Editor's Overview

Kenneth J. Shapiro

There is a cohesiveness amidst the diversity of the papers in this second issue of S&A. For diversity, several disciplines are ably represented and the papers span three of the four broad areas which are the scope of the journal ­ applied uses of animals, animals in the popular culture, and wildlife and the environment. Our effort to attract scholars from outside the US has resulted in a truly international issue.

Present contents

The coherence is around the issue of attitudes toward nonhuman animals. On reflection, this coherence is not surprising. Embedded in the subtitular topic, the "human experience of other animals," is necessarily the question, what are our basic attitudes toward nonhuman animals?

Hills' study is an attempt to provide a superordinate framework of all possible attitudes. It is built on three "motivational bases" that, arguably, drive, or organize or inform our attitudes: (1) instrumentality or usefulness of animals to us, (2) awareness of and sympathy with the animal's point of view, and (3) beliefs and values about the nature and status of animals. This is an important study, for the results of the application of the model begin to illuminate the inconsistencies in our attitudes and practices regarding animals and suggest the underlying motives or interests that must be addressed if opposing viewpoints are to be brought together.

Broida, Tingley, Kimball and Miele correlate another psychological construct, personality type, (arguably as fundamental as "motivational base"), with attitudes toward animal experimentation. Intuitive and feeling types were more likely to oppose animal experimentation and to be more critical of science, or at least of a science that features control and manipulation. Although not providing direct evidence (as the subjects are a general population of undergraduates), this study adds some empirical light to the often heated but unsubstantiated charges as to the character and attitudes of those on both sides of the current debate on our use of animals. A surprising finding is that undergraduate students majoring in fields where they more directly encounter animal experimentation were more opposed to that practice than were students in majors more far afield.

Moving from psychological constructs to sociocultural variables, Dahles', Hawley's and Quinn's studies and Birke's review essay all illuminate attitudes toward animals through analysis of a symbol. Interestingly, each locates themes of dominance, conquest and power relations ­ themes that are strongly suggestive of a feminist critique of culture.

In his study of the subculture of cockfighting, Hawley describes the glorification of the cock for his courage as a fighter and how the cock then "serves as a living symbol to a vibrant though mythic and heroic past" for the cocker. In her study of hunting in contemporary Netherlands, Dahles also keys on a glorification of fierce competition and bravery that was the center of the symbol of "game" animals. Both authors conclude that in the contemporary world such symbolic rationalizations of the two respective activities are quickly becoming unsustainable ­ particularly given environmentalist and animal rights concerns. Quinn describes how portraiture styles featuring corpulent cattle were seized upon as "a symbol of English prestige" and became an ideal type that actually guided breeding practices. Birke reviews three books that treat the symbol of meat. In different cultural settings, the symbolism of meat-eating confers status to a particular species (human over nonhuman), gender (male over female), social class (gentry over the poor), or nation (Great Britain's "roast beefe" and the United States' hamburger ­ as forms of cultural imperialism).

In all these articles, the attitude is an often ambivalent mix of identification with the strength of animals and nature and the demonstration of their conquest.

Future considerations

In her commentary, Noske examines the connection between assumptions about science and attitudes toward animals. Critical of the tendency to locate the study of animals exclusively in the natural sciences, she calls on her own field of anthropology to allow that nonhuman animals are social and cultural beings and that, therefore, social scientific approaches to their study should be undertaken. She distinguishes social from natural science in that the latter is more typically predicated on a biological reductionism and essentialism, particularly when it comes to animals. This discussion dovetails with Hills' third motivational base, the status of nonhuman animals vis-a-vis human animals and extends it to the question of how to study animals: Should we assume them different from us such that we can know them (but not ourselves) divorced from their own social-cultural setting? Or are they (and we) inherently social so that we can only know them in social context? Must there, then, be sociocultural studies of nonhuman animals?

What relation would such a field have to "animal studies," which we have defined as the subfield within the social sciences that will further the understanding of the human side of human/nonhuman animal interactions? If we recognize the possibility of sociological and anthropological studies of animal societies, then animal studies is simply the investigation of the human aspect of sites where human and animal societies interface or where they are already "mixed communities." According to Mary Midgley, "all human communities have involved animals" (1992, p. 211).

The current debate between modernism and postmodernism is relevant here. Modernism took as its regulative ideal the possibility of understanding any object of study as it is, independent of the individual investigator's point of view and social and linguistic community. Challenging this ideal, postmodernism assumes that reality as we know it is necessarily a social construction and directs the investigator to develop methods that reflect on, "deconstruct" and, generally, interpret that construction. The Enlightenment project of finding an ultimate truth is abandoned, at least within the social sciences, for the more limited project of understanding the world as we are continually constructing it (for an example of this debate in psychology, see The Humanist Psychologist , 18 , 1, whole issue).

In the context of this debate, when we study the human side of the human/nonhuman animal interaction we face several daunting layers: The animal with whom we interact is severally determined by biological givens which are subject to evolutionary pressure, by his or her membership in an animal society, and by his or her embeddedness in a human society which includes a heavy symbolic or social construction both of the animal (which construction itself can include a reconstruction through selective breeding and genetic engineering of the animal's biological givens) and of the human, particularly with respect to his or her status vis-a-vis that animal. Any takers?

Reference Midgley, M. (1992). The mixed community. In E. Hargrove, (Ed.), The animal rights/environmental ethics debate: The environmental perspective (pp. 211-227). Albany: State University of New York Press.

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