Animals

This study addresses the relationship between animals and capitalism in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. These texts and their authors attempted to change the conversation surrounding animals and imagine alternatives to traditional thinking surrounding animal subjectivity. Despite their intentions, however, the authors fail to depict non-exploitative relationships with animals within capitalist systems, suggesting an inherently exploitative relationship between animals and biopolitical capitalism.

Appraisal theory posits that the addition of new, relevant, information can alter the outcome of the appraisal process for a given emotional elicitor, such as an animal. The current study aimed to explore whether the addition of animal movement would sufficiently influence the intensity of emotional reactions and action motivation ratings for animals. The current study compared self-reported emotional reactions and self-reported action motivations for still images and videos for six animal categories (snakes, spiders, cockroaches, tortoises, deer, and ducks). Our findings indicate that movement increases the intensity of relevant emotional reactions to cockroaches, tortoises, deer, and ducks, but not snakes or spiders. Action motivation ratings indicate that movement increases approach motivations for the positively associated animals but does not alter avoidance motivations for the negatively associated animals. The implications for our understanding of the perception of and reactions to animals are discussed.

When interpreting how an animal "learns" discrimination tasks, strain capabilities must be considered, and it should be shown that they comprehend the task in a manner consistent with the given interpretation. A novel visual-discrimination (VD) task for relative-size-relations was used to examine visual cue use in C57BL/6J mice, which are shown to have biologically good vision and neurologically intact memory for VD tasks. Results suggest C57BL/6J strain may not be fully capable of relative cue-size associations or even object recognition-based on a water maze VD task. This is in contrast to previous studies suggesting this mice strain is quite strong in visual skills and on VD tasks. Additionally, cue size and/or cue-pairings do appear to influence specific directional preferences or stereotyped behaviors as trainings continued, and these strategies shifted during novel probes. Future studies should assess how mice discriminate between objects and test rat's capabilities on this task.