Maverick: A life among animals, reconsidered
At the opening of the essay collection Maverick, Laura Jean Schneider writes: I’m in the third generation of butchers in my family. As a family, we slaughtered and butchered most …
Animal Behavior
Book Review: World of Wonders; In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
No one sees nature quite like a poet and Aimee Nezhukumatathil proves that in World of Wonders, her first book of prose. This collection of essays centers around Nezhukumatathil’s lifelong interactions with and observations of the natural world. Born to a Filipina mother and a father from South India, Nezhukumatathil grew up all over the United States due to the demands of her mother’s job as a psychiatrist, and was immersed in landscapes from New York to Arizona. She writes from both the poet’s perspective and as a person of color in a white-privileged world.
Writing for deer; writing for animals
Summer in Ashland, Oregon, means fawns following their mothers through the streets of our small town. The local deer are, sadly, a contentious issue. Many residents resent their appetites for …
In Animal City our painful past is still painfully present
If I asked you to picture a “cow town,” you would probably picture a small town, surrounded by pasture, set far away from the big city. Yet in the 1800s, …
Book Review: Rescue Dogs: Where They Come From, Why They Act the Way They Do, and How to Love Them Well
Pete Paxton hesitated upon hearing the command, “Jump inside.” Inside the trench, which was more than one hundred feet long, six feet wide, and six feet deep, lay dogs in …
Book Review: The Humane Gardener
What in the world could be inhumane about gardening? Plenty, it turns out, thanks to this beautifully produced and incredibly important book by Nancy Lawson: The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a …
LitHub’s climate change library
If we lived on this planet only one day a year then perhaps celebrating one “Earth Day” a year would make more sense. But as LitHub points out, every day …
Happy World Penguin Day
Today is World Penguin Day— not that we need a reason to celebrate these amazing little creatures, but it’s great to have a designated day on which everyone thinks about these …
Book Review: Orphaned by Eliot Schrefer
This imagined prehistory is undeniably the crowning achievement in Schrefer’s ape quartet, at once brimming with hope and loss, love and cruelty, constantly challenging the reader to question, in six hundred thousand years, how much and how little we’ve evolved.
The Sexual Politics of Meat, 20 Years Later
The other day I saw an ad for a new model of Audi. In it, a woman enters a butcher shop, and the butcher, a female, knowing that this woman …