In a sense the term Animal Studies may be deceptive, since, for the most part, we do not study animals. We generally leave that to the zoologists and others. The real subject of Animal Studies, it seems to me, is human-animal relations. Perhaps we could just as well call it Human Studies, though the term Anthrozoology might be most accurate.

    The essential insight of Animal Studies (I stick to the term out of custom), it seems to me, is that our understanding of ourselves as human beings, with everything that entails, is intimately bound up with our relations to animals. By ourselves we are almost nothing at all. We construct our identity as human beings primarily through...

The ways in which people can care about animals are almost as diverse as the creatures themselves. Personally, I wonder if there are really any people at all out there who are actually  indifferent to animals, but many have not managed to identify or articulate the ways in which animals are important to them. My own experience teaching college seems to confirm this. In courses on human-animal relations, I often begin by telling my students something like, " I can't tell you whether or not you should hunt, eat meat, visit the zoo, or clone your pet dog, but I do ask you to consider such issues frankly and honestly." I never sermonize, but I ask my students in every stage to relate the experience of their...