Resources

Sister Associations

• British Sociological Association Animal/Human Study Group
• Canadian Sociological Association Animals in Society Research Cluster
• International Association of Vegan Sociologists
• Polish Sociological Association Interspecies Relations Section
• The Australian Sociological Association Sociology and Animals Thematic Group
• Animals and Society Institute 

Centers and Program Links

• Animal Behavior Society
• Center to Study the Human-Animal Relationships and Environments (CENSHARE), University of Minnesota
• Companion Animal Information and Research Center (CAIRC)
• Minority Students in Veterinary Medicine Scholarship
• New York University Animal Studies
• Program for Companion Animal Behavior, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis

Colloquium Series and Webinars

The section runs a colloquium series, in co-sponsorship with the Animals and Society Institute to highlight and share the in progress and new scholarship of section members. Recordings of past colloquium, with permission of the speakers, is posted here. We also occasionally host webinars, and post them here as well.

Service, Support, or Companion?: Species, Ability, and Care in Intimate Partner Violence Shelters
March 2023
Presenter: Dr. Sarah May Lindsay, Department of Sociology, McMaster University

At the intersection of species, ability, and trauma are nonhuman caregivers (carers). In this talk, I explore the contribution of “service”, “emotional support”, and companion animals to the well-being of people in emergency housing, specifically intimate partner violence (IPV) shelters. Through interviews with shelter workers, we find that only certain nonhuman animals and disabled humans are accommodated by IPV shelters. Through a joint critical animal and disability studies lens, we observe a hierarchy of disability as well as species, where certain nonhuman animals and abilities are accommodated in these shelters and others are not. We also find complex and sometimes contradictory opinions about the place of companion, “emotional support”, and “service” animals in residential care settings, including muddling of these “types” by some workers, and the presence and work of nonhuman carers. This work foregrounds the well-being of nonhuman carers, disrupts the division between “type” of animal and disability, and problematizes shelters in their current form. This work adds to what is known about nonhuman carers in social housing settings and is useful for those working in social work and public policy, particularly with multispecies families, trauma survivors, and clients with disabilities.

The Relational Horse: Including Animal Others’ Perspectives in Our Relationships and Studies
October 2022
Presenters: Dr. Gala Argent, Human-Animal Studies Program Director, Animals & Society Institute; Faculty in Animal Studies at Eastern Kentucky University & Dr. Jeannette Vaught, Lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles

How can we better include animal others’—specifically, horses—perspectives in both academic studies and our dealings with them? In this colloquium, editors Gala Argent and Jeannette Vaught will discuss how their new book, The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves, applies the Human-Animal Studies tenet of presenting other animals’ interests and lived experience to the study of multiple forms of human-equine relationships. They explore how their own backgrounds as “horse people” and how their own evolving relationships with horses informed their vision for the book. They point out possible ways forward where horses’ voices are present, attuned to, and included in both human-equine scholarship and human-horse relationships.

Publishing Workshop 
April 2022
Presenter: Dr. Thomas Aiello, Professor of History and Africana Studies, Valdosta State University

Talk Description: This colloquium will examine publishing opportunities in human-animal studies using as an exemplary case study an analysis of the history and criticism of Pornocrates, a late-nineteenth century painting by Belgian artist Félicien Rops, in relation to interpretations of human-animal difference. In a relatively young discipline like human-animal studies, publishing opportunities for scholarly research can often seem limited by the available venues emphasizing those animals. Those opportunities, however, are continually growing, and opportunities also exist in avenues outside those that make nonhuman animals their specific focus.

“Responsible” Anthropomorphism in Children’s Picture Books?: From Classic Examples to New Proposals  
March 2022
Presenters:  Melissa Jacobi, MA, BFA, Artist and Dr. Jenny R. Vermilya, Assistant Professor Clinical Teaching Track ,Sociology Department, University of Colorado Denver

This project is a collaboration between an artist and an animal studies academic. Together they critically explore the historical uses of anthropomorphism in classic children’s literature and propose a framework for illustrators who still wish to use nonhuman animal subjects in their storytelling, and who additionally answer to the popular demand for animal-inspired art.

The Meaning of “Wildness” in Artificial Breeding Programs
February 2022
Presenter: Dr. Valerie Berseth, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia

To address biodiversity loss, artificial breeding programs produce and release animals into the natural environment. In this talk, Dr, Berseth draws on interviews with salmon producers working at hatcheries in British Columbia, Canada to examine what it means for something to be “wild,” when and how to intervene in animal lives, and the implications of doing so.   

Moving From the Muddy Middle: Teaching Pig Production
November 2021
Presenter: Seven Mattes, PhD, Assistant Professor, Center for Integrative Studies, Michigan State University

Dr. Mattes introduces their engagement in a new pedagogical project: The Pig Studio. This is an experiential learning course in which students are brought into a pastured pig production site and take part in all aspects of the reality of pig production – from birth to slaughter. Dr. Mattes explores working within this middle zone, which is challenging and uncomfortable, ethically and emotionally, for the human-animal studies scholar. 

Revolutionizing Animal Shelters: Emerging Models of Community, Compassion and Care
October 2021
Presenters:
Katja M. Guenther, PhD, Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UC Riverside, author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals
Kristen Hassen, MA, Maddie’s® Director of American Pets Alive!

Katja Guenther and Kristen Hassen have a new vision of caring for unhoused animals and their communities. Join us for this colloquium to learn about their vision and help provide them feedback as they develop a talk to present their ideas to shelters and other animal protection communities. 

COVID-19

The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak is directly linked to human relations with other animals. Scholars, researchers, and graduate students specializing in the study of Animals & Society share their thoughts on the sociological importance of the pandemic.

If you would like your essay, artwork, audio, video, etc. shared here, please email 2020 Section Chair, Dr. Corey Wrenn at [email protected] listed here represent only the opinions and research expertise of contributors and do not necessarily represent that of the Animals & Society Section or the American Sociological Association.

Moses Seenarine, Independent Researcher/Climate Change 911 – “Regs to Nowhere”
Catherine Price – University of East Anglia – “The Anthropocene: Animals and the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Bonnie Berry – “Resistance as an Instance of Evolution”
Miri Eliyahu, Northwestern University – “Meat Alternatives, China and COVID-19: A Case of Repeated History?”
Shannon Waite, University of Exeter – Art

Regs to Nowhere
Moses Seenarine, Independent Researcher/Climate Change 911

In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s seminal book, The Jungle, first brought the shocking details of the animal industry to the forefront of US national attention. A national outcry prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to task the USDA with the inspection of animal carcasses and slaughterhouses.(988) When Congress first addressed food safety issues, it concentrated on the meat processing industry with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 that required meat processing to be continuously inspected. The US food processing sector is now extensively regulated by state and federal agencies.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 (FSMA) was signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011. The law grants FDA a number of new powers, like mandatory recall authority, which the agency has sought for many years. Notably, federal law still does not prohibit the sale of animal-based products that are infected with pathogens. In particular, it is not illegal for TFCs (transnational food corporations) to sell chicken products polluted with salmonella. Oddly, the USDA does not have the authority to shut down an animal-based agribusiness that fails too many tests. It can only step up inspections.

The USDA has pledged repeatedly to set limits for the most dangerous pathogens, salmonella and campylobacter, in animal-based products. Salmonella and campylobacter live in the guts of animals and can contaminate raw flesh when animals are slaughtered. The USDA’s current expectation is that less than 44.6% of a plant’s ground chicken and 49.9% of a plant’s ground turkey should be infected with Salmonella.(989) This means around half of the total animal carcass production can be dangerously toxic and still be approved for consumption.

On January 21, 2015, the USDA finally proposed new testing standards for chicken and turkey aimed at reducing rates of salmonella and other bacteria. The proposed rules aim to reduce contaminant levels by about half, to 25% of tested samples.(990) This is still a dangerous amount of bacteria.

The USDA is not requiring chicken processors to take specific steps to reduce dangerous pathogens in their products. Instead, it is proposing limits on the number of chicken samples that can test positive for salmonella and campylobacter before a facility is deemed to have failed the standards. One of the agency’s pilot program allows pig carcass producers to ramp up the speed of processing lines by 20% and cut the number of USDA safety inspectors at each plant in half, replacing them with private inspectors. This program fails to stop contamination, and USDA has allowed other countries to use equivalent methods in plants producing red meat for export to the US.(991)

The USDA’s own report determined that livestock “plants have repeatedly violated the same regulations with little or no consequence.” And that inspectors did not “take enforcement actions against plants that violated food safety regulations.”(992)

Meat recalls due to contamination have become so commonplace that when the USDA announced in 2008 the recall of 143 million pounds (65m kg) of ground cow carcass, the largest recall in history, it hardly sparked much interest. Around 50 million pounds (22m kg) of that cow flesh went into school lunches and federal food programs for the poor and elderly.(993)

Livestock production creates a multitude of health issues for people and animals. In the US, chicken products contaminated with pathogens such as Salmonella, cause a larger number of deaths than any other food product.(994) Numerous illnesses can quickly become life-threatening for food animals trapped in CAFOs (concentrated animal feed operation), and can spread rapidly under massed confinement.(995)

Excerpt from Meat Climate Change: The 2nd Leading Cause of Global Warming. Xpyr Press (2016).

The Anthropocene: Animals and the Covid-19 Pandemic
Catherine Price, University of East Anglia

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the human-animal relationship once again into focus. The Covid-19 virus in all likelihood originated in animals, and scientists are working to establish its origins (Cyranoski, 2020). Humans often like to see themselves as separate to animals, but the Covid-19 virus illustrates that all species are part of the same ecosystems.

Recently, climate change and harm to the environment has made its way onto government agendas and has become more prevalent in people’s consciousness. Extreme weather events and melting ice sheets are now daily occurrences on the planet. But as Haraway (2015: 159) argues, ‘it’s more than climate change; it’s also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters, etc., etc., in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse’. This era we now live in has been termed the Anthropocene. ‘The term Anthropocene suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita’ (Steffen et al., 2007: 614, emphasis in original). The Anthropocene is the ‘manifestation of the madness of a species disconnected from the conditions of their world’ (Wright, 2017: 177), and is illustrated by the alteration of the global carbon cycle, the escalating loss of biodiversity and the worldwide fragmentation of forests. This human disconnection from the world is troubling and concerning. Interconnected webs of multispecies entanglements sustain life on Earth. However, in the era of the Anthropocene many of these webs are disentangling. ‘Our inattention to the connectivities we emerge from, and are sustained by, has caused such environmental devastation that we are now the agents of Earth’s sixth mass extinction event’ (Wright, 2017: 178). It is important that we consider these aspects of the Anthropocene in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst it may not be immediately obvious what the relationship is between the Anthropocene and Covid-19, the two are inextricably linked. Here, it is necessary to think of the multispecies entanglements which are present on Earth.

As (Haraway, 2008: 41) argues, there is an entanglement of ‘a motley crowd of differentially situated species, including landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies’. The lack of acknowledgement of multispecies entanglements is part of the problem with the Covid-19 pandemic. Humans see nature as a resource to be used and exploited. Rivers can be used as sources of hydroelectric power, mountains can be quarried for building materials, and forests can be used for wood and paper. Animals too can be perceived as resources. They are eaten, hunted, experimented on, and stared at in zoos. Our more than human world also reaches beyond our relationships with animals. Bacteria and viruses are also part of the ecosystems in which we belong. They are also part of humans. ‘I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm’ (Haraway, 2008: 3). This time though, Covid-19 is causing humans and animals harm and is the latest of many diseases to have affected both humans and animals. Others include Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and avian influenza (Rabinowitz, 2018). However, we need to acknowledge that emergent zoonotic disease epidemics and pandemics are caused by human activities. As we live through the Covid-19 pandemic, we are being shown how the effects of human activity create a serious and powerful threat to our own being. The Covid-19 pandemic is not something we should be dismissive of. Donna Haraway (2014) in her presentation of ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’ spoke about humans ‘incapacity to think the world that is actually being lived. The inability to confront the consequences of the worlding that one is in fact engaged in, and the limiting and thinking to functionality. The limit of thinking to business as usual’. If we continue to think in a business as usual manner, either throughout the Covid-19 pandemic or beyond, we will struggle. Our anthropogenic activities will continue to increase human-animal interactions through losses in wildlife habitats as well as through our consumption of farmed animals. This will serve to continue to facilitate zoonotic disease transmission.

If we wish to think beyond business as usual, then we need to rethink our relationship with animals. We have to think of a multispecies becoming with, and we need to think of multispecies entanglements. Different viewpoints of enacting change need to be considered. Collective reimagining needs to take into account the types of changes we wish to see with our relationships with other animals. We will also need to consider how these changes will be enacted post-pandemic. This will be a radical departure from business as usual and what we are used to. However, only when we acknowledge that we are not separate from nature, and that we cannot manipulate and control other species as objects for profit, will we be able to address some of the problems we face. Covid-19 is a warning shot of what humanity will face if it does not change its ways and start to acknowledge we are only one part of the ecosystems in which we live.

References: Cyranoski, D. (2020) Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people? Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00364-2 (Accessed 31 March 2020). 

Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. (2014) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. Available at http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ (Accessed 30 March 2020).
Haraway, D. (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, pp. 159-165.
Rabinowitz, P. M. G., Pappaioanou, M., Bardosh, K. L. and Conti, L. (2018) A planetary vision for one health. BMJ Global Health, 3(5), pp. 1–6.
Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J. and McNeill, J. R. (2007) The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? Ambio, 36 (8), pp. 614-621.
Wright, K. (2017) Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene. Abingdon: Routledge.

Dr Catherine Price is a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include human-animal relationships, the food system, science and society, and the environment. She tweets at @CatherineJPrice and details of her research can be found at ResearchGate

Resistance as an Instance of Evolution
Bonnie Berry, Social Problem Research Institute

As to the resistance from the discipline of sociology, to view animals-and-society studies as a serious academic venture, I might offer that the resistance is an instance of evolution. I am 66 years old and when I was a college student (1972-1983), gender studies and feminism were also stigmatized to a degree.  It was and is baffling that sociologists would be biased against gender studies, as well as against race/ethnicity studies and A&S studies. 
 

I was on the ASA A&S organizing committee and was dismayed at how difficult it was to get the new Division approved by the ASA.  However, as we might guess, those who study the devalued (nonhuman animals in this case) are often devalued themselves.  I don’t know this for a fact but I wonder (doubt) that other proposed ASA divisions have had as much trouble gaining approval.  Can we imagine the uproar if a division on gender or race or SES inequality were to face resistance by a sociology organization?  But with these areas of study we are talking about humans. 

On matters of race, disability, and other stigmatized categories, we find today that of course these ism’s still exist.  However, progress has been made with the civil rights movement, disabilities protection, etc. It’s not perfect but it moves forward.

Another evolutionary factor to keep in mind and with reference to environmental damage, it is painfully obvious that the US presidential administration denies all science, climate and other. Soon, hopefully, Trump will be gone and will be replaced by an administration that treasures scholarship and science. 

Specific to COVID-19, we as humans are concerned about it because it affects us.  More pointedly as to COVID-19 and nonhuman animals, we learn yesterday that a tiger in the Bronx (NY) zoo has corona virus, contracted from a human zoo worker.  We don’t know how many other big cats at this zoo have the virus.  This development is heartbreaking to those who admire at least certain kinds of animals, those considered beautiful and exotic.

It is probably a matter of time before we discover that farm animals are infected with COVID-19.  They are in captivity and forced to interact with human farmworkers.  That will disturb humans because they like to eat animals.  Consider also entertainment animals (horses, et al.) who may get the virus because they too are in captivity and in involuntary contact with humans.  The list goes on.

Will humans begin to care more about nonhumans because their food source, entertainment, and other exploitative purposes to which nonhumans are put begin to get sick and die from COVID-19?  Time will tell.

Progress is unbearably slow, but recall what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Bonnie Berry, PhD, is Director of the Social Problems Research Group in Seattle, WA.

Meat alternatives, China and Covid-19: A Case of Repeated History?
Miri Eliyahu, Northwestern University

For the past 2 years, I have been researching the emergence and expansion of the vegan food market in the US and the UK, as a form of a moral market. During that time, I had collected thousands of archival documents, dozens USDA datasets and interviewed most of the individuals currently involved in the vegan market in both the UK and US, as well as the first entrepreneurs who founded it years ago (54 interviews as these are still small yet expanding markets). I have learned during this time that even though the alternatives to farming animals have increased over time both in product and in manners of production (i.e. plant based alternatives and lab grown meats), the meat industry in the US was not overly concerned.

This does not mean that cattlemen’s associations are not proactive about protectionist legislation, what it does mean that most of the industry leaders in the meat industry have set their eyes on emerging economies; developing countries that now enter wealth accumulation, in which the desire for meat consumption as a status symbol is so great, it makes up for any decrease in meat sales they might experience on the national level due to vegan or plant based alternatives to meet rising.

For those of us who are unfamiliar with the global food industry, I wish to present a brief review of why China is central to both the meat industry, as well as the developing and expanding vegan and lab grown meat alternatives. China’s population is over 1,400,000,000 individuals, most of which, only in recent years encountered wealth accumulation which allows them to mimic western consumption in several ways; one of which is food consumption. The process that is now happening in China is like the US after World War 2, where agriculture subsidies made meat consumption no longer a luxury but rather a commodity (Bonnen and Schweikhardt 1998; Franck, Grandi, and Eisenberg 2013). It is assumed that the US’s historical transformation of the meat industry and consumption is the model for meat consumption demand in developing countries, and even if the vegan market succeeds in western countries, developing countries will still enjoy as similar trajectory of rise in meat sales long before veganism becomes a market category. In other words, there is a curve for meat consumption, and it will be high, as the Chinese population develop an appetite to meat and American foods.

However, there are also ways in which the Chinese market can be expected to behave differently than the US one. Unlike Americans that feel uncomfortable with lab grown meats, East Asian countries are leading the world in developing lab grown seafood as well as lab grown hog as alternatives to animal agriculture[1]. The Chinese perceptions of these are not as rigid as the Western ones, as they were less exposed to the marketing of the animal agriculture groups, nor do they have an aversion to plant based proteins as a large part of their diet and cultural foods are based on soy. This makes China the next battleground for the meat industry and the vegan and lab grown meat producers. To truly influence animal farming and reduce the number of animals harmed the vegan producers must get an early foothold in this rapidly expanding food market as both groups are trying to vie for the attention of palette of these new consumer populations that now have the financial ability to be omnivores at all costs.

Before COVID-19, it was perceived as a fact even, that the vegan market would be a late development in the Chinese food industry, as the appetite for pork and meat grows rapidly in China, making China the largest importer of animal products in the world on the recent decade (feednavigator.com n.d.). Whenever I would ask my informants in the meat industry why are they not worried about the decline in meat sales which might eventually come they all said, “China is buying all the meat right now, not the US”. This was expected to be the trend in food for the next few years, China would increase its consumption of animals, and would be the world’s largest buyer of pork, meat and poultry (“Beef Imports in China Are Expected to Continue to Grow in Volume Over the Forecast Period, 2020-2024 – ResearchAndMarkets.Com” 2020).

For meat consumption at least, recent news show that COVID-19 has flattened the curve of meat consumption in China. Not only that, but the Chinese government has banned the consumption of wildlife animals[2], a step that before COVID-19 no market expert could have foreseen. China never saw the need to restrict its animal consumption, as wild animals are in many cases considered delicacies. Unlike the US population, many in China have made the connection between animal consumption and the risk of pathogen transference and like the UK after the Mad Cow disease outbreak, they are now as a society, trying to learn more about meat alternatives and avoid the risks of eating animals spurring interest in varied alternatives[3]. If we look at modern history, this has happened before in a different country when there was a severe outbreak of BSE, or better known as mad cow disease, in the UK. The outbreak began in the mid 1980’s, and lasted in ongoing cycles of cattle illness and death until the mid-1990’s. It not only caused the loss of large numbers of animals, but once there was a suspicion of transference to human in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a high risk neurological disease, the British public reduced its consumption of meat drastically to a point in which “no one wanted the risk of dying, so for months, no one ate meat” as Craig, a former CEO of a vegetarian meat alternative brand in the UK told me. This was a health crisis for the UK, and Brits quickly learned that in a globalized supply chain it is hard to buy cheap meat with no risks. This contributed to the rise of vegetarian brands such as Quorn, one of the first meat alternatives to dominate the UK food market. For several months, meat sales were non-existent, and the American beef industry feared that it too will suffer if BSE were to migrate to American farms.

This has changed how the British populations consumes animals permanently. Currently, All farms are highly regulated by the government, the import of meats is restricted and only made possible from places who comply with the high restrictions of the UK, such as no hormones, but more than that, meat alternatives became a norm in the UK long before they emerged in the US. A walk through a Tesco store will show diverse selection of meat and dairy alternatives, all situated alongside their animal product counterpart. Even though the US has become a powerhouse of vegan alternatives since Beyond Meat and Impossible foods, in the UK this trend of meat alternatives existed for much longer.  Vegan steaks, gyros, hotdogs and so on are available for mass consumption not because of compassion, but because of the risks associated with meat consumption to one’s health. The BSE outbreak in the UK did not eliminate animals from their diet, but it did change the way British consumers view animal products, and the quantities they consume animal products. Even today, over 30 years post BSE, the Brits never reached similar consumption proportions of meat compared to Americans.

It is too early to see if COVID-19 would have a similar long lasting effects on China’s animal consumption but if history is any indication, it seems as if they are following a path that increases the chances of a developing country adopting meat alternatives before they ever adopt meat fully. The panic of contracting illnesses coupled with their flexibility towards innovations such as lab grown meats and plant-based proteins makes them ideal adopter of vegan meat alternatives after the COVID-19 health crisis, and its direct relation to animal consumption. It is no surprise that large plant-based producers such as Impossible foods have set their goals to China amid COVID-19 as now, an emerging market of vegan meat alternatives. I expect that COVID-19, and its connection to animal consumption will have long lasting effects on how the Chinese population views meat consumption, in ways that might reduce animal harm in the food industry as they move towards a different path than post WW2 US.