Animal Studies

I'm incredibly excited and privileged to be teaching a course this semester about a new and exciting field: human-animal studies. HAS looks at how our lives intersect with the lives of animals, so it covers everything from how predators are portrayed in literature to laws about "dangerous" dog breeds, to emotional support animals. To get ready for the semester, I've been using Animals and Society.

 This is a wonderful teaching text. It includes important terms in bold to help students study and has supplementary material at the end of each chapter to show students how the theoretical issues discussed can be translated into real life. My only complaint is that there is some repetition and some chapters are uneven in terms of their usefulness. I'll update when I learn how students react to the text.

 When my sister was little, she used to delight in trying to gross me out by telling me about maggots being used to clean wounds or how a fly eats. So, when I was book browsing one day I found this title and sent it to her as a sort of joke. It's pretty repetitive (most mammals do, in fact, fart) but I could see it being fun to browse with younger readers!

 I have very mixed feelings about this title. I wanted to love it and I loved that much of what the author feels about predators mirrors my own thoughts. But it seemed almost too personal, too subjective, so it had trouble holding my interest at times. Also, I felt it lacked an overarching concept to hold it together. Despite this, I have a feeling I will end up coming back to it... so, I remain undecided!

This was a fun read of (mostly) anecdotes about famous animal-human relationships in the 18th and 19th centuries. I knew a little about some of the animals and some episodes were far more interesting or entertaining than others, but a fun rainy-day read for all that!