What does human-animal studies have to offer ethology?
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COMMENTARY
What does human-animal studies have to offer ethology? Sindhu Radhakrishna 1
&
Asmita Sengupta 2
Received: 20 November 2019 / Revised: 21 June 2020 / Accepted: 21 July 2020 # ISPA, CRL 2020
Abstract Although animals are the primary focus of studies in human-animal studies (HAS), very few ethologists engage with this discipline. Insights from HAS can help provide a deeper and richer understanding of animal behaviour and human-animal interactions. HAS perspectives regarding animal and human spaces, the sociozoological scale theory, and the concepts of animal agency and intersubjectivity in human-animal interactions help demystify puzzling aspects of human-wildlife conflict scenarios and impel a re-examination of ethological dictums and methodologies. We argue that inputs from human-animal studies will aid in the growth of ethology. Keywords Human-animal studies . Ethology . Intersubjectivity . Animal agency . Habituation . Behaviour sampling
Human-animal studies or HAS, as its practitioners often refer to it, seeks to examine the multifaceted, complex nature of human-animal relationships, the history of their association, and the ethical, social, and political impacts of their interactions (DeMello 2012). Although there have been studies on human-animal interactions within the ambit of other disciplines, the formal discipline of HAS is relatively young and owes its emergence to the animal rights movement of the 1970s and publication of two seminal volumes, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (Wolfe 2009; DeMello 2012). Over the past few decades, HAS has grown into an academic field in its own right that includes, within its fold, scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines like literature, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, geography, and cultural studies (Wolfe 2009; Birke 2002). While HAS appears strongly anchored in the field of social sciences and humanities, several HAS scholars have pointed out the great debt HAS owes ecology and ethology. It is unlikely that HAS would have
* Sindhu Radhakrishna [email protected] 1
School of Natural Sciences and Engineering, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore 560 012, India
2
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Royal Enclave, Sriramapura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore 560 064, India
reached its current stage of academic development without the influence of zoological studies that demonstrated the intricate social relations in primates and cetaceans and the cognitive complexity of parrots and corvids (Wolfe 2009). Although the primary axis of HAS is animals, the number of biologists, particularly ethologists, wildlife biologists, and ecologists, engaged in this stream of enquiry is few and far between (Birke 2011). This may be the outcome of early approaches to studying animal behaviour that were circumscribed by certain reductionist frameworks of understanding and concomitant technical language (Crist 1998, see for exam
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