Animals & Society Institute News

Enjoy Open Access chapters, news, funding opportunities, and much more
Dear Friends and Colleagues, Welcome to the Animals & Society Institute’s Human-Animal Studies Report. This month’s Report has a bit for everyone. We at ASI are heartened to see our decades of work into The Link between animal abuse and human violence gaining significant public policy traction with bills...

Policy Corner: Chicken Rescuers, Happy the Elephant, and the Animal Cruelty & Violence Intervention Act
Welcome back to another edition of the Policy Corner! There have been many policy developments in various sectors of late; below are three recent items that could signal a larger change in attitude towards nonhuman animals more broadly. Back in March, two California activists were acquitted of misdemeanor theft...

ASI’s Response To “Is There an Ethical Way to Kill Rats? Should We Even Ask?”
Earlier this year, the New York Times published the online article, “Is There an Ethical Way to Kill Rats? Should We Even Ask?” In this article, the author raises the issue of controlling the urban rat population, and questions what the extraction of rats from the urban environment would do to existing ecosystems....

Find Open Access chapters, news, funding opportunities, and much more
Dear Friends and Colleagues, From all of us at ASI, Happy New Year! This month, ASI has been busy publishing within our two managed journals. Both Society & Animals and the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science passed significant milestones last year, with 30 and 25 years of publication respectively. In...

Read more about HAS news, upcoming Colloquium Series, Living With Horses Conference call, and more
Welcome to the Animals & Society Institute's Human-Animal Studies Report. Again this month, the Human-Animal Studies (HAS) field is active and busy, this time with an extraordinary wealth of podcasts and recorded seminars, publications, and conferences and courses. ASI has been very active too. In the ASI News...

HARA Week 2022 | World Kindness Day
It is no coincidence that the launch of the annual Human-Animal Relationship Awareness Week falls on World Kindness Day, a day when people are encouraged to show more kindness to both those around us — human and nonhuman — as well as to the planet. But how can we turn the ethos behind this celebratory day into...

Announcing the 25th Anniversary of the Publication of JAAWS
As indicated in the statement of the journal’s aims and scopes, "The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science (JAAWS) publishes articles on methods of experimentation, husbandry, and care that demonstrably enhance the welfare of nonhuman animals in various settings.” To this end, “JAAWS publishes papers that present...

An Interview with the Editors: The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics, and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves
We are excited to share the latest release in the ASI-managed Brill Human-Animal Studies Book Series, The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves. In this anthology edited by Gala Argent and Jeannette Vaught, human-horse relationships take the...

Book Release: The Oxford Handbook of Animal Organization Studies
The Oxford Handbook of Animal Organization Studies, edited by Linda Tallberg, Managing Editor of the ASI-managed journal, Society & Animals, and Lindsay Hamilton, has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Just as climate change and environmental sustainability have become growing concerns in public...

Defining Human-Animal Studies: An ASI Video Project
As university classes are preparing for the new semester, we want to take the opportunity to share our Defining Human-Animal Studies Video Project with students, scholars, and faculty. Because Human-Animal Studies scholars come from such diverse fields, they often have a difficult time reading the work of scholars...