Anthropomorphizing Animals: Foxhunting Stories and the Nature Faker Controversy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper uses a selection of foxhunting stories to explore the way in which anthropomorphized foxes were used to communicate pro-hunting messages to their mostly young readers. These justifications also appeared in nonfictional foxhunting sporting literature. Indeed, this literature included some of the same incredible anecdotes that also appeared in the work of nature writers at the turn of the twentieth century such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton working in a new sympathetic genre called the “animal story.” These writers found themselves under attack because naturalists like John Burroughs, and hunters, including President Theodore Roosevelt, found their stories to be inaccurate and anthropocentric. Roosevelt dubbed them the “nature fakers.” Foxhunting “histories” employed imaginative material and much anthropomorphism but were not attacked for doing so. This tends to indicate that anthropomorphisms were more acceptable when they were facilitating animal exploitation than when they were used to promote the perspective of nonhuman animals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".