What species of creatures
Subtitle: animal relations from the New World
By: Sharon Kirsch.
Publisher: New Star Books
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Vancouver
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9781554200405
Subjects: Zoology -- North America -- History; Human-animal relationships -- North America -- History; Zoology -- North America; Animals -- North America; Zoologie -- Amérique du Nord -- Histoire; Relations homme-animal -- Amérique du Nord -- Histoire; Zoologie -- Amérique du Nord; Animaux -- Amérique du Nord
Description: "Three centuries ago, white Europeans began to colonize the North American continent. In doing so, they encountered flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and the easily tamed beaver: creatures their kind had never met before. The accounts of early explorers and settlers in describing these animals and others provide fascinating insight into the taxonomies they carried to the so-called New World. Their literature of discovery was by turns comic, cruel and adulatory. This book brings together period quotes and 21st-century science in an idiosyncratic narrative. Extended anecdote conveys the adventures of historical personalities, and the book borrows, too, from fables, children's stories and natural histories. Yet WHAT SPECIES OF CREATURES addresses present concerns - our habitual understanding of wild animals and our own place in the natural order. In the process of quoting from and commenting upon European ancestors' speciesist arrogance, Kirsch interrogates our seemingly insatiable appetite to trap, catch, skin, domesticate, eat, eradicate or otherwise bend to our use the animals in our midst."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.