Origins of Attitudes towards Animals is a truth-seeking journey that takes the study of attitudes towards animals to the global scale. The book relies on rigorous mathematical analysis of large amounts of data to make unprecedented discoveries about animal protection. Origins of Attitudes towards Animals steps off the path of focusing on animal welfare, which is only one aspect of animal protection, and reveals the science, philosophy, and cultural factors behind different groups of peoples' attitudes towards animals, worldwide. The book is based on the results of the ground-breaking survey research project, Global Attitudes to Animals Survey, which was initiated and managed by the author. Thousands of people around world were involved in the project, including many renowned academics, who worked as collaborators. The book also includes comprehensive and critical reviews of a large amount of existing literature. The quality of the study, in consideration of the issues it covers, the number of survey participants and the complexity of the mathematical methods applied, has no peers in academia. The book is a must-read for animal activists and people who are interested in the academic study of animal protection, and it contains a treasure-trove of data for researchers. To gain a full understanding of the study,knowledge of key mathematical techniques, such as factor analysis is required. Areas covered by the book include: Animal behaviour, anthropology, biology, chemistry, cosmology, cultural study, ethics, finance, history, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, religion, and veterinary science. It is also available as an E-Book.

This book argues that the movement to protect animals from cruelty never lost its essentially anthropocentric outlook. The author also comprehensively documents the changing place of animals in human life.

What did British people in the late eighteenth century think and feel about their relationship to nonhuman animals? This book shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights. Some people began to conceptualise animal rights as an extension of the rights of man and woman. But because oppressed people had to insist on their own separation from animals in order to claim the right to a full share in human privileges, the relationship between human and animal rights was fraught and complex. This book examines that relationship in chapters covering the abolition movement, early feminism, and the political reform movement. Donkeys, pigs, apes and many other literary animals became central metaphors within political discourse, fought over in the struggle for rights and freedoms; while at the same time more and more writers became interested in exploring the experiences of animals themselves. We learn how children's writers pioneered narrative techniques for representing animal subjectivity, and how the anti-cruelty campaign of the early 1800s drew on the legacy of 1790s radicalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Spence, Mary Hays, Ignatius Sancho, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Oswald, John Lawrence, and Thomas Erskine are just a few of the writers considered. Along with other canonical and non-canonical writers of many disciplines, they placed nonhuman animals at the heart of British literature in the age of the French Revolution.

How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Man illuminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect, and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, including well-known poets, important authors who mixed art and science, and largely forgotten writers of sermons and children’s stories all offered innovative alternatives to conventional narratives about the meaning of animals in early modern Europe. They question Descartes’ claim that animals are essentially soulless machines incapable of thought or feelings. British writers from 1660-1800 remain informed by Cartesianism, but often counter it by recognizing that feelings are as important as reason when it comes to defining animal life and its relation to human life. This British line of thought deviates from Descartes by focusing on fine feeling as a register of moral life empowered by sensibility and sympathy, but this very stance is complicated by cultural fears that too much kindness to animals can entail too much kinship with them—fears made famous in the later reaction to Darwinian evolution. The Riseof Animals uncovers ideological tensions between sympathy for animals and a need to defend the special status of humans from the rapidly developing Darwinian perspective. The writers it examines engage in complex negotiations with sensibility and a wide range of philosophical and theological traditions. Their work anticipates posthumanist thought and the challenges it poses to traditional humanist values within the humanities and beyond. The Rise of Animals is a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our changing attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture.

Publisher description

This innovative collection opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. This title is also available as Open Access.