The Historical Animal

By Susan Nance, Jason Colby, Abraham H. Gibson and 15 more

The conventional history of animals could be more accurately described as
the history of human ideas about animals. Only in the last few decades have
scholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives of
historical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings with
complex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us to
examine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover how
animals have altered the course of our collective past.
The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the Pacific
Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillas
and horses to salamanders and orcas. Together they seek out new methodologies,
questions, and stories that challenge accepted historical assumptions
and structures. Drawing upon environmental, social, and political history, the
contributors employ research from such wide-ranging fields as philosophy and
veterinary medicine, embracing a radical interdisciplinarity that is crucial to
understanding our nonhuman past.
Grounded in the knowledge that there has never been a purely human time
in world history, this collection asks and answers an incredibly urgent question
for historians and others interested in the nonhuman past: in an age of mass
extinctions, mass animal captivity, and climate change, when we know much
of what animals have done in the past, which of our activities will we want to
change in the future?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Sep 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815653394

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3428-7 (cloth)

978-0-8156-3406-5 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5339-4 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The historical animal / edited by Susan Nance. — First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3428-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-3406-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-5339-4 (e-book)

1. Human-animal relationships—History.2. Animals—Social aspects—History.I. Nance, Susan.

QL85.H565 2015

590—dc232015021627

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Susan Nance

PART ONE. Historicizing Nonhumans

1. Change in Black and White:

Killer Whale Bodies and the New Pacific Northwest

Jason Colby

2. Beasts of Burden:

Feral Burros and the American West

Abraham H. Gibson

3. Zombie Zoology:

History and Reanimating Extinct Animals

Sandra Swart

PART TWO. Archives and the Animal Trace

4. Animal Archive Stories:

Species Anxieties in the Mexican National Archive

Zeb Tortorici

5. Finding Animals in History:

Veterinary Artifacts and the Use of Material History

Lisa Cox

6. Nonhuman Animal Testimonies:

A Natural History in the First Person?

Concepción Cortés Zulueta

PART THREE. The Animal Factor of Historical Causation

7. Horses and Actor-Networks:

Manufacturing Travel in Later Medieval England

David Gary Shaw

8. Species Agency:

A Comparative Study of Horse–Human Relationships in Chicago and Rural Illinois

Andria Pooley-Ebert

9. Too Sullen for Survival:

Historicizing Gorilla Extinction, 1900–1930

Noah Cincinnati

10. Migrant Muskoxen and the Naturalization of National Identity in Scandanavia

Dolly Jørgensen

PART FOUR. Animals Coping with/Adapting to Us

11. Exploring Early Human–Animal Encounters in the Galapagos Islands Using a Historical Zoology Approach

Nicola Foote and Charles W. Gunnels IV

12. Of Leopards and Lesser Animals:

Trials and Tribulations of the Human-Leopard Murders in Colonial Africa

Stephanie Zehnle

13. Mountain Meeting Ground:

History at an Intersection of Species

Drew A. Swanson

PART FIVE. Documenting Interspecific Partnerships

14. Viewing the Anthrozootic City:

Humans, Domesticated Animals, and the Making of Early Nineteenth-Century New York

Scott A. Miltenberger

15. He Took Care of Me:

The Human–Animal Bond in Canada’s Great War

Andrew McEwen

16. Tony the Wonder Horse:

A Star Study

Courtney E. White

Notes

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

I.1. Parishioners Assembled outside St. James’ Church, ca. 1930

1.1. Dr. Michael Bigg tests radio transmitter, 1973

1.2. Killer whale with freeze-branding and radio pack, 1976

2.1. Prospector and burro, 1903

2.2. Cowboys and Helicopters Round Up Burros in China Lake, 1983

3.1. Reinhold Rau and the quagga foal, 1980

4.1. Traces of pests in a 1584 archival document

4.2. Page from Discurso Filosofico Sobre el Lenguage de los Animales

5.1. Bovine tuberculosis ear punch, 1903

9.1. Captured mountain gorillas, Belgian Congo, 1930

12.1. Leopard trap, Liberia, ca. 1906

12.2. Leopard skin drum, early colonial Ghana

15.1. Matania, Good-bye Old Man, 1916

Introduction

SUSAN NANCE

When I was a kid in Vancouver, one of the various animals I lived with was a dog, named Judy. Old Jude (as my step-dad called her) looked very much like the dog in Philip Timms’s photograph, Parishioners Assembled outside St. James’ Church, 303 Cordova Street (fig. 1). Hunting around in the City of Vancouver archives I have found other photographs dating as early as the 1880s, 100 years before Judy’s time, showing canine residents similar to Judy and the dog at the church: setter/spaniel-looking individuals with multi-colored medium-length coat, about two feet tall.¹ The photographs show these dogs participating in the life of the city by dozing on the floor in places of work, walking diagonally across busy roads, sitting on the lawn, or straining in the embrace of a child being told to smile for the camera in the family living room.²

Today I almost never see dogs that look anything like Judy did, and it seems their numbers had declined considerably by the time that our Judy died in 1981. They were replaced by Labrador and Golden Retrievers, and other more exotic creatures like pugs, miniature pinschers, Shiba Inus, wolf-hybrids, and anything crossed with a poodle. Equally, today Vancouver-area shelters abound with terrier, retriever, and toy breed mixes of all kinds, who testify to how canine reproductive agency often defies the puppy mills and elite breeders. They also testify to contemporary Vancouverites’ struggle to cope with dog behaviors produced by inbreeding, or solitary, housebound canine living, or other changes in human–canid relationships that we might investigate. That is, the Judy-type setter/spaniel-looking dog speaks to me of a particular era in the joint history of dogs and the city of Vancouver, one that opened and closed within about a hundred years. It was an era before a consumer fixation on essentialized canine appearance drove a mass market for purebreds, when leash laws were non-existent or went seldom-enforced, when a dog could stand around on the sidewalk at will with no particular place to go and no one to answer to. And people generally did not mind, because they invited dogs to follow them to church or wander the neighborhood, and otherwise trusted dogs to manage their own behavior in public. Hence, it is not only the dog’s body type but also a network of canine and human behavior that characterized that era, and came and went, possibly never to return.

I.1. Parishioners Assembled outside St. James’ Church, 303 Cordova Street, ca. 1930. Philip T. Timms, photographer. City of Vancouver Archives.

Beyond historicizing Judy and Vancouver’s more autonomous canine past, this photograph invites us to think about how scholars are constructing Animal History. I propose that as a subfield, Animal History directs us to document the lives of historical animals as an intrinsically valuable history through which we can better understand nonhumans and ourselves. Animal History invites us to ask unconventional questions about the interspecific past in non-anthropocentric ways. It asks us to put nonhumans in the subjects of our sentences, rooting out the passive-voice or animals-as-objects prose by which we fool ourselves into thinking we are writing about animals, when we are actually only writing about human ideas about and uses of animals as raw materials of supposedly independent human action. It directs us to employ a radically interdisciplinary supporting literature, ranging from veterinary medicine to philosophy, by which to interpret historical sources. It requires us to be mindful of what animals do not know or care about (namely, how we humans create, justify, and organize our activities), and to identify moments in the past when the disconnect between human and nonhuman perception has shaped the course of events. It reminds us to acknowledge that animals have always had agency but, often, not power, since they do not comprehend the politics and cultures that drive human activity and animal captivity. It is precisely the scholarly task of this volume to offer options for thinking about and executing all these goals.

To see what I mean, consider the caption that became attached to Timms’s photograph at some point over the last eighty years: Parishioners Assembled outside St. James’ Church, 303 Cordova Street. Is the dog a parishioner? Or is it assumed the viewer will edit him or her out of the image even though the dog is clearly at the center of the shot? Did the photographer take this photo because of the arrangement of people and dog, or in spite of it? Look carefully at everyone there and certainly it seems that the human subjects were aware that a dog was present at the moment of photography. Perhaps they personally knew this canine as a parishioner’s pet or the companion of the rector. Is that why they seem to giggle at the camera, or why some on the right are distracted and out of focus since responding to the dog’s presence? Look at the dog and we can see that he/she is wagging a little, because the bottom half of his/her tail is out of focus. Indeed, the photograph represents two realities, one canine (focused on the people on the right) and one human (focused on the cameraman, the group, perhaps the dog).

Timms’s photograph of a dog and people at the Cordova Street church thus demonstrates some historical problems for anyone who might use this image, like so many other historical sources, to talk about the shared history of dogs and people in 1930s Vancouver, or any interspecific context in the past:

1. How can we employ extant sources to properly historicize nonhumans as beings who changed over time and space, who adapted to their contexts? How does this dog’s body type and freedom from a leash, muzzle, crate, or other restraint indicate his adaptation to human Vancouverites and the shared cultures of dogs and people in early twentieth-century North American cities?

2. How do we find new evidence of nonhuman life in anthropocentric archives, when mostly we are trained to edit animals out of our analysis? If an archivist had not supplemented the image’s anthropocentric caption by adding the descriptor dog to the archival record, perhaps this dog would have been effectively edited out of the city’s past, since one would have to search needle-in-a-haystack style through thousands of images to find him.

3. Are we able to account for animals as factors of causation, given that certainly one central question historians always want to answer as fully as possible with respect to processes and events in the past is why? Why are the church people arranged in a semicircle around the dog? What does that tell us about human attitudes toward domestic animals and their autonomy in interwar Canada? Why were there dogs in Vancouver, and how did they shape urban life?

4. Do we agree that, for animals, a central activity in our current Anthropocene age (in which human activity and consumption have become dominant drivers of environmental change) has been to learn to adapt to or cope with human activity, the causes of which they do not understand as people do? That is, mindful of the fact that nonhumans exist in the same context but have parallel experiences of it informed by their own senses and interests, and ignorant of our abstract political and social cultures, how do we write history to account for animals’ agency while documenting their lack of power in human-dominated contexts? The Timms photograph dog has no idea that a photograph is being taken or that she is at church on Cordova Street, yet her blurry tail indicates wagging, and thus, knowledge of how to prosper by integrating into human activity through social learning. Nonetheless, even if dogs as a domesticated species co-evolved with humans and have prospered by living with us, as an individual the Cordova Street dog had limited power in that moment, something about which we must not be in denial. She freely inhabited the city sidewalk that day in the 1930s at the convenience of the churchgoers, who in other places and times might have tied her to a lamp post, chased her off with stone throwing, or called Animal Control to capture her.

5. As a central task of Animal History, can we recognize and document the degree to which all history is inherently interspecific, and that to write others out is a methodological and, even political, choice. True, at times excluding nonhuman animals from our approximation of the past can clarify (with respect to, say, parliamentary history). Yet at other times, it limits our understanding of the past by positing a false sense of human autonomy and minimizing the importance of human experiences of other animals in favor of other issues. Even at church, interwar Vancouverites encountered and made space for other beings, like the Judy-type setter/spaniel-looking dog, in ways that changed in the late twentieth century as urban dog densities increased sharply. Today, the dog at the church might more likely be a purebred toy breed locked and barking noisily in one of the parked cars at the edge of the photograph. That dog would have shaped the image in a different way and have spoken of a different canine experience of the churchgoers, and different human politics over the place of dogs in urban life.

Animals are everywhere, and there has never been any purely human moment in world history. This fact of the past has become widely acknowledged, to the point of academic truism, one which we all know but upon which we do not always act. Certainly, scholars of animals and their representation have come a long way over the last two decades, essentially founding interdisciplinary humanities and social science/medicine fields we broadly call Animal Studies and Human–Animal Studies, respectively. Over the same period, so have animal scientists—veterinarians, behaviorists, ethologists, ecologists, and animal welfare researchers alike—developed methods that take more account of nonhuman sentience and choice, in order to ask questions grounded in a sense that animals are usually more complex (not less) than we guess and that we can improve human and animal life by working to understand how other species function and experience life. The cumulative effect of all this work has been to question, although not overturn, human supremacist or human exceptionalist ways of thinking and acting grounded in the (often subconscious) insistence that the human form and sentience are an ideal against which all other beings should be contrasted, and inevitably subjugated because inherently inferior to humankind.

Hence, to define Animal History as a historical subfield and place this collection in its academic context could easily demand a literature review of impossible length. Indeed, taking just the substantial and growing Humanities and Social Science scholarship examining human ideas about and uses of animals, human–animal relationships and the related field of environmental history, we find a literature so large it defies summary in a paragraph, even with an extensive footnote attached.

Forced to choose, my list of important sources would include works that have pushed me to think about why and how to write an intrinsically valuable history of nonhuman life. It would begin with Ann Norton Greene, who reminds us in Horses at Work that historians routinely forget or refuse to see that animals change over time and hence require historicizing just like humans. She urges us to resist the tendency to see them as static, in contrast with changes in human society, a stubborn habit rooted in an old belief in nature as equally static.³ It would include Malcolmson and Mastoris’s The English Pig, and Virginia Anderson’s Creatures of Empire, which both seek out the activities of nonhumans as factors of historical causation in a necessarily interspecific past.⁴ It would also include a group of scholars who have explored the issue of the animal trace and the ways nonhumans mark the historical record without knowing they are doing so.⁵ And it would make space for authors who have written directly if not conclusively yet on how we manage our power to decide what history might be for other species, and how we, as historians, must take care not to put words into animals’ mouths, so to speak.⁶ It would additionally take into account Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World, which documents the roots of our contradictory modern condition with respect to animals by which we celebrate, demonize, and kill them. His work conveys a distinct sense of historical nonhumans as beings whose livingness created the feeling of unease about the nature of the human control, consumption, and destruction of animals that characterizes modernity and the recent Anthropocene era writ large.⁷

Interdisciplinary in nature, my list of basic works would equally include research from scientists and social scientists working with contemporary animals. They have the luxury of directly observing other species and the people who know them to ask the questions that historians must coax out of historical sources that were usually designed for entirely different purposes. Their work provides us with new questions and possible explanations for animal life that we can use to reconsider historical sources in new ways. For instance, recent work on the superior ability of domesticated dogs to engage in social learning with humans points us to notice how the dog at the church was wagging her tail, when previously that photographic detail might have escaped our notice. These interdisciplinary studies also help us to examine how particular contexts created particular kinds of animals and people, how humans and animals shared cultures, how we might approximate the outlines of an animal’s experience, and how historical animals have always been individuals with unique lives.⁸

My list is an incomplete one, to be sure. And, each of the scholars featured in this collection would have their own diverse list of foundational sources, all equally as valuable as my own. We do not all proceed from a single methodological tradition, which is a good thing. As this collection shows, animal historians find their home in and draw from almost all disciplines, employing research and theory from philosophy to veterinary medicine in a kind of radical interdisciplinarity that is unique and crucial since currently the vast bulk of lay and academic study of other species takes place beyond the academic discipline of history. Indeed, historians of animals have much work to do.

Hence, this volume presents an invitation for more work by way of chapters documenting animals from the Pacific Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. They propose questions, topics, themes, and methods that constitute the core tasks of the animal historian in seriously documenting animals as historically contingent and relevant beings, either as populations, captive groups, families, or individuals, whose past is intrinsically valuable and illustrative of human life as well.

The first section, Historicizing Nonhumans, contains three essays that examine nonhumans as sentient beings who responded to or were products of specific contexts. This is perhaps the most important historiographical intervention in our existing practice that the researchers in this volume offer, here and throughout the chapters. These first three authors show how one can historicize nonhumans by allowing animals the same context specificity we allow people, plants, land, and the weather.

To see what is at stake, consider this: how many times in world history has one nation, class, or group justified killing or taking land or resources from another group by arguing that they have a primitive or incomprehensible culture, or that they have no history and have not changed over time? Colonial, gender and race histories have countless examples we might name, but what if we include nonhumans in that observation about the global past? These first three chapters challenge the sense of timelessness and ahistoricity that often characterizes our understandings of historical animals by historicizing particular groups of nonhumans as beings who were specific to and responsive to particular contexts. These three stories are also about people’s sense of regret and desires for redemption in the face of those animals’ agency.

Jason Colby’s chapter historicizes wild orcas who lived off the northwest coast of North America and whose scarred bodies and collapsed dorsal fins marked them as creatures of the 1960s and 1970s, when orcas first confronted human efforts at taking them captive, attaching scientific devices, or branding them for identification. He documents how the orca-ness of their responses to that new human activity inspired public support for bans on orca capture in Canada and the United States. Colby’s research shows that animals do indeed create historical evidence by their material form. Next, Abe Gibson documents the rise and fall of the burro in the American west, a population that took its own fate in hand and prospered—for a time. Gibson uses his case study to ask, What constitutes evolutionary success, and for whom? Although nineteenth century domesticated burros were loyal, adaptable, and indispensable mining workers, in the twentieth century their descendants formed autonomous feral communities that repurposed land sought by the US military and others. With their floppy ears, Eeyore-like countenances, and distaste for human contact, twentieth-century burros drove fierce human debates over whether they were long-lost friends or wily, exasperating pests marked for extermination. Sandra Swart next analyzes the case of the quagga, a subspecies of plains zebra from South Africa extinct since 1883, whose numbers, behavior, and look were integral to the region and human experiences of it for centuries. She proposes that we routinely ask about how various ideas about species and the look of animals shape our choices about how to group historical animals for study. Swart tells of species restoration efforts reliant upon crossbreeding related animals in order to recreate a being that looked like a quagga. Swart counters, Why is (our) sight privileged over our other sensory experiences of the quagga—especially the quácha sound, for which it was baptized? That is, the quagga were composed of unique physiologies, smells, sounds, cultures, and behaviors that are now permanently lost to any new creatures that might be created.

The second group of chapters, Archives and the Animal Trace, offers ways to find living historical animals in new and existing source bases. Indeed, our archives and museums have been structured to document human agency and life, so simply locating animals in the historical sources can be a puzzle. Equally, because we tend to mentally edit animals out as inconsequential, that evidence of animal life is often hidden in plain view in sources we do know. Thus, these authors suggest a number of solutions for wringing every last detail about animal life possible out of old sources while thinking innovatively about new kinds of evidence we might seek out directly from animals, or records of their bodies or behavior (as demonstrated by Colby’s orcas).

Zeb Tortorici contributes the first of these chapters and tackles the challenge of drawing from archival sources where evidence of nonhuman life at first appears fleeting or obscure at best. Writing about himself as a historian looking for signs of animal life in Mexico’s national archive, he discusses the range of ways animals unknowingly mark or inhabit archival collections with two related concepts: animal-made history (wherein animals shape events or cultures), and animal made-history (wherein animals materially constitute or inhabit an archive). As a case study he thereafter examines his own encounters with the Discurso Filosofico Sobre el Lenguage de los Animales, an anonymous translation from a French text in manuscript form, to identify how animals shaped that item and the past it refers to. The document suggests what he calls a potentially transatlantic economy of ideas about animal sentience in colonial Spain, writ large, in which we can sense animals driving conceptions of cruelty and compassion that were controversial and even subversive. Thereafter, Lisa Cox discusses the intersection of material culture and the animal trace. Discussing her work as archivist for the C.A.V. Barker Museum at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) in Canada, she demonstrates that, in some ways, animals do have their own archives. The OVC veterinary medical collection provides a way of comprehending the physicality of horses, cattle, sheep, and other species long since dead, and the experiences of working with animals for whom being healthy meant enduring close human contact, restraint, injections, teeth pulled, invasive examinations and noxious substances administered. The shape of veterinary tools—determined as they were by animals’ bodies and (often) resistance to treatment—and also sometimes fragments of tissue, blood, or hair on them are invaluable for reconstructing how people and animals experienced one another beyond language, through all the senses. Concepción Cortés Zulueta’s work on natural history in the first person is perhaps the most challenging chapter here for thinking about what constitutes historical evidence and personal testimony. Zulueta engages the issue of nonhuman, sensory history and asks how other species might understand the past, or describe events in their lives. Michael Puig, a gorilla from Cameroon held at the Gorilla Foundation at Woodside, California, takes center stage as she examines his use of a mode of American Sign Language modified by and for apes to communicate about the moment when his mother was killed and he was taken captive. Zululeta examines how Michael reports those events in an order of his choosing and in a sensory-specific way that challenges us to relinquish our power somewhat in defining History as a practice that privileges human language and chronology over smells, images, physical sensations and emotions conveyed in some other prioritized or storytelling order.

To some degree, every chapter in this collection demonstrates how nonhuman animals have shaped our collective past, whether by direct action, unique perception of a given context, or their simple materiality. The authors in the third section, The Animal Factor of Historical Causation, interrogate the often-overlooked role of nonhumans in historical processes and events. By different methods, each useful in its own way, they uncover the phenotype plasticity, described by Foote and Gunnels later in this volume, by which historical animals responded to specific contexts in their own interest. The problem for the human historical actors in all these cases was how to harness those responses to human needs, something not always achieved. The first researcher here, David Gary Shaw, employs Bruno Latour’s Actor-network theory (ANT), a tool that can be a basic item in the animal historian’s methodological kit. Looking at equines and travel in later medieval England, he mines both nonfiction and fiction textual sources to demonstrate how ANT reveals in them that actors are brought into play by other actors to produce results often unintended, but collectively produced. Examining how horses shaped travel for particular classes of people, he finds the accessible pacing horses (as opposed to medieval trotters, plow-horses, and all-purpose all rounders) of the period facilitated the act of riding as social and communicative practice by a growing segment of the population. Shaw’s analysis demonstrates how powerful ANT is in moving us past debates over the nature of human versus nonhuman consciousness of historical patterns by declining to privilege human agency over nonhuman agencies.

Three more chapters in this section similarly explore cases in which animals shaped human processes and debates. Andria Pooley-Ebert problematizes equine agency as a species-specific animal agency that was/is historically and contextually contingent, not uniform. She compares reports of urban versus rural horse behavior in Illinois at the turn of the twentieth century, a key moment when the nation was a wealthy and productive industrial power that was utterly dependent upon equine labor. Pooley-Ebert argues that in urban contexts horses had less autonomy and ever-changing drivers, so horse agency manifested more often as resistance to human needs. In small town and rural contexts, horses were more likely to show compliance with human goals since horses carried more responsibility for independently remembering and executing a more diverse range of tasks. Noah Cincinnati brings together themes from the previous section by historicizing changes in gorilla behavior that coincided with global modernity, but does so by examining the ways gorillas themselves (unknowingly) influenced the human debates over extinction and the roles of zoos versus parks carved from gorillas’ traditional habitats in conservation efforts of the period. Cincinnati finds a fluid process and debate between species wherein gorillas set their own parameters by their behavior and drew in famous Americans like William Hornaday and Carl Akeley. Fiercely defensive in the face of hunters while sullen and short-lived in captivity, gorillas effectively drove the debate over protection toward in situ conservation in the Belgian Congo. Next, the volume visits Scandinavia, where Dolly Jørgensen presents research on migrating muskoxen of the twentieth century and the degree to which the communication gap between people and muskoxen shaped Norwegian and Swedish politics around native species. She proposes a social science approach to animal migrations (moving beyond analysis only as a biological phenomenon) to consider nonhumans as self-interested individuals, animal immigrants even, seeking relief from environmental stressors and a safe place to raise young, and acting in ignorance of how their behavior would be interpreted by the people at hand.

Section four, Animals Coping with / Adapting to Us, gathers together research illustrating how for countless animals, the last few centuries—the so-called Anthropocene Age—has involved a process of learning to live with us (or not) as they have been unknowingly drawn into environmental or technological change driven by human fecundity, needs, and rivalries. And, like the Gibson and Jørgensen chapters, these essays reveal that people have often expressed ambivalence about animals’ self-interested ability to persevere by their own ingenuity, seeing some successful animals as naturally resilient (such as domesticated animals) and others as irritatingly invasive (like feral or wild animals who adapt to urban spaces).

First, Foote and Gunnels discuss interspecific encounters on the Galapagos Islands in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and propose a methodology, which they call Historical Zoology, for using scientific concepts and questions to make sense of historical sources. Thus do they discover adaptable individuals, like the famed thousand-pound tortoise whom visitors called Port Royal Tom, who bore on his shell the carved names of various whalers and sailors who had encountered him. He and many other animals there exhibited phenotype plasticity by which they persevered in the face of human hunting and vandalism, today defying more recent characterizations of the islands and their inhabitants as uniquely passive and vulnerable. Stephanie Zehnle’s chapter next delves into the mysteries of the human-leopard murders in colonial West Africa between 1880 and the 1940s. She combs colonial accounts of these events, some of which were ascribed to leopards, some to men who had somehow transformed themselves into leopards, reading them through the lens of contemporary ethological sources to consider how fact and fiction were tangled in those days. Zehnle explores the questions around the murders as reflective of the evolving human political and environmental context with which leopards contended in the colonial period. Moving back to the United States, Drew A. Swanson addresses the southern Appalachian Mountains, with a case study of North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain in the twentieth century. Focusing on the mountain’s dynamic ecology and his own work as an ecologist there, he finds a landscape into which many new species have inserted themselves over the last century, including adelgids (an aphid-like insect that inhabits and can harm conifers) and people. Swanson documents the stubborn survival of local salamanders in the face of these new insect and human agents, by which they belied the helplessness implied by labels like endangered species. Like Shaw, Swanson draws upon ANT, in his case to document an interspecific struggle for resources, space, and existence that illustrates the joint nature of agency and the importance of relationships between species in that context.

The final group, Documenting Interspecific Partnerships, features research that encourages us to recognize the degree to which global history is defined by trans-species relationships such that to write nonhumans out of our accounts of that history is a political and methodological choice that necessarily shapes our findings. Scott Miltenberger analyzes accounts of early nineteenth-century New York City with a special focus on livestock, canids, and people. He introduces the concept of the anthrozootic city as shorthand for an urban environment, society, and culture defined by the interactions between humans and animals, and their interdependence, which was premised on the self-directed activities of free-roaming (for periods of their lives, at least) nonhuman animals. For Miltenberger, this urban history is necessarily interspecific, and his chapter warns against our tendency to position humans as the central axis around which all history took place, setting the stage for research that considers how urban life was shaped by relationships between nonhumans. Andrew McEwen discusses the human–animal bond in wartime with a study of World War I Canadian soldiers’ accounts of their horses, in prose and poetry. He applies contemporary research into the beneficial effects of animal-assisted therapy for those who suffer psychological trauma to historical sources, in order to understand why soldiers described horses as partners who saved their sanity, and how and why horses may have behaved in ways that made that human interpretation possible. In the process, McEwen shows that horses—as sentient individuals—were critical to human military history in ways we have not yet appreciated.

Thereafter, Courtney E. White wraps up the volume with a case study of a particular equine individual, Tony the Wonder Horse. His ability to engage with his trainer Tom Mix by learning and performing exceptionally complex series of behaviors with little obvious direction made Tony a star in the golden age of cinema. White analyzes early films featuring Tony in a leading role by discussing the material conditions of their production, thus separating the representations from the real animal and his relationship with Mix embedded in them. She shows that the horse had a crucial role in making audience identification with him possible in an age when moviegoers were especially concerned with the degree to which actors’ personal lives and personalities were authentically displayed in their film roles. Tony’s validity as the consummate movie horse lay in the perception that he was essentially playing himself on screen because of his special bond with Tom Mix.

All these authors agree that the complete history of nonhuman animals is important on its own terms, but that only some aspects of the nonhuman past are available to historians. And we know that, as humans, we tend to find stories that involve us more interesting and instructive than stories that do not. Nonetheless, an intrinsically valuable history of animals by which we also learn about ourselves is entirely doable and well underway, even if we are still working out how best to approximate that past accurately. Beyond that, should any one goal unite the field? Consider how feminism undergirds women’s and gender history, or how advocacy for conservationism and sustainability undergirds environmental history. Should Animal History similarly assume a particular philosophy with respect to animals on the part of the researcher or reader? At this point, I would say no. The scholars collected here do not all emerge from a single political perspective (say, animal rights/critical animal studies versus welfarist versus utilitarian), nor need they. There is much too much work yet to be done. In any event, since Animal History is about diversity and inclusion, whether of species or perspectives, to require some kind of ethical purity test that might exclude researchers or readers would seem counterproductive.

At the same time, for any group to achieve their justice—whatever their particular justice may be—they must have their history written and accepted within the academy. I would argue that nonhuman animals are the last ones still waiting for their history to be written, although they do not know it. And perhaps this is why Animal History presents us with such a great opportunity and also such a great ethical and psychological challenge. For, if we come to know what animals have done in the past, which human activities will we feel compelled to change in the future?

PART ONE

Historicizing Nonhumans

1

Change in Black and White

Killer Whale Bodies and the New Pacific Northwest

JASON COLBY

Killer whales (commonly called orcas) know one other. Within their pods, they know each other by sound, and likely by sight as well. Their striking black-and-white coloration represents not only the bold markings of an apex predator but also a likely means of visual identification and hunting coordination.¹ People in the Pacific Northwest know orcas, too—or at least they think they do. Their iconic forms have come to symbolize the transborder region’s identity as a land of rugged wilderness and environmentalist values. Scientists, as well as many amateur orcaholics, can now identify individual killer whales by sight and even describe their family trees, or matrilines. But it hasn’t always been so. Although orcas have long struck the region’s human residents with fear and wonder, their black-and-white forms remained inscrutable to human eyes until quite recently. Well into the post-World War II period, most northwesterners, above all fishermen, viewed the so-called blackfish as dangerous, salmon-eating pests who were both plentiful and virtually indistinguishable from one another. For their part, researchers and government officials made no attempt to quantify the killer whale population or identify individual animals. Paradoxically, it was the rise of orca capture and display in the 1960s that altered regional views of the species. Within a decade, killer whales would be transformed, in the eyes of many northwesterners, from mysterious black-and-white masses to individuals with stories of their own.

This political and cultural change was closely tied to the shifting treatment and perception of the orca body itself. Today, no image is more evocative of the transborder Pacific Northwest than the arresting sight of a killer whale. The chance to see wild orcas draws tens of thousands of visitors to the region each year, and the species’ fetishized form graces tourist literature, business logos, and bumper stickers on both sides of the border. Yet the bodies of killer whales, wild and captive, living and dead, have played a more complex role in the region’s transformation than most observers realize. During the period of live capture, roughly 1964 to 1976, orca bodies were not only commodified through capture and sale but also inscribed, physically and metaphorically, with the shifting values of the region. They were pierced by fishermen’s bullets, harpooned and netted by acquisitive aquariums, and prodded and dissected by scientists. As interest in quantifying the orca population grew, researchers, government officials, and entrepreneurs attempted to alter orca bodies to make them legible to human eyes. Yet these schemes were frustrated, not only by public protest but also by the behavior and physical characteristics of the species itself. By the early 1970s, in the face of rising opposition to both capture and invasive research, scientists began to explore more passive means of decoding orca bodies.