Frog and Cyberfrog are Friends: Dissection Simulation and Animal Advocacy

Ken Fleischmann

Although at first glance it may seem an unlikely alliance, frogs and cyberfrogs certainly benefit from an unusual friendship that connects the virtual world of dissection simulation and the physical realm of nonhuman animal advocacy. This paper focuses on the symbiotic relationship of dissection simulation designers and animal advocates. Dissection simulation manufacturers benefit from this relationship through the purchasing and promotion of their products by animal advocacy organizations, and also they benefit from policy changes that encourage the use of dissection simulations as alternatives to dissection. Reciprocally, animal advocacy organizations benefit by saving animal lives, gaining a new tool for convincing teachers to stop dissecting, and demonstrating that they are a pro-technology movement. The knowledges and values embedded in cyberfrogs make them both boundary objects and cyborgs.
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“What a thing, then, is this cow ...”: Positioning domestic livestock animals in the texts and practices of small-scale ‘self-sufficiency’.

Lewis Holloway

This paper focuses on the positioning of nonhuman animals in the texts and practices of two versions of small-scale food ‘self-sufficiency’ in Britain. William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1822) and John Seymour’s writing on self-sufficiency (1960s/1970s) are discussed, suggesting that livestock animals are central, in a number of ways, to the constitution of these modes of self-sufficiency. First, animals are situated in both the texts and in the practicing of self-sufficiency, regarded as essential parts of the economies and ecologies of small-scale food production. Second, animals’ role in small scale domestic food supply is supplemented by their parts in these authors’ criticisms of wider social, economic and political conditions. Animals become associated with a morality of human behavior and lifestyle, and are part of the broader social critiques which the writing and practicing of these modes of self-sufficiency imply. These historically and geographically-specific versions of self-sufficiency are valuable in defining and enacting possible alternative modes of human-animal relation in the context of food production.
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Who or What is the Laboratory Rat (and Mouse)?

Lynda Birke

This paper explores the many meanings attached to the designation, “the rodent in the laboratory” (rat or mouse). Generations of selective breeding have created these rodents. They now differ markedly from their wild progenitors, nonhuman animals associated with carrying all kinds of diseases. Through selective breeding, they have moved from the rats of the sewers to become standardized laboratory tools and (metaphorically) saviors of humans in the fight against disease. This paper sketches two intertwined strands of metaphors associated with laboratory rodents. The first focuses on the idea of medical/scientific progress; in this context, the paper looks at laboratory rodents often depicted (in advertising for laboratory products) as epitomizing medical triumph or serving as helpers or saviors. The second strand concerns the ambiguous status of the laboratory rodent who is both an animal (bites) and not an animal (data). The paper argues that, partly because of these ambiguous and multiple meanings, the rodent in the laboratory is doubly “othered”Cfirst in the way that animals so often are made other to ourselves and then other in the relationship of the animal in the laboratory to other animals.
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The Moral Reasoning of Believers in Animal Rights

Gary Block

This study evaluated the moral reasoning of 54 individuals who believed in the concept of nonhuman animal rights using a research tool based on Kohlberg’s (1986) cognitive theory of moral development. Results for these primarily college-and postgraduate-educated individuals suggest that people who believe in animal rights have equivalent or higher-level moral reasoning when compared to adult, education-matched, historical control groups.
 

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