1 Editor's Introduction to Society and Animals Kenneth J. Shapiro When we pause to reflect on it, the continued broad scope, pervasiveness and varied form of animals in our lives is surprising. The dominant image of the modem world is a human-centered and technologically dense landscape. The baying of horses in the streets has long been drowned out by the whirring of motors. Yet our world is still replete with animals in the street, home, nursing home, consulting room, at the "feeder," in the city alley and city park, in the lab, on the farm, in the stream, in the wild.... In addition to these living relations, our lives are saturated with former animals- the animal-based products and byproducts with which we feed, medicate and clothe our bodies. And our thought and language remains suffused with fictional animal- the symbolic animals that provide images and metaphors for our rituals, pastimes, names, fables, character analyses... As social scientists we are interested in how all these animal presences infonn our psychology, sociology and anthropology. The main purpose of Society and Animals is to foster within the social sciences a substantive subfield, animal studies, which will further the understanding of the human side of human/nonhuman animal interactions. Renewed interest in human-nonhuman animal relations is also prompted by the current debate over the ethics of our use of animals. In addition to better understanding ourselves, through animal studies we wish to understand our varied relations to them, and to assess the costs- economic, ethical and, most broadly, cultural- of these relations. For those impacts are complex and often of mixed consequences for both parties, human and nonhuman. On the face of it, this emerging field itself might contribute to the anthropocentrism which many discussants contend is the root cause of animal exploitation. For animal studies is the investigation of nonhuman animals as they influence and are present to us human animals. However, as social scientists we believe that we can provide a relatively independent set of information so that people can make more informed judgments about practices and policies involving nonhuman animals. Most social scientists now agree that their work is itself a powerful influence on the society which we study. Whether we like or intend it, the topics we investigate, the