Animal Studies Journal

Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions and Circus. 2012. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan

Wendy Woodward — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:40:20 PDT

The circus had come to town, a small coastal backwater in 1960s South Africa. I was ecstatic but my beloved, visiting grandmother declined the invitation to attend, condemning the cruelty that was the daily experience of the animal performers. The circus, subsequently, was a glum event for me, the spectacle was tawdry, the trainers sadistic, the animals only victims. What a pity that my grandmother did not have access to Tait’s analysis of circus, for it keeps in balance the tension between the glamour of the show and what goes on behind the scenes – the trainers and their different tactics, the performing big cats and elephants with their potential agency and complicity, and how impossible it is to generalise about circus.

Menageries and Museums: John Simons' The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy (2012) and the Lives and Afterlives of Historical Animals

Deirdre Coleman — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:30:23 PDT

A few years ago two very old taxidermied Colobus monkeys turned up in the basement of Vienna’s Natural History Museum. They were sent by the collector Henry Smeathman to one of his patrons, the wealthy naturalist and collector, Thomas Pennant. The monkeys’ story, of how they travelled from Sierra Leone to England in the early 1770s, sheds light on the intersection of collecting with the history of the British slave trade. The article then moves from museums to menageries, and to further discussion of the lives and afterlives of animals via a review of John Simons’ The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy: Exotic Animals in Victorian England (2012).

Why Do Animals Matter in Contemporary Australia?

Zuzana Kocourkova — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:25:20 PDT

Animals have increasingly become a subject of inquiry within the field of humanities and the attention given to their importance has been accompanied by a gradual academic shift away from a humanist framework toward a posthumanist one. It is necessary to note that humans are in a position to ask whether animals matter due to their institutional supremacy over non-human animals, which is affirmed by a binary separation of Homo sapiens and animals. The consequent deprivation of subjectivity of non-humans renders them largely subordinated to human interests, which has damaging ramifications. Inspired by Jane Goodall, this essay will explore the frameworks which govern these distinctions and which empower people to adjudge whether animals matter, and the assumptions behind this license. It will then explore the various discourses which have aimed at challenging human primacy, noting the limitations of posthumanist frameworks, concluding that it is ultimately necessary to shift the question of the animal in a different direction. Paradoxically, the privileged and dominant position of humanity is what makes animals matter in contemporary Australia, their vulnerability rendering them critically significant.

Poem: Talking to Jasper, in the garden

Wendy Woodward — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:15:20 PDT

Poem by Wendy Woodward.

Poem: Animal Dreaming

Catherine Cole — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:05:27 PDT

Poem by Catherine Cole.

Linking Animal and Human Places: The Potential of Webcams for Species Companionship

Ike Kamphof — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:50:22 PDT

This article investigates the ambiguous potential of webcameras, as they are currently being used by nature conservation societies to broadcast non-human animal life 24/7, for relationships of species companionship. The article presents a post-phenomenological analysis of structures of webcam viewing. It is argued that while this viewing can affirm the power of technology and human animals over nature, sustained viewing also affords visual co-presence of human viewers with nonhuman animal life, a first basic condition for species companionship. A second condition of companionship must be that animals are experienced as living beings in their own right. Webcam viewing contains nonhuman animals as objects for spectacle in a viewing space defined by the human eye. It is argued however, that camviewing also invites ‘haptic’ viewing that challenges optical viewing regimes and established subject-object hierarchies. Haptic viewing speaks to the bodies of viewers, touching them and drawing them out of themselves into animal life as shared life. Webcam viewing is not symmetrical. Nonhuman animals do not relate to the camera in the same way as human animals. Nevertheless, they are not absent from the design and set-up of the camera, and actively participate in the hermeneutic work taking place. The article concludes that there is room for improvement in current practices to further challenge one sided relationships of voyeurism, such as making the participation of non-human animals more explicit and facilitating haptic over optical viewing by the organisation of the views.

Observing across scales: Broome Bird Observatory as a site of multiple exchanges

Perdita Phillips — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:20:21 PDT

Roebuck Bay’s waters and shoreline fringes in the Kimberley of Western Australia are host to nonhuman worlds of waders and bowerbirds. The Broome Bird Observatory (BBO) is the site of scientific investigations by professional ornithologists and amateur birdwatchers. Focussing on bird banding and the bowers of the Great Bowerbird, the author undertook fieldwork to investigate the nature of these points of exchange between nonhumans, scientists and artists. The imagery presented contrasts the dramatic colour and compositional elements of the environment with the more awkward and intimate details of human-animal encounters. Waders have worlds that span the globe, whereas male bowerbirds focus considerable attention on their bowers and the objects that they collect for them. Both bird banding and working with bowerbirds created sites of dialogue that mingled objective (scientific) and emotionally motivated processes in what Whitney calls ‘emotional ecologies’. For both waders and bowerbirds the surrounding environment was a significant ecological participant that fleshed out and enriched the field of investigation. In the art and science project Green, Grey or Dull Silver small green objects were offered as part of a ‘conversation’ at bowers. With bowerbirds, the individuality of birds played an important role in creating more reciprocal and dynamic engagements. A mixture of interaction and inter-patience (Candea) was required to both ‘speak’ and listen to the conversation of others. This image essay, therefore, endeavours to convey the richness of the affective landscape of emotional and material exchange at BBO.

Dogs of War: The Biopolitics of Loving and Leaving the U.S. Canine Forces in Vietnam

Ryan Hediger — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:10:21 PDT

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.

Tales of Cruelty and Belonging: In Search of an Ethic for Urban Human-Wildlife Relations

Erin Luther — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:05:16 PDT

In the summer of 2011, a Toronto resident was charged with animal cruelty for beating a litter of ‘nuisance’ raccoons in his backyard with a shovel. The subsequent media furore, and the organisation of a local anti-raccoon rally, revealed deep tensions in narratives of urban belonging. This paper looks at how the rhetoric of animal cruelty is grounded in notions of civility that police the moral boundaries of the city. I discuss possibilities for an ethic to guide urban human-wildlife that can challenge the limiting framework of civility and move toward a deeper recognition of our non-human neighbours.

In Pursuit

Christine Lowther — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:55:21 PDT

Since 1992 I have lived in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, a place of rare, ancient temperate rainforests. Wolves and black bears are at home in this habitat, which happens also to be one of the most cougar-populated ecosystems in the world. Yet chance sightings of the great cat are extremely rare.

Bearing Witness: Re-storying the Self in Places that are Always More Than Human Made

Alette Willis University of Edinburgh — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:50:21 PDT

This paper argues that through their presence in the places where humans dwell, other-than-human animals challenge the stories people tell about themselves and open up new possibilities for people to be and act in the world. Drawing on literature from narrative therapy, I take a dialogical approach (Bakhtin) to think with autobiographical essays written by Alice Walker, David Hopes and Laura Foreman. I explore how their respective experiences of being witnessed in everyday places by a horse, a groundhog anda coyote led them to alter their stories to live by. These animals become the audiences with which the authors co-construct their narrative-identities and come to provisional answers to the ethical question: ‘how ought I to live?’ I conclude by arguing that ecological memoirs such as these are public acts of witnessing. Through such essays, readers can imaginatively enter distant and bounded places where they vicariously encounter animal others who call on them to develop stories all species can live by.

Introduction: Animals, Place and Humans

Gavan P. L. Watson — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:40:22 PDT

Place has multispecies meaning. From their wintering grounds in Central America individual Wood Thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina) have been shown to return over 7500 km to the same place they nested the year before (Stutchbury et al.). With this example, one among many, it is clear that humans are not the only species to have a relationship to place. Just as it has been shown that humans are not the sole proprietors of language and culture (Rendell and Whitehead; Pepperberg and Lynn), place is another fertile territory to disrupt our human-held assumptions about animals

Animal Studies Journal 2013 2 (1): Cover Pages, Table of Contents and Editorial

Melissa J. Boyde — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:35:19 PDT

Cover pages, table of contents, editorial, contributor biographies and call for papers for Animal Studies Journal Vol. 2 No. 1 2013