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Many of us keep pet animals; we rely on them for companionship and unconditional love. For some people their closest relationships may be with their pets. In the wake of the animal rights movement, some ethicists have started to re-examine this relationship, and to question the rights of humans to “own” other sentient beings in this way. This book brings a Christian perspective to bear on the subject of our responsibility to animals, looked at through the lens of our relations with pets—especially dogs. The book argues that the emotional bond with companion animals should play a central role in the way we think about animals in general, and—against the more extreme animal liberationists—defends the intermingling of the human and animal worlds. It tries to imagine what it would be like to treat animals as a gift from God, and indeed argues that not only are animals a gift for us, but they give to us; we need to attend to their giving and return their gifts appropriately. Throughout, the book insists that what Christians call grace is present in our relations with animals just as it is with other humans. Grace is the inclusive and expansive power of God's love to create and sustain relationships of real mutuality and reciprocity, and the book unfolds the implications of the recognition that animals participate in God's abundant grace. The book's thesis affirms and persuasively defends many of the things that pet lovers feel instinctively—that their relationships with their companion animals are meaningful and important, and that their pets have value and worth in themselves in the eyes of God.

This book takes a broad approach to animal movement across both temporal and spatial scales. Movement and migration on land, in the air, and in water are pervading features of animal life—from the smallest protozoans to the largest whales—and can extend from millimetres to global scale. Research into animal movement ecology is now entering a new era with the development of novel molecular, electronic, and technical methods that make it possible to analyse the movements of individual animals under complex environmental conditions that determine the evolution of movement habits. This book addresses how and why animals move and in what ways they differ in their locomotion and navigation performance. The book also synthesizes current knowledge of the genetics of movement/migration, including gene flow and local adaptations. Based on long-term data sets, a future perspective on how patterns of animal migration may change over time together with the potential evolutionary consequences is provided. Throughout it is suggested that optimization is a useful approach for understanding the evolution of movement patterns among different animals as well as their travelling performance, movement strategies, and paths followed. Taking movement, dispersal, and migration into account is crucial for understanding the spatial scale of adaptation, and for analysing the consequences on population and community levels of landscape and climate change, as well as of invasive species.

The contemporary animal rights movement encompasses a wide range of sometimes-competing agendas from vegetarianism to animal liberation. For people for whom pets are family members—animal lovers outside the fray—extremist positions in which all human–animal interaction is suspect often discourage involvement in the movement to end cruelty to other beings. This book argues that in order to achieve such goals as ending animal testing and factory farming, activists need to be better attuned to the profound emotional, even spiritual, attachment that many people have with the animals in their lives. Offering an alternative to both the acceptance of animal exploitation and radical animal liberation, the text shows that a deeper understanding of the nature of our feelings for and about animals can redefine the human–animal relationship in a positive way. The text explores five realms in which humans use animals: as pets, for food, in entertainment, in scientific research, and for clothing. In each case it presents new methods of animal advocacy to reach a more balanced and sustainable relationship association built on reciprocity and connection.

This book investigates the historical significance of the American animal welfare movement at home and overseas from the Second Great Awakening to the Second World War, a time span encompassing the nation’s shift from muscle power to motorization. Dedicated primarily to laboring animals at its inception, the humane movement grew to include virtually all areas of human/animal interaction. Embracing animals as brethren through biblical concepts of stewardship, humane activists worked with temperance groups, educators, missionaries, religious leaders, civil rights activists, policy makers, and anti-imperialists to create an expansive transnational “gospel of kindness” in hopes of building a more merciful nation and world. Ultimately, animal protectionists defined kindness to animals as an American humanitarian ideal. Their interpretation of this “gospel” extended beyond the New Testament to preach kindness as a secular and spiritual truth. As an ideological and tactical product of antebellum evangelical revivalism and reform, as well as the rights revolution of the Civil War era, animal kindness became a barometer of free moral agency, higher civilization, and Americanization. Yet given the enormous intersectional diversity of the United States, its empire, and other countries of contact, standards of kindness and cruelty were culturally contingent and therefore controversial: those accused of cruelty invoked their own culturally specific ideas regarding their rights of self-determination to defend culturally specific animal practices, such as cockfighting, bullfighting, songbird consumption, and kosher slaughter that animal protectionists judged repugnant. Animal welfare, therefore, was—and remains—in the crosshairs of cultural and political contestation in a pluralistic society.

Animals that must hunt and kill for at least part of their living are inherently interesting to many people, and the role that carnivores play in biological communities attracts interest from ecologists and conservation biologists. Conflicts with human activities stimulate continual debates about the management of carnivore populations, and throughout the world people seek workable solutions for human/carnivore coexistence. This book describes research methods and techniques for the study and conservation of all terrestrial carnivore species. Particular attention is paid to techniques for managing the human/carnivore interface. Descriptions of the latest methodologies are supported by references to case studies, whilst dedicated boxes are used to illustrate how a technique is applied to a specific land cover type, species, or particular socio-economic context. The book describes the most recent advances in modelling the patterns of animal distributions, movements, and use of land cover types, as well as including the most efficient methods to trap, handle, and mark carnivores. Carnivores are biogeographically diverse and whilst extensive scientific research has investigated many aspects of carnivore biology, not all species have been equally covered. This book is unique in its intention to provide practical guidance for carrying out research and conservation of carnivores across all species and areas of the world.