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Many of the human communities that comprise the South have cosmologies that place human and nonhuman animals on a continuum. Culturism, with its foreign logic and dynamics, has broken this continuum, thereby fuelling speciesist practices. In this chapter, I portray the deep relation that some rural Southern communities have with nonhuman animals, and analyse some of the imposed logics that lead the South to abuse nonhuman animals while denying that what they are doing is mistreatment.

Only within the past decade have sociologists begun to investigate the relationships between humans and other animals. Even more recently, college courses that examine this subject have emerged. This article looks at one such undergraduate sociology course – Animals and Society – at the University of South Carolina Spartanburg. It outlines the opposition to the course and the fight for its approval. Then an overview of the course objectives and content is presented, followed by an assessment of the impact of the course on students. Finally the implications of the emergence of animals and society courses in sociology, and the new sub‐field of animal studies, are discussed.