History
As an interdisciplinary subject, animal studies exists at the intersection of a number of different fields of study. Different fields began to turn to animals as an important topic at different times and for various reasons, and these separate disciplinary histories shape how scholars approach animal studies.
In part, animal studies developed out of the animal liberation movement and was grounded in ethical questions about co-existence with other species: whether it is moral to eat animals, to do scientific research on animals for human benefit, and so on. Animal studies scholars who explore the field from an ethical perspective frequently cite Australian philosopher Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation, as a founding document in animal studies. Singer's work followed Jeremy Bentham's by trying to expand utilitarian questions about pleasure and pain beyond humans to other sentient creatures.
Theorists interested in the role of animals in literature, culture, and continental philosophy also consider the late work of Jacques Derrida a driving force behind the rise of interest in animal studies in the humanities. Derrida's final lecture series, The Animal That Therefore I Am, examined how interactions with animal life affect human attempts to define mankind and the self through language. Taking up Derrida's deconstruction and extending it to other cultural territory, Cary Wolfe published Animal Rites in 2003 and critiqued earlier animal rights philosophers such as Peter Singer and Thomas Regan. Wolfe's study points out an insidious humanism at play in their philosophies and others. Recently also the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a book on the question of the animal: The Open. Man and Animal.
Read more about this topic: Animal Studies
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“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)