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Anthrozoology, the study of human–animal interactions (HAIs), has experienced substantial growth during the past twenty years and it is now timely to synthesise what we know from empirical evidence about our relationships with both domesticated and wild animals. Two principal points of focus have become apparent in much of this research. One is the realisation that the strength of these attachments not only has emotional benefits for people, but confers health benefits as well, such that a whole area has opened up of using companion animals for therapeutic purposes. The other is the recognition that the interactions we have with animals have consequences for their welfare too, and thus impact on their quality of life. Consequently, we now study HAIs in all scenarios in which animals come into contact with humans, whether as pets/companions, farm livestock, laboratory animals, animals in zoos or in the wild. This topical area of study is of growing importance for animals in animal management, animal handling, animal welfare and applied ethology courses, and also for people within psychology, anthropology and human geography at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. It will therefore be of interest to students, researchers and animal managers across the whole spectrum of human–animal contact.

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and debates in these fields which only Deleuzian understandings of human subjectivity can provide. While Deleuzian studies has always been critical of the structure and status of human subjectivity, utilizing Deleuze in discussions of the contentious and unstable concept of the animal underlines the utility of his work for altering both theories and practices from art to philosophy to everyday activism. This book collects essays by established scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and new scholars, to show not only the diversity of Deleuze’s applicability to human-animal studies but to call into question what we mean by the seemingly simple idea of ‘the animal’. Through 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal as a discrete, easily understood concept and thereby simultaneously places the human as animal and critiques the centrality of the human. The book aims to create new questions in reference to what the age of the anthropocene means by ‘animal’ as much as to analyse and explore examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal.

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.

The harm and crime committed by humans does not only affect humans. Victimisation is not isolated to people, but instead encompasses the planet and other beings. Yet apart from fairly recent green criminological scholarship employing an expanded criminological gaze beyond the human, the discipline of criminology has largely confined itself to human victims, ignoring the human-caused suffering and plight of the billions of other individuals with whom we share the Earth. In order to take another step in rectifying criminology’s blindness to the non-human world, we propose a ‘Wildlife Criminology’. Wildlife Criminology is a complimentary project that expands the existing green and critical criminological scholarship even further beyond the human. As the book’s chapters will demonstrate, criminology’s current and future engagement with wildlife issues needs to develop by considering wider notions of crime and harm involving non-human animals and plants. We focus on non-human animals: as property, as food, for sport, reflectors of violence, the link to interpersonal human violence, and rights through exploration of four interconnected themes - commodification and exploitation, violence, rights, and speciesism and othering. We offer directions for the future of criminal justice system, humans’ relationship to the non-human, and for the project of Wildlife Criminology.

This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. In outlining this integrative approach to storytelling in a more-than-human setting, the study also considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. Focusing on techniques employed in these media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Conversely, emphasizing that stories are, in general, interwoven with cultures’ ontologies, their assumptions about what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans, promises to reshape existing frameworks for narrative inquiry. Ideas that have been foundational for the field are at stake here, including ideas about what makes narratives more or less amenable to being interpreted as narratives, about the extent to which differences of genre affect attributions of mental states to characters (human as well as nonhuman) in narrative contexts, and about the suitability of stories as a means for engaging with supraindividual phenomena unfolding over long timescales and in widely separated places, including patterns and events situated at the level of animal populations and species rather than particular creatures.