Towards a Continuous View of Human and Nonhuman Persons

Regarding Animals is a book that examines the human-animal relationship through sociological ethnography. Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders demonstrate how we live in an interspecies society but fail to fully recognize this fact. Arluke is Professor of Sociology at New York University and Senior Scholar at the Center for Animals and Public Policy of Tufts University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Sanders is a noted symbolic interactionist and professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He has focused his studies on human-animal interaction and written primarily about how canines are treated. In Regarding Animals, honored as the best book in the symbolic interaction studies in 1996, these sociologists have combined their research in different settings and made a highly significant analysis of the ways dogs, cats, primates, and mice are treated by caretakers, pet owners, laboratory technicians, shelter workers, dog trainers, and veterinarians. The power of the book’s analysis, supported by ample quotations selected from thousands of hours of interviews, is to make readers acutely aware of how everyday human behavior and condescending language demean even those ordinary pets we live with. The book’s thorough documentation supports the case for a greater awareness of how nonhuman animals and humans are related to one another, and the plea for a deeper understanding of nonhuman animals and more benign treatment of them. The study predicts, but does not preach or admonish, a less hierarchical, more continuous view of human-animal interaction in the future.