New Books in Animal Studies

In this episode, Kim finds out that Saronik gets a little weird when it comes to dogs. We talk about Donna J. Haraway’s book The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness.Haraway studies methods (and practitioners) of agility training in order to try and figure out what these praxes that bring together nature and culture, by means of which humans relate with species they have evolved with.Saronik is waiting to meet Miles, Kim’s amazing Newfie. Below, you can see him with Toby.He met Toby on two occasions a year apart, at the same cafe in Bushwick, completely by accident. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

The All About Birds Regional Field-Guide Series brings birding enthusiasts the best information from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, AllAboutBirds.org, used by more than 21 million people each year. These definitive books provide the most up-to-date resources and expert coverage on bird species throughout North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas, but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance.Combining ethnological, historical, archaeological, and political perspectives with comparative reference to other North Pacific cultures, Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species (U Washington Press, 2021) traces fishery development in Southeast Alaska from precontact Indigenous relationships with herring to postcontact focus on herring products. Revealing new findings about current herring stocks as well as the fish’s significance to the conservation of intraspecies biodiversity, the book explores the role of traditional local knowledge, in combination with archeological, historical, and biological data, in both understanding marine ecology and restoring herring to their former abundance.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Packed with beautiful imagery, but also hard scientific facts, Jackie Higgins's book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses (Atria Books, 2022) explores how we process the world around us by analyzing the incredible sensory capabilities of thirteen animals and reveals that we are not limited to merely five senses. There is a scientific revolution stirring in the field of human perception. Research has shown that the extraordinary sensory powers of our animal friends can help us better understand the same powers that lie dormant within us. From the harlequin mantis shrimp with its ability to see a vast range of colors, to the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors; from the orb-weaving spider whose eyes recognize not only space but time, to the cheetah whose ears are responsible for its perfect agility, these astonishing animals hold the key to better understanding how we make sense of the world around us. Eye-opening and captivating, Sentient will change the way you think about what it is to be human. Ana Georgescu is a Romanian transplant, astrophysics graduate, aspiring journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

The author of The Five Roles of the Master Herder and the bestseller The Tao of Equus, Linda Kohanov speaks and teaches internationally. She established Eponaquest Worldwide to explore the healing potential of working with horses and offer programs on everything from emotional and social intelligence, leadership, stress reduction, and parenting to consensus building and mindfulness. Her main website is eponaquest.com. More information about The Five Roles of a Master Herder is available at masterherder.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Join Dr. Mary Menton and Dr. Philippe Le Billon as they dive into their new edited volume, Environmental Defenders: Deadly Struggle for Life and Territory, published by Routledge as a part of their Explorations in Environmental Studies Series in 2021. The interview explores what/who defenders are, what threats they face, and what can be done to help support and protect them.  Broken up into three parts: On Defenders, Dirty Projects, Green Projects, Environmental Defenders provides into insight into the challenges and responsibilities defenders assume through firsthand accounts and global perspectives. The accounts highlight the diversity of defender and the collective character of their struggles. It identifies how power struggles take place in various forms of violence on a daily basis. Recognizing the visible and invisible forms of violence allows the reader to understand the complex emotional and gendered dimensions embedded in environmental contests. While successfully documenting local communities, the twenty-two chapters also seek to explain the roles that corporations, NGOs, BINGOs, national, and international authorities play within the defender narrative by breaking down their complicated relationships with defenders.  Finally, Environmental Defenders illustrates how assumptions derived from Global North knowledges, developmental infrastructures, and economies, while helpful and supportive in some cases, also undermine, appropriate, and/or delegitimize forms of indigenous knowledge, cultures, communities, and environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Controversy over the medicinal uses of wild animals in China has erupted around the ethics and efficacy of animal-based drugs, the devastating effect of animal farming on wildlife conservation, and the propensity of these practices to foster zoonotic diseases. In Mao's Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China (Duke UP, 2021), Liz P. Y. Chee – Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute and Lecturer at Tembusu College, both at the National University of Singapore – traces the history of the use of medicinal animals in modern China. While animal parts and tissue have been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, Chee demonstrates that the early Communist state expanded and systematized their production and use to compensate for drug shortages, generate foreign investment in high-end animal medicines, and facilitate an ideological shift toward legitimating folk medicines. Among other topics, Chee investigates the craze for chicken blood therapy during the Cultural Revolution, the origins of deer antler farming under Mao and bear bile farming under Deng, and the crucial influence of the Soviet Union and North Korea on Chinese zootherapies. In the process, Chee shows Chinese medicine to be a realm of change rather than a timeless tradition, a hopeful conclusion given current efforts to reform its use of animals.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Walter Tschinkel has spent much of his career investigating the hidden subterranean realm of ant nests. This wonderfully illustrated book takes you inside an unseen world where thousands of ants build intricate homes in the soil beneath our feet.Tschinkel describes the ingenious methods he has devised to study ant nests, showing how he fills a nest with plaster, molten metal, or wax and painstakingly excavates the cast. He guides you through living ant nests chamber by chamber, revealing how nests are created and how colonies function. How does nest architecture vary across species? Do ants have “architectural plans”? How do nests affect our environment? As he delves into these and other questions, Tschinkel provides a one-of-a-kind natural history of the planet’s most successful creatures and a compelling firsthand account of a life of scientific discovery.Offering a unique look at how simple methods can lead to pioneering science, Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests (Princeton UP, 2021) addresses the unsolved mysteries of underground ant nests while charting new directions for tomorrow’s research, and reflects on the role of beauty in nature and the joys of shoestring science.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Today I talked to Annette Whipple about her book Whooo Knew? The Truth About Owls (Reycraft Books, 2020)How do owls see in the dark? Can owls spin their heads all the way around? Why do owls puke? These and other questions are answered by an owl expert, along with some extra information provided by the owls themselves!Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies