Placing Animals

An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations

By (author) Julie Urbanik

Not available to order

Publication date:

23 July 2012

Length of book:

206 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442211865

As Julie Urbanik vividly illustrates, non-human animals are central to our daily human lives. We eat them, wear them, live with them, work them, experiment on them, try to save them, spoil them, abuse them, fight them, hunt them, buy and sell them, love them, and hate them. Placing Animals is the first book to bring together the historical development of the field of animal geography with a comprehensive survey of how geographers study animals today. Urbanik provides readers with a thorough understanding of the relationship between animal geography and the larger animal studies project, an appreciation of the many geographies of human-animal interactions around the world, and insight into how animal geography is both challenging and contributing to the major fields of human and nature-society geography. Through the theme of the role of place in shaping where and why human-animal interactions occur, the chapters in turn explore the history of animal geography and our distinctive relationships in the home, on farms, in the context of labor, in the wider culture, and in the wild.

Chapter 1: Geography and Human-Animal Relations
Chapter 2: A History of Animal Geography
Chapter 3: Geographies of More-than-Human Homes and Cultures
Chapter 4: Beasts of Burden: Geographies of Working Animals
Chapter 5: Down on the Farm: Geographies of Animal Parts
Chapter 6: Into the Wild: Geographies of Human-Wildlife Relations
Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Place of Geography in Human-Animal Studies

Julie Urbanik has authored a thought-provoking and innovative geography of human–animal relations for the twenty-first century. Placing Animals both reformulates animal geography and asserts its significance as an important but oft-neglected field. Whereas traditional animal geographies tended to focus on farming, including both sedentary animal husbandry and nomadic pastoralism, Urbanik takes us into a dominantly urban world, where most people experience animals primarily as food, leather, pets, photographs, film, and backyard wildlife. . . .Placing Animals has many of the currently fashionable features of textbooks, notably a series of thought-provoking insets to the text: profiles of the tiger, the camel, the dog, the donkey, the pig, and the whale and dolphin. . . .Placing Animals will appeal to students willing to debate ideas and confront a wide range of esoteric examples, drawn from across the world. . . .Researchers will find Placing Animals thought-provoking in the range of ideas and issues that it covers.