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A variety of healthcare robots for elderly care have been developed. However, as the elderly and caregivers experience psychological resistance towards not only new technologies but specifically to robots, the adoption of healthcare robots has scarcely progressed. This article aims to develop a service design method, which consists of a design process including design tools to identify jobs in an elderly care facility and to reveal what kinds of jobs to assign to service robots and to caregivers. This article develops a design method which is composed of six steps and adopts original design tools to identify jobs needed in elderly care facilities and assign them to human and non-human actors, including service robots. The tools include an actor map to visualize the Actor to Actor (A2A) network, a current jobs to be done (JTBD) worksheet to visualize existing jobs, a new JTBD worksheet to visualize new jobs, and an actor worksheet to summarize information about each actor including their philosophy. With this design method, we conducted a series of workshops with the aim to develop a service fulfilled by humans and non-humans at an elderly care facility in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. The results of questionnaires administered to the workshop participants demonstrated the effectiveness of all the tools except the new JTBD worksheet. Also, the results of interviews with employees in the elderly care facility indicated the effectiveness of the approach, which reveals visible and invisible regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements through interviews with human actors, and embeds them in the service design process. The design method including the original design tools proposed in this article contribute to a service design method for the use of robots in elderly care facilities by allocating jobs to human actors and non-human actors appropriately, and it also contributes to the issue of psychological resistance to the adoption of service robots in these facilities, which brings efficiencies to society. The contribution of this article is to reframe the issue of resistance to the adoption of service robots in elderly care facilities to the issue of what kinds of jobs in an elderly care facility should be assigned to service robots or caregivers, and the development of a service design process including original design tools.

While myriad studies have explored the role of humans in online social media-based communities, fewer studies have examined the roles of non-human actors in those online places. This study uses the actor-network theory and the viable system model to analyze the roles of hashtags communities to gain a better understanding of the larger cybernetic ecosystem in which non-human actors operate. Actor-network theory provides the theoretical understanding that frames this study. The viable system model is a five-tier system based on methods of communication and control in both living and non-living entities. Data sources included fieldnotes, social media profiles, blogs, personal websites, personal communications, interviews, and demographic surveys. Findings suggest that non-human actors have an ability to affect change within the ecosystem, but non-human actors cannot be viewed as viable standalone systems. Viability is only possible when humans participate within the ecosystem at large.

Dalit autobiographies narrate the journey of protagonists from the ‘untouchable’ communities of India towards self-realisation and their struggle for human rights. A vigilant reading recognises the...

“Counselling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals. It’s a type of applied psychology”. When used for helping an individual in quitting a habit it requires using cognitive therapies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used in the healthcare sector, but its use for counseling purposes is still questionable. Recently a virtual health worker has been introduced by World Health Organization (WHO) representing increased use of AI in healthcare. This article also explores the features of this virtual health worker and how the counseling process is done by a human health professional and what is different in counseling done by a virtual health worker.Counselling

Background Peripheral nerves are constant targets of traumatic injury which may result in neurotmesis and which invariably requires surgical treatment. In view of this, tissue engineering studies developed biomaterials which were first tested in animal models and used as a guide for nerve stumps in the procedure in order to speed up the healing process. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of biomaterials used in tubing technique on healing and histological and functional recovery after peripheral nerve neurotmesis in rats. Methods We will search PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, LILACS, and CENTRAL (from inception onwards). Grey literature will be identified through searching dissertation databases, guidelines, policy documents, and reports. We will include randomized and non-randomized trials conducted in young adult rats with peripheral neurometsis undergoing surgical repair through tubing technique with biomaterials. Primary outcomes will be histomorphometry, immunohistochemistry of the nerve tissue, and sciatic functional index. Secondary outcome will be nerve macroscopic evaluation. Two reviewers will independently screen all citations, full-text articles, and abstract data. Potential conflicts will be resolved through discussion. The methodological quality (or risk of bias) of individual studies will be appraised using an appropriate tool. If feasible, we will conduct random effects meta-analysis. Discussion This systematic review of animal studies will identify, evaluate, and synthetize the evidence on the the efficacy of tubing technique with biomaterials compared to direct coaptation technique after peripheral neurotmesis in nerve healing and return to functionality. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42018106042.

Human dreams of a long and healthy life are becoming increasingly real. The advancement of medical technology allows to modify the genome or personalised therapy in order to avoid troublesome side effects. This process also leads to the blurring of boundaries between humans and animals. Rats with induced human diseases are used for testing drugs for incurable illness; humanised pigs can donate organs that are compatible with the genome and immune system of the recipient. A brave new human is approaching, and new “human” animals are making this possible. The main objective of the article is to show the differences between the refinement of people and other animals and to analyse this phenomenon from an ethical point of view.

Can human co-existence with wild animals can be mediated by an ethic of hospitality? Some Christian environmental and animal ethicists have outlined ways Christians can model a more expansive, imaginative, and informed hospitality toward non-human animals. This paper will explore philosophical and theological underpinnings for such a practice, to ask whether it can have any prescriptive “teeth” when the interests of humans and non-human, non-domestic animals collide in ways that humans perceive as costly. The paper will argue that a commitment to interspecies hospitality can indeed function as a biocentric and biblical form of justice that adapts and extends community to our fellow creatures.

This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comparatively unique manoeuvrability within digital infrastructural assemblages. They extend the Internet to offline rural environments, while following and strengthening local systems of moral economic social reproduction. Recognising the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors, these brokers are also dependent on the broader infrastructural assemblages in which they operate, especially the cables and waves that initially allow digital bits to travel to Solomon Islands. Localised Internets such as Solomon Islands are, thus, continuously in flux, being perpetually reassembled by the agentive practices of their constituent parts.

Purpose of Review Observations of differing bacterial, intestinal microbiomes in people living with HIV have propelled interest in contributions of the microbiome to HIV disease. Non-human primate (NHP) models of HIV infection provide a controlled setting for assessing contributions of the microbiome by standardizing environmental confounders. We provide an overview of the findings of microbiome contributions to aspects of HIV disease derived from these animal models. Recent Findings Observations of differing bacterial, intestinal microbiomes are inconsistently observed in the NHP model following SIV infection. Differences in lentiviral susceptibility and vaccine efficacy have been attributed to variations in the intestinal microbiome; however, by-and-large, these differences have not been experimentally assessed. Summary Although compelling associations exist, clearly defined contributions of the microbiome to HIV and SIV disease are lacking. The empirical use of comprehensive multi-omics assessments and longitudinal and interventional study designs in NHP models is necessary to define this contribution more clearly.

The ability to automatically track non-human primates as they move through the world is important for several subfields in biology and biomedicine. Inspired by the recent success of computer vision models enabled by benchmark challenges (e.g., object detection), we propose a new benchmark challenge called OpenMonkeyChallenge that facilitates collective community efforts through an annual competition to build generalizable non- human primate pose tracking models. To host the benchmark challenge, we provide a new public dataset consisting of 111,529 annotated (17 body landmarks) photographs of non-human primates in naturalistic contexts obtained from various sources including the internet, three National Primate Research Centers, and the Minnesota Zoo. Such annotated datasets will be used for the training and testing datasets to develop generalizable models with standardized evaluation metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset quantitatively by comparing it with existing datasets based on seven state-of-the-art pose tracking models.

Cwik (2020) has written an excellent paper. His proposal that we analyze human germline genetic interventions in terms of their targets, goals, possible outcomes, and mechanisms seems sensible and ...

This essay argues that Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem challenges what Mark Shucksmith terms the “visioning of rural areas by hegemonic middle-class culture” (163), which still dominates the way many British people see the countryside and is rooted in nostalgia for a neat and pretty rural idyll, cleansed of untidy (bio)diversity. The second major line of argument is that the shadow of William Blake hangs heavily over the play, and that Rooster both embodies and employs the Blakean imagination in ways that challenge dominant “hegemonic” ideas about the rural. The untidy and disruptive Rooster, and the wood that bears his name, represent a very different kind of mindscape and a very different kind of (living) landscape. Simply by his presence in the wood he symbolizes an alternative way of being in the land. It is true that Rooster’s is an imperfect echo of the mythopoetic Blakean world-view, but it is nevertheless unmistakeably Blakean, so the prologue to Jerusalem, part of the preface to Blake’s Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1808), is central to a proper understanding of the play. Rooster’s verbal combativeness and mythopoetic visions penetrate the hypocrisy behind the veneer of respectability in Flintock, and the justifications for prevailing human relationships with the land.

This commentary discusses SSIs in relation to environmental ethics. In their article, Augusto Macalalag Jr., Joseph Johnson and Michelle Lai note tensions between SSIs and environmental education and investigate educational experiences that address some of these tensions. The discourse associated with SSIs generally does not consider nature-centric ethics, which prioritize the sustenance of nature above any of the entities that are part of it, including humans. I will discuss education funded by oil and gas companies developing the oil sands in Canada, to examine different ethical positions embedded in this SSI. Discussion focuses on how the human and social implications of education development are often prioritized, without considering the environmental implications of accepting corporate funding for education. I argue that considering nature-centric ethical positions can more fully illuminate and inform decision making in educational development and SSIs more broadly.

This paper presents the content analysis of 123 tourism policies, from 73 countries, at the national and sub-national level. Specifically, we examined the policies for evidence of growing awareness of and concern for the impacts of tourism development and activities on non-human animals. The analysis reveals that tourism policy has been evolving over time, particularly as it relates to the depth and breadth of issues addressed. Policies that were mostly focused on economics in the 1990s have evolved to now include a broader range of topics related to the welfare of social and natural environments, including concern for the welfare of animals. However, we temper this positive finding by suggesting that until animals are considered a stakeholder in the tourism industry, their rights to exist and thrive will be considered only as it relates to their ability to enhance the attractiveness of and economic potential of a destination.

Narrative myth tellings have the magical capacity to give voice to the non-human and to initiate dialogue between forces and figures previously assumed to be binary opposites. These well-establishe...

Research on the effectiveness of the application of ASB, especially in relation to village funds, is still rarely done. Many factors influence the effectiveness of the ASB preparation, but can be classified into two factors, namely the human and non-human aspects. Both of these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of the application of ASB. This study used exploratory factor analysis. The results of the analysis show that: (1) The dimensions or factors that shape human aspects in the effectiveness of the application of ASB are commitment factors, competency, adaptation, collaboration, technical capability, sub-district supervision function, organizational skills, village head development and planning ability. (2) Dimensions or factors that shape nonhuman aspects in the effectiveness of the application of ASB are Regulatory factors, Village Support, Administration, Wages / salaries and Village Institutions. (3) The dimensions or factors that shape the effectiveness of the application of ASB are factors: Standard cost of inputs, control tools, Abc (activity-based costing), according to village priorities, general validity, approval or determination and easy to update the data

This article studies volunteer tourism by following the trajectories of a non-human actor. Based on fieldwork at a Nepalese orphanage and drawing on insights from the material semiotics of Actor–Network Theory, we describe how the louse interferes as an unexpected actor with volunteer tourism at the orphanage. This post-human approach decentres the volunteer and destabilises the host–guest binary while adding to our understanding of tourism practices as complex and materially distributed endeavours. We analyse two configurations of head lice enacted through a modern morality of hygiene and Nepalese everyday life and show how they are deployed, contested and reconfigured onsite by volunteer tourism actors. By exploring patterns of absence and presence and using the concept of ontological choreography as an analytical resource, we show how the situated lice work of human and non-human actors at the orphanage offers new ways to grasp the forging of volunteer experiences and subjectivities.

International audience; Over the past 10-20 years, neuroscience witnessed an explosion in the use of non-invasive imaging methods, particularly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to study brain structure and function. Simultaneously, with access to MRI in many research institutions, MRI has become an indispensable tool for researchers and veterinarians to guide improvements in surgical procedures and implants and thus, experimental as well as clinical outcomes, given that access to MRI also allows for improved diagnosis and monitoring for brain disease. As part of the PRIMEatE Data Exchange, we gathered expert scientists, veterinarians, and clinicians who treat humans, to provide an overview of the use of non-invasive imaging tools, primarily MRI, to enhance experimental and welfare outcomes for laboratory non-human primates engaged in neuroscientific experiments. We aimed to provide guidance for other researchers, scientists and veterinarians in the use of this powerful imaging technology as well as to foster a larger conversation and community of scientists and veterinarians with a shared goal of improving the well-being and experimental outcomes for laboratory animals.

We present the design and results of an experiment investigating the occurrence of self-illusion and its contribution to realistic behavior consistent with a virtual role in virtual environments. Self-illusion is a generalized illusion about one's self in cognition, eliciting a sense of being associated with a role in a virtual world, despite sure knowledge that this role is not the actual self in the real world. We validate and measure self-illusion through an experiment where each participant occupies a non-human perspective and plays a non-human role using this role's behavior patterns. 77 participants were enrolled for the user study according to the priori power analysis. In the mixed-design experiment with different levels of manipulations, we asked the participants to play a cat (a non-human role) within an immersive VE and captured their different kinds of responses, finding that the participants with higher self-illusion can connect themselves to the virtual role more easily. Based on statistical analysis of questionnaires and behavior data, there is some evidence that self-illusion can be considered a novel psychological component of presence because it is dissociated from sense of embodiment (SoE), plausibility illusion (Psi), and place illusion (PI). Moreover, self-illusion has the potential to be an effective evaluation metric for user experience in a virtual reality system for certain applications.

The musical motives of a song emerge from the temporal arrangement of discrete tones. These tones normally have few durational values, and are organized in structured groups to create metrical patterns. In the present study we show that the ability to detect the rhythmic structure of a song, while ignoring surface changes, is also present in other species. We familiarized rats (Rattus norvegicus) with an excerpt of the Happy Birthday song. During test, we presented the animals with (i) the same excerpt of the familiarization, (ii) a constant-pitch version of the excerpt that reduced melodic intervals to only one tone (i.e., isotonic) but preserved rhythmic structure, and (iii) a rhythmically scrambled version of the excerpt that preserved the melodic intervals. The animals discriminated the rhythmically scrambled version from the versions that preserved the original rhythm. This demonstrates that rats were sensitive to at least some parts of the rhythmic structure of the tune. Together with previous findings, the present set of results suggests that the emergence of rhythmic musical universals might be based on principles shared with other species. This work was supported by a grant from the BIAL foundation (reference 13/18) and by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MEC) FPI grant BES-2014-070547.

Especially in the realm of technology, big data, and new media it is questionable if our traditional understanding of responsibility is able to face current challenges—mostly due to its restricted focus on the autonomous, self-sufficient, individual human being as the genuine responsible agent. The possibility of ascribing responsibility to artificial systems or in cases in which we cannot reduce responsibility to a limited and clearly defined group of responsible persons has recently been challenged. In such cases, our conventional methods of identifying individual human agents as the solely feasible responsible agents—or as other important functions within the relational setup of the traditional concept of responsibility such as the addressee and the authority—frequently fail. We need to question and move beyond a traditional understanding of responsibility in order to update it for these and further challenges.

This article discusses Coase’s theory on the firm in the market, which regards the firm as a special contract between human capital and non-human capital. One of the characteristics of the firm as a contract is that it does not or is not able to define ex ante all the rights and obligations of the participating factors and the owners thereof; and it always leaves some to be regulated during the contract execution process.

There exists great discrepancy in a manner that human and non-human animals are treated during disasters despite an enormous role that the latter play in the lives of the former. Every year there are a large number of animal deaths due to disasters and intensified human suffering due to this loss, yet the focus of laws, regulations and machinery for rescue and rehabilitation remains quite insensitive towards them. The impact of disasters on animals is visible from the flooding and destruction of their habitats from coastal to mountain ecosystems, from tropical to temperate forests and from villages to cities. Experience has shown that when floods strike in coastal areas, the official management structures of NDMA, SDMA and DDMA spring into action to save humans whereas non-humans are left behind for lack of concern, arrangements or even attitudes of officials. Even laws such as the CRZ 1991 and the DMA 2005 have been conservative, closed and deficient in incorporating within their folds lives other than humans and since there is little sensitivity on this front, the officials fail to collaborate with wildlife officials, city municipal bodies and animal owners in their plans for preparedness. Community resilience measures have simply shown adhoc arrangements, which are either personality driven or driven by the need for economic viability. This chapter asserts that human and non-human arrangements for preparedness and rescue overlap and can contribute to the mutual strengthening of resilience building.

Non-human beings need to be protected under special provinces. Their right to life, dignity and freedom should be fundamentally provided to them. The trend in India and predominantly in the world can be seen that the concept of non-human revolves around very few certain animals. A clear and broad distinction between non-human beings and other animals needs to be instilled. Recognition of non-humans without set procedure will result in friction between judiciary and law making. As non-humans contain intrinsic value, there is a need for recognition and protection of them. Since they cannot represent themselves or their rights, it is our duty to recognize and protect their rights, and provide them with appropriate compensation in cases of abuse.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has well established the fact that without concern, compassion and welfare of non-human animals these goals are not likely to be achieved (Keeling et al. in Front. Vet. Sci., 2019) but the vision is neither holistic nor inclusive. The companion animals are again left out reflecting upon the utilitarian and segmented vision which has gone behind the framing of the SDG Agenda (ibid.). Man goes against the laws of nature for his insatiable desires, which Gandhi rightly reflects as Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed’. Hempel (Environmental Governance. Island Press, Washington, DC, p. 11, 1996) rightly said in the following note, ‘our world is embarked on a precarious adventure that will test the elasticity of earth’s capacity’. Man greed has no limits but it takes a turn for the worse when it combines with lack of data on limits to environmental destruction, economic indicators on the use of natural resources to both the omnivores and the ecosystem people and unwilling politicians who are naive about environment (Guha in Econ. Polit. Wkly. 32:348, 1997). Non-humans influence and impact upon environment and for that reason they are part of environmental governance which in totality is called a web of ecological relationships. When a disaster strikes these relationships are broken and very few of them bounce back to life. A resilient ecological relationship is also the ground for better commerce, business and also stable employment. Since environment is the heart of SDGs (2015–2030), this chapter would look into the ethical values which surround the discourse on non-humans.

In Western educational literature people are made aware of the evolution of early hominins in the Eastern Hemisphere within the continent now known as Africa. Discussions that would lead people to question human evolution in broader frames of other possibilities, have remained buried in a few academic papers and the occasional textbook. Western constructs of human evolution are often framed in epistemologies of agnotology. That is, knowledge is constrained through what is not taught. To gain an understanding of the human past it is necessary to discuss the evolution of humanity’s earliest primate ancestors on a global scale. I discuss the earliest reported primate ancestors, recent discoveries of new fossil hominins, human migrations to the Western Hemisphere (the Americas), and the impacts of political control of the human past. I argue that primate and human evolutionary histories have been underreported and silenced in educational literature due to national and historical dimensions of politicised knowledge production. The power of the past as it is created in the present, has a history of producing ignorance rather than knowledge. Discussions of human evolution, as they have traditionally been taught, are often framed through colonialism and epistemologies of agnotology.

This paper focuses on how social meanings indexed by language use in the real world can be recontextualised in telecinematic texts such as anime to construct and convey different aspects of a character’s identity. In a case study of the science-fiction anime series, From the New World (Shinsekai Yori; 2012–13), the paper analyses three corpora comprised of dialogue from the series in order to shed light on the discursive construction of the non-human character Squealer. A non-human character was selected to minimise the influence of preconceptions about identity. Drawing on Androutsopoulos’s (2012) three-level film analysis framework and Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) identity framework, the approach incorporates both computerised and manual discourse analysis. The computer-facilitated keyword analysis provides initial insights into the character’s demographic information and speech style, showing the key linguistic features used by the character’s species, and by extension, the focal character. This is complemented by a detailed analysis of dialogue from selected scenes which shows how various aspects of the character’s identity are expressed using different linguistic devices in different contexts. The analysis demonstrates that shifts between the use and non-use of certain linguistic features serve to foreground different aspects of a character’s identity—namely, stances and presentational personae. By integrating corpus linguistic analysis with scene-based analysis drawing on sociolinguistic concepts, the study shows how we can gain insights into telecinematic characters’ identities through language. The paper also highlights issues encountered in applying corpus linguistic methodologies to analysis of Japanese language, which may be of use to future researchers and software developers in this area.

It is no secret that the advent of the digital age has spurred significant progress in businesses – particularly with the rising deployment of bots and artificial intelligence (AI) to boost efficiency in the workplace. But, as with most opportunities, there are challenges. And, unfortunately for businesses, fraudsters are not lagging behind when it comes to adopting these technological innovations to support their criminal efforts. As companies increasingly embed artificially intelligent ‘workers’ to help support operations, they are unwittingly exposing themselves to further risk if not properly secured, creating additional pathways for fraudsters to infiltrate.

This paper applies actor–network theory (ANT) to study the non-human agents that participate in the translation and publication process of Monkey, an English translation of the Chinese classic Xi You Ji. The materials used consist mainly of the letters exchanged between the publisher George Allen & Unwin, the translator Arthur Waley, and the jacket and title page designer Duncan Grant. Moreover, the “Preface” of the translation written by the translator himself and the publisher’s autobiography are referenced as additional sources of information. The research reveals two groups of entities which act as what ANT scholars term as “non-human actors”. The first group consists of texts, more specifically, the “Preface” to Monkey and some letters exchanged between Waley as a translator and Unwin as a publisher, which reveals the reasons of re-translating Monkey and the translation strategy used. The second group includes the Second World War and the influenza epidemic in the 1940s that impeded the reprinting of Monkey. The paper concludes that, in addition to human actors, non-human actors that have also actively exerted influences on both the process and the outcome of a major translation project deserve to receive more attention when looking at translation as a social activity.

Informed by life-writing, comics, feminist and disability studies, I consider autobiographical comics in which the categories of ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are directly opposed by the authors’ visual-ver...

Previous studies on the Book of Jonah often concentrated on God, Jonah, and the people of Nineveh. This article takes a different approach by focusing on the roles of all “non-human creatures” in the Book of Jonah—the great Storm, the great fish, the animals of Nineveh, the worm, the land and the kikayon plant. This approach reveals something new about the role of non-human creatures in the book and the implications thereof for the amelioration of today’s ecological crisis. It highlights the beauty of all elements of nature working together with humanity for the good of all: a clear indication of the ecological vision implicitly proposed by the Book of Jonah. In this regard, YHWH’s attitude to every creature in the book is exemplary, to him every creature is in itself valuable and fulfills a particular important role in nature and existence.

Aimé Césaire scandalised the question of the human subject by exposing the deceit and hypocrisy of the idea of Europe and its myth of civilisation. The question of the human is foundational and constitutive in Césaire’s subjectivity, which originates from the site of the dehumanised and also railing against all forms of dehumanisation that plagued the colonised subject. The human is interrogated here in the light of the distance and proximity to the non-human. It is from the positionality of being non-human that Césaire opposes faux humanism, which presents a scandal and it having a tendency of preaching humanism while engaging in dehumanisation. In order for there to be the insurrection of the colonised subject to become human, Césaire’s conception of ‘the return’ is re-engaged from the standpoint of Negritude as decolonial humanism and reconceptualising it in its complexity. This then serves as the launching pad to imagine the possibility of the emergence of another humanity coming into being through the end of the modern colonial world – the decolonised world.

This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. Based on empirical examples of microbial borders, evidence from the natural sciences, interviews with public health practitioners, and theoretical support from ethnographic encounters with Amazonian ontologies, the conceptualization links the geopolitics of microbial bordering to biodiversity loss and deforestation, and suggests that microbial bordering should prompt acknowledgment of the role humans play in ecological patterns that far exceed human control and meaning making. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and security efforts in general, expands the theoretical agenda for critical border studies, and contributes to the fields of global health security and New Materialism in International Relations by highlighting that international relations include our relations with non-humans, and that how we choose to cohabitate with them has large implications for human security.

Ageing Western societies are facing an increasing prevalence of chronic inflammatory and degenerative diseases for which no effective treatments exist. The pressure on the drug development industry to develop such treatments creates a need for translationally relevant animal models, which faithfully replicate essential pathogenic mechanisms of the human disease. In this Short Review, we discuss the essential role of the non-human primate (NHP) in the translational research into the pathogenesis and treatment of the autoimmune neurological disease multiple sclerosis (MS).

Non-human primates (NHPs) are included within safety testing programmes for potential new medicines when justified as the relevant species for use. Although the NHP is often the only relevant species for the testing of large molecule biotherapeutics, a proportion of small molecule compounds may also require testing in NHPs, when other non-rodent species are unsuitable. Whilst the toxicology studies continue to be required for regulatory submissions, there are opportunities to both reduce the number of animals and refine procedures used within the studies, by implementation of best practice study designs and processes identified by NC3Rs-industry data sharing projects. With the rapid expansion of biotherapeutics within the industry expected to continue or increase, the number of compounds within company pipelines, and hence the number of NHPs used for testing, are likewise anticipated to grow. A wider acceptance and adoption of established 3Rs approaches should continue to minimise the use of NHPs whilst maximising the potential these new therapies bring to improve human health.

In chapter 1, the author investigates the relation between language and anthropocentrism. By discussing the relation between human language and non-human animal exclusion, she argues that, in order to adequately address anthropocentrism, we need to redefine language in and through interaction with non-human animals. The first section of this chapter criticizes an anthropocentric view of language, reason, and animals. The author discusses the connection between the concepts “language” and “animal” in part of the Western philosophical tradition, using the work of René Descartes and Martin Heidegger as examples. We find an alternative approach in the work of Jacques Derrida, which is discussed in the second part of the chapter, and which complicates stereotypical views about “the animal” and critically examines the image of the human that is connected to it. His critique is valuable, but he provides only a negative view of non-human animals, language, and human-animal relations. In the final section, the author argues that this is unfortunate: in order to adequately address anthropocentrism, we need to redefine these concepts in and through interaction with non-human animals.