Animal studies is not a discipline of its own, but emerged simultaneously within many disciplines, such as sociology, geography, biology, art history, education research, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, political science, and gender research. Animal studies stands for a transformed way of doing scholarly work, always through the lens of the human/animal relationship. If anything keeps the field together, it is the productive “incoherence” that it creates wherever it challenges human-centred modes of work. What does it mean to do animal studies? Due to the essential “undisciplinarity” of the field, a traditional textbook approach could not answer the question. Undisciplined Animals is a series of confessions: “this is how I and my basic outlook changed through the efforts of unruly animals, neither of us happily adapting to human-centred perspectives.” The hope is that readers will recognize the same productive tensions in their own work; that the book will help them use these tensions and not hide them as breaches of disciplinary rules. Undisciplined Animals is a collection of invitations to animal studies, addressed to emerging scholars in a variety of fields who want to see how animal studies can vitalize work in their disciplines. The chapters are intersected by short interludes that describe an experience, a notion, or a thought that secretly drives the author’s work. These interludes reveal animal studies to transgress not only disciplinary borders, but also borders between the academic and the personal.

Societal views on animals are rapidly changing and have become more diversified: can we use them for our own pleasure, and how should we understand animal agency? These questions, asked both in theoretical discourses and different practices, are also relevant for our understanding of horses and the human–horse relation. Equine Cultures in Transition stands as the first volume to bring together ethical questions of the new field of human–horse studies. For instance: what sort of ethics should be developed in relation to the horse today: an egalitarian ethics or an ethics that builds upon asymmetrical relations? How can we understand the horse as a social actor and as someone who, just like the human being, becomes through interspecies relations? Through which methods can we give the horse a stronger voice and better understand its becoming? These questions are not addressed from a medical or ethological perspective focused on natural behaviour, but rather from human acknowledgement of the horse as a sensing, feeling, acting, and relational being; and as a part of interspecies societies and relations. Providing an introductory yet theoretically advanced and broad view of the field of post humanism and human animal studies, Equine Cultures in Transition will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as human–animal studies, political sociology, animals and ethics, animal behaviour, anthropology, and sociology of culture. It may also appeal to riders and other practitioners within different horse traditions.

From Dublin, Ireland to Barbados, to Virginia, to Georgia, to Mississippi, James Wilkerson's lineage marches westward. Son Wilkerson continues to trace the roots of the people who settle La Plata County, Colorado. Two exciting novels make up La Plata County Series III. INDIANS AND SOLDIERS portrays the Cavalry's role in clearing La Plata County of the Ute Indians. RANCHERS AND RUSTLERS brings two retired Indian fighters into the County and into D.H. and Melinda Wilkerson's life. Privation follows the early settlers, but the beauty of the mountains compensates them.