Wild Animals and Other Pets Kept in Costa Rican Households: Incidence, Species and Numbers

Carlos Drews


A nationwide survey that included personal interviews in 1,021 households studied the incidence, species, and numbers of nonhuman animals kept in Costa Rican households. A total of 71% of households keep animals. The proportion of households keeping dogs (53%) is 3.6 higher than the proportion of households keeping cats (15%). In addition to the usual domestic or companion animals kept in 66% of the households, 24% of households keep wild species as pets. Although parrots are the bulk of wild species kept as pets, there is vast species diversity, including other birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates? typically caught in their natural habitat to satisfy the pet market. The extraction from the wild and the keeping of such animals is by-and-large illegal and often involves endangered species. Costa Ricans, in a conservative estimate, keep about 151,288 parrots as pets. More than half the respondents have kept a psittacid at some point in their lives. Pet keeping is a common practice in Costa Rican society, and its incidence is high by international standards.
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Explaining Support for Animal Rights: A Comparison of Two Recent Approaches to Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and Postmodernity

Adrian Franklin, Bruce Tranter, and Robert White


Questions on "animal rights" in a cross-national survey conducted in 1993 provide an opportunity to compare the applicability to this issue of two theories of the socio-political changes summed up in "postmodernity": Inglehart’s (1997) thesis of "postmaterialist values" and Franklin’s (1999) synthesis of theories of late modernity. Although Inglehart seems not to have addressed human-nonhuman animal relations, it is reasonable to apply his theory of changing values under conditions of "existential security" to "animal rights." Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis argues that new values emerged within specific groups because of the achievement of material security. Although emphasizing human needs, they shift the agenda toward a series of lifestyle choices that favor extending lifestyle choices, rights, and environmental considerations. Franklin’s account of nonhuman animals and modern cultures stresses a generalized "ontological insecurity." Under postmodern conditions, changes to core aspects of social and cultural life are both fragile and fugitive. As neighborhood, community, family, and friendship relations lose their normative and enduring qualities, companion animals increasingly are drawn in to those formerly exclusive human emotional spaces. With a method used by Inglehart and a focus in countries where his postmaterialist effects should be most evident, this study derives and tests different expectations from the theories, then tests them against data from a survey supporting Inglehart's theory. His theory is not well supported. We conclude that its own anthropocentrism limits it and that the allowance for hybrids of nature-culture in Franklin's account offers more promise for a social theory of animal rights in changing times.
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Language, Power and the Social Construction of Animals

Arran Stibbe


This paper describes how language contributes to the oppression and exploitation of animals by animal product industries. Critical Discourse Analysis, a framework usually applied in countering racism and sexism, is applied to a corpus of texts taken from animal industry sources. The mass confinement and slaughter of animals in intensive farms depend on the implicit consent of the population, signaled by its willingness to buy animal products produced in this way. Ideological assumptions embedded in everyday discourse and that of the animal industries manufacture and maintain this consent. Through analysis of texts, this paper attempts to expose these assumptions and discusses implications for countering the domination and exploitation of animals.
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Imagining Rabbits and Squirrels in the English Countryside

Hilda Kean

Drawing on contemporary coverage, particularly in The Field and Country Life, this article considers the construction of rabbits and squirrels as images of the past in England. By the 1930s, the red squirrel had become increasingly rare in the English countryside. Particularly in towns and suburbs, the population of the grey squirrel was growing rapidly. Those who saw themselves as the custodians of the countryside depicted the grey squirrel as a foreign force inimical to a mythical English way of life as epitomized by the red squirrel. In the post war period, the debate resurfaced about the nature of the countryside and who had a right to defend it. The focus then was upon the spread of myxomatosis from France, which was depicted as a foreign disease. Wild rabbits, who died in the thousands from this infection, became appropriated, as red squirrels before them, as symbols of a lyrical and ordered past in the countryside.
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Teaming Incarcerated Youth with Shelter Dogs For a Second Chance

Tami Harbolt and Tamara H. Ward
The Animal Humane Association of New Mexico, Inc. and the Youth Diagnostic and Development Center of New Mexico

Numerous studies have noted the prevalence of nonhuman animal abuse in the backgrounds of adult criminal offenders (Ascione & Arkow, 1999; Lockwood & Ascione, 1998). Other studies have discussed the efficacy of animal- assisted therapy and education programs in prison settings (Szaraval, 2000). Project Second Chance, a training program held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, teams older teenage offenders with shelter dogs in order to foster empathy, community responsibility, kindness, and an awareness of healthy social interactions.
 

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