The Animal-Human Interaction

A We Animals photograph was used on this billboard to decrease attendance at a circus that exploits animals.

It's about animals, photographs of animals interacting with human beings, or the human environment. What do we human beings have in common with these fellow creatures of earth, all living and breathing, much like we are?

It's what award-winning photo-journalist and educator, Jo-Anne McArthur set out to demonstrate in founding WE ANIMALS. Photographs have the power to tell a story, sometimes more than words. It is that aspect of photography that Jo-Anne and fellow project members utilize to show interactions between animals and humans in their ordinary sharing of space. It is in these spaces that the human thought process of considering animals as objects, can be examined and some conclusions drawn about how sentient our animal companions are.



Since the beginning of this project, animals have been photographed in more than 40 countries and used in more than 100 campaigns to end animal suffering. Photographs cover a variety of areas in which people and animals come together, from companion animals to shelters, to working animals, to laboratory animals, to animals used for food. There are slaughterhouse photographs, factory farms, zoos and aquariums, all the way to sanctuaries and cruelty investigations - the photographs range and tell their stories, with the help of powerful words of human observers.

From around fifteen years of work, numbering thousands of photographs, came a book, We Animals. Taking some of the best photos, over wide-ranging subject areas, the book investigates human-animal interactions in their many forms. Through these photographs, Ms. McArthur educates the reader about how we treat animals, holds industries that work with animals accountable, and depicts the sentient nature of the animals. Included are also "Notes from the Field" journal entries that discuss investigations in various areas around the world. Published in 2013, the book can be can be purchase new or used at Amazon for less than $40.

Alligators on a Cambodian farm live on a concrete slab and are slaughtered at the age of three, even though crocodiles in the wild can live to the same age as humans, to make fashion-statement purses for the retail market.

Wade Davis, an explorer in residence at National Geographic said about the book, "If ever there was a document that might cause human beings to reconsider our entire relationship to the animal world, this hauntingly beautiful book is it." Dr. Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist and author, weighed in, "Powerfully disturbing. These images take us to dark and hidden places visited only by a few determined and courageous individuals like Jo-Anne McArthur. They reveal the secret practices that many people will not want to know about. For the animals' sake, I beg that you will not only look but feel. For if we truly understand their suffering then, surely, we shall no longer condone it. And the heart-warming images at the end of the book show us the road to compassion."

We Animals, the book.

Thanks for information from this article on We Animals: http://www.weanimals.org/book; this citation on page 2 from We Animals: http://weanimals.org/pub/WA_Endorsements.pdf; this article from We Animals: http://www.weanimals.org/about; and the above link.