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This chapter provides some scientific background of risk assessment and sets up some of the institutional questions concerning the appropriate evidentiary standards needed within torts and administrative law to establish the requisite harms or risks of harm. The discussion here focuses on animal bioassays and human epidemiological studies, two aspects of carcinogen risk assessment relied upon in regulatory institutions to ascertain risks to human beings. The best evidence that proves that a substance causes cancer to human beings is provided by well-done epidemiological studies with large samples and sufficient follow-up. However, the chapter begins by considering animal studies, which is the evidence much more frequently relied upon by regulatory agencies, although it is less typically used in tort law and some jurisdictions give it little credence. There are uncertainties in animal bioassays which are large enough such that two different researchers using exactly the same data points from an animal study can come to much different conclusions.

Chapter Four explores all the implications of a non-standard approach to thought for both animal and film (animation) studies, explaining how Laruelle’s humanism is actually a form of non-standard humanism that reforms what philosophers have previously thought about the animal.

This chapter focuses on studies from animal and human-based research that reflect a general approach and provide converging evidence in support of the working-with-memory (WWM) model. It suggests that as WWM structures, regions of the frontal cortex (FC) operate strategically on information delivered to the medial-temporal/diencephalic system and recovered from it, thereby conferring “intelligence” to what essentially is a “stupid” medial temporal lobe/diencephalic system. The FC is needed to implement encoding and retrieval strategies. The latter includes initiating and directing search in accordance with the demands of the task, monitoring and verifying recovered memories, and placing them in the proper temporal-spatial context.

This book explores a key mechanism of biopolitics by which forms of power ranging from state authority to familial intimacy get conjoined and worked out via animal representations. More specifically, it highlights the crucial role of animals in the ways Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Drawing on the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, the book explains how biopower thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It demonstrates the exceptionality and exemplarity of animals, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, to the biopolitical state. In addressing the cultural and political dimensions of animal representations as well as their significance, the book brings American literary studies in dialogue with critical animal studies.

The introduction examines the role played by empathy in contemporary Animal Studies within the broader context of the affective turn. Outlining key features of Animal Studies, it contends that over-emphasis on empathy is problematic because it restricts engagement with animal life to sentient beings who share qualities with humans. In order to respond to the current environmental crisis, it argues that we need affective and cognitive responses which acknowledge the ethical value of all living beings, and a new model of cross-species storytelling.

In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses the challenges and particularities of the academic and scientific field of “animal studies”, as well as the functionality of experience and her own anxieties about what “animals” are actually involved in animal studies. Desmond wraps up the introduction with a general statement about the book’s purpose, and her hopes that it will help us understand how so many arenas of everyday life unfold in an embodied concert with animals.

The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.

This book explores new and necessary questions about the relationship between animality and advocacy, such as whether animal advocacy suggests prioritizing the suffering of animals over the suffering of human beings. In other words, who comes first in activism, disenfranchised humans or animals. The book tackles this and other questions of animality in relation to constructions of human race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability by focusing not only on whether cultural studies should pay more attention to animal advocacy but also on whether animal studies should respond more broadly to the cultural politics of animality and “the animal.” It also asks why there has been resistance in the academy to linking advocacy for animals with advocacy for various human groups. Finally, it illustrates how animal studies remain a broad field with no mandatory form of advocacy and no necessary correlation with animal rights activism, in particular.

This chapter reviews studies on intertemporal choice (ITC) in animals. It argues that intertemporal decisions between immediate and delayed rewards involve competition between affective and cognitive processes, but that when neither reward is immediate, the competition exists primarily between different types of outcome representation, or levels of construal. Thus, when faced with an ITC between two nonimmediate rewards, the behavioral outcome of this decision depends on the relative strength of various prospective representations. The relative contribution of episodic representations diminishes with the temporal distance of the event being represented, to be replaced by representations of the decontextualized “essence” of the event. In line with this view, the contribution of both episodic and non-episodic prospective cognition to the intertemporal decisions of nonhuman animals can be investigated by assessing preference across different nonimmediate time delays.

Beginning with attention to the anxious exploration of human relations with other animals and wildness in The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae, this chapter engages the question of the animal in Heidegger, Derrida, and present critical animal debates. It argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work on the animal question anticipated and moved considerably beyond the positions of most present theorists. By examining his attention to scientific animal studies in embryology, Uexküll’s umwelt theory, ethology, and human evolution in the Nature lectures, the chapter closes with a description of his acknowledgment of an evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals. It demonstrates his recognition of symbolic behavior, culture, and proto-linguistic activities among animals that manifest a “strange kinship” with humans.

In conjunction with the growing impact of ecological thinking and its emphasis on empathy, the seventies witnessed a new focus on the affective quality of human-animal relations. Numerous popular works advocated the recognition of animals as intelligent, feeling, and communicative beings. Acknowledging the emotional lives of animals demanded moving beyond behaviorist approaches, which remained rooted in the dualism of mind and matter that characterized Enlightenment science. This led to a particular excitement about exploring new forms of human relationship with horses and small toothed whales (dolphins and killer whales), as these were two groups of animals that were known to resist behavioral conditioning. Due to its reliance on empathy and physicality, the new ideal for interacting with animals was often described as a kind of dance. A range of innovative choreographies, including John Lilly's flotation therapy, contact improvisation, and horse whispering, were developed to foster empathetic connections between humans and animals through interactive or emulative bodily movements. The goal of achieving better emotional rapport with animals was not entirely directed toward establishing their more humane treatment; it was also predicated on the idea that humans could benefit from the interaction by learning to empathize with their own animal being.

This chapter is concerned with how variations in socio-economic position affect physical disease. It begins by describing the pathways that theoretically link socio-economic position with physical disease, and by explaining the potential significance of psychobiological responses. The findings concerning psychobiological processes are organized round the primary methodologies that have been used to explore these pathways, namely animal studies, human laboratory mental stress testing, and naturalistic studies of biological function in everyday life. It is shown that there has been rapid development in this field over recent years, and that although there are still many uncertainties, we are moving into an era in which conclusions about the significance of psychobiological processes can be made with greater confidence.

This chapter highlights at least one additional source of potential common ground: by better defining and assessing animal distress, researchers could likely reduce such distress and also improve the quality of research results. It analyzes some of the issues that arise in attempts to assess the “value” and “costs” of animal research and describes some of the criticisms of a reliance on animal studies to advance biomedical knowledge and therapies. It argues that the techniques for measuring either the benefits or the costs of animal research are too crude to produce a clear “for-or-against” answer. This chapter suggests that assessing costs (in terms of distress and suffering) is extraordinarily difficult and there has been very little serious scholarship on the question of the “costs” of animal research.