| Sumario: | It is informed that animals are so much a part of the taken-for-granted lives and one carries so much common sense about them that it has taken a surprising amount of time for scholars to step back from this familiarity to cast a more critical gaze at animal-human relationships. It is opined that the significant rise in the studies of the animals and society in the 1980s was the emergence of a post-traditional way of thinking in the humanities and in the humanistic social sciences. In this view, talk about animals or images of animals are almost always narratives about something else troubling humans. Animals, like children, are projective material for adult ideological conflicts. Americans are deeply ambivalent about their society, not only about its well-known and widely publicized issues and troubles, but also about the good life that so many of its inhabitants enjoy. Not surprisingly, this concern includes the role of animals in the nation's food supply. As pets, animals constitute a sizable part of the world. By the 1990s scholarship on animals and society constituted a major interdisciplinary specialty. The journal Society & Animals was founded in 1992, and some publishers launched book series on cultural studies of animals. The success of the "Nature Channel", "Animal Planet", the "Discovery Channel" and related televisual programmes featuring animals, indicates that the audience for mass-mediated, popular culture has kept pace with scholarly interest.
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