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Associate Editor's Introduction:

Bringing Animals into Social Scientific Research

Arnold Arluke

While there is abundant popular literature about the place of animals in society, the

academic social science community has been slow to demonstrate much interest in this

topic until recently. It is ironic that so little research interest has been paid to studying the human experience of them when animals occupy such a commanding presence in

our society. Attendance at zoos, for example, far exceeds that at professional sporting

events; the amount of money spent by pet owners on their animals is greater than the

amount spent by parents on baby food; and the amount of mail received by Congress

regarding the protection of animals was greater than that received on the Vietnam war.

Merely because the topic has not been studied, however, is not itself an adequate

justification for doing so. There are both practical and scholarly reasons why Society and

Animals encourages this research. As concern mounts and consciousness changes in our

society over the proper use of animals, the findings of researchers will be absolutely critical to make what is often an emotionally charged and highly polarized debate more

reasoned and informed. An example of this is the need for social scientists to examine

the ways in which laboratory personnel actually interact with animals used for

experimentation. Without such description policy makers and concerned citizens can

only draw upon the typically over-simplified diatribes of animal activists or the self-

serving public relations efforts of scientists.

Animals also represent one of the richest windows for understanding ourselves, and

it is at this level that scholars may find great opportunities. How we think and act toward

them may reveal our most essential conceptions of the social order and unmask our most

authentic attitudes toward people. For instance, the use of animal images may at times

be tantamount to expressing underlying racism: some of the most damning testimony

given by accused police at the Rodney King trial involved characterization of King as

a "gorilla"; during the Gulf War Saddam Hussein was described in the American press as a "rat"; and the actions of people in the Los Angeles riots were likened by media

commentators to "packs of vicious animals."

To date, social scientists have woefully neglected the study of the human experience of animals. Yet educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologist and anthropologists

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and others have begun to carve out discrete pockets of research interest in this nascent

field. Society and Animals hopes to expand some of these interests as well as move

research in some new directions.

Primarily having a psychological and clinical perspective, the clearest and most

dominant line of research over the last few decades has been the study of companion animals-what benefits they have for humans, what characterizes owners and those who

bond with these animals, and what effects they have on the emotional and daily lives of

people at various developmental stages. One major limitation of this research is that it

is often biased toward demonstrating the positive influences of animals on humans.

While such influences may be real, it is not clear how prolonged these influences are

when they do occur, exactly what triggers a positive outcome, and what influences

humans have on animals either positively or negatively. A more comprehensive

understanding of human-companion animal relationships requires attention to what

psychiatrist Carl Jung called the shadow-our vices, jealousies, and vanities. By

studying the human-companion animal relationship through its shadow rather than

through some preconceived notion or romantic bias, it is easier to see the relationship as it is, as distinct from how some feel it ought to be. We know, for example,

comparatively little about the abuse of companion animals or the keeping of animals for

reasons relating to social status, as perhaps is the case when exotic or dangerous pets are

kept. The study of companion animals has also been too narrowly construed because of

its clinical bent. Other topics need to be examined including, for instance, the meaning of folk concepts such as "dog person," "cat person" or "animal lover," or the place of

the dog in the history of the American family. In the past decade, the primary interest of sociologists, albeit modest, has been to

study the nature of occupations involving animals, such as that in a slaughterhouse, race

track, or biomedical laboratory. Many topics remain to be investigated from an

occupational perspective, such as the study of the socialization process of veterinary

profession and the role of animals as co-workers. We also need basic descriptive studies of the occupational perspectives of park rangers, zoo workers, animal trainers, pet shop staff, and game wardens. A more serious problem with this line of sociological research

is that while it examines settings where animals are an integral part, it is often

predominantly concerned with research questions that do not shed light on the nature of

the particular human-animal interaction itself. Recently, sociologists have begun to use

other perspectives from within the field to study humans and animals, drawing on

theories from the symbolic interactionist, deviance and social movements literature. It

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is hoped that questions coming from these various theoretical perspectives will continue

to be asked along with entirely different ones from other sociological subfields such as

social stratification and social problems. For a far longer time than either psychologists or sociologists, anthropologists have

paid attention to the use and function of animals in nonindustrialized societies and to

how these societies generate animal related symbols. While ethnographies have

produced extensive data on how people think and act toward animals, a good portion of

this data is buried within more general descriptions of culture-despite the Human

Relations Area Files category on "ethnozoology." Unfortunately, it will remain

inaccessible to many scholars outside of anthropology until it is culled from texts and

subjected to analysis from a comparative perspective. Although the domestication

process has been one of the chief concerns of anthropologists, they still need to study the metaphorical and symbolic classification of domesticated animals in order to more

extensively test notions that are now only equivocally answered-such as the belief that

domesticated animals serve as a link between human culture and wild nature. Also,

certain domesticated animals have been largely ignored, such as the symbolism of dogs in different types of society. Many questions regarding animal practices are begging for

cross-cultural analysis. Why, for instance, are there striking variations in pet-keeping

practices in the industrialized world, and why are animal metaphors, so present in non-

industrialized societies, also highly present in the modem world? Indeed, I would hope that anthropological interest studying the symbolism of animals could go beyond

"primitive culture" so that we can begin, for instance, to understand the meaning of

animals in television and print advertising, as well as in cartoons and comic strips, and

how these images have changed in recent years.