Enter the Animal

In Enter the Animal, Teya Brooks Pribac examines academic and popular discourse on animals’ experiences of grief and spirituality, which are rooted in our intrinsic capacity and propensity for connections and relations, and highlights important ethical implications of humans’ treatment of other species.

Praise for Enter the Animal

‘This path-breaking book engages a surprising range of sources to shed extraordinary clarity on aspects of animal subjectivity that make other species every bit our equal. I could not stop reading.’

– Cynthia Willett, author of Interspecies Ethics

‘Enter the Animal is a fascinating journey into the hearts and minds of nonhuman animals and our shared capacities for experiencing a wide variety of deep and rich emotions. Employing an impressively broad scope of interdisciplinary research, this most important and forward-looking book offers a lucid, engrossing, and insightful exploration of the capacities for grief and spiritual engagement that humans share with other animals.’

 – Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals, Rewilding Our Hearts and The Animals' Agenda

‘This is a very impressive book which illuminates human–nonhuman animal relations with its thorough research and sophisticated theoretical analysis. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in grief in animals.‘

– Peta Tait, author of Fighting Nature and Wild and Dangerous Performances

‘It is clear, and easy to read, and easy, as well, to understand. Whether you are a scholar in the broad area of animal studies, a student embarking upon animal-related research or simply a reader interested in all matters animal, this is an essential book, which will help you understand three fundamental points: where we are currently, how we got here, and where to go next.‘

– Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and Lost Companions

'Enter the Animal offers a moving exploration of the ways in which grief is a cross-species phenomenon that manifests in a diversity of expressions and experiences. Reading this beautifully written book informs ways of thinking about the political work grief, and acknowledging grief, does for other species as well as our own. A wonderful contribution to scholarship on animal subjectivity, sociality, and grief specifically.'

– Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow With Ear Tag #1389

Teya Brooks Pribac, PhD, is an independent scholar and multidisciplinary artist. She lives in the Australian Blue Mountains with sheep and other animals.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1: Animal subjectivity           

2: Intersubjective attachment and loss

3: Cross-cultural grief matters                       

4: Spiritual animal                 

5: Grief at a distance: humans grieving unknown nonhuman animals

Coda: The precarious way ahead

References

Index

"[The book is] not only a well-crafted study of animals, humans, and their many channels of emotional attachment, it’s a powerful intervention within the humanities more broadly – the dramatic unveiling, promised by the title, of the urgent necessity of taking the animal perspective seriously for understanding both nonhuman and human lifeways."
Donovan Schaefer   Animal Studies Journal