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Arnold Arluke

Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves (Animals, Culture, and Society) Paperback – June 16, 2006

by Arnold Arluke (Author)

9 ratings

Part of: Animals Culture And Society (10 books)

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In Just a Dog, Arnold Arluke argues that animal cruelty must be understood in terms of social relationships rather than an individual's psychological problem or personality disorder. Arluke situates cruelty in actual situations where groups of people decide, on their own terms, what constitutes the wrongful harm of animals and how best to communicate their understanding to others. He captures how law enforcement agents, shelter workers, humane marketers, the general public, and animal abusers (or neglecters), make sense of animal cruelty. In each case, cruelty's meaning reflects the practical, personal, and ideological concerns of these groups and the wider social and cultural confusion over the nature and significance of animals and their proper treatment. He shows that these divergent definitions are not mere reflections of the social world but are actively created and used by group members to achieve sought-after identities.

Print length

232 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Temple University Press
Publication date

June 16, 2006
Dimensions

6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1592134726
ISBN-13

978-1592134724
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arluke (Regarding Animals), an authority on animal cruelty, believes that in order to formulate effective programs and policies to combat such behavior, society must have an in-depth understanding of why people mistreat or neglect animals and of the cultural and social factors that encourage abuse. In this dense and overly long sociological study, he reports on the results of interviews with five groups of people: law enforcement agents who investigate incidents of abuse, adolescent animal abusers, animal hoarders, animal shelter workers (including those who must sometimes euthanize animals as well as those who believe no animal should ever be killed) and public relations experts who use animal cruelty as a marketing tool for fund-raising and education. Arluke examines the experiences and motivations of each group and reflects on how individuals think about their actions"whether cruel or humane"and use them to create identities for themselves. Wisely, the author keeps passages describing specific examples of cruelty to a minimum, and he refrains from making moral judgments. But Arluke's academic approach and language are off-putting, thwarting his objective of stimulating discussion and debate among the general public about the nature of animal cruelty and the importance of finding new ways to deal with it. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Temple University Press (June 16, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1592134726
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1592134724
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,378,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #957 in Animal Rights (Books)
- #3,094 in Violence in Society (Books)
- #3,803 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions

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9 ratings

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Arnold Arluke

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Arnie Arluke is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Northeastern University and Senior Scholar at the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy. His research examines conflicts and contradictions in human-animal relationships. His writing has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the International Association for Human-Animal Interaction Organizations, and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He formerly edited with Clinton Sanders the Animals, Culture, and Society series for Temple University Press.

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D_shrink

A Must Read for Animal Rights Advocates

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 16, 2013

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The author does a good job of presenting a fairly balanced description of what constitutes animal abuse, who does it, and why they do it.

Among the relevant points presented are:
1. "[W]orkers in animal laboratories or slaughterhouses, for example, are thought to undergo desensitization as a coping mechanism." P8
2. "[SPCA] agents think of professionalism as an ability to maintain emotional distance form cases." P43
3. Adolescents who engage in animal cruelty, which the author calls dirty play, sometimes do it to see if what adults say about things as cruelty is true and at other times, do it simply out of boredom. P56

However, I found the best chapter of the book to be the one on animal hoarders, especially as in my home city of Charleston, we are currently hearing about a man who killed over 200 hunting dogs, and was still found with about 45 more malnourished dogs at the time of his arrest, when neighbors alerted authorities to a terrible smell coming from his property. And just as the book predicted his defense is that he was simply a kindly man who wanted to help as many animals as he could, but things simply got out of hand. Yeah, and his saintly nature is why they found 200+ animal corpses in various stages of decay on his property. Having read this one chapter in the book almost makes it unnecessary to read the daily news on this event as it was all foretold in the book with the names and places changed. The author and I may disagree on this point, but I find these individuals to be suffering from anxiety types of disorders, and as he stated in the book, the man did not get along with other people, which is why it took the stink from 200 dead hunting dogs to cause neighbors to complain to local authorities. I think we can say this is an obsessive compulsive type of person, who becomes anxious at the lack of human to human contact, then displaces that to human animal contact, and then gets upset when the animals do not fulfill all his needs, so finally has to kill them as they are suffering due to his lack of proper care, although he believes he is actually helping them.

The author also gives a nice presentation on the difference in no-kill and open-admission shelters and how the workers from each think they are the real saviors of animals and the other type of shelter is exhibiting a form of cruelty by either killing what they consider to be adoptable animals or merely keeping animals alive with minimal socialization for months and sometimes over a year while waiting for the right person to adopt them.

Throughout the book the author describes how we anthropomorphize animal actions by intertwining their actions with our own fears and anxiety over what constitutes cruelty. Because what constitutes cruelty varies by culture from one group to another based on the sociological concepts of folkways and mores.

This is a must read for all those interested in animal welfare regardless of your specialty field or even if just concerned as a lover of a companion animal, i.e. - a PET. You may not agree with ever point, but it is a well presented argument on the whole.

7 people found this helpful

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Judith Shapiro

Useful, but shallow

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2013

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This book offers some useful ethnographic information on how animal cruelty is understood and talked about by humane agents, teen-agers, hoarders, shelter workers, marketers and media, and how people in these positions are seen by others. Unfortunately, it is also tedious, repetitious, and uninspired in its cultural analysis of animal cruelty as a window into how we see the relationship between humans and their fellow creatures.
The author's mechanical use of the distinction between a "normative" and a "descriptive" approach (i.e. that he is not making judgments, but rather simply giving an objective account) ill fits his subject; his approach to it is also rather naïve at this point in the history of the social sciences. The main upshot is a rather flattened account of what Arluke himself recognizes as a morally, legally, culturally, emotionally complex and compelling subject.
Arluke draws on the work of some truly original and interesting thinkers - notably, Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss - unfortunately, to very little effect. His use of Levi-Strauss's analysis of why animals are "good to think" is especially unfortunate; in calling animal cruelty "good to think", Arluke simply sows confusion in the mind of anyone who has felt truly enlightened by Levi-Strauss's brilliant analysis of totemism .
My own favorite sentence in the book comes in the last paragraph, as the author is wrestling with the constraints imposed by his own concept of what is proper behavior for a sociologist: "I certainly struggled for the right words to describe the mistreatment of animals, but no matter how I expressed my thinking, it always fell short of what I suspected was the reality." One virtue this book definitely does have is honesty.

3 people found this helpful

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Linds

Just a Dog

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2010

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I chose this book for a class assignment, but it's a great book and came in a very timely manner and in really great condition. I'd definitely purchase from this seller again in the future.

One person found this helpful

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catclan

interesting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 5, 2015

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very interesting read. nice size book and great information. Thank you

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lngarrison

Great background about animal shelter workers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 23, 2010

I was doing a research paper on animal shelters and while trying to understand the euthanasia debate, Arluke gave great unbaised research especially about the choices animal shelter workers must make when working at an open admissions shelter.

Although extremely informative, it should be updated (i.e., Utah is not an entire state of 'no kill' policies, although it is striving to do so).

6 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Wonderful Author

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 10, 2016

This book was very well written. Animal cruelty is a subject that has not been taken seriously enough for far too long. 2016 hopefully will be a turning point for our furry friends.

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Sydnee

Great read for those questioning why

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 26, 2021

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Beautiful and heartfelt. Helps people understand the mind of animal abusers and why they chose to abuse animals. I gifted it to my sister who has had many dogs over the years who have all been subject to her bipolar abuse and neglect. She wasn't happy about the gift but it got my point across. I see her walking her dog from time to time now.

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