If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection With Animals (Animals, Culture, and Society) [Hardcover]

Leslie Irvine (Author), Marc Bekoff (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004 | Series: Animals, Culture, and Society

Nearly everyone who cares about them believes that dogs and cats have a sense of self that renders them unique. Traditional science and philosophy declare such notions about our pets to be irrational and anthropomorphic. Animals, they say, have only the crudest form of thought and no sense of self at all. Leslie Irvine's "If You Tame Me" challenges these entrenched views by demonstrating that our experience of animals and their behavior tells a different story. Dogs and cats have been significant elements in human history and valued members of our households for centuries. Why do we regard these companions as having distinct personalities and as being irreplaceable? Leslie Irvine looks closely at how people form 'connections' with dogs and cats available in adoption shelters and reflects on her own relationships with animals. "If You Tame Me" makes a persuasive case for the existence of a sense of self in companion animals and calls upon us to reconsider our rights and obligations regarding the non-human creatures in our lives. Leslie Irvine is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of "Codependent Forevermore: The Invention of Self in a Twelve Step Group". Marc Bekoff is Professor of Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder; his most recent books are: "Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart" and (co-authored with Jane Goodall) "The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love".

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With much pleasure and interest I read Irvine's book about dogs, cats, and their 'guardians' (the word Irvine uses for people owning companion animals). Bekoff's foreword is very friendly and a good appetizer: it prepares you and makes you curious about the chapters to come. . This sympathetic book is rich in ideas and will generate discussion! This is exactly what it needs to do. It is a first step toward an empirically grounded theory about animal selfhood, and hopefully inspire fellow researchers to develop it further. The book will also most certainly inspire animal lovers, who will gain more understanding about cats and dogs." Anthrozoos "This volume is an important contribution to the recent explosion of sociological analyses of the roles of animals in human life." The American Journal of Sociology "Leslie Irvine's If You Tame Me is a fine book, one that introduces modern ideas about the self and the importance of emotions both for humans and for animals. I hope that many people will read this, look at their companion animals the way Irvine urges us to, and think about the implications. I love it when she gets personal; I only wish there were more passages about her own animals. She is good on anthropomorphism and why spoken language is not the be-all and end-all of intelligence. I learned much from reading this excellent book. I wish it a long life!" --Jeffrey Masson, author of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals and The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the Feline Heart "This book is a major effort in developing a conceptual and theoretical framework for looking at issues of animal selves and human-animal intersubjectivity. It is an important work that extends existing sociological research in both social psychology and animal behavior. Rich with ideas and insights, If You Tame Me is must reading for anyone wrestling with the question of how we can know the animal other." --Janet and Steve Alger, authors of Cat Culture: The Social World of a Cat Shelter "Anyone who has experienced connection with an animal will appreciate Leslie Irvine's systematic establishment of the notion of animal selves." --Boulder Daily Camera "I love Leslie's book. It is accessible and at the same time well researched and scholarly, filled with 'hard science' and anecdotes." --Marc Bekoff, from the Foreword " makes a persuasive case for the existence of a sense of self in companion animals and calls upon us to reconsider our rights and obligations regarding the non-human creatures in our lives." Pets Quarterly

From the Publisher

Narrowing the gulf between humans and animals --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592132405
• ISBN-13: 978-1592132409
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,292,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and thoroughly enjoyable, February 20, 2005

By 

Patricia Anderson "[e-mail]" (Macomb, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection With Animals (Animals Culture And Society) (Paperback)

Sociologist Dr Leslie Irvine's If You Tame Me is a very important and inspiring book. It will be of great interest to all who love animals and are concerned about their welfare. If you sense a kinship with nonhuman animals and the natural world, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. It is very well-written and well researched. It takes many of the assumptions that we commonly make about the animal "other" and skilfully dismantles them to reveal pernicious social constructs that should stimulate us all to be more cognizant of how we treat other species. I couldn't put it down!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully inspiring read, August 8, 2005

By 

Kate Nicoll "of Soul Friends" (Wallingford,CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection With Animals (Animals Culture And Society) (Paperback)

Leslie Irvine's voice provides those in animal science, animal welfare and just plan animal lovers with a new insight into the psychological relationship of the human-animal bond. A compelling theoretical read with real-life examples. A must have in any animal welfare/animal social policy or human-animal bond literature.

Kate Nicoll, MSW Soul Friends, Inc.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Disappointing, August 1, 2011

By 

5/0 "Outdoors USA" - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection With Animals (Animals Culture And Society) (Paperback)

Leslie Irvine's book, "If You Tame Me" is largely a serious disappointment. There is nothing inherently wrong with being an activist for the S.P.C.A. or any other group or cause but respectable activism requires a goodly amount of ethical presentation. In any book written by an activist the reader should expect, and accept, some amount of "bias" or slant" - it's just "the nature of the beast", and that's okay. But there is really no ethical place for junk science, innuendo and misleading information in such work.
"If You Tame Me", however, is littered with supposedly scientific conclusions that don't necessarily follow from the evidence presented to the exclusion of other possibilities. Some of the "science" put forth is based on obscure and sometimes irrelevant or insignificant "scientific studies", and some appear to be based substantially upon Imagination or somewhat creative conjecture. Nearly anyone with a familiarity with animals would readily recognize some of her statements as simply wrong. Additionally, some of Ms. Irvine's commentary might well abrade white, heterosexual Christians, especially males, and especially since she seems to overlook the neglect and abuse pets receive at the hands of other cultural groups. Those are the main reasons Ms. Irvine's book is so disappointing to me and I would not recommend it.
But even though the connections between her observations and her conclusions are sometimes very weak, she does make some genuinely interesting observations and pose a fair number of interesting questions. One in particular is her discussion of the role of Religion in the development of the human-animal relationship and another s her discussion of "anthropomorphism", and yet another is her distinction between "pet" and "companion animal". So it's at least possible that some readers somewhere (in addition to some "animal activists") would find the book thought-provoking, or at least entertaining.