9780231158268Alasdair Cochrane

Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia University Press, 2012)



An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)



9780252072901_lgRobert McKay

Killing Animals. With the Animal Studies Group (University of Illinois Press, 2006)



John Miller

Walrus. With Louis Miller (Reaktion Press, 2014)

9781780232911Known for its prominent tusks and distinctive whiskers, the walrus has often cropped up in contemporary culture: from the grandiloquent protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, to The Beatles’ enigmatic pronouncement ‘I am the Walrus’. Walruses have also played a significant role in Arctic indigenous communities, where they have held a central place in traditional mythologies.

Walrus explores the intriguing and affecting history of an animal that remains on the frontline of contemporary conservation debates. Commercial walrus hunting was banned in the 1930s, and today only subsistence hunting is permitted, yet the mammal still faces an uncertain future. Shrinking pack-ice caused by global warming is causing serious problems for walrus herds, while the exploitation of arctic oil and gas resources puts further pressure on the animals.

This important book combines natural, cultural and environmental histories to offer a refreshing and wonderfully illustrated account of the much-loved mammal. Walrus foregrounds the ethical dilemmas they embody, such as the continuing and intensifying conflict between the developed world and indigenous interests, and the impact of global warming on arctic animals.

Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (Anthem Press, 2012)

9200000031304041Empire and the Animal Body explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860–1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of violence, either in big-game hunting or in the collection of scientific specimens, and draw on a range of literary sources, most notably romance, natural history writing and ‘penny dreadful’ fiction.

This study investigates how these texts’ depictions of forms of violence complicate the seemingly fundamental distinction of humans from animals, and undermine the ideological structures of imperial rule. Rather than an innate and hierarchical opposition, the relationship of humans with their animal others emerges in this context as a complex interplay of kinship and difference. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focused criticism. Most vitally, it also signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, environmental activism and global social justice.