ABSTRACT
People treat nonhuman animals in contradictory ways—they kill them for sport, eat them for food, and slaughter them as vermin, but they also adore them as companions, include them as family, and embrace them as pets. Indeed, the only consistency in our treatment of nonhuman animals is our inconsistency (Herzog, 2011). Instead of studying history to understand our modern incongruous stance toward animals, scholars have focused on how humans express and manage their present-day dissonance by identifying various social psychological mechanisms that allow people to hold contradictory views. To what extent were these ambiguities present in the United States in the past and how do they link to larger cultural ideas about our human relationships to other animals and nature?
