How have pets been defined in american history

Reference no: EM133281362

Case: Our readings in this unit have described pet keeping as a constellation of customs that reveals many of the tensions and ambiguities in American life. Kasey Grier, for example, used a wide range of sources to recount Americans' relationships with their cats, dogs, birds, fishes, rodents, and other animals, addressing the role of pets in consumer culture as she charts the emergence of a "domestic ethic of kindness" that has profoundly shaped our modern understanding and treatment of nonhuman animals. In Grier's history, and in our other readings in this unit, we have seen the human-pet relationship described in many ways, ranging from "dominance and affection" (Tuan) to "companion species in relation" (Haraway). For this formal paper, I would like you to assess the significance of pet keeping for our understanding of the material and cultural contributions of non-human animals in American culture.

The significance of pet keeping in America in the past and present, you may wish to consider some of the following questions:

How have pets been defined in American history? What species have been considered as "pets" and how might the boundaries between pets and other animals be blurred or contested? How does pet keeping reflect changing ideas about the family and morality? What is the relationship between pet keeping and social class and the development of consumer culture? What are some of the specific changes over time that you found to be most significant? What areas of interpretation did you find most revealing? Why? What evidence did you find of ambivalence in the human-pet relationship in America? Ultimately, what does the history of pet keeping tell us about how Americans think about and live with non-human animals? So what?

Please incorporate the relevant course readings where appropriate, setting up quotations with proper introductions and citing them with either in-text citations and a bibliography or by using footnotes. Please make sure to proofread your paper before turning it in, as that is the best way to catch errors, both grammatical and typographical, in your paper.

Reference no: EM133281362

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