Animal studies

Animal Studies is a recently recognized field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars from fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, film studies, history, sociology, biology, psychology, literary studies, geography, philosophy and feminism or queer theory seek to understand both human-animal relations now and in the past, and to understand animals as beings-in-themselves separate from our knowledge of them. Because the field is still developing, scholars and others have some freedom to define their own criteria and structure for the field.

In part, Animal Studies developed out of the animal rights movement and was grounded in ethical questions of how best to co-exist with other species: whether it could ever be right to eat animals, whether it could ever be right to do scientific tests on animals if animals were not the end beneficiaries of such studies, etc. Works in this vein include the Australian philosopher Peter Singer's seminal work Animal Liberation (book) and John Maxwell Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999).

Cultural historians took a different approach, seeking to understand how representations of animals function to create our understandings (and misunderstandings) of other species. To what extent do we always necessarily anthropomorphize the other when looking at animals? Is it impossible not to bring our own biases and prejudices with us when we "objectively" observe animals? For instance, in Donna Haraway's book, "Primate Visions" in a chapter entitled Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936, she shows how the taxidermist Akeley who created the dioramas for the American Museum of Natural History created the family groupings to appear as the traditional "Nuclear family" with heterosexual parents and 2.5 offspring, despite the fact that he'd seen very different behavior and groupings when observing, for instance, Great Apes in the wild. Contrawise, people often mistakenly identify with animals, thinking that they understand the thought processes of species other than their own. This is the theme of Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man in which bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell believed that he was to some extent part of the bear community and that he understood the mindsets and social heirarchies of the bears he documented, only to be killed by a bear at the end of the film. Given the complexity of human-animal relations, one aspect of animal studies is to emphasize that animals are very like us, and yet not at all like us, in interesting ways. As Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous dictum puts it, "animals are good to think with."