With growing concern for biodiversity loss, conservationists are faced with increased pressure to depict animals in ways that evoke empathy and lead to conservation. In recent years, conservation ...photographers have called on scientists to assist them in identifying the best ways to depict animals to elicit an emotional response. Collaborating with conservation photographers, we used an original survey experiment with 1,152 participants to answer this call by comparing how individuals respond to traditional wildlife photography and animal portraiture. Those who were exposed to animal portraits reported increased empathy and decreased positive and relaxed emotions. We engage critical anthropomorphism, arguing that it is an essential tool to encourage conservation efforts and that animal portraiture may be an ideal “attention grabber,” after which wildlife images can serve as “educators.” As the first study to make this quantitative comparison, our findings have important implications for conservationists and particularly conservation photographers.
For an emancipatory animal sociology Taylor, Nik; Sutton, Zoei
Journal of sociology (Melbourne, Vic.),
12/2018, Letnik:
54, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sociologists have contributed to the development of the animal studies field in recent decades. However, many of these ventures have been anthropocentric, stopping short of sociological calls for ...animal liberation despite the fact that critical sociological concepts are often the (unspoken) antecedents of such work. Here, we present a systematic review of peer-reviewed sociological articles on human-animal relationships since 1979. Our analysis identified key themes supporting charges of anthropocentrism, but also aspects of politicised animal sociology. Based on this we call for sociological animal studies to incorporate a specifically Emancipatory Animal Sociology: an approach grounded in a social justice and emancipatory praxis that explicitly and critically engages with the material conditions of animals' lives, taking into account the experiences and knowledge of activists and others working directly with animals and, where possible, centres the animals themselves.
PurposeThis paper considers the role of nonhuman animals in the thought of Donna Haraway, going from her critique of the animal as model/mirror for the evolution of the human body politic to her ...proposal for a “compost” society. It demonstrates her changing positions in relation to the social role of animals and the deepening of her critique of intersectional relations that subordinate nonhuman animals and animalized people.Design/methodology/approachThe paper intertwines a loosely historical approach and a thematic one, focusing on key issues of sociological theory, such as work, agency and kinship, and the way these relate to the animal question in Haraway's writings. Her texts are discussed both broadly and in-depth, and her positionality in terms of both feminism and antispeciesism is foregrounded.FindingsThe paper shows how the progressive abandonment of a posthuman approach in favor of a compostist one brings Haraway nearer to intersectional ecofeminism and to a fuller consideration of nonhuman agency at a material level, as well as to a deeper critique of instrumental relations of domination and issue that had been problematic in critiques of her earlier work.Social implicationsThe paper highlights the role of nonhumans in the evolution and constitution of societies and advocates a response-able multispecies politics.Originality/valueThis paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the social role of animals in Haraway's thought and the deepening antispeciesism of her feminist approach that sheds a different light on her positionality in relation to ecofeminism.
Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) emerged in the early 2000s as a way of evaluating the expressive quality of animal behaviour and emotions using qualitative descriptors, such as “playful” or ...“depressed.” Developed in response to the scepticism of behaviourist attitudes to animal emotions, QBA is now an internationally respected methodology, if still contentious in some circles for what is perceived as an “anthropomorphic” approach. This article results from a research period spent with a UK university laboratory team who were developing species-specific QBA descriptors for the welfare assessment of laboratory mice. The case of the search for a “calm mouse” illuminates the difficulties sometimes encountered in finding the “qualitative” in QBA. It suggests that welfare assessments of animals are epistemologically multiple. Through a historical account of QBA’s emergence, drawing on Cristina Grasseni’s concept of an “ecology of practice,” I argue that different modes of perceiving animal behaviour have emerged through socially and historically inscribed practices.
Leo Pardi (1915–1990) was the initiator of ethological research in Italy. During more than 50 years of active scientific career, he gave groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of social ...life in insects, especially in Polistes wasps, an important model organism in sociobiology. In the 1940s, Pardi showed that Polistes societies are organized in a linear social hierarchy that relies on reproductive dominance and on the physiological and developmental mechanisms that regulate it, i.e. on the status of ovarian development of single wasps. Pardi’s work set the stage for further research on the regulatory mechanisms governing social life in primitively eusocial organisms both in wasps and in other insect species. This article reconstructs Pardi’s investigative pathway between 1937 and 1952 in the context of European ethology and American animal sociology. This reconstruction focuses on the development of Pardi’s physiological approach and presents a new perspective on the interacting development of these two fields at the origins of our current understanding of animal social behavior.
The book presents the taxonomy and systematics of bees (Anthophila) and their biology: the collection and transport of food, picky behavior of bees, which are linked to certain food plants, nesting ...methods, Cuckoo bees laying eggs in the nests of other species, behaviors and adaptations of males. In the chapter on the diversity of wild bees changes in the Slovenian fauna are described. In the author's opinion, they are mainly due to climate change and extreme weather conditions. The greater part of the book deals with the social life of bees, especially the primeval social forms that facilitate the understanding of the development of social communities. In the chapter Highways and byways of evolution author describes the long-term advantage of species with social or symbiotic connections over the species in which the dominance of the strongest and largest specimens in mutual combat increases the size of the specimens and reduces their number. He continues with a chapter on the various forms of social communities, with examples in bees. In the last chapter the families and genera of bees living in Slovenia are presented. Great value of the book are also 154 original photos of different species of bees, which illustrate their behavior in the wild.
Social learning from peers can trigger herd-wide intoxication with white locoweed (Oxytropis sericea), an alkaloid-synthesizing herbaceous legume that grows on rangelands of western North America. We ...conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that restriction of the area allocated to animals to feed in would inhibit social facilitation of locoweed ingestion in yearling heifers. Eight heifers that avoided white locoweed (LA) and eight heifers that readily consumed it (LE) were selected from a pool of 40 cross-bred heifers and were randomly assigned to the social facilitation or social interference treatment groups. We conducted 200 10-min feeding trials in three 5-day phases (pre-treatment, treatment, post-treatment) during which animals were presented with a set of bowls arrayed in a test arena, some of which contained ground wheat straw and others contained air-dried ground white locoweed. During the pre-treatment (days 1 to 5) and the post-treatment phases (days 11 to 15) non-social trials were conducted in which the feeding behavior of individual animals was investigated in an 80 m2 arena containing 12 feeding bowls. During the treatment phase (days 6 to 10) social learning trials were conducted in which LA + LE pairs from the social interference group were exposed to 12 bowls of food distributed in an 80 m2 arena intended to induce social interference, and LA + LE pairs from the social facilitation group were exposed to 36 bowls of food distributed in a 240 m2 arena intended to permit social facilitation. During pre-treatment phase, LA heifers consumed detectably less locoweed and wheat straw and exhibited lower preference for locoweed than LE (P <= 0.05) although wheat straw preference of LA and LE was similar. During social learning trials (treatment phase), LA in the social interference group visited similar number of locoweed bowls (mean ± s.e.m.: 0.2 ± 0.12) as they had during non-social learning (0.2 ± 0.20). Conversely, LA heifers in the social facilitation group visited detectably more locoweed bowls during social learning trials (1.6 ± 0.46) compared with the pre-treatment phase (0.2 ± 0.16). Correlation between daily number of locoweed bowls visited by LA and LE during social learning trials was detected in the social facilitation (r = 0.70; P < 0.01), but not in the social interference group (r = 0.15; P = 0.52). During testing trials (post-treatment phase), locoweed and wheat straw intake and preference of LA and LE in both treatment groups was similar. Manipulation of the feeding environment delayed, but did not inhibit social learning of toxic weed ingestion in this study.
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