the silly can occupy two sides of the same coin in American legal history.