Ethics & Nonhuman Animals
CAGED: TAKING ANIMALS AND SOCIETY WHILE INCARCERATED
By Amanda Peltier
"How would you feel if separated from your family, you were shipped to different cities in a cage no less, bound of life, with pain/pleasure techniques, and complete humility for performance under duress, a whip no less. If you were a tiger would you do it? Would you break away, think of escape and if desperate, kill and avow your infinite humiliation and guaranteed death? Do you do it now as a human?" ...These words wouldn't have hit home the way they did had I not been in the circumstance I find myself in. I have been incarcerated at Minnesota Correctional Facility- Shakopee since May of 2014. Had I taken this class outside of this setting, having never had the experience of imprisonment, I wouldn't have the power to reach the depth of empathy that I currently have for nonhuman animals. |
THE HACKENSACK RIVER
Have you ever wondered about what life would be like in someone else’s shoes, or fins? Robin Becker did. She rewrote a memory of fishing from her childhood from the perspective of the fish...
The stream was muddy, full of silt and toxins, and the water moved sluggishly on its way to merge with the Hackensack River, after which it would dump into Newark Bay and, eventually, the Atlantic. |
ANIMAL IDIOMS & EXPRESSIONS
In spring 2020 a group of faculty took a mini version of the Animals and Society course. Yes, faculty went back to class. How cool! For one assignment, participants read an article about how language can promote speciesism. They then chose idioms or phrases that involve animals and researched where they came from and discussed if these phrases are harmful to nonhuman animals. They phrases they chose to research are stool pigeon, you can lead a horse to water, it’s raining cats and dogs, kill two birds with one stone, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite, mutton dressed as lamb and hush puppies. Here are their findings!
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INDIGENEITY & VEGANISM
This is a simple informational pamphlet on how switching to a vegan lifestyle can help many Native American people respect Mother Earth’s creations more and live a more traditional lifestyle. Not only would it help the animals that walk besides us on this Earth, but it would help to repair the human animals health too. Repair the health that has been broken by a westernized diet of white four, white sugar, fast food, and so on. Throughout the pamphlet there will even be some cases where it would cause people to revert into even more traditional ways, such as being able to eat a more truly traditional diet of food that would be natural to area we live in.
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HE OR SHE, NOT IT
Grammatically, the pronouns He and She are used for mobile and living beings, and It is used for objects or beings that are not mobile. In this case, if we examine the case of nonhuman animals, what are they? Of course, they are mobile and living beings. They have feelings like humans, they run, jump just like us. So why are people still using the pronoun It when they know that nonhuman animals are in some ways just like us?
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WHAT MAKES HUMANS DISTINCT FROM OTHER ANIMALS?
So far, the students in Animals and Society in the spring 2018 have not figured it out. One the first day of class we brainstormed a list of things that people might think make humans distinct from nonhuman animals, then we went about researching them. It turns out some species of other animals can do all these things. Check out what we learned!
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ATTITUDES TOWARD ANIMAL:
SOCIETY AND ANIMALS SPRING 2017
By Dr. G (Carol Glasser)
Students in the Spring 2017 section of Society and Animals (SOC 285W: Special Topics) took a survey measuring their attitudes toward nonhuman animals in the first day of class and again 14 weeks later, toward the end of the semester. |
THE DAMAGING EFFECT OF A SINGLE POTATO CHIP
By Emily Mosher
Over 50 percent of packaged foods in grocery stores contain palm oil, a product derived originally from the jungles of West Africa. The oil is taken from the flesh of the palm oil fruit, by pressing the seeds together and gathering the chemicals collected from this process. The problem with this common ingredient, is that the plants that the oil comes from can only be found in jungles, jungles where non-human animals, specifically orangutans, live and depend on these trees to survive. |
THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE
By Students in SOC 285W, Spring 2017
In a class discussion in Animals and Society (SOC 285W) we tried to figure out if there were any qualities that set humans apart from all other nonhuman animals. Students brainstormed a list of qualities that might only belong to humans, then spent the week researching if any nonhuman animals had these qualities also. Here is the list of the qualities we thought of and what we learned. |