Read War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

Brian Griffith

4.9/5 (25847 ratings)

Description:An exploration of the love and hate relations that different cultures have with different animals, how prejudice against particular species has often led to wars of extermination, how those wars have commonly blown holes our ecosystems, and how people around the world are building better relations with animals.“The animals that one culture likes are often hated in the next, and it seems that the animals themselves know it well. Basically, one culture’s animal partner is often another culture’s nightmare from hell. Naturally, I wonder how relations between people and animals got to be so different around the world. How did it happen that some cultures treat bats, snakes, wolves, or ravens as embodiments of evil, while other people treat the same animals with affection or even reverence?”Our wars with the animals go way back. Beyond the light cast by our prehistoric campfires, the eyes glowing in the night seemed to represent a great hostile force. As we began to cultivate crops and husband a few favoured animals, we generally regarded other creatures as threats to our chosen few. Using the logic of war, we sought to maximize the populations of certain creatures, and the destruction of others. In the past, that war effort was our great crusade for the advancement of civilization as we knew it. The war had a frontier, a front line, and an ongoing battle on the home front. Expanding outward from our various cradles of civilization, we progressively “tamed” the forests and grasslands, converting them to monocrop plantations or pastures. Then we had to defend our monocrops from encroaching weeds, insects, and wild animals.In this immediately engaging, story- and fact-filled page-turner of a book, Brian Griffith looks at the range of ways we relate to animals and the stories we tell about them. He asks how we choose whether buddyhood, fearful respect, businesslike predation, or genocidal war is the most appropriate response to each species we meet. He watches how our treatment of “inferior beings” affects our treatment of “inferior people,” and traces some of the chain reactions we unleash when we try to weed out species we don’t like. “Without much hope of making animals fit my personal preferences,” he writes, “I wonder how good our relations can get.”Media endorsement:“Griffith invites us into the ebb, flow, and evolution of our complex and ambivalent relationships with animals of all kinds – from wolves, dogs, snakes and cows to monarch butterflies, spiders and microbes – from pets to pests. This book is an accessible, fascinating and compelling revelation, urgently needed to regenerate a world worth living in together.” -- Tom Atlee, Research Director for the Wise Democracy Project; Founder and Director of The Co-Intelligence InstituteWe have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals. To get started finding War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 208

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Wood Lake Publishing

Release: 2020

ISBN

Description: An exploration of the love and hate relations that different cultures have with different animals, how prejudice against particular species has often led to wars of extermination, how those wars have commonly blown holes our ecosystems, and how people around the world are building better relations with animals.“The animals that one culture likes are often hated in the next, and it seems that the animals themselves know it well. Basically, one culture’s animal partner is often another culture’s nightmare from hell. Naturally, I wonder how relations between people and animals got to be so different around the world. How did it happen that some cultures treat bats, snakes, wolves, or ravens as embodiments of evil, while other people treat the same animals with affection or even reverence?”Our wars with the animals go way back. Beyond the light cast by our prehistoric campfires, the eyes glowing in the night seemed to represent a great hostile force. As we began to cultivate crops and husband a few favoured animals, we generally regarded other creatures as threats to our chosen few. Using the logic of war, we sought to maximize the populations of certain creatures, and the destruction of others. In the past, that war effort was our great crusade for the advancement of civilization as we knew it. The war had a frontier, a front line, and an ongoing battle on the home front. Expanding outward from our various cradles of civilization, we progressively “tamed” the forests and grasslands, converting them to monocrop plantations or pastures. Then we had to defend our monocrops from encroaching weeds, insects, and wild animals.In this immediately engaging, story- and fact-filled page-turner of a book, Brian Griffith looks at the range of ways we relate to animals and the stories we tell about them. He asks how we choose whether buddyhood, fearful respect, businesslike predation, or genocidal war is the most appropriate response to each species we meet. He watches how our treatment of “inferior beings” affects our treatment of “inferior people,” and traces some of the chain reactions we unleash when we try to weed out species we don’t like. “Without much hope of making animals fit my personal preferences,” he writes, “I wonder how good our relations can get.”Media endorsement:“Griffith invites us into the ebb, flow, and evolution of our complex and ambivalent relationships with animals of all kinds – from wolves, dogs, snakes and cows to monarch butterflies, spiders and microbes – from pets to pests. This book is an accessible, fascinating and compelling revelation, urgently needed to regenerate a world worth living in together.” -- Tom Atlee, Research Director for the Wise Democracy Project; Founder and Director of The Co-Intelligence InstituteWe have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals. To get started finding War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

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