Series: Animal Publics

Animal Dreams collects David Brooks' thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream, and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian literature and culture, from The Man from Snowy River to Phar Lap, to contemporary debates about horse-racing, live animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native species such as kangaroos and sharks. In his piercing,...

The lives of non-human animals, their ways of being and seeing, their experiences and knowledge, and their relationships with each other, continue to be ignored, discounted, written over, and destroyed by anthropocentric practices and endeavours. Within the vestiges of colonialism, this silence and occlusion co-opts and consumes animals, physically and culturally, into the servitude of human interests and selective narratives...

Dingo Bold is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between people and dingoes. At its heart is Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo on the beach on K'gari (Fraser Island), a young male she nicknames Bold. Struck by this experience, and by the intense, often polarised opinions expressed in public conversations about dingo conservation and control, she sets out to...

Historically, grief and spirituality have been jealously guarded as uniquely human attributes. Although nonhuman animal grief has been acknowledged in recent times, the potency of the feeling has not been recognised as equal to human grief. Both academic and popular discussions continue to be tainted by anthropocentric philosophical questions. In Enter the Animal, Teya Brooks Pribac examines what we do...

The animal agriculture industry, like other profit-driven industries, aggressively seeks to shield itself from public scrutiny and uses a distinct set of rhetorical strategies to deflect criticism. These tactics are fundamental to modern animal agriculture but have long evaded critical analysis. In Meatsplaining, academic and activist contributors investigate the many forms of denialism perpetuated by the animal agriculture industry. What...

Much of the discussion on the Anthropocene has centred upon anthropogenic global warming and climate change and the urgency of political and social responses to this problem. Animals in the Anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures shows that assessing the effects of human activity on the planet requires more than just the quantification of ecological impacts towards the categorisation of...

Throughout the 19th century, animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to contain multiple species in their thousands. These 19th-century menageries entrenched beliefs about the human right to exploit nature through war-like practices against other animal species....

The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds explores what happens when the two worlds meet. Joshua Lobb's stories are at once...

This book approaches the study of animal law topics through the lens of the legal and regulatory framework governing the interaction between humans and animals. The key characteristics of the framework are identified and explored throughout, starting with two unusual cattle cases in Western Australia that illustrate the paradoxical nature of this discipline. Australian Animal Law prompts questions about the...

Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London is the story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first 'star' animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo. In 1850, a baby hippopotamus arrived on English shores, allegedly the first in Europe since the Roman Empire, and almost certainly the first in Europe since prehistoric times. Captured near an island from which he took his...

The plight of animals in China has attracted intense interest in recent times. Speculation about the origins of COVID-19 has sparked curiosity about how animals are treated, traded, and consumed in China today. In Animal Welfare in China, Peter Li explores the key animal welfare challenges facing China now, including animal agriculture, bear farming, and the trade and consumption of...

Animal Death is a complex, uncomfortable, depressing, motivating, and sensitive topic. For those scholars participating in human-animal studies, it is accompanied by the concept of 'life,' the ground upon which their studies commence, whether those studies are historical, archaeological, social, philosophical, or cultural. It is a tough subject to face, but as this volume demonstrates, one at the heart of...