Suchergebnisse

Preliminary Material /Ryan Hediger -- Animals and War: Introduction /Ryan Hediger -- Bees, Border and Bombs: A Social Account of Theorizing and Weaponizing Bees /Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut -- Zoo Animals and Modern War: Captive Casualties, Patriotic Citizens, and Good Soldiers /John M. Kinder -- Canine Soldiers, Mascots, and Stray Dogs in U.S. Wars: Ethical Considerations /Janet M. Alger and Steven F. Alger -- The Best Friend of the Murderers: Guard Dogs and the Nazi Holocaust /Robert Tindol -- Finnish Narratives of the Horse in World War II /Riitta-Marja Leinonen -- Nuclear War, Radioactive Rats, and the Ecology of Exterminism /Brian Lindseth -- Recognizing and Resisting Animal Subjectivity in Timothy Findley's The Wars /Paul Huebener -- Jackie the Lucky Raven: Myth, Commerce, and Their Historical Foundations /Boria Sax -- Wars of Images and Representations: Contested Meanings and Narratives Surrounding Animal Advocacy /Brian M. Lowe -- Animals and War Memorials: Different Approaches to Commemorating the Human-Animal Relationship /Hilda Kean -- Index /Ryan Hediger.

Increasing understanding of the impressive cognitive and social capacities of nonhuman animals suggests the possibility that they may sometimes commit suicide. Such notions tend to be dismissed as "anthropomorphism." That interpretive hazard, I argue, must be weighed against the opposite hazard of "anthropodenial" — "the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals" (de Waal 2006). If animals do commit suicide, how often is it motivated precisely by the impact of humans on animal life?

This essay uses Michel Foucault's notion of biopower to explore how dogs were used by the United States military in the Vietnam wars to mitigate the territorial advantages of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. Relying in particular on the account by U.S. soldier and dog handler John C. Burnam, the essay also shows agency to be situational: since the dogs' superior sensory abilities enabled them to help significantly the United States military, their presence complicates and at times reverses dogmatic ideas of human agency trumping other animals' agency. But the operation of contemporary biopower makes such categorical inversions flimsy and reversible: the dogs' status changed from heroes set for moments above human soldiers to mere machinery, pressed below even animals, in order to excuse official United States policy to leave the dogs in Vietnam. Thus, most of the 4,000 or so dogs used in conflict were abandoned in the war zone when the United States withdrew, leaving many of the dogs to become meat, to be eaten by the Vietnamese. Soldiers' love for their canine partners heightened the teams' effectiveness, but it also sharpened the soldiers' sense of loss, contradiction, and betrayal in the face of the dogs' abandonment, helping to inspire a legal change in U.S. policy regarding military dogs in 2000. This specific historical case is understood as characteristic of contemporary biopower's function more generally.

While many scholars who write about animals deal with animal agency in some way, this volume is the first to position the question of nonhuman agency as the primary focus of inquiry. Section I presents studies of actual animals demonstrating agency; Section II moves agency into new terrain while considering key representations of animal agency in literature; Section III analyzes animals as mediators and as conveyances of human-to-human communication;and Section IV investigates the agency of beings who defy conventional species categories. The Envoi demonstrates how the microscopic polyp is interwoven into notions of agency and mythical superagency. This volume's interdisciplinary explorations press hard on issues of agency to open up space for more questions about how we can understand relationships between the human and the nonhuman

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of animal resistance to human behaviors, and considering the ways the presence of animals refracts human notions like agency and species