Animals

In recent decades, social historians have also dealt with change in human relations with and ideas about animals as part of the emergence of industrial society. Westernization, the great cultural watershed of the past 500 years, profoundly altered perceptions of the natural world. Europe’s global expansion; its agricultural, industrial, and political revolutions; capitalism; science; and technology have transformed our interaction with other living creatures in complex ways. As historian Keith Thomas (1983) observes, the conflict between material expectations and new sensibilities “is one of the contradictions upon which modern civilization may be said to rest.”