Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations. Ed. Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt

Animals are clearly en vogue, and with their choice of title, Considering Animals, the editors consciously place their collection in a line of recent publications on humananimal relations, Representing Animals (2002), Figuring Animals (2005), Killing Animals (2006), and Knowing Animals (2007), to name but those that use the same syntactic pattern (cf. p. 4); in Considering Animals, the editors “use the present particle to indicate progressive movement – as an acknowledgement that all understanding of human-animal encounters is partial, contingent, and in-process” (p. 4). In keeping with this declaration, the collection is eclectic and interdisciplinary in a comparatively wide sense: it contains fourteen essays by fifteen contributors with diverse backgrounds in literary- and cultural studies, art history, social anthropology, law and biology, and it includes contributions by three artists. Temporally, topics range from the “dramatic rise to dominance in tropical regions of a group of fast-growing grasses,” some six to eight million years ago (p. 199), via the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the medial preoccupation with penguins, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, or the outbreak of SARS that mark the first decade of the twenty-first century (but most topics are rooted in the last two decades); spatially, topics include the USA, Britain, South Africa, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand and Australia. While this certainly makes for very diverse reading, critics might complain that the collection is somewhat weak in terms of focus. However, since the diversity of approaches and topics is clearly intentional, it would hardly be fair to criticize a publication for failing to do what it does not set out to do.