animals

Jean M. Langford explores different modes of interspecies communications at an urban parrot sanctuary, suggesting that humans can alter their interactions to ease parrots’ distress.

Les Beldo proposes thinking about nonhuman contributions to production, including those taking place at the microbiological level, as labor, and offers an ethnographic description of the lives of broiler chickens.

Considering the role of sound in shifting conceptions of the ocean, Ritts and Shiga explore how the US Navy mimicked whale, dolphin, and popoise communication techniques during the Cold War.

Aimee L. Schmidt and Douglas A. Clark examine the response of local people and agencies to a polar bear-inflicted human injury in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, showing how human-bear conflict is often widely publicized and controversial, and how it shapes public expectations around bear management.

Owain Jones, a Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, offers ideas and resources about environmental humanities in this blog.

In episode 56 of Nature’s Past, a podcast on Canadian environmental history, Sean Kheraj joins Joanna Dean and Christabelle Sethna to discuss their new book Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada and, more broadly, the history of animals and cities.

Chrulew’s response to the Papal Encyclical Laudato si’ for the Special Commentary section discusses the appointment of Pope Francis in 2013, and particularly his call to shift from addressing only Catholics to caring for every living entity on Earth.

Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew present a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates.

Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.

In this article, Monica Vasile discusses the recent reintroduction of bison in the Romanian Carpathians, and the surrounding local narratives and unresolved tensions.