Biodiversity losses are often influenced by humans due to increased demand over natural resources and retaliatory killing of wildlife as a result of human–wildlife conflicts. Large carnivores are in decline globally due to the current human–carnivore conflicts. This study was conducted in the Maasai steppe of northern Tanzania to understand the role of traditional husbandry techniques in reducing livestock predation, herding challenges that place livestock at risk for predation, willingness of pastoralists to participate in schemes for livestock security improvement, and the role of Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) in mitigating human–carnivore conflicts. Data were collected using interviews with individuals in households and with herders in grazing fields and were reinforced with field observations. The primary husbandry strategies for livestock protection in homesteads were the bomas where livestock were enclosed at night, while in the grazing fields the strategies included: splitting livestock herds, herder among livestock, herder carrying weapons, and noise. There was no significant correlation between the wealth of an individual and the type of livestock protection strategy used at homesteads. All traditional strategies used by pastoral communities were equally ineffective in preventing livestock predation both at homesteads and in the grazing fields. However, over a four year period, there were no successful predations in any boma reinforced with chain-links, suggesting that reinforcing bomas with studier materials such as chain-link can be effective against livestock predation. Grazing in groups was found to provide more effective livestock protection in the grazing fields than any other strategy. While losing livestock by herders in the grazing fields contributed most to increased livestock predation, other herding challenges exposing livestock to predation included the seasonal nomadic lifestyle and long distances travelled by pastoral communities. The majority of respondents (91%) were willing to improve their livestock security by the use of chain-link fences at homesteads, while 87% were willing to participate in an insurance scheme for livestock security. Neither experience of livestock attack nor level of awareness of insurance scheme influenced willingness to participate in the scheme. There is growing awareness among pastoral communities of the benefits provided by carnivores and wildlife at large. Therefore, major conservation agencies such as TANAPA, Wildlife Division (WD) and other stakeholders should focus more than they have been on addressing the actual conflicts i.e. human–carnivore conflicts and helping to improve husbandry practices against predation to achieve conservation objectives by reducing retaliatory killing of carnivores.

This thesis examines the way the absence of moral consideration of the animal in Christian doctrine is evident in Middle English literature. A fundamental difference between the theology and literature of the medieval period is literature's capacity to present and theorise positions that cannot, for various reasons, be theorised in the official discourses provided by commentators and theologians. Patterns of excluding the animal from moral consideration by Christianity are instigated with the rejection of the ethics of late Neoplatonism. Highlighted by Neoplatonists, and evident in the stylistic differences in reading scripture and philosophy, is an early Christian ideological predisposition toward purely humanocentric concerns. The disparity between a definite Hellenic ethic of the animal and its absence in Christian thought is most evident in the contrast between an outward looking Neoplatonic understanding of creation, and the closed matrix of scholastic interpretative thought. Influential textual representations of the universe require that creation is interpreted through a fideistically enclosed system of signs. The individual must have faith before approaching knowledge. The animal is placed into a system dominated by the primacy of faith in God, which paradoxically produces the predetermined answers supplied by Christian doctrine and selective scriptural and doctrinal suppositions. In literary texts, the animal provides an obvious method of Christian debate. Contemporary theological values, such as the doctrinal commonplace of comparing man with animal in the corporeal context highlights the uncomfortable similarity to, yet prescribes that man aspire to distance himself from, the animal. The primacy of man and the importance of his salvation, is a doctrine which countermands the theocentric basis of Christian theology, in which God is understood as a presence in all his creation. Such conflicting perspectives result in animals in medieval literature being used to test theological and philosophical parameters, illustrating the inadequacy of sharp theological boundaries, and demonstrating the ability of literary expression to escape that which has already been enclosed.

Animal slaughter has recently become highly visible in popular food media. This thesis interrogates the myths, assumptions and ideologies underlying this so-called New Carnivore movement, through critical analysis of a range of popular gastronomic texts. Socially-constructed ideas about ‘reality’, ‘sentimentality’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘redemption’ are intimately implicated in the process of animal slaughter, as are the notions of ‘good taste’ and social distinction. The domination of animals, demonstrated through the slaughter, butchery, and consumption of nonhuman bodies, is held to be an integral component in the performance of gender, as well as a means of reconnecting, via a kind of secular epiphany, with ‘Nature’ at its most authentic. As a hostile backlash against the social progress made by the animal advocacy and vegetarian movements, New Carnivorism denigrates vegetarianism and veganism as outdated, unfashionable, unnatural, puritanical and rude. Although these texts’ potential to inspire farmed animal welfare reform should not be ignored, New Carnivorism ultimately serves to naturalize, justify and promote the continued consumption of meat, and the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals, in Western societies.

While human-animal relations have always been part of human cultures the public zoo is a relatively recent phenomenon that reflects very specific elements of Western cultures’ modern ideas about, and relationships with, nonhuman animals. By becoming such a familiar part of popular culture the zoo naturalises these ideas as well as certain modes of looking at and interacting with animals. In this thesis I argue that as literary works contemporary novels provide a valuable defamiliarisation of zoos which encourages the re-examination of the human attitudes and practices that inform our treatment of nonhuman animals. Through my analysis of J.M. Ledgard’s novel 'Giraffe', Diane Hammond’s 'Hannah’s Dream', Lydia Millet’s 'How The Dead Dream', Valerie Martin’s 'The Great Divorce' and Ben Dolnick’s 'Zoology' I explore the inherently anthropocentric social construction of nonhuman animals in human discourses and the way the novels conform to or subvert these processes. I demonstrate that nonhuman animal characters are constructed through a process of identification which involves naming, recognising the existence of their emotions and mediating their nonhuman forms of communication. Anthropocentric tendencies both aid and hinder this identification, for example the human valuing of sight over the other senses that sees eyes become important literary symbols and the gaze a crucial part of interaction and attributing meaning. Gaze and observation are also fundamental to the concept of the zoo where human treatment of nonhuman animals is represented in visual terms in the relationship between powerful spectator and disempowered object. Drawing on texts from multiple disciplines I argue that the anthropocentric nature of socially constructed nonhuman animals in human discourses means that any study of these animals is actually concerned with the human ideologies and processes that create them; as a site of captivity that markets wildness and freedom the paradoxical nature of the zoo provides the literary setting for an exploration of these themes.

This paper examines the roles "the animal" plays in various broad movements in contemporary critical theoretical work in and around the humanities and social sciences. It brings together elements of theory and practice in imagining discursively-constructed subjects who are not necessarily human. Some vocabulary drawn from the equestrian practices of dressage and Centered Riding© is employed as a means of translating phenomenologically various and immediate embodied expression into written language. Central theorists are Vicki Hearne (Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name), Barbara Noske (Beyond Boundaries), Cary Wolfe (Animal Rites and Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed.), Donna Haraway (a number of selections), Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation), and Jacques Derrida ("The Animal that Therefore I Am" and "And Say the Animal Responded," two sections of a 1997 conference lecture entitled "U Animal autobiographique").

This dissertation explores the ways in which practices of killing animals in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Canada shaped humans’ perceptions of self and place. Analyzing the multivalent meanings of animal death in wild animal stories, sport hunting, photography, taxidermy, and meat eating, I argue that killing animals was integral to the expansion of settler colonialism in the dominion, materially facilitating the extension of agriculture and industry, and rhetorically legitimizing claims to conquest over indigenous peoples and wild landscapes. But humans’ self-definitions through animal death were not straightforward tales of mastery. Increasingly aware of the disappearance of wildlife from the dominion’s forests, less dependent upon wildlife for subsistence, women and men attributed greater cultural, political, and economic value to the nation’s animals, empathizing with animals and condemning animal extinction. Expressing a sense of guilt over human culpability in the vanishing of wild species, then, humans sought ways of defeating the ravages of modernity by preserving traces of animals in material, representational forms, using encounters with animals as means of defining a sense of self and nation. Fictional stories of animals proliferated, sport hunting soared in popularity, and taxidermied animals adorned many walls. Contemporaries killed animals as a means of legitimizing colonial occupation of newly settled land and asserting mastery over nature, then, but they also regretted their role in precipitating the disappearance of animals from nature. In reconciling this paradox, human and animal engaged in an ongoing process of co-constitution, defining and redefining shifting boundaries of kinship and otherness in a myriad of ways. Such paradoxical meanings of animal death emerged when humans were no longer reliant upon wild animals for survival. As such, I conclude this study by analyzing an important counterpart to wild animal death—the slaughtering of domestic animals as meat. Eating commercially produced meat increasingly defined one’s status as a modern subject within a technologically advanced and civilized nation, the transition from eating wild animals to domestic animals symbolizing a sense of success in overcoming the challenges of settlement in a colonial landscape.

Domestic violence remains a serious social issue. In North America, millions of women are victimized each year, and many of these women are victims of violence at the hand of their intimate partners. A small but growing body of research on domestic violence has shown that companion animals are among the victims of such violence. Abuse of or threats to the pets are used to control, manipulate and emotionally abuse the female partner. However, the majority of this research has focused on the perspective of the abused female partner; the male perspective is missing. Through semi-structured interviews with ten incarcerated men who have committed intimate partner violence (IPV), this thesis explores the abuser’s motivations for abuse of the pet as well as their perspective of pets in the context of a violent relationship. The findings indicate that, contrary to previous research, most men do not abuse pets in the relationship, and in fact have positive relationships with their pets. Just as pets are sources of comfort for women in abusive relationships, pets can be sources of comfort and support for the abusive men as well. When incorporated into violence intervention and treatment programs, relationships with pets can provide a venue for men construct a masculine identity in a positive way, and the treatment of animals can illustrate how violence is not an effective solution.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-93). / vii, 93 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A. (Psychology)) - Rhodes University, 2008. / A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology.