Tagged: Animals

two golden fish thrashing above water

Carp as Villains and Victims

Teri Harman considers resilience, fishy companionship, and the culpability of “invasive” carp in Utah Lake. Are carp villains or victims?

A Cage of One’s Own? On Interspecies Captive-ation

Using the concept of captivation, Quinn Georgic unpacks human-animal interspecies relations by looking closely at mutual power that binds humans and primates together—from HBO’s CHIMP CRAZY to fieldwork with lemurs.

a black and brown insect with eight legs crawling on a green leaf

My Strange Kinship with a Tick

What messages are shared through a tick bite? Maxime Fecteau explores his experience with Lyme disease, revealing how an undesired relationship with ticks nonetheless has profound impact on his way of seeing ecological degradation, multispecies kinship, and the Anthropocene.

illustration of a dog surrounded by human hands

Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries

Vita Sleigh investigates the connections between animal consent, interspecies erotics, and the (at times violent) power differentials that characterize commonly experienced relationships with animals. How can we attend to the otherness of creatures and hold our attractions to them with care?

dog looking out over mountain landscape

Love, Violence, & Respect in Animal-Human Companionship

Companionship across species is not always simple, nor always rewarding, but perhaps says something about respect for more-than-human beings. In this poem and short essay, Kelsey Dayle John reflects on how the complex fear of witnessing her two dogs fight shaped her approach to multispecies relations.

a red fox standing on a car hood, staring through the windshield at a person

Thinking With Animal Companions: A Keynote

In this series keynote, professor emerita and historian Harriet Ritvo sets the stage for further investigation of “companion species.” She introduces the varied threads of animal companionship—from influence and impact to proximal, favored reciprocity.

black bird sitting on a tree branch in a green forest

The Strange Love of Cuckoos and Currawongs

Kate Judith shares a creative and speculative story through the vertiginous voices of the cuckoo and currawong, which underscore the tension between parasitism and care. The currawong’s caregiving is marked by both sacrifice and survival, while the cuckoo’s actions highlight a demolishing invasive behavior. This form reflects the complex, often painful exchanges that define interspecies interactions.

magnified drain fly with dark blue water droplets surrounding it.

Psycho Drain Flies

A trip to the bathroom sends Henry Hughes on a journey to discover what critters are living in the urinals and what we might learn from them in this era of environmental precarity.