Linking Animal Cruelty and Family Violence
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Linking Animal Cruelty and Family Violence By Lisa Anne Zilney

Chapter 1:  Theoretical Foundations
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The main thrust of the NEP is that achieving a sustainable relationship between society and nature requires modification of patterns of human behavior and social organization. This work concerns itself mainly with the second assumption of the NEP, arguing that human behavior is shaped predictably by interaction with nonhumans.

The NEP versus the HEP distinction delineated by Catton and Dunlap spurred environmental sociological inquiry, and helped legitimize it as a sub-field in sociology. Gramling and Freudenburg (1996) went further, arguing that environmental sociology succeeded in:

  • overcoming resistance toward examining biophysical variables;
  • helping society recognize the reality of physical limits and resources, as well as the significant social consequences of violations of these limits; and
  • helping people realize the linkages between human behavior and abuses of the environment and its inhabitants.
  • Although sociologists and social theorists have rarely shown much interest in the flora and fauna of the social worlds they have studied, some notable exceptions include Vilfredo Pareto, Thorstein Veblen, and Read Bain (Synnott 1987). In 1928, in an article entitled “The Culture of Canines,” sociologist Read Bain made the case for an “animal sociology,” asserting that “... the persistent attempt to set human phenomena distinctly and widely apart from all other