HAS Courses in the Northwest
Carroll College
Anne Perkins
Introduction to the Human Animal Bond
The Human-Animal Bond Program at Carroll College is the first degree program of its kind in the nation. Carroll College's Human-Animal Bond Program (HAB) is designed so that students attend three core classes that provide them with foundational information regarding theory, research, and services applicable to human-animal bonding.
Eastern Washington University
Media Studies, Film Studies
Pete Porter
Representations of Animals
Montana State University
History
Brett Walker
Animal Histories. This course is designed to investigate the interrelationship between human and nonhuman animals in comparative historical settings, ones elucidated through the interdisciplinary approach of science, technology, cultural studies, and straight history. Increasingly, historians have begun to investigate the role of nonhuman animals in shaping human history and, even more intriguingly, the potential for nonhumans to experience and generate histories of their own. This course offers an opportunity to participate in this pioneering field of inquiry. From the calories that fuel our society to the large predators that continue to haunt our collective imaginations, nonhumans directly participate in and shape our histories, cultures, and ecologies.
Montana State University
Philosophy
Sara Waller
Other Animals.This
course explores how animals have been, and currently are, understood
from scientific, philosophical, and cultural perspectives. The
understanding of both animal minds and behavior will be examined using a
priori and empirical approaches. The various methodologies employed in
studying animals, their underlying assumptions, and possible limits,
will be discussed, as well as the larger moral issues they, and their
findings, raise.
Northwestern University
Classics
Claudia Zatta
From Love-Gifts to Beasts: Animals in Antiquity. Protagonists
of myths, endearing pets and love tokens, objects of the hunt, and
bridges to the unknown future and the remote gods: animals have played
the most versatile and diverse roles in Antiquity. Animals are symbols
of heroism for Homer, vehicles of economic stability in Hesiod,
creatures of a mythical time for Plato, and political beings akin to
humans in Aristotle. This course explores the rich literature about
animals in the Greek and Roman world, focusing on the relationship
between men and animals and how it developed over time. This course not
only addresses how the ancients conceived of the life, identity and
function of animals, but it also shows how their notion of the animal
ultimately reflected their conception of the human.
Oregon State University
Animal Science
Kelvin Koong
Contentious Social Issues in Animal Agriculture. This course, available to all undergraduate students, features a number of guest lecturers, and devotes several class sessions to each of the following five issue areas: public lands, animal products and human nutrition; animal products and food safety issues, animal rights and welfare, and animal biotechnologies
Oregon State University
Animal Science
Kelvin Koong
Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture. Focuses on contributions of domestic animals to human welfare; animal products in the human diet; societal concerns (food safety, health aspects of consumption of animal products, environmental issues); industrial animal production; and the future of animal agriculture. $10 course fee assessed.
Oregon State University
Animal Science
Candace Croney, P. Cheeke
Ethical Issues in Animal Agriculture. This is a senior level intensive writing course and is therefore required of all animal science majors. The course combines the study of ethics and issues in animal agriculture such as animal welfare, animal rights, and animal liberation. The students use different writing activities to explore and discuss these issues.
Oregon State University
History
Anita Guerrini
History of Animal Use in Science. Using a variety of sources, this course will explore the ways humans have thought about and used animals in science and medicine from the seventeenth century to the present. How has science constructed the boundaries between humans and animals, and what have the consequences been for each?
Oregon State University
Veterinary Medicine
Jill Parker
Veterinary Medical Ethics. This is an intensive elective course that offers an introduction to ethics in veterinary medicine, with specific attention to the moral status of animals, the process of ethical reasoning, and ethical decision making in practice.
Portland State University
Theatre Arts
Mark Berrettini
Wildlife Film and Television. This course will cover a range of film and television texts, fiction and non-fiction, that represent nonhuman and human animals, nature and "wildlife". We will examine concepts such as: anthropomorphism, human-animal interactions, the cultural construction of nature and wilderness, the animal "world" as an extension of humanity, the definition and boundary of wildlife, subjectivity, and the popularity of animal and nature genres in film and television.
University of Oregon
Environmental Studies
Ted Toadvine
Environmental Aesthetics. Explores aesthetic experience of nature through philosophical perspective; emphasizes nature and art; beauty and the sublime; embodiment, culture, and science; and ethics, conservation, and preservation.
University of Oregon
Environmental Studies
Environmental Ethics. This course introduces key concepts and methods in environmental ethics and surveys a range of contemporary positions in this field while developing skills of value clarification and ethical reasoning applicable to areas of interdisciplinary environmental study and problem-solving. Topics covered include the interdependence of facts and values in environmental decision-making, the relation of environmental ethics to traditional ethical theory, the conceptual foundations of environmental ethics, attributions of intrinsic value and rights to nature and other species, consumption and sustainability in our conceptions of the good life, and problems of resource distribution and environmental justice. The course concludes with case studies of specific ethical problems confronting environmentalists today (recent examples include restoration of oak savanna and the Klamath River salmon controversy). Emphasizing the skills of critical thinking, value reasoning, and philosophical inquiry within an interdisciplinary context, this course guides students in the application of these skills to real-world examples requiring analysis and interpretation.
University of Oregon
Debra Merskin
Communicating Nature
University of Washington
History
Maria Elena Garcia
Animals: Articulating human and non-human struggles. How are animal rights and feminist movements connected? Does eating meat perpetuate notions of patriarchy? Can we successfully challenge the exploitation of human beings without also fighting for the rights of non-human animals? Can we morally distinguish between human and non-human exhibitionism? How do notions of class structure our choices about eating habits? This course explores some ethical, political, and cultural questions regarding animals, or as philosopher Peter Singer calls them, non-human animals. Specifically, it looks at the cultural production of difference between humans and non-humans, as well as the tactics, strategies, and ideologies behind animal rights movements. Drawing on debates in anthropology, philosophy, literature, and politics, this course invites students to interrogate the discourses and practices that reduce animals to "inferior beings." The class also asks students to critically examine their own relationships with animals, to explore cultural debates about animals and the environment, vegetarianism, the industrial food complex, health, zoos, and animal experimentation (among other topics), and to think about the discourse of "rights" more concretely. Moreover, this seminar will emphasize the significance of the animal rights movement and its connections to other global movements for cultural, social and environmental justice.
University of Washington
History
Maria Elena Garcia
Animals in Global Perspectives. This course examines the multiple ways in which animals have entered transnational flows through the international economy of food and development programs, and the transnational movement around animal rights. The globalization of the "factory farm" model of production has implications for human and non-human animal lives as the epidemics of "mad cow" disease, avian flu, and "swine" flu have recently and dramatically demonstrated. While these diseases are often seen as separate to the "normal" workings of international political economies, this seminar will explore how they have emerged in and through the processes of industrialization and globalization. Students will also examine the implications of development programs that place "traditional animals" at the center of new strategies to confront poverty in many parts of the developing world. We will engage this new development literature and ask what the cultural and economic implications of this process are for local communities who often value animals for religious and social reasons that are incommensurable with the metrics of international development. Finally, students will explore the ethical and moral debates that have emerged under the rubrics of animal rights and animal welfare. While this debate has largely been seen as a "First World" phenomenon, this course will look at how concerns for the lives of non-human animals have been expressed by local communities and activists in a global context. Taking animals as the proverbial "fish in the water," this course seeks to complicate and de-naturalize the common sense understandings that make non-human animals an all too invisible part of world politics.
University of Washington
History
Maria Elena Garcia
Suffering: Animals, Violence, and the Consequences of Silence. This advanced seminar invites students to engage intellectually with the idea and experiences of suffering. How do we think about suffering and, perhaps more importantly, how do we not think about it? Reviewing philosophical, cultural, and social questions about the nature of pain and violence, this course pays special attention to the suffering of non-human animals. In the United States, approximately 10 billion animals are killed each year in the food industry alone, although this does not include fish or other sea animals. Throughout the world, millions of animals are used in illegal fighting and trafficking circles, used in medical experiments, and killed in harrowing ways for their fur and skin. The pain and suffering that these and other animals endure in life, and during the process of death, is mostly hidden from public view. Do we consider the fate of pigs, chinchillas, or mice, in the same way that we think about the dogs or cats with whom we share a home? How do humans make decisions about the relative importance (and non-importance) of the suffering of particular animals? What are the consequences of those decisions?
Washington State University
Animal Science
Ruth Newberry
Rights and Welfare of Animals. Examines the ethics and philosophies underlying human/animal relations. Defines and assess animal welfare using knowledge of animal health, productivity, physiology and behavior. Examines the controversies and current issues relating to the use of animals in agriculture, recreation, cultural events and research. Evaluates the impact of current and future legislation on animal use and management practices.
Washington State University
Veterinary Medicine
Francois Martin
Introduction to the Human Animal Bond. This is a two part continuing education course.
Willamette University
English
Tobias Menely
Humans and other Animals. We will investigate the ways writers have shepherded readers into an animal world-the perspective of a fish or dog or elephant-and, in doing so, have crossed a boundary that Western philosophy has worked assiduously to maintain. We will also analyze moments when human beings find their sense of what it means to be human troubled by encounters with other animals, be it Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms or Jacques Derrida, naked and feeling the shame of being stared at by his pet pussycat. Throughout the class, we will attend to the ethical, social, and representational questions raised by conscious, communicative animals.
