EARL HESS has added the study of human-animal relationships and their roles in the Civil War to his long list of scholarship. In his new Animal Histories of the Civil-War Era, he gathers essays on subjects ranging from insects and bees to hogs, dogs, camels, and horses. The war not only exposed the need for an Army veterinarian service, but the scope of suffering and slaughter of millions of animals possibly contributed to the movement toward humane treatment of animals that was gaining ground in the mid-1800s.
CWT: How did you come to the topic of animal histories?
In 2018, historian Joan Cashin hosted a panel on animals and the Civil War at the Southern Historical Association conference. I attended that and had the idea of
