From the website: "Animal Studies queries the relationship between nonhuman animals (or “animals”) and human social orders. It is an interdisciplinary field, encompassing scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences and emerging primarily in the past three decades. Drawing generalizations about such a diverse body of scholarship can be tricky, but three related commitments are shared, to varying degrees, by most scholars who actively publish in animal studies. Broadly, all three commitments should be understood as a critical response to speciesist assumptions embedded in the Western humanist tradition."