Description: This program examines the vexed interchange between humans and animals in commodity culture. We encounter animals daily, although likely we pay little attention to, or don’t recognize, these encounters for what they really are. We eat animals. We wear them. Our beauty, health, and home products are tested on them. Animals perform for us and satisfy our need for intimacy, entertainment, and novelty. Human action and indifference remove animals from their natural lives and display them for a variety of human pleasures. Western culture and its mix of theologies generally positions animals as subservient to humans. Laws subjugate their bodies in the same discursive frame that prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to originally use the subtitle The Man That Was a Thing for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.