Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental disorder that causes a large economic burden and is prevalent across all cultures and countries around the world. Although both environmental factors and genetics are known to play an important role in the etiology of schizophrenia, the exact role of genetics and its interaction with environmental factors in an individual’s predisposition to develop schizophrenia is poorly understood. Schizophrenia is characterized by symptoms that include positive symptoms (e.g. delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and speech), negative symptoms (e.g. avolition, anhedonia, depressive-like behavior), and cognitive dysfunctions (e.g. executive functioning deficits in learning and memory, attention, and vigilance). Genomic screening has identified polymorphisms of the vesicular monoamine transporter 1 (VMAT1) gene (SLC18A1) that are associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The current study represents the first extensive phenotyping of both young and aged mice in which the VMAT1 gene (SLC18A1) has been deleted. The results demonstrated behavioral effects of deleting the VMAT1 gene that may relate to aspects of schizophrenic-like behavioral changes in this model. Specifically, young VMAT1 knockout mice displayed significant deficits in sensorimotor gating in the prepulse inhibition (PPI) task and in the acquisition of operant learning in the autoshaping task. When exposed to a mild stressor (24 hours of food deprivation), young VMAT1 knockout mice displayed a significant reduction in locomotor activity that was not evident under free-feeding conditions. Thus, young VMAT1 knockout mice showed deficits in tasks that model positive symptoms and cognitive deficits seen in schizophrenia; however, they did not display differences in behaviors related to models of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia or deficits in tasks designed to measure motor skills. While less extensive phenotyping was conducted in aged VMAT1 knockout mice, there were no significant deficits evident in any of the assays conducted in older animals. These findings demonstrated that deletion of the VMAT1 gene has behavioral effects that appear to be mediated by changes in brain monoamine function and changes in response to stressors (i.e. food deprivation) that may reflect changes in adrenal gland monoamine function.

Located on the short arm of chromosome 4, there exists a gene, IT15, responsible for the trinucleotide CAG expansion involved in the autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease (HD). The brain region associated with the most atrophy, the striatum, leads to expression of severe motor dysfunction, the hallmark feature of HD. To a lesser degree, the cortex and hippocampus show earlier deterioration indicative of the cognitive deficits that occur prior to motor symptom onset. The brain regions associated with HD-induced neuronal death additionally selectively express the protein Rhes - the combination of Rhes and mutant huntingtin being cytotoxic. Using a 3-nitropropionic acid animal model of HD, we hypothesized that animals with preserved prenylation of Rhes would display cognitive and motor symptomology similar to genetic models of HD while animals administered statins or bisphosphonates would show inhibited Rhes prenylation and delayed cognitive symptoms. Experimental animals, however, did not perform differently than control animals on shallow water variants of the t-maze and MWM.

This thesis analyzes contemporary political ecologies of pig farming in the People's Republic of China, as well as emergent discourses of “meatification” and the industrialization of Chinese agriculture more broadly. Situated within these extensive, heterogenous, and dynamic assemblages, which I contextualize in historical-geographical terms throughout Chapter I, I narrow my argument to three relatively neglected problematics that occupy subsequent chapters: the role of pigs in the affective construction of modernity, the microbiological zones of insecurity intertwined with industrial pig production, and the re-valorization of urban food waste through peri-urban pig farming, including so-called “garbage pigs.” Animated by broad political, ethical, ontological, and epistemological concerns about society and ecology, culture and technology, and food and the mass-production of commodified organisms, this research helps demonstrate how fraught relationships between pigs, people, and place participate in the politics of "modernity" in the People's Republic of China. / 10000-01-01

This dissertation examines the establishment and influence of the International Livestock Exposition, an annual show that began in Chicago in 1900 and that served as the central hub of the national livestock improvement movement. Industrial meatpacking firms and land-grant university professors worked together to transform the genetic composition and physiology of American meat-producing animals. Packers hosted the Exposition at the Union Stockyards to address market irregularities in quality and supply. University researchers intended to solve a larger set of problems that included rural population decline, the need for more food output to feed a growing population, and diminishing soil fertility. These unlikely partners created the International to eliminate inferior, or “scrub,” livestock. The International played a pivotal role in remaking livestock genotypes and phenotypes. Its organizers and participants favored “improved” animals descended from purebred, British livestock with recorded ancestries—a preference rooted in the reformers’ pseudo-scientific belief in eugenics. Purebred animals had standard bodies with a narrow set of physiological outcomes, which amounted to biotic technology. But genetic homogeneity was only a building block for improvement. The International also employed contests, demonstrations, and advocacy to reconfigure American livestock by making them smaller, more compact, and early-maturing. This study also analyzes the larger shift in American agriculture toward the Corn Belt model of grain feeding. Treating animals as dynamic historical agents, it suggests that machinery, tractors, seeds, and implements did not alone accomplish the industrialization of agriculture. Meat-producing cattle, sheep, and pigs were a requisite component in an emerging industrial sequence. These grain-fed modern livestock and their farmer caretakers fit into a developing web of mutually dependent agricultural specialists. The International united this movement into a singular body at the end of each year in Chicago, and in the process, shaped American agricultural practices and encouraged farm specialization until the show closed in 1975. Sources consulted include land-grant university research and publications, meatpacker records and propaganda, and newspaper and agricultural journal articles.

This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.

This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by exploring parliamentary left and anarchistic approaches to animal advocacy using a Critical Animal Studies (CAS) framework. This is significant because CAS is a field of scholarship which developed in order to theoretically support animal activists; nonetheless, in its focus on direct action and its rejection of reformist politics, CAS has too often ignored the legislative developments which are extremely important to most animal activists. Therefore, this thesis makes an overarching claim that CAS scholarship should treat the relationship between direct action and legislative reform more seriously. This thesis considers the relationship between direct action activists and legislative politics and as such makes a useful contribution to both CAS and wider animal rights scholarship. More broadly, the thesis provides a particularly useful assessment of one social movement at a time of rapidly changing moral, political and activist landscapes as Britain enters a new ‘age of dissent'.

The oppression of nonhuman animals in Western culture observed in societal institutions and practices such as the factory farm, hunting, and vivisection, exhibits alarming linkages and parallels to some episodes of the oppression of human animals. This work traces the foundations of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy and connects them to the oppressions of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism. In outlining a uniform theory of oppression detailed through the marginalization, isolation, and exploitation of human and nonhuman animals alike, parallels among the groups emerge as the fused oppression of each exhibits a commonality among them. The analysis conducted within this work highlights the development and sustainment of oppression in the West and illuminates the socio-historical tendencies apparent in the oppression of human and nonhuman animals alike.

abstract: The coyote of the natural world is an anthropomorphic figure that occupies many places within Southwestern Pueblo cultures in oral traditions as well as the natural environs. The modern-day coyote is a marginalized occupant of Southwestern milieu portrayed as an iconic character found in cartooned animations or conceptualized as a shadowed symbol of a doglike creature howling in front of a rising full moon. Coyote is also a label given to a person who transports undocumented immigrants across the United States–Mexico border. This wild dog is known as coyote, Coyote, Canis latrans, tsócki (Keresan for coyote), trickster, Wylie Coyote, and coywolf. When the biology, history, accounts, myths, and cultural constructs are placed together within the spectrum of coyote names or descriptions, a transmergent materiality emerges at the center of those contributing factors. Coyote is many things. It is constantly adapting to the environment in which it has survived for millions of years. The Southwest landscape was first occupied by rudimentary components of life evolving into a place first populated by animals, followed by humans. To a great extent, the continued existence of both animals and humans relies on their ability to obtain food and find a suitable niche in which to live. This dissertation unpacks how the coyote that is embedded in American Pueblo literature and culture depicts a transmergent materiality representing the constantly changing human–animal interface as it interprets the likewise transformative state of food systems in the American Southwest in the present day. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

Potential alliances between queers and animals populate queer scholarship, while dominant culture has relegated both groups to similar sites of subjugation and abjection. My work presents utopic visions crafted from these shared sites of marginalization and asks how they can enable new biopolitical communities. I ask: can we co-habitate, with non-human animals, these particular sites of marginalization in a manner that enables cross-species, affective solidarity? And can this co-habitation also encourage ruptures within heteronormative and human-centric paradigms? Rescuing the subjectivity and cultures of animals from extent subjugations can build new multispecies communities that are essential in an era of environmental devastation and climate change. Through printmaking, installation and time-based media, I explore real, psychological and metaphorical environments of cross-species encounters.

My dissertation examines the ways that canine roles affect genre—the categories into which we place works of literature, which shape their forms and which in turn shape our expectations of what we read. For instance, if epitaphs and elegies are at least partially meant to usher the dead into heaven and praise the dead’s suitability for a Christian afterlife, what happens when the subject is a dog denied a soul by Christianity? These are the kinds of questions I address. In addition to epitaphs and elegies, I consider detective and sensation fiction as well as dog autobiographies—works of fiction written from the dog’s perspective—to explore how taking the dog as a subject forced the conventions of certain genres to change, or in the case of detective and sensation fiction, how dog-like ways of knowing helped to birth a new genre altogether. In either case, what is important is that the generic changes signal a less human-centered approach to literature: one which opens animals up to be the possessors of souls, intelligence, and subjectivity. These changes paved the way for the Victorians to consider animals as beings worthy of compassion and respect.