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69 3 Animal husbandry Late one afternoon in July 1790, a tailor’s assistant walked into Tothill Fields in Westminster, seized a sow and, it was later alleged, attempted to commit bestiality. When the animal escaped, Mathew Mulvie made a second ‘attempt’ with a cow and caught breeches-down by the cow- keeper’s son, who was watching from a haystack, the young man was arrested. At the Old Bailey, Mulvie admitted that he had been ‘very drunk’ but insisted that it would have been ‘madness to perpetrate such a crime in such a publick place’. The jury decided that
3 THE ANIMAL METAPHOR: THE MORON AS AN ATAVISTIC SUBHUMAN 1 There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Señor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Super-human: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world.2 If the group that is the target for social control can be viewed as falling short of that which defines the fully human
On Christmas Eve, 1881, the Colony of Victoria passed an unlikely piece of legislation. Championed by a future Australian Prime Minister and vigorously supported by the colony’s Premier and Attorney-General, An Act for the Protection of Animals codified Victoria as only the second legislature worldwide to formally regulate vivisection. Although patently derived from
allegory and practice become manifest. This chapter investigates that process via the depiction of animals. While animals are frequently introduced in the service of colonial allegory, they also are entangled with the practice of life in Elizabethan Ireland. Their presence forces allegory and practice into confrontation, as animals both make and unmake Derricke’s ‘discoveries’. 5 The Image deploys its animals according to a basic colonialist trope. For example, when Derricke asserts that Irish kern have destroyed the
‘Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow’s dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.’ (from The Triads of Ireland, c . ninth century) ‘A honeybee meadow is something very different from a human meadow.’ (Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth , 2008) Visualising the zoosphere Animal studies (particularly ‘critical animal studies’, which I draw most on here
, haematologist, pneumatologist, oncologist, general practitioner, psychiatrist, self-psychoanalyst, it's inhuman. 2 For him the stresses of this particular profession groom the death drive. The animal is stressed, this stress is transferred to the human who absorbs it and in so doing the vet becomes the
1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess-player in medieval and early-modern literature At the margins From the arrival of chess in medieval Europe, the chess-player was a troubling figure, raising issues concerning sin, leisure, intellect, and emotion. The assumed Islamic origins of the game and its associations with a number of vices related to play pushed the chess-player into a marginal space in a society defined by Christian regulation and authority. Yet, in parallel, the chess-player and the game found secure footings within highly
While domesticated sheep have had a close association with humans for around 10,000 years, literary animal studies is a relatively new discipline that has gained momentum in the current millennium, and is based on ways of reading that place a new focus on animals. This new emphasis does however build on a growing understanding that humans are not as exceptional in the animal kingdom as had been thought, but above all on ways of looking at animals that have developed over at least two centuries. This chapter considers some of these foundations
3 Animal welfare and ‘humane education’: new roles for women I n nineteenth-century Britain, the astonishing growth of organised charities offered middle-and upper-class women opportunities to venture out of the home, to comprehend more fully the nature of the society in which they lived, and slowly to change it. Through voluntary work in ragged schools, hospitals, workhouses and reformatories, they not only encountered at first hand the realities of destitution, but also became more conversant with the functioning of the official bodies that were
3 Animal welfare and ‘humane education’: new roles for women I n nineteenth-century Britain, the astonishing growth of organised charities offered middle-and upper-class women opportunities to venture out of the home, to comprehend more fully the nature of the society in which they lived, and slowly to change it. Through voluntary work in ragged schools, hospitals, workhouses and reformatories, they not only encountered at first hand the realities of destitution, but also became more conversant with the functioning of the official bodies that were