New Books in Animal Studies

Nov 21 2024 269 ep. 55 mins 70
New Books in Animal Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars and activists on animals and animal-human relations.

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Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Nov 21 2024 47 mins  
A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the

David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and that Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)

Oct 31 2024 51 mins  
In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than

Nicolas Delsol, "Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study" (UP of Florida, 2024)

Oct 28 2024 59 mins  
In Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study (University Press of Florida, 2024), Nicolas Delsol compares zooarchaeological and material evidence from sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to show how the introduction of cattle, beginning with imports by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, shaped colonial American society. Before European coloniza

Larisa Jasarević, "Beekeeping in the End Times" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Oct 26 2024 63 mins  
Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather t

Himanshu Upadhyaya, "Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India (1850–1980)" (Springer, 2024)

Oct 25 2024 58 mins  
Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India: Tracing the Pre-history of Green and White Revolutions (Springer 2024) traces the contours of the symbiotic relationship between crop cultivation and cattle rearing in India by reading against the grain of several official accounts from the late colonial period to the 1980s. It also skillfully unpacks the multiple cultu

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)

Oct 17 2024 50 mins  
Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from. For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence

Peter Joshua Atkins, "The Animalising Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4: Reading Across the Human-Animal Boundary" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Oct 16 2024 44 mins  
The Animalising Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4: Reading Across the Human-Animal Boundary (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a detailed investigation into the nature of Nebuchadnezzar's animalising affliction in Daniel 4 and the degree to which he is depicted as actually becoming an animal. Peter Atkins examines two predominant lines of interpretation: either Nebuchadnezzar undergoes a

Roberta L. Millstein, "The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Oct 10 2024 67 mins  
Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Land is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millenium (University of Chicago Press), Roberta Millstein aims to set the record straight. Millstein, who is professor emerit of philosophy at the University of Cali

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)

Sep 29 2024 63 mins  
From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the invention of horse-drawn transporta

Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Sep 14 2024 68 mins  
China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement - has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western