Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg gives a lecture on virtual animals at the Immersium in Vienna (Photo Credit: Oliver Hirtenfelder) On the 8th of October 2025 the Vienna Animal Studies group hosted its largest lecture yet. Held within the impressive in Immersium in Vienna Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, a Senior Researcher in Animal Ethics and Animal Cognition at the Messerli Research Institute, talked to us about the ethics of digitally representing animals. The event started with a

Konstantin Deininger, Katharina Leibezeder, and I were recently interviewed by Mara-Daria Cojocaru about our contribution to the project "Philosophy in the Wild. Finding Hope in Mixed Communities," a project that between April 2025 and April 2026 will collect fieldnotes and multispecies poetry in an anthrozoological vasculum that represents Mary Midgley’s biscuit tin

More than twenty people gathered on the 11th of June 2025 to hear Dr Carlo Salzani talk on the development of the modern zoo. Focusing on Schönbrunn Zoo, Dr Salzani used Foucault's models of power as a theoretical grid to argue that ‘the zoo’ and ‘the prison’ are expressions of the same disciplinary matrix.

Dr Claudia Hirtenfelder answers some questions about urban animal studies and the connections between animals and cities.

We are now accepting chapter proposals for the edited handbook “Animals in Business Ethics: Managing Multispecies Relations in Organizations

On the 30th and 31st of January 2025, running in tandem with the " Hello Nature " exhibition in Nuremburg, scholars and activists will come together to ask the question "How do we want to live together?" Among the list of speaker's is VAS member Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, a Senior Researcher at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna who works at the intersection of animal cognition and animal ethics At this all-German-speaking event, Judith will be in the session " Rights in

Season 7 of the The Animal Turn podcast has an overt focus on dogs and is explicitly concerned with questions related to multispecies health