Scholars of the arts, humanities, and social sciences reflect the inchoate and mercurial nature of the discipline called Animal Studies (or any of several other names) by exploring a wide range of encounters between humans and other animals from at least as wide a range of perspectives. Among the topics are if horses had hands, post-meateating, rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research, animals and the Renaissance anatomies of human exceptionalism, fellow-feeling with chickens, and human-nonhuman libidinal relations. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)