Book ReviewJonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist who has reached the pinnacle of achievement for a US research scientist, election to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his work on lizard adaptations and evolution – specifically the anole lizards of...
Book ReviewMore has been written on the moral status of animals in the past fifty years than in the previous 5,000. Peter Singer championed the cause of animals using Utilitarian approaches, Tom Regan developed a deontological argument on behalf of animal rights, and Bernard Rollin...
Such an Array of Umwelts Ed Yong’s 2022 instant classic, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, delves into the senses of our animal cousins, including sight, sound, pain, smell, touch, vibrations, electric fields, and magnetic fields, and explains for the...
The first edition of Regarding Animals, authored by Arluke and Sanders, was published in 1996 and received the 1997 Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction for its important contribution to the perspective of symbolic interaction. When the book...
Thanksgiving is perhaps the most important family holiday in the United States. As we head into the coming week and the gathering of family members, it seems appropriate to reflect on our families and who is included at this critical time. In the Rowan household,...
The lockdowns of the recent pandemic are said to have led to an "Anthropause" – a dramatic release of human pressure on the nonhuman world. From media coverage capturing feral hogs roaming city streets in Europe to daytime sightings of bears and bobcats in American...
The April 2022 Tales of WellBeing included a review of a book on human happiness written by social psychologist and professional ethicist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Haidt looked at happiness and how it might be achieved from the perspective of positive psychology. Professor Ng’s new (open...
A journey into the alien mind of an insect Bees were once thought to be cleverly designed biorobots that can construct elaborate comb architectures, have labor divisions, and nest climate control. But all this engineering and complex behavior was considered to be delivered by reflex machines...
This book is remarkable and deserves to be very widely read. The cover image is unusual – what on earth could be a man's relationship riding an elephant to happiness? Haidt uses the image to metaphor the human condition in which two systems govern our...
In 1987, when I was working on the first issue of Anthrozoos (the earliest surviving academic journal on human-animal interactions), the publisher and I agreed to carry reviews and brief abstracts of relevant books and scholarly articles appearing in other journals. Back then, this was...
