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This open access book is the biography of one of Britain’s foremost animal welfare campaigners and of the world of activism, science, and politics she inhabited. In 1964, Ruth Harrison’s bestseller Animal Machines triggered a gear change in modern animal protection by popularising the term ‘factory farming’ alongside a new way of thinking about animal welfare. Here, historian Claas Kirchhelle explores Harrison’s avant-garde upbringing, Quakerism, and how animal welfare debates were linked to concerns about the wider ethical and environmental trajectories of post-war Britain. Breaking the myth of Harrison as a one-hit wonder, Kirchhelle reconstructs Harrison’s 46 years of campaign...
A tuneful natural and cultural history of this globally renowned songbird. The robin is a small bird with a distinctive ruddy breast, at once a British national treasure and a bird with a global reputation. In this superbly illustrated account, Helen F. Wilson looks at many aspects of the cherished robin, from its status as a harbinger of seasonal change and, in the United Kingdom, an icon of Christmas, to its place in fairy tales, environmental campaigns, and scientific discovery. In moving between cultural and natural histories, Robin asks wide-ranging questions, such as how did the robin’s name travel the world? Why is the robin so melancholy? Who was Cock Robin? And how has the history of the color red shaped the robin’s ambivalent associations and unusual origin stories?
This edited volume explores the emergence of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions; its uses in making novel linkages between disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. In short, this volume explores what happened when stress entered the discourse around modernity.
This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse.
Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who ’we’ humans think ’we’ are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples’ everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others .
No detailed description available for "Living with Animals".
The first in-depth study of the role of canines in WWII Britain, an “important but hitherto under-represented subject,” with photos included (Society of Army Historical Research). The Second World War allowed for the use of an unprecedented number of dogs for military duties, both internationally and among the British Armed Forces. On the British Home Front, civilians responded to calls from the British Army’s War Dogs Training School and the Ministry of Aircraft Production Guard Dog Training School by donating their canine pets for military training and employment “for the duration.” As dogs were instructed in roles with the British Army, the Royal Air Force and the London Civil D...
With its distinctive, comical walk, large bill, and association with the conservation movement, the pelican has attained iconic status. But as Barbara Allen reveals, this graceful skimmer of ocean waves has a checkered history. Originally classed as “unclean” in the King James Bible, the legend of the compassionate pelican was later appropriated by Christianity to symbolize Christ’s sacrifice. This majestic bird, gifted to British royalty in 1664, has been celebrated in art and literature, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to the writing of Edward Lear, and is the holder of three Guinness World Records. The pelican’s anatomy has been copied for paper plane construction, aircraft design, and in 3D imaging, and its resilience is as remarkable as its make-up: the pelican has rallied against threats of extinction, habitat destruction, and environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A must-read book for all bird enthusiasts, Barbara Allen’s Pelican weaves together wildlife trivia, historical tales, and the latest research to provide an engaging, many-feathered account of this emblematic bird.