Includes bibliographical references and index.

Approaching the agency of other animals : an introduction / Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger -- Animals as agents -- Whale agency : affordances and acts of resistance in captive environments / Traci Warkentin -- The racehorse as protagonist : agency, independence, and improvisation / Shelly R. Scott -- Consuming Timothy Treadwell : redefining nonhuman agency in light of Herzog's Grizzly man / David Lulka -- Dancing penguins and a pretentious raccoon : animated animals and 21st century environmentalism / Sarah E. McFarland -- Speaking through animals -- No human hand : the ourang-outang in Poe's "The murders in the Rue Morgue" / Stephanie Rowe -- Sled dogs of the American North : on masculinity, whiteness, and human freedom / Rebecca Onion -- The slave whisperer rides the frontier : horseface minstrelsy in the western / J.J. Clark -- Speaking for animals -- Representing the experimental animal : competing voices in victorian culture / Jed Mayer -- Forms of life : the search for the simian self in ape language experiments / Rebecca Bishop -- Animals, agency, and absence : a discourse analysis of institutional animal care and use committee meetings / Debra Durham and Debra Merskin -- Humanimals and other marginal species -- "To abandon the colonial animal" : "race," animals, and the feral child in Kipling's Mowgli stories / Dipika Nath -- At the top of the hierarchical ladder : were-animals in Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and chocolate and Patrice Kindl's Owl in love / Cat Yampell -- The microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces / Matthew Candelaria -- Crossing over : (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death in the marginal genre work of Temple Grandin and Jim Harrison / Ryan Hediger -- Envoi towards a philosophy of the polyp / Laurence Simmons.

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of animal resistance to human behaviors, and considering the ways the presence of animals refracts human notions like agency and species.