Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: ABSTRACT
There has been considerable research on the extent that disadvantaged groups have used litigation to reduce mistreatment and establish rights, but virtually all that scholarship has been confined to human groups. However, since the 1970s, there has been a rise in interest groups that use litigation to bring about better treatment of non-human animals. Although legal scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the distinctive field of animal law and recognized animal litigating organizations’ impact on shaping animal law, there has been minimal scholarship that empirically tests the extent that organized animal activist litigation influences the outcome of animal law cases and generates public attention to the plight of animals. Moreover, since extant animal law research emphasizes legal doctrine, scholars have not addressed political explanations of the effectiveness of animal litigation. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by testing whether animal organizations’ litigation increases the chance of a judicial decision favoring animal interests, and it investigates whether animal litigation increases media attention to animal liberation issues. This research reports the analysis of two sets of data the author collected on animal litigation. The results demonstrate that animal litigating groups do not exert a significant impact on the outcome of animal law cases, but there is some evidence that organized animal litigation creates increased media attention to the animal liberation movement and a vegetarian lifestyle. Since this research is in its early stages, this paper concludes with a discussion of further research on animal litigation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of multiple concerns within the growing field of green criminology is the exploitative nature of human-animal relationships. Various studies have explored how humans damage animal species and how animal abuse by individuals is associated with and/or predicts human-upon-human aggression and crime. This paper will instead explore how humans and animals can help one another in attempts to prevent and treat aggression and crime in adolescence. The data used here come from an ethnographic program evaluation of an equine-assisted psychotherapy program used in conjunction with a residential treatment facility for at-risk and delinquent young women. In past analysis, participating girls reported gains in prosocial competencies and coping skills, an increased sense of determination, and improvements in behavior and treatment that carried over to the residential facility. The current paper will discuss the role played by the horses more specifically, investigating how a human-horse bond can benefit institutionalized girls as they navigate through treatment in an otherwise stressful institutional environment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: By arguing for animal rights based on animals' cognitive abilities, animal rights lawyers may be creating incentives for experimentation on animals. This paper explores alternative bases for the inclusion of animals in the moral rights-holding community.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A critique of liberal social contract and animal rights theory, this paper argues that an understanding of the concept of sacrifice is necessary to comprehend the political relationship between human and non-human animals.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Present day narratives on and around cloning are often embedded in the polarized narratives of, on the one hand, a dystopian future of excessive social control and, on the other, a benevolent future wherein human suffering is alleviated through new kinds of therapeutics. As different as these may appear, both use the same narrative structure in which technoscientific objects are projected into a predetermined - and often remarkably socially familiar - future. Both narratives make the consequences of cloning for human futures central. In turn, animals become representatives of the consequences cloning may have for humans. In turn, cloned animals are deemed de facto as unproblematic. In order to both problematize this discourse and think about alternative ways to conceptualizing the meanings of cloning(s), this paper employs the symbolic interactionist concepts of “social worlds” and “situational maps” to explore the humans, nonhumans, sites, institutions, epistemic communities, practices, and discourses that converge when animals of endangered species are cloned. I contend that the stakes of cloning can be alternatively articulated when this practice is conceptualized as situated action. Specifically, I show how the endeavor to clone animals of endangered species is made possible by transposing the “technical mediations” used in one type of human-animal relations to another, which links up heterogeneous human and animal ontologies in complex ways. I position these connections as important junctures that illuminate the kinds of stakes that various humans and nonhumans have in cloning endeavors.