Love, Hate or Eat: How Humans Relate to Animals

Title

Love, Hate or Eat: How Humans Relate to Animals

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Description

Why do some cultures eat dogs and others invite them into their bedrooms? Why do some people find spiders disgusting but others consider them a delicacy? Who enjoyed a better quality of life—the chicken on a dinner plate or the rooster who dies in a Saturday-night cockfight? What can we really learn from experiments on mice?

On the next episode of WHY? we’ll talk with author Hal Herzog about human attitudes towards animals, examine how rational we are when it comes to pets, and ask what all this tell us about ourselves. Drawing on more than two decades of research in the emerging field of anthrozoology, the new science of human–animal relations, Hal offers surprising answers to these and other questions related to the moral conundrums we face when considering the creatures with whom we share our world.

Hal Herzog is Professor of Psychology at Western Carolina University. He has been investigating the complex psychology of our interactions with other species for more than two decades. He is particularly interested in how people negotiate real-world ethical dilemmas, and he has studied animal activists, cockfighters, animal researchers, and circus animal trainers. An award-winning teacher and researcher, he has written more than 100 articles and book chapters. His research has been published in journals such as Science, The American Psychologist, The Journal of the Royal Society, The American Scholar, New Scientist, Anthrozoös, BioScience, The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and Animal Behavior. His work has been covered by Newsweek, Slate, Salon, National Public Radio, Scientific American, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and many other newspapers.

Hal’s blog “Animals and Us” can be found here.

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Publication Date

4-8-2012

Publisher

Institute for Philosophy in Public Life

City

Grand Forks, ND

Keywords

Human-animal relationships ; Interdisciplinary research

Disciplines

Philosophy

Love, Hate or Eat: How Humans Relate to Animals

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