Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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.

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.

This book is very thought provoking and efficiently reviews several perspectives regarding the connection between humans and animals. It is very well written and succintly conceptualizes the human-animal bond.

This is a book highly recommended by people in the know about living with animals. I wish there was a book like this about humans.