User:Laurenchaffin184/finalarticle

These are my recommendations for revising the article: Animal studies.

- I added the Animal Welfare in Scientific Animal Studies section

- I added the A Sociological Approach to Animal Studies section

- I added 4 peer-reviewed sources

- I changed the wording of a sentence in the History section, my edit is in bold

Animal Welfare in Scientific Animal Studies

There are numerous organizations that work to ensure animals are treated ethically within scientific animal studies. Launched in early 2019, the Animal Studies Registry is a new aspect within the field of animal studies. The Animal Studies Registry, or ASR, works to "increase transparency and reproducibility of bioscience research and to promote animal welfare." The ASR provides a way for researches to demonstrate their commitment to being transparent and having quality data to the public, editors and reviewers, as well as to third-party donors. Another organization that focuses on animal welfare is known as PREPARE (The Planning Research and Experimental Procedures on Animals). PREPARE provides guidelines for scientists working with animals in their experiments. PREPARE also highlights "legal and ethical issues" related to stakeholders involved in experiments involving animals. Another organization that focuses on animal welfare within research is known as the NC3Rs, which stands for National Center for the Replacement, Refinement, and Reduction of Animals in Research. NC3Rs works to minimize animal use in research through the application & discovery of new technologies.

A Sociological Approach to Animal Studies

The discipline of sociology has a lot to offer to the field of animal studies. It is beneficial to understand animal studies through a sociological lens, because it incorporates non-human and human interaction within society. The field of sociology focuses on human societies, however humans are only a small part of what makes up the broader concept of society . Moreover, “Connections between nonhuman animals and human societies have become an increasingly prominent topic of sociological research over the past decade” . Thinking in terms of concepts, such as evolution, it is clear how animals have had an impact on humans and vice versa as well within society. In terms of environmental sociology, the new ecological paradigm, or NEP, "materially situates humans and social systems in an ecological context, one that humans share with other animals in numerous ways and with numerous implications" .

Copied content from Animal studies: see that page's history for attribution.

History

As an interdisciplinary subject, animal studies exists at the intersection of a number of different fields of study. Over time, different fields began to turn to animals as an important topic at different times and for various reasons, and these separate disciplinary histories shape how scholars approach animal studies. Historically, the field of environmental history has encouraged attention to animals.

In part, animal studies developed out of the animal liberation movement and was grounded in ethical questions about co-existence with other species: whether it is moral to eat animals, to do scientific research on animals for human benefit, and so on. Animal studies scholars who explore the field from an ethical perspective frequently cite Australian philosopher Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation, as a founding document in animal studies. Singer's work followed Jeremy Bentham's by trying to expand utilitarian questions about pleasure and pain beyond humans to other sentient creatures.

Theorists interested in the role of animals in literature, culture, and Continental philosophy also consider the late work of Jacques Derrida a driving force behind the rise of interest in animal studies in the humanities. Derrida's final lecture series, The Animal That Therefore I Am, examined how interactions with animal life affect human attempts to define humanity and the self through language. Taking up Derrida's deconstruction and extending it to other cultural territory, Cary Wolfe published Animal Rites in 2003 and critiqued earlier animal rights philosophers such as Peter Singer and Thomas Regan. Wolfe's study points out an insidious humanism at play in their philosophies and others. Recently also the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a book on the question of the animal: The Open. Man and Animal.

Research topics and methodologies

Researchers in animal studies examine the questions and issues that arise when traditional modes of humanistic and scientific inquiry begin to take animals seriously as subjects of thought and activity. Students of animal studies may examine how humanity is defined in relation to animals, or how representations of animals create understandings (and misunderstandings) of other species. In order to do so, animal studies pays close attention to the ways that humans anthropomorphize animals, and asks how humans might avoid bias in observing other creatures. For instance, Donna Haraway's book, Primate Visions, examines how dioramas created for the American Museum of Natural History showed family groupings that conformed to the traditional human nuclear family, which misrepresented the animals' observed behavior in the wild. Critical approaches in animal studies have also considered representations of non-human animals in popular culture, including species diversity in animated films.

By highlighting these issues, animal studies strives to re-examine traditional ethical, political, and epistemological categories in the context of a renewed attention to and respect for animal life. The assumption that focusing on animals might clarify human knowledge is neatly expressed in Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous dictum that animals are "good to think."