Animal Studies Insight: Henry Beston

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928) (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 24-25. Photo shows Beston on the steps of "the Fo'castle," his Outermost House, in 1928. From the web site of the Henry Beston Society.

Animals & Music: The Thai Elephant Orchestra

Many links to articles and video clips about the Thai Elephant Orchestra, including four downloadable mp3 files, can be found on the page of their record label, Mulatta Records. Now you can see and hear these "ellies" at work (or is it play?)...

Welcome!

This blog serves as a more multimedia friendly adjunct to the H-Animal Discussion Network, the on-line home for the growing number of scholars across disciplines who are engaged in the study of animals in human culture. At that site you will find a series of essays entitled Ruminations that provide overviews of some of the scholarly activity in the field. You will also find a list of animal studies resources and links to some of the course syllabi used to teach the intertwined histories of humans and animals. We hope you enjoy your time spent with us in this exciting and important inquiry.