Let’s Talk About Animals

Pets and other animals can act as a protective factor in an emergency if we leverage design to communicate more effectively. A new prototype website does just that

The Child Learns About Animals

The child will see everything in his environment, physical or social, whether it be the running of ponies or the swaying of leafy branches in the trees. He will hear everything from the laughter of the neighborhood children to the singing of a canary bird. He will touch, whether it be with his cheek, toe, finger or tongue, the smooth round stem of a dandelion, the soft fur of a kitten, or the sticky coldness of an icicle. He is ready for experience with everything around him, and if he is energetic he will set out by himself to have this

How do we speak about art about animals?

‘How do we speak about art about animals?’, my closing plenary address at the Warsaw conference Animals and their People: The Fall of the Anthropocentric Paradigm?, was the first international paper in which I included discussion of work in my Scapeland series. In part, the abstract read as follows: ‘“De l’animal peut-on parler?,” Jacques Derrida famously asked in relation to philosophy’s tendency to overlook nonhuman animals, and to have little idea of how to speak about their relation to humans in meaningful terms. … Drawing on a range of contemporary examples, including a few of the pieces on show in the Ecce Animalia exhibition in Orońsko, this talk will consider the distinctive “voice” of the artist … The focus will be on artists who engage directly with questions of animal life,. … Conventional distinctions (human versus animal; ethics versus aesthetics) have no useful place here. Instead, to borrow Foucault’s words from a slightly different context, what these artists can sometimes offer are images, experiences and structures “within which we both recognize and lose ourselves’.” Immediately after this talk tje conference delegates were taken on an evening visit to the Ecce Animalia exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, which had been planned to coincide with the conference and which included an installation of early pieces from my Scapeland series. A welcome outcome after the conference was a request from the organizers to translate an essay of mine for the first Polish edited collection of writings on animal stidies. This appeared in 2015 as: ‘Sztuka wspolczesna i prawa zwierzat’, in Zwierzeta i ich ludzie. Zmierzch antropocentrycznego paradygmatu, eds A. Barcz and D. Lagodzka (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN), 2015, pp. 65-87. ISBN 978-83-64703-27-0. (A Polish translation of my essay ‘Contemporary art and animal rights’.)N/

COVID-19: Enough About Humans, What About the Animals?

This article will provide examples of how zoo animals and domestic animals around the world have both benefited and suffered during this pandemic, and the actions taken by their caregivers to protect them from the adverse impacts of COVID-19. It will then examine how the provisions of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and the PREPARED Act, have both failed to protect zoo animals. This article will also examine how the PETS Act and other legislation enacted during COVID-19 have better protected domestic animals during this time, and how the PREPARED Act would be a beneficial addition to the PETS Act because it would add commercial animals to the list of animals protected during emergencies. Finally, this article will assert that more regulations like the PREPARED Act, are needed to better protect animals impacted by COVID-19 and other future emergencies by creating stricter guidelines for emergency planning

Introduction : Viewing animals

The introduction to this special issue of Worldviews goes back to the first European encounters with the New World as a way of opening up a discussion about the nature of viewing animals. I argue that, just as the Europeans transformed this New World into a recognisable one in the sixteenth century, so too do we constantly transform the natural world that we view. The process of comprehension is offered as classification followed by observation, then representation, and all of these elements of our engagements with animals take place, I argue, in particular contexts: historical, geographical, cultural, intellectual. The critic "reading" animals, and reading human observations of animals must take these factors into consideration when thinking about the act of engagement

On Thinking Theologically about Animals: A Response

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Clough, D. (2014). On Thinking Theologically About Animals: A Response. Zygon, 49(3), 764-71. DOI: 10.1111/zygo.12119, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/zygo.12119/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-ArchivingIn response to evaluations of On Animals: Volume 1, Systematic Theology by Margaret Adams, Christopher Carter, David Fergusson, and Stephen Webb, this article argues that the theological reappraisals of key doctrines argued for in the book are important for an adequate theological discussion of animals. The article addresses critical points raised by these authors in relation to the creation of human beings in the image of God, the doctrine of the incarnation, the theological ordering of creatures, anthropocentrism, and the doctrine of God. It concludes that, given previous neglect, much more discussion by theologians is required in order to think better concerning the place of animals in Christian theology, but acting better toward fellow animal creatures is an important next step toward this goal

Morgan's canon, Garner's phonograph, and the evolutionary origins of language and reason

`Morgan's canon' is a rule for making inferences from animal behaviour about animal minds, proposed in 1892 by the Bristol geologist and zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, and celebrated for promoting scepticism about the reasoning powers of animals. Here I offer a new account of the origins and early career of the canon. Built into the canon, I argue, is the doctrine of the Oxford philologist F. Max Mu$ller that animals, lacking language, necessarily lack reason. Restoring the Mu$ llerian origins of the canon in turn illuminates a number of changes in Morgan's position between 1892 and 1894. I explain these changes as responses to the work of the American naturalist R. L. Garner. Where Morgan had a rule for interpreting experiments with animals, Garner had an instrument for doing them: the Edison cylinder phonograph. Using the phonograph, Garner claimed to provide experimental proof that animals indeed spoke and reasoned

University Scholar Series: Scott Shaffer

A New Form Of Biotechnology: Novel Data Logging Devices Reveal Secrets About The Lives Of Marine Animals On September 25, 2013, Dr. Scott Shaffer gave a talk titled “A New Form Of Biotechnology: Novel Data Logging Devices Reveal Secrets About The Lives Of Marine Animals” as part of the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Ellen Junn at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Dr. Shaffer’s research focuses on the ecology, physiology, and conservation of marine vertebrate species. Specifically, he uses novel smart technologies to study long-range movements, distribution, and behavior of wild seabirds and marine mammals. This new form of biotechnology is shedding light on the secret lives of marine animals that range widely over the open sea. Dr. Shaffer has used this technology to study animals in Alaska, Antarctica, the Arctic, and the tropical Pacific. Dr. Shaffer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1028/thumbnail.jp