Animals (Concepts and Theories)

 A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth about Factory Farms (USA: Don McCorckell, 2009: 91 mins) ["A heart-stopping new documentary, A River Of Waste exposes a huge health and environmental scandal in our modern industrial system of meat and poultry production. The damage documented in today's factory farms far exceeds the damage that was depicted in Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, a book written over 100 years ago. Some scientists have gone so far as to call the condemned current factory farm practices as "mini Chernobyls." The European Union stands virtually alone in establishing strong health and environmental standards for the industry. In the U.S and elsewhere, the meat and poultry industry is dominated by dangerous uses of arsenic, antibiotics, growth hormones and by the dumping of massive amounts of sewage in fragile waterways and environments. The film documents the vast catastrophic impact on the environment and public health as well as focuses on individual lives damaged and destroyed. As one observer noted, if terrorists did this, we would be up in arms, but when it is a fortune 500 company, it is just "business as usual." In 1906, public outrage at the scandal exposed by Sinclair led to major reforms thatcleaned up a corrupt and dangerous system. It is the hope of the filmmakers to mobilize a similar public outcry for reform."]

Bakker, Karen, "The Sounds of Invisible Worlds." NOEMA (June 20, 2023) ["Like the microscope and the telescope did centuries ago, new technologies to capture and analyze sound are leading to startling discoveries about what the eyes cannot see."]

Bardenwerper, Will, Stan Brewer and Tucker Malarkey. "Wild Ecologies: So Go the Salmon, So Go the World." Fiction/Non/Fiction (November 19, 2019) ["In this episode, writers Tucker Malarkey and Will Bardenwerper, as well as rancher, rider, and member of the Oglala Sioux tribe Stan Brewer talk about their connections to the natural world. Malarkey talks about efforts to save wild salmon, their vital role in the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest, and how relations between the US and Russia on this issue might provide insight on global climate change cooperation. Bardenwerper and Brewer, the first writer-source duo to appear on the show together, discuss Indian relay horse racing, and horses’ importance to the Lakota community."]

Bedic, Tamara and Phillip Murray. "Basic Legal Rights for Animals: Activists and Advocates." Law and Disorder Radio (March 16, 2020)

Blase, Martin. "Missing Microbes." Radio West (April 28, 2014) ["Your body is host to about 100 trillion bacterial cells that form your microbiome, the complex ecosystem of microorganisms on which your life depends. Today, our microbiomes are threatened by a loss of species diversity that could be our undoing. In a new book, Dr. Martin Blaser argues that our obsession with hygiene and overuse of antibiotics has bleached our microbiomes, making them weak and making us more susceptible to dangerous new diseases."]

Camenzind, Franz, et al. "Guardians vs. Gardeners: Relocating wolves to help balance ecology." Ideas (March 12, 2019) ["How much should humans try to "fix" nature? That question gets at the heart of our relationship with the entire natural world. Contributor Brad Badelt travels to isolated Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, where a controversial decision has been made to relocate wolves from the mainland to help sustain the island's dwindling pack. The world's leading wolf researchers and environmental thinkers debate that decision — and what our idea of wilderness means."]

Christensen, Villy, Reg Waatson and Siwa Msangi. "Will There Be Any Fish in 2050." The Science Show (February 26, 2011)

Connor, Eamonn. "Diffractive Visions: Towards an Oceanic Trans-Corporeality in Leviathan." The Cine-Files #14 (Spring 2019)

Corson, Trevor. "Stalking the American Lobster." The Atlantic (April 2002) ["Government scientists say that lobsters are being dangerously overfished. Lobstermen insist that stocks are plentiful. It's a familiar kind of standoff—except that now a new breed of ecologist has taken to the waters, using scuba gear, underwater robots, and even nuclear submarines, in order to figure out what's going on. It turns out that the lore and lessons of the lobsterman are worth paying attention to."]

Denali Outside (June 9, 2015) ["There's no easy way to say goodbye to a friend, especially when they've supported you through your darkest times. Denali is the story of photographer Ben Moon and his beloved dog, Denali. A collaboration between director Ben Knight, producer Ben Moon and cinematographer Skip Armstrong, Denali celebrates the human-dog bond and illuminates the incredible resilience we can conjure up with the help of friends."]

Dunn, Rob. "Home Alone, with 200,000 Friends." American Scholar (February 5, 2021) ["As we in the United States approach a full year of spending even more time than usual at home, and away from friends and family, we’re all a little bit lonely. But even though it might feel as if your immediate family and your pets are the only signs of life in your house—you’re not as alone as you might think. The modern American house is a wilderness: thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that we always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our houses has had unintended—and dangerous—consequences for our health and the environment. Biologist Rob Dunn, a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, joins us to impart some advice about how to graciously welcome these unbidden guests into our homes."]

Dunning, Brian. "Animal Predictors: Psychic, Sensitive, or Silly?" Skeptoid (April 29, 2014)

Earle, Sylvia. "Her Deepness." On Being (June 7, 2012)

Eisen, Jessica. "Animals under the law: What options are there for animals to 'lawyer up'?" Ideas (March 22, 2019) ["Under the eyes of the law, animals that live in our homes or on a farm are 'property.' But there's a growing movement to grant some animals like chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins 'non-human persons' status. Harvard Law School doctoral candidate Jessica Eisen thinks the law could do even better than that."]

Fang, Lee, Glenn Greenwald and Leighton Akio Woodhouse. "Animal Rights Activists Face Multiple Felony Charges, Brought by Prosecutors With Ties to Smithfield Foods." The Intercept (June 7, 2018)

Flannery, Tim. "Raised by Wolves." New York Review of Books (April 5, 2018)

Foreman, Dave. "On the History and Definition of Rewilding." Rewilding #1 (September 8, 2018)

Franks, Becca, et al. "The Case Against Octopus Farming." Issues in Science and Technology 35.2 (Winter 2019)  ["... factory farming is a key part of a highly industrialized food system that is both cruel to individual animals and environmentally unsustainable. Despite efforts of animal welfare and environmental groups to redress these problems, they are deeply embedded in the global food systems’ production technologies, corporate profits, and patterns of consumer demand. Decoupling the ethical and environmental consequences of food production from this system is a daunting challenge, and it should lead us to ask whether we want to repeat mistakes already made with terrestrial animals with aquatic animals, especially octopus."]

Freeberg, Ernst. "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books, 2020)." New Books in Biography (October 13, 2020) ["In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement. From the center of these debates, Henry Bergh launched a shocking campaign to grant rights to animals. Ernest Freeberg's book A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books, 2020) is revelatory social history, awash with colorful characters. Cheered on by thousands of men and women who joined his cause, Bergh fought with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as they pushed for new laws to protect trolley horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals. Raucous and entertaining, A Traitor to His Species tells the story of a remarkable man who gave voice to the voiceless and shaped our modern relationship with animals. Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee. He has authored three award-winning books, including The Age of Edison. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee."]

Greenberg, Joel. "A Feathered River Across the Sky." Radio West (April 24, 2014) ["This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon. Her species was native to North America, and in the 1800s the birds numbered in the billions. Their vast airborne flocks reportedly blotted out the sun and took days to pass overhead. But in just a few decades, they were gone. Naturalist Joel Greenberg has written a book about the passenger pigeon’s natural history and its speedy flight to extinction, and he joins us to examine what the bird’s demise reveals about our relationship to the natural world."]

Greenwald, Glenn. "Six Animal Rights Activists Charged With Felonies for Investigation and Rescue That Led to Punishment of a Utah Turkey Farm." The Intercept (May 4, 2018)

---. "This Pet Shelter Only Hires Homeless People Who Love Animals." The Dodo (May 16, 2017)

Jones, Matthew. "The Case for Animal Rights: A Defense of Tom Regan." Philosophy in Film (October 24, 2020) [On Tom Regan's 1987 book The Case for Animal Rights and Bong Joon-Ho's 2017 film Okja.]

"Kill 'em All." Radiolab (March 25, 2014) ["Ever since there have been humans, mosquitoes have been biting us, and we’ve been trying to kill them. And, for the most part, the mosquitoes have been winning. Today there are over 3000 species on pretty much every corner of Earth. Mosquito-borne diseases kill around 1 million people a year (most of them children) and make more than 500 million people sick. But thanks to Hadyn Perry and his team of scientists, that might be about to change. Producer Andy Mills talks with author Sonia Shah about the difficulties of sharing a planet with mosquitoes and with science writer David Quammen about the risks of getting rid of them."]

Kofler, Natalie. "What role should humans play in editing nature?" When We Talk About Animals (November 19, 2018) ["A few years ago, our guest, molecular biologist Dr. Natalie Kofler, was completing her postdoctoral training at Yale University. She was actively using CRISPR gene-editing techniques to study the mammalian cardiovascular system to try to develop better tools to treat human vascular diseases. While attending talks on conservation biology at the Yale School of Forestry, she started to wonder: Could the invasive emerald ash borer be genetically edited with these same techniques to save American ash trees? Could coral reefs be genetically edited to be more resilient to warming waters? Should humans develop and use these technologies to change nature? If so, how? And who gets to decide? Today Dr. Kofler is a leading thinker on these questions and an important voice on the potential environmental applications of gene-editing technologies — technologies that have the extraordinary potential to end malaria or to suppress Lyme disease, but also to change or delete entire species and to transform life in previously unimaginable ways. To think clearly about their use, she says, forces us to rethink who we are, to define what is important to us, and to reconsider how far our human knowledge of nature’s interconnectedness extends."]

Kurlansky, Mark. "On His Most Important Environmental Writing Yet." The Literary Life (April 10, 2020) ["On this episode, Mark Kurlansky talks with Mitchell about his latest book, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate and the impact of climate change on food supplies and sea life."]

Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household. New York University Press, 2021. ["The rise and increasingly important role of companion animals in our families. From homemade meals for our dogs to high-end feline veterinary care, pets are a growing multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States. In Just Like Family, Andrea Laurent-Simpson explores the expanding role of animals in what she calls “the multi-species family,” providing a window into a world where almost 95 percent of adults who share their homes with dogs and cats identify—and ultimately treat—their animal companions as legitimate members of their families.
With an insightful eye, Laurent-Simpson examines why and how these animals have increasingly become an important part of our households. She highlights their various roles in our lives, including as siblings to our existing children, as animal children themselves, and in some cases, even as grandchildren, particularly as fertility rates decline and a growing number of younger couples choose to live a childfree lifestyle. Ultimately, Laurent-Simpson highlights how animals—and their place in our lives—have changed the structure of the American family in surprising ways. Just Like Family provides a fascinating inside look at our complex relationships with our beloved animal companions in the twenty-first century."]

Lennard, Natasha. "How the Prosecution of Animal Rights Activists As Terrorists Foretold Today’s Criminalization of Dissent." The Intercept (December 12, 2019) ["A new documentary “The Animal People” tells the story of the SHAC 7, who were sentenced to prison on terrorism charges over their protest activity."]

Leonard, Christopher. "The Meat Racket." Radio West (March 7, 2014) ["Just a handful of companies raise nearly all the meat consumed in America, and among them, Tyson Foods is king. According to the journalist Christopher Leonard, Tyson wrote the blueprint for modern meat production. He says there’s no better way to understand how our food is produced than to know how the company works. In a new book, Leonard explores how Tyson mastered the economics of factory farming to rise to the top, and how it transformed rural America and the middle class economy in the process."]

Leopold, Aldo. "Thinking Like a Mountain." (Originally published in Sand County Almanac in 1949: posted on Eco-Action)

Mezrich, Ben. "Woolly." Radio West (December 8, 2017) ["Believe it or not, scientists are actually trying to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. It's not going to be easy, but if they get it right, and if they manage all the legal and ethical hurdles, the results could actually help save the world.  What if you could take the DNA of an ancient creature and bring it back to life? It sounds like the plot of Jurassic Park, but you can’t actually rebuild a dinosaur. You could to it with a woolly mammoth though. The writer Ben Mezrich has a new book about the scientists and researchers who are working to insert DNA from a mammoth hair sample into an elephant embryo. Wednesday, he joins Doug to tell the story, and to explain how the results could actually help save the world."]

Mishan, Ligaya. "Frogs are Disappearing. What Does That Mean?"The New York Times (October 18, 2018) ["For ages, they have been symbols in human culture — of fertility, gastronomy and now the alt-right movement. But these noble amphibians are declining in numbers."]

Ng, Alan. "Rodents of Unusual Size." Film Threat (September 12, 2018)

Page, Lewis. "An Inconvenient Animal: Rodents of Unusual Size." BLARB (January 9, 2019)

Pinkerton, Nick. "Leviathan: Sea lives meet amphibious cameras meet a hulking, devastating war machine: welcome to a documentary like nothing you’ve seen (or felt)." Sight and Sound (December 6, 2013)

Potter, Will. "FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists." Green is the New Red (December 20, 2011)

Rabinowitz, Alan. "We Are All Wildlife." On Being (October 13, 2011)

Schwarz, Gabrielle. The Complaint of Female Subjectivity: On Brent Morgern's Jane." Another Gaze (January 18, 2018)

Schyler, Krista. "Butterflies, Bison and the Border Wall." She Explores (2019)
["Conservation photographer Krista Schlyer describes the almost 2,000-mile border between the US and Mexico as a vibrant landscape teeming with life. Raising awareness for its biodiversity has become an integral part of her life’s work and is the focus of a new documentary film she directed, Ay Mariposa, which came out in May. We hear a lot about the border wall in the news, but we don’t often talk about the wildlife and landscape that its construction impacts.
Note: We want to emphasize that while there’s a lot of talk about flora and fauna in this episode, it’s not to discount the very human elements of the US/Mexico border – it’s simply to highlight what exists alongside it."]

Shane, Charlotte. "Stupid Human Tricks: Why animals may be smarter than we think." Bookforum (May 2021) [On the book How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger: "Human are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origin of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Challenger examines how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with other species with whom we share this fragile planet. That we are separated from our own animality is a delusion, according to Challenger. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to Be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human, and a robust defense of what it means to be an animal."]

Stephenson, Marcia. "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World (University of Texas Press, 2023)." New Books in Animal Studies (January 27, 2024) ["Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas Beyond the Andes: The Untold History of Camelids in the Modern World (University of Texas Press, 2023) by Dr. Marcia Stephenson tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas. Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South."]

Wuerthner, George. "The War on Wolves is Part of the Culture War." Counterpunch (February 11, 2020) ["Recently the Idaho Fish and Game changed its rules to allow any hunter or trapper to kill up to 30 wolves per year. And the state is considering a proposal to open much of the state to year-round wolf killing."]