Entertaining and informative, Pets in America is a portrait of Americans' relationships with the cats, dogs, birds, fishes, rodents, and other animals we call our own. More than 60 percent of U.S. households have pets, and America grows more pet-friendly every day. But as Katherine C. Grier demonstrates, the ways we talk about and treat our pets--as companions, as children, and as objects of beauty, status, or pleasure--have their origins long ago. Grier begins with a natural history of animals as pets, then discusses the changing role of pets in family life, new standards of animal welfare, the problems presented by borderline cases such as livestock pets, and the marketing of both animals and pet products. She focuses particularly on the period between 1840 and 1940, when the emotional, behavioral, and commercial characteristics of contemporary pet keeping were established. The story is filled with the warmth and humor of anecdotes from period diaries, letters, catalogs, and newspapers. Filled with illustrations reflecting the whimsy, the devotion, and the commerce that have shaped centuries of American pet keeping, Pets in America ultimately shows how the history of pets has evolved alongside changing ideas about human nature, child development, and community life. This book accompanies a museum exhibit, "Pets in America," which opens at the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in December 2005 and will travel to five other cities from May 2006 through May 2008.

"Everybody who is interested in the ethics of our relationship between humans and animals should read this book." --Temple Grandin, author ofAnimals Make Us Human   Hal Herzog, a maverick scientist and leader in the field of anthrozoology offers a controversial, thought-provoking, and unprecedented exploration of the psychology behind the inconsistent and often paradoxical ways we think, feel, and behave towards animals. A cross between Michael Pollan'sThe Omnivore's Dilemma and Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, in the words of Irene M. Pepperberg, bestselling author of Alex & Me, "deftly blends anecdote with scientific research to show how almost any moral or ethical position regarding our relationship with animals can lead to absurd consequences."

What do Mickey Mouse, Ganesh, a leopard-skin pillbox hat,A Lion Called Christian, and the Aflac duck have in common?  They all represent human beings' deeply ingrained connection to the animal kingdom. InBeing With Animals,anthropologist Barbara King unravels the complexity and enormous significance of this relationship.      Animals rule our existence.  You can see this in the billions of dollars Americans pour out each year for their pets, in the success of books and films such asMarley and Me,in the names of athletic teams, in the stories that have entertained and instructed children (fromThe Cat in the Hatback to well before Aesop created his fables), in the animal deities that pervade the most ancient forms of religion (and which still appear in sublimated forms today), to the paintings on the cave walls of Lascaux.  The omnipresence of animal beings in our lives--whether real or fictional--is something so enormous that people take often it for granted, never wondering why animals remain so much a part of human life.  It has continuously maintained a powerful spiritual, transcendent quality over the tens of thousands of years that Homo sapiens have walked the earth.  Why?   King looks at this phenomenon, from the most obvious animal connections in daily life and culture and over the whole of human history, to show the various roles animals have played in all civilizations.  She ultimately digs deeply into the importance of the human-animal bond as key to our evolution, as a significant spiritual aspect of understanding what truly makes us human, and looks ahead to explore how our further technological development may, or may not, affect these important ties.   BARBARA J. KING is Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She has studied monkies in Kenya and great apes in various captive settings. She writes essays on anthropology-related themes for bookslut.com and theTimes Literary Supplement(London). Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.