A new issue of Between the Species is out. Nick J. Overton (Manchester) and Yannis Hamilakis (Southampton): A Manifesto for a Social Zooarchaeology. Jonathan Crowe (Queensland): Animal Welfare and the Economy of Kindness. From Between the Species, a special issue on nonhuman animals and moral agency, equality, and the nature and scope of our obligations, including an interview with Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlikca, authors of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. From the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof, here is the entry on Animals in Political Theory by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. John Berkman (Toronto): From Theological Speciesism to a Theological Ethology: Where Catholic Moral Theology Needs to Go. Oscar Horta (Santiago de Compostela): The Scope of the Argument from Species Overlap. Catia Faria and Eze Paez (Pompeu Fabra): Anthropocentrism and Speciesism: Conceptual and Normative Issues. Charles Wolfe (Ghent): Boundary Crossings: The Blurring of the Human/Animal Divide as Naturalization of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy. Josephine Livingstone on the ultimately othered Other: Animal Studies, a new academic discipline, explores the identities of our furred and feathered friends. Lori Gruen is a leading feminist philosopher who asks deep questions about the ethics of captivity, ethics, animals and what we’re doing to nature. Adam Weitzenfeld and Melanie Joy on an overview of anthropocentrism, humanism, and speciesism in critical animal theory. Owen Cotton-Barratt on human and animal interventions: the long-term view. You can download Animal Experience, ed. Leon Niemoczynski and Stephanie Theodorou.
The trade in illegal wildlife is a $19 billion annual business with ties to the Russian mob and Islamic extremists, and there’s one place the world turns to investigate the crime: a federal forensics lab (and curiosity cabinet) in a hippie town in Oregon. G. Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu on the ethics of producing in vitro meat. Marc Wilcox (Leeds): Moral Status and the Interests of Non-Sentient Life. Jaime Lowe interviews Peter Singer on the animal rights revolution four decades after he started it. Rhys Southan on the enigma of animal suffering. Do animals cry? Maria Konnikova on the appearance and the authenticity of emotion in the animal kingdom — and how we can use science to explore it. How do you figure out if a mouse is “depressed”? Alice Robb investigates. Ascribing value to non-human animals: Lisa Jean Moore reviews Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species. Hamilton Nolan on the approximate dollar value of the lives of your pets. Pets allowed: Why are so many animals now in places where they shouldn’t be? Meet the people who want to turn predators into vegans. As predators big and small push quickly into North American cities, biologists are following — and discovering how much we’ve underestimated them. Despite their reputation for exceptional intelligence, dolphins may not be as brilliant as commonly believed. Chimps outplay humans in brain games: There are ways that chimpanzees are more intelligent than us. Corporations have legal rights — chimpanzees should have them too. Cooperation is what makes us human: Kat McGowan on where we part ways with our ape cousins. Vicki Morwitz (NYU): Insights from the Animal Kingdom. A look at how animals get high.
“The whole world is becoming a kind of zoo”: Elizabeth Kolbert on how humanity is wiping out our fellow creatures. A staggering 400 million birds have vanished from Europe since 1980. EO Wilson warns wildlife face a “biological holocaust”. 90 percent of the world's African's lions are gone: Chris Mooney on how our planet may be on the verge of its sixth mass extinction. How many animals are really going extinct? Ruth Graham on the fierce scientific debate over whether our estimates are right, and whether even discussing it could hurt conservation efforts. Barry Yeoman on why the passenger pigeon went extinct and whether it can, and should, be brought back to life a century after it disappeared. Back from extinction, but not safe: Captive breeding restores a giant Galapagos tortoise. From Environment 360, Stewart Brand on the case for de-extinction: Why we should bring back the woolly mammoth; and Paul R. Ehrlich on the case against de-extinction: It’s a fascinating but dumb idea. The Mammoth Cometh: Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool, unless it ends up being very, very bad. Alejandro E. Camacho (UC-Irvine): Going the Way of the Dodo: De-Extinction, Dualisms, and Reframing Conservation. Francine Madden and Brian McQuinn (Oxford): Conservation’s Blind Spot: The Case for Conflict Transformation in Wildlife Conservation. Where the wild things were: Conservationists are reintroducing large animals to areas they once roamed, providing ecologists with the chance to assess whether such “rewilding” efforts can restore lost ecosystems. Let's play God: Gene drives could be a powerful new tool to manage wild ecosystems. Have we reached species overload? Anders Halverson wonders. From lol my thesis, there is no moral reason to preserve endangered species — we do it because it makes us feel good inside.
