New course explores the human-animal connection

The intimate connection between animals and humans has never been murkier.

In this confusing era of animal rights movements, engineered creatures, cloning, factory farms, animal research and chronic cartoon anthropomorphizing, the age-old relationship between animals and humans has been redefined. It is far cry from the juxtaposition of our agriculturist ancestors and their domesticated farm animals.

In an attempt to clear away some of the polemic and misinformation that clouds our modern perspective of human-animal symbiosis, a new course explores the many issues and realities of how people work with, befriend and utilize animals.

“I don’t think there’s a class like it in the world,” says Mark Cook, a professor of animal science and the driving force behind the new offering. “We certainly don’t have any education on this campus involving issues of animals.”

The class, Human/Animal Symbiosis, Cook says, will explore the tangle of concerns that beset the modern symbiosis between animals and Homo sapiens. The history of vivisection, animal welfare laws, the agricultural use of animals, the animal rights movement, human-animal communication, and ethical issues in biotechnology, among others, are topics that will be explored.

The one-credit class was developed with the help of Lindsay Meeks, an undergraduate zoology major and a lab technician who works for Cook. Meeks, who aspires to work for a zoo and considers herself a moderate animal rights advocate, has approached the class from a different philosophical perspective than Cook who, for 20 years, has been one of the university’s leading poultry and animal scientists, and sometimes a target of animal rights groups.

“We tend to have opposing views,” Cook says, “but that’s OK. It just strengthens the course.”

The truth about human relationships with animals, Cook argues, is clouded in misinformation and rhetoric, and tends to be hidden from the vast majority of Americans who’ve never been in touch, for example, with the gritty realities that support the nation’s diet of fast food or its reliance on modern medicine.

The course, Animal Science 375, to be held on Mondays at 4:35 p.m., is intended for a broad cross-section of society, says Cook. “We’d like to try and inform people about what I perceive as this huge divide between animal agriculture and animal rights,” Cook says. “The course will be broad, and we’re hoping people in the community who have an interest in animals can come and learn the facts on both sides.”

For Meeks, a member of the Madison Coalition for Animal Rights, the goal is similar. “Some of the scientific facts (about animal production and laboratory use) are skewed,” she says. “Some of the (animal rights) groups skew the facts in the opposite direction. I want people to see both sides and make their own decision.”