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Since the 1970s, scientists studying animal welfare and philosophers writing about animal ethics have worked toward the common goal of understanding and articulating our proper relationship to animals of other species. However, the two groups approached this task using such different concepts, assumptions, and vocabulary that they functioned as two distinct ''cultures'' with little mutual understanding or communication. Some of the best known ethical writing created barriers for scientists because it tended (1) to focus only on the level of the individual rather than making some decisions at the level of the population, ecosystem or species, (2) to advocate single ethical principles rather than balancing conflicting principles, (3) to ignore or dismiss traditional ethics based on care, responsibility, and community with animals, (4) to seek solutions through ethical theory with little recourse to empirical knowledge, (5) to lump diverse taxonomic groups into single moral categories, and (6) to propose wholesale solutions to diverse animal use practices. Meanwhile, some of the scientists alienated the ethicists by taking the view that suffering and other subjective experiences of animals are not amenable to scientific enquiry, and by the claim that science could ''measure'' animal welfare as if it were a purely empirical concept. However, other (often less well known) work in animal ethics creates links with animal welfare science and looks to empirical research to help resolve animal ethics issues. Some of this work (1) expresses moral concern about animals using concepts that lend themselves to scientific analysis, (2) attaches value to traditional care for and community with animals, (3) recognizes the importance of empirical analysis for discriminating between good and bad animal use practices, and (4) sees different taxonomic groups as meriting different types and levels of ethical concern. At the same time, animal welfare science has grown more compatible with the approaches used by some ethicists. Some ...

This paper attempts to develop an experimental analysis of drug-induced religious behavior. The first part discusses drugs and religious behavior in man and includes sections on anthropological, contemporary, and experimental perspectives. The second part reviews analogous natural and drug-induced animal behaviors which are seen to be structurally similar to human religious activities. The functional similarities are examined in the third section which analyses religion in terms of operant behavior concepts and findings. It is concluded that the behavioral, albeit not necessarily the experiential, aspects of drug-induced religious behavior can be studied in the animal model.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wild animal story emerged in Canadian literature as a distinct genre, in which animals pursue their own interests--survival for themselves, their offspring, and perhaps a mate, or the pure pleasure of their wildness. Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early stories--by Charles G.D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London and other--had an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunter--Theodore Roosevelt--discredited these writers as "nature fakers," accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior

Introduction -- Behind bars: contradictions in the expectations and experiences of life with marginalised companion animals -- Dog shows as casual leisure: asymmetry of human and animal experience -- Dog showing and training: enjoyable hobbies or destructive practices that reinforce speciesist ideologies? -- Off-leash recreation in an urban national recreation area: conflict between domesticated dogs, wildlife and semi-domesticated humans -- Walking the dog -- chore or leisure? -- Recentring companion species wellbeing in the leisure experience: towards multispecies flourishing through dog walking -- Domesticated dogs and 'doings' during the holidays -- From labour to leisure: the relocation of animals in modern Western society -- Post-humanistic insight into human-equine interactions and wellbeing within leisure and tourism -- Pampered prisoners: meeting the ethological needs of the modern sport horse to enhanced equine welfare -- Human-initiated animal fights -- Domestic animals' leisure, rights, wellbeing: nuancing 'domestic', asymmetries and into the future.

Animals and Human Society provides a solid, scientific, research-based background to advance understanding of how animals impact humans. As a resource for both science and non-science majors (including students planning to major in or studying animal science, pre-veterinary medicine, animal behavior, conservation biology, ecotoxicology, epidemiology and evolutionary biology), the book can be used as a text for courses in Animals and Human Society or Animal Science, or as supplemental material for an Introduction to Animal Science. The book offers foundational background to those who may have little background in animal agriculture and have focused interest on companion animals and horses. Animals have had profound effects on people from the earliest times, ranging from zoonotic diseases, to the global impact of livestock, poultry and fish production, to the influences of human-associated animals on the environment (on extinctions, air and water pollution, greenhouse gases, etc.), to the importance of animals in human evolution and hunter-gatherer communities. The volume introduces livestock production (including poultry and aquaculture) but also includes coverage of companion and lab animals. In addition, animal behavior and animal perception are covered. It can also function as a reference or recommended reading for a capstone class on ethical and public policy aspects related to animals. This book is likewise an excellent resource for researchers, academics or students newly entering a related field or coming from another discipline and needing foundational information, as well as interested laypersons looking to augment their knowledge on the many impacts of animals in human society

Farm animal welfare is a major concern for society and food production. To more accurately evaluate animal farming in general and to avoid exposing farm animals to poor welfare situations, it is necessary to understand not only their behavioral but also their cognitive needs and capacities. Thus, general knowledge of how farm animals perceive and interact with their environment is of major importance for a range of stakeholders, from citizens to politicians to cognitive ethologists to philosophers. This review aims to outline the current state of farm animal cognition research and focuses on ungulate livestock species, such as cattle, horses, pigs and small ruminants, and reflects upon a defined set of cognitive capacities (physical cognition: categorization, numerical ability, object permanence, reasoning, tool use; social cognition: individual discrimination and recognition, communication with humans, social learning, attribution of attention, prosociality, fairness). We identify a lack of information on certain aspects of physico-cognitive capacities in most farm animal species, such as numerosity discrimination and object permanence. This leads to further questions on how livestock comprehend their physical environment and understand causal relationships. Increasing our knowledge in this area will facilitate efforts to adjust husbandry systems and enrichment items to meet the needs and preferences of farm animals. Research in the socio-cognitive domain indicates that ungulate livestock possess sophisticated mental capacities, such as the discrimination between, and recognition of, conspecifics as well as human handlers using multiple modalities. Livestock also react to very subtle behavioral cues of conspecifics and humans. These socio-cognitive capacities can impact human-animal interactions during management practices and introduce ethical considerations on how to treat livestock in general. We emphasize the importance of gaining a better understanding of how livestock species interact with their physical ...

Many people believe that only humans have the cognitive and behavioral capacities needed for suicidal behavior, such as reflexive subjectivity, free will, intentionality, or awareness of death. Three counterarguments — based on (i) negative emotions and psychopathologies among nonhuman animals, (ii) the nature of self-destructive behavior, and (iii) the problem of model fidelity in suicide research — suggest that self-destructive and self-injurious behaviors among human and nonhuman animals vary along a continuum.

"Animal studies is a growing interdisciplinary field that incorporates scholarship from public policy, sociology, religion, philosophy, and many other areas. In essence, it seeks to understand how humans study and conceive of other-than-human animals, and how these conceptions have changed over time, across cultures, and across different ways of thinking. This interdisciplinary introduction to the field boldly and creatively foregrounds the realities of nonhuman animals, as well as the imaginative and ethical faculties that humans must engage to consider our intersection with living beings outside of our species. It also compellingly demonstrates that the breadth and depth of thinking and humility needed to grasp the human-nonhuman intersection has the potential to expand the dualism that currently divides the sciences and humanities."--Amazon.com.