Embodying and destabilising disability and childhood

Young people's bodies have been at the centre of much policy and media discourse of late, forming the focal point of moral panics about obesity, substance abuse, and anti-social behaviour, to name just a few. Political responses to these issues are often focused on finding 'pragmatic' solutions based on a normative understanding of child development. This book, instead, demonstrates the contested and differentiated nature of childhood and youth embodiment. It combines the critical analysis of imagined and disciplined youthful bodies with a focus on young people's lived and performed, embodied subjectivities. Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth points towards ways of addressing the issues that affect young people's wellbeing without criminalising and stigmatising them. It presents cutting edge interdisciplinary research in an accessible style that seeks to bridge the divide between theory and practice in research.

Terrestrial carnivores and human food production: impact and management

1. The production of food for human consumption has led to an historical and global conflict with terrestrial carnivores, which in turn has resulted in the extinction or extirpation of many species, although some have benefited. At present, carnivores affect food production by: (i) killing human producers; killing and/or eating (ii) fish/shellfish; (iii) game/wildfowl; (iv) livestock; (v) damaging crops; (vi) transmitting diseases; and (vii) through trophic interactions with other species in agricultural landscapes. Conversely, carnivores can themselves be a source of dietary protein (bushmeat). 2. Globally, the major areas of conflict are predation on livestock and the transmission of rabies. At a broad scale, livestock predation is a customary problem where predators are present and has been quantified for a broad range of carnivore species, although the veracity of these estimates is equivocal. Typically, but not always, losses are small relative to the numbers held, but can be a significant proportion of total livestock mortality. Losses experienced by producers are often highly variable, indicating that factors such as husbandry practices and predator behaviour may significantly affect the relative vulnerability of properties in the wider landscape. Within livestock herds, juvenile animals are particularly vulnerable. 3. Proactive and reactive culling are widely practised as a means to limit predation on livestock and game. Historic changes in species' distributions and abundance illustrate that culling programmes can be very effective at reducing predator density, although such substantive impacts are generally considered undesirable for native predators. However, despite their prevalence, the effectiveness, efficiency and the benefit:cost ratio of culling programmes have been poorly studied. 4. A wide range of non-lethal methods to limit predation has been studied. However, many of these have their practical limitations and are unlikely to be widely applicable. 5. Lethal approaches are likely to dominate the management of terrestrial carnivores for the foreseeable future, but animal welfare considerations are increasingly likely to influence management strategies. The adoption of non-lethal approaches will depend upon proof of their effectiveness and the willingness of stakeholders to implement them, and, in some cases, appropriate licensing and legislation. 6. Overall, it is apparent that we still understand relatively little about the importance of factors affecting predation on livestock and how to manage this conflict effectively. We consider the following avenues of research to be essential: (i) quantified assessments of the loss of viable livestock; (ii) landscape-level studies of contiguous properties to quantify losses associated with variables such as different husbandry practices; (iii) replicated experimental manipulations to identify the relative benefit of particular management practices, incorporating (iv) techniques to identify individual predators killing stock; and (v) economic analyses of different management approaches to quantify optimal production strategies.

Safety behaviour: a reconsideration

There is ample evidence that the use of safety behaviour can interfere with the progress of therapy, particularly if exposure is involved. As a result, it is widely asserted that safety behaviour is anti-therapeutic. However, an unqualified rejection of safety behaviour should be reconsidered because we now have theoretical justification, experimental evidence and clinical observations showing that the judicious use of safety behaviour, especially in the early stages of treatment, can be facilitative. Experiments in which escape behaviour facilitated fear reduction, and others in which the use of safety gear facilitated fear reduction, are reviewed. It also appears that safety behaviour does not necessarily prevent disconfirmatory experiences. We propose that additional investigations of the judicious use of safety behaviour will help to elucidate therapeutic uses of safety behaviour in the treatment of anxious and related types of psychopathology. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.