The Zoological Connection: Animal-Related Human Behavior

Sociologists have been derelict in their failure to address the zoological component in human interaction and attendant social systems. Even a cursory examination of our language and other cultural inventory reveals a discernible animal influence on our social lives and behavior which has been largely neglected by sociological researchers. In this connection, several investigative directions in studying animal-related human behavior would seem to hold particular productive research promise. Research might be profitably directed at such topics as animals as social problems, ideological conflicts involving animals, the human—animal interface attendant to work, the animal as surrogate human, and animal-related crime and deviancy. As sociologists interested in understanding human behavior in all of its vagaries, we might be well-advised to add animal to the lexicon of our discipline, and so turn our research attention to the “zoological connection.” We might accordingly come to perceive whole new vistas of behavioral linkages and social causation.