Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals

By Éric Baratay and Alexander Laban Hinton

What would we learn if animals could tell their own stories? Éric Baratay, a pioneering researcher in animal histories in France, applies his knowledge of historical methodologies to give voice to some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most interesting animals. He offers brief yet innovative accounts of these animals’ lives in a way that challenges the reader’s thinking about animals.

Baratay illustrates the need to develop a nonanthropocentric means of viewing the lives of animals and including animals themselves in the narrative of their lives. Animal Biographies launches an all-new investigation into the lives of animals and is a major contribution to the field of animal studies.

This English translation of Éric Baratay’s Biographies animales: Des Vies retrouvées, originally published in France in 2017 (Éditions du Seuil), uses firsthand accounts starting from the nineteenth century about specific animals who lived in Europe and the United States to reconstruct, as best as possible, their stories as they would have experienced them. History is, after all, not just the domain of humans. Animals have their own.

Baratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to give us the biographies of some of history and literature’s most famous animals. The reader will catch a glimpse of storied lives as told by Modestine, the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the Alps; Warrior, the World War I horse made famous in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse; Islero, the bull who gored Spain’s greatest bullfighter; and others. Through these stories we discover their histories, their personalities, and their shared experiences with others of their species.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820362199

Éric Baratay

ÉRIC BARATAY is professor of contemporary history at the Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon. A specialist in animal history, Baratay is the author of many books, including Le Point de vue animal: Une Autre version de l’histoire (The animal point of view: Another side of the story) and Bêtes des tranchées: Des Vécus oubliés (Beasts of the trenches: Forgotten experiences).

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INTRODUCTION

In Search of Individuals

While philosophers have tended to negate or deny the notion of animal individuality, there have always been dissenting voices. Various strains of thought have complicated or opposed the majority view, and I will address them briefly to help situate the aims of this book.

Zoological Indifference

From antiquity onward, naturalists have spurned the notion of the individual in favor of the anecdote, preferring stories that recount the one-time behaviors of a being or a species in particular situations.¹ These anecdotes serve to provide concrete examples of animal characteristics, to compare them to human characteristics, and to put forth behavioral examples. Here the individuality and the uniqueness of a given creature’s existence disappears, minimized behind the example it is intended to provide. The use of the anecdote began to decline in the eighteenth century, with the rise of modern species definitions and classifications. Prior to the 1950s, zoology was mainly concerned with identifying these species characteristics so as to better order them—in other words, with describing physical constants rather than fluctuating behaviors. Reduced to the body, the individual became merely the representation of the species; to describe one of them would be to describe the whole, thus deemphasizing the idea of the individual.² This trend was also perpetuated by the classificatory impulse, which created higher-level groups (genus, order, class) rather than working on the individual plane. The naturalists who continued to use behaviors to catalogue animals considered them constants, and the use of individual anecdotes became less common.³ Other naturalists, such as Buffon or Darwin, used anecdotes only as illustrations or as proof of specific facts, reinforcing the idea of the individual’s lack of autonomy to such an extent that the term biography came to be used for entire species.⁴

The supplanting of the anecdote in favor of experience in the early twentieth century further de-emphasized the individual, who was no longer observed but interrogated, split into multiple facets depending on procedures and tools and then reallocated across different articles or chapters.⁵ Twentieth-century ethology was founded on this model. Behaviorism held the learning processes upon which behaviors were based to be the same for all animals; incidental individual variations had to be neutralized by working on standardized subjects—the lab rat, for example. Classical ethology assumed that behaviors are shared and immutable. Sociology, in turn, treated individuals simply as structures charged with assuring the reproduction and survival of the species.

Rare, in other words, were the naturalists who took any interest in a single individual. If they did, it was in the case of some extraordinary animal, newly arrived in the West: a chimpanzee adapting to Parisian life, for Buffon; two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes, for Houel; a capuchin monkey kept by his family, for Romanes.⁶ But these studies had barely any impact; their authors, unsure what to do with them, struggled to fit them into their research. For the majority of scientists, individuals and anecdotes were relegated to the mainstream—and to literature.

The Literary Taste for Fictional Biographies

Until recently, philosophy and theology remained distant from these questions. Since the ancient Greeks, philosophers have focused on the distinction between the human and the animal, or on the idea of animality, even at the risk of rehashing the same concepts, constructs, deconstructions, and reconstructions. Such philosophical thinking has led to impasses and has become increasingly isolated; its debates and considerations have become obsolete and removed from contemporary empirical research. Literature, on the other hand, has long privileged individual animals and their stories, from Ulysses’s dog, Argos, to Reynard the Fox. Interest in animal stories grew rapidly starting from the end of the eighteenth century, first in Britain and in France, and later in Western Europe and North America.⁷ Destined for children in Anglo-Saxon countries and adults in France and Germany until the middle of the twentieth century, the genre reached its peak in the years from 1860 to 1920, led by the success of Mémoires d’un âne (Memoirs of a Donkey), Memorie di un pulcino (Memoirs of a Baby Bird), and Black Beauty, and followed by a flurry of such publications starting in the 1980s.⁸

In earlier versions of this genre, the story of the fictional individual is told directly by the writer. Paradoxically, human roles are often equal to or superior to animal ones; the concern for the animal advertised by the title is matched by some difficulty in distributing the piece’s focus, in making the animal—who is often relegated to the background or set as a pretext—seem real.⁹ Only a small minority of authors produced true biographies, in the sense of biography as a description of a being.¹⁰ A second configuration is the autobiography, in which the author has the animal express themselves in the first person. In this kind of text, the animal must necessarily be at the center and its interiority must be considered in order to present its story and its experiences.¹¹ Both configurations are often marked by a strong humanizing impulse: animals possess all human faculties, they understand humans, relate their conversations, and chat with other animals—but never with humans, in order to preserve the tale’s credibility.¹² This concerns interiorities only. Otherwise, they appear as ordinary members of their species, unlike the animals of fables, comic books, or cartoons, who behave as humans.

This anthropomorphism has prevented such literature from being taken seriously. Such a dismissal attests to the difficulty of exiting the human species, even though the presence of animals in titles and stories might, in the nineteenth century, have seemed important in itself, sufficient and difficult to think beyond in the cultural context of the time. In a sense, humanization leads us to be interested in animals, to uncover their lives, and to become aware of their state, furthering these authors’ goals. If some of them used animals only as a pretext to critique humans, most wished to raise interest in a species, revalue its image, and change human behavior toward it.¹³ Anthropomorphism helps in the recognition of animals, not in our understanding them. As this understanding is biased and often falsified, at the end of the nineteenth century, writers began to integrate zoological knowledge into their fictions—in particular, knowledge about wild animals, whose lives are far enough removed from ours to keep them from humanization.¹⁴ Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, the animals in these stories are hardly singular. Instead, they remain examples of their species—the story of a fox or a cricket is the fable of The Fox or The Cricket.¹⁵

The Growing Demand for Real Biographies

This literature naturally fostered interest for real individual animals and their biographies, which picked up in the years from 1780 to 1920 in France and Great Britain, focusing on famous animals.¹⁶ It then extended to include ordinary animals, tenuously in the nineteenth century and then more strongly from 1900 to 1930, and in full force after the 1980s, with a focus on horses, cats, and dogs, from Munito the Learned Dog to Bébert, Céline’s famous cat.¹⁷ There was no stark rupture with fictional biographies. In the nineteenth century, some celebrity animal lives and the majority of ordinary animal ones were fictionalized on the basis of a few facts—if not completely invented—even using the humanizing approach of autobiography. A more realist and factual approach, sketched out in this earlier time for celebrity animals and extended into versions of ordinary animal lives at the beginning of the twentieth century, came to the fore only after 1950, influenced by a popularized ethology.¹⁸ Here again, however, nonhumanized animals often played a secondary role, while more animal-centered texts tended toward anthropomorphosis, believing in and imagining some shared essence.¹⁹

Thus the early heroes were replaced by representatives of the species, and finally by atypical individuals, who approached implausibility in their character and behavior.²⁰ In other words, there is a striking parallelism with human biographies when it comes to types of character (hero, representative, singular individual) as well as to the genre’s forms (entire life, episode, portrait) and its goals.²¹ Human heroes and celebrity animals are depicted in their extraordinary dimensions and their devotion to a cause, with the ends of edification, including moral instruction. Representative characters illustrate the condition of their social milieu or their species, standing in as ideals. And accounts of singular animals increasingly emphasize life experiences and individual values, in the manner of Pierre Michon’s (human) Vies minuscules.²² There is also a chronological similarity. Animal biographies first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, at the moment of the literary genre’s crystallization and democratization; biographies of famous animals imitated the mode of hero biography dominant at the time. Representative biographies appeared in the nineteenth century, and individual biographies came to dominate by the end of the twentieth in the cases of both humans and animals. The human model, then, was easily applicable to animals, illustrating and strengthening convictions of closeness and giving rise to the terms biography and autobiography that were applied to animals as well as humans starting from early in the nineteenth century.²³

Science Meets Individuals

Whether it concerns real animals or fictional ones, this body of literature is not negligible. Little by little, especially starting in the middle of the twentieth century, it has helped us become aware of other existences and other individualities, opening the way toward a kind of reflection that has long been forbidden in the sciences, philosophy, or theology. Like the comic book or the cartoon, this literature has forcefully influenced and transformed representations and social norms.²⁴ It has even, in turn, led to scientific attempts to prove what it postulated: it is no accident that ethologists began to realize the importance of the individual starting in the 1950s.²⁵ Literary context, however, was not the only factor at work. The loosening of theological-philosophical constraints starting in the 1960s also allowed for new ways of thinking, following the initiatives of Japanese ethologists in the 1950s. This work stemmed from a culture that admitted the individuality of each animal—like the individuality of each human—rather than focusing on the distinction between the human and the animal. At the same time, the arrival into ethology of women, who by their marginalized position were freer from dominant ways of thinking than men were, also contributed to the rise of this new view.

Beginning in the 1950s, field primatologists began to individualize observed animals in order to understand their social relations. This approach was then taken up by experimental primatology, in an attempt (for example) to grasp the kinds of reconciliations that occurred based on temperaments and partners.²⁶ Starting in the 1980s, the trend was reinforced by cognitive ethology, which attributes animal functions and reveals personal differences between them; by the discovery of animal cultures in the 1990s and the resultant questioning of animal inventions and inventors and particular beings; by the recent discovery of environmental influence on genetic capital and its diversification of personalities; and by a return to Darwin, emphasizing the importance of individual variations for adaptation, selection, and evolution.²⁷

The advent of the individual overturned existing ethology completely. The study of dogs came to lead the way, proposing canines as observational units for the study of personality types, or products of interactions between genetics and the environment whose reality is proven by the differences in biochemical measurements in situations of stress. The individual became a good way of determining what part of a given behavior belongs to species biology, what part to environmental (and social) context, and what part to personality.²⁸

This view has now been theorized by philosophers seeking to escape from debates about animality into the domain of the sciences. For them, each being represents an expression of animal existence; its richness leads back to its self, its internal coherence, its difference from others, its manner of life through representations and emotions, and its ability to change. The individual is also placed at the center of encounters, interspecies relationships, and hybrid communities.²⁹ These philosophers join researchers in the human sciences who began to develop a body of thought on animal actors in the 1990s.³⁰ These studies privileged interactions with humans in ordinary life, games, or work. And yet, while they kept equal distance from humans and animals, this was more in service of understanding humans and much less so for understanding animals.³¹ Proof of this is the current spread of concepts of animal agents and agency, forged in the Anglo-American world. This thinking justifies the observation of interactions to see what effect animals have on humans but does not require going much further in the study of these animals; nor does it mean any substantial recognition of their abilities. Rereadings of animals in history are often undertaken from this point of departure, with animals as agents but not yet as individuals, people, or subjects.³²

In fact, the interest in animal personalities actually originated in interest in human individuality beginning in the 1980s, itself the product of a growing emphasis on the individual in Western societies. This emphasis, in turn, stemmed from the development of the personal sphere and an interiorized autonomy in reaction to increasing interdependencies and social rules; it continued with the ever-strengthening public expression of such individualities, as these rules became looser in the second half of the twentieth century.³³ Both human and animal approaches dealt with the same questions of interaction, dependency, sharing with others and groups, and the ways in which personalities come to be structured by interdependency.

Toward a Scientific Genre

In this context, it is no surprise that some ethologists have turned to biography. Such biographical accounts are less specific and less anecdotal than those formerly produced by naturalists; they are better integrated into scientific research, and they span diverse ends and approaches. Some of them, such as Lorenz and his geese, focus on individual departures from a supposed behavioral norm. Others, like Goodall and her chimpanzees, depict singular incarnations of species behavior. Most describe experiences with individual animals.³⁴ Yet there is still no stand-alone animal biography genre structured by and able to communicate issues that are unique to animals. This question has also been addressed in the early twenty-first century by certain researchers in the human sciences, most often from the human side: experiments with and controversies surrounding a particular animal, the intellectual, political, or social issues provoked by another, or the memories left behind after a death.³⁵ Others describe time spent with animal owners, studying interactions or episodes from their lives to show the condition of an animal species or a group, its interactions with humans, or human activities via the animal as witness.³⁶ These approaches are of course rich and valuable; they demonstrate the appeal of biography—the word, indeed, is already in use.³⁷

Yet I propose another approach. I suggest we place ourselves beside the animal in order to understand what it lives, experiences, and feels at any given moment or period, or across its entire life. In line with my earlier work, the idea is to be on the side of the animal—not on the human’s side, or in the middle.³⁸ While animal-human relationships are not diminished in the model I offer, they are placed in the background to make room for the animal point of view. This suggested perspective has been criticized by those who hold that animals have no point of view—a philosophical or religious opinion held so strongly that there seems to be no need to prove it. Others have objected that such an enterprise is simply impossible to carry out. In their hands, Von Uexküll’s theories are pushed to their extreme; his notion of a world unique to each species becomes the idea that worlds are so different that any intersection is an impossibility—an idea that, if true, would have prevented all animal domestication. Moreover, these critics remember only the first of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s responses to his famous question—What is it like to be a bat—which considered the difficulty of this line of imagination, given subjective differences.³⁹

The search for an animal point of view has tempted Western thought since the second half of the nineteenth century. For artists, this meant adopting different spatial perspectives: the photographer Batut took portraits of dogs by lowering himself to their level, while in works such as Lion Walking in Cage (1901) and Tiger in a Cage (1925) the German painters Max Slevogt and Otto Dill made the spectator seem to be looking from the back of the cage to see first the animal, then the bars, then the public, then the zoo, conveying a sensation of containment. Others attempted this from a psychological vantage point. In 1912 Franz Marc painted his How My Dog Sees the World—an abstract landscape in bright colors, obviously fictional but still emphasizing the dog’s different vision.⁴⁰ Writers also demonstrated a utopian desire to slip into an animal’s skin. Jack London invented a canine psychology. Kafka put his reader squarely between an inescapable humanity and an incredible animality. Virginia Woolf represented the supposed perceptions of the dog Flush in fragments that still today represent the best attempt at this sort of work.⁴¹ Although it declined after 1945, this representational desire has grown again since the 1990s. Despite the risk of either humanizing or reducing the subject in the search for another way of seeing, the ability to suggest an animal’s point of view—with the alterity and diversity this entails—has become a common benchmark for critique and for popular opinion.⁴²

In the wake of this cultural production, ethologists have only recently recognized the necessity of animal points of view. This recognition had been called for by a few field primatologists as early as the 1960s—as Dian Fossey, for example, made clear, integrating herself into a gorilla population by imitating their noises and actions. As a goal, it was suggested again in the 1990s and is now held to be necessary as a way of better understanding animals and of improving animal-human relationships through glimpses of animal perceptions of humans. Little by little, researchers must learn to think and approach these points of view, overcoming obstacles and blind spots—about perceptions or emotions, for example. Our inability to leave the human species altogether and our limited access to otherness represent neither an impossibility nor a reason to give up.⁴³ A 2016 experiment carried out by a remarkable school of canine ethology in Hungary attests to the possibility of progress: there, researchers were able to use MRI imaging to analyze ordinary dogs’ cerebral functioning, showing that they pay attention to human words and intonations and that they understand through processes similar to human brain activity.⁴⁴ This general conviction has been echoed by certain anthropologists, in the United States starting in the 1990s and then in Europe, following Nagel’s 1986 contention that it is necessary to move beyond the human to make any progress in our understanding of the world.⁴⁵

In fact, the quest for animal points of view represents both an absolute exigency and an unattainable end. There is no question that we must cross over to the animal’s side—and yet we are only humans, one species among species. We are not dogs or horses or monkeys, nor are we ethereal spirits gifted with absolute knowledge. This quest is first and foremost an intention, a method that would help us decenter ourselves and approach the animal, demonstrating both empathy (a capacity to perceive the animal’s state) and sympathy, not foreclosing any possibility in advance. And this must all happen with the knowledge, even as we push against the barriers, that actually entering different worlds remains a horizon: in the best case, we might be able to bring worlds together or partially recover them, but whatever we reconstruct will inevitably retain a large human element. The whole affair might seem too subjective for researchers who would erect human understanding as absolute knowledge and human observations as perfect experiments. But it is justified and it is scientific, in that it allows us to understand what was previously hidden, to better understand animals, and to ask new questions.

A Biographical Challenge

In service of these ends, then, it is necessary to revise history, to shift Western conceptions of animals, to escape from the grip of anthropocentrism, to hold our anthropomorphism in check, to expand our concepts, and to mix natural and human sciences. I refer here to my earlier work.⁴⁶ Progress toward these aims is happening widely today, across various disciplines—proof of a major methodological reversal.⁴⁷

In other words, ethologists have realized that refusal of all anthropomorphism often leads to the total reduction of animals into biological machines (which, moreover, is generally the philosophical goal underpinning this move). And even if an anthropomorphism that projects and draws instant conclusions, negating all specificities, must be avoided, a more questioning version of anthropomorphism can help advance hypotheses and test methods and knowledge initially formulated for humans. In this framework (although not across the board), a community-based anthropomorphism might help us detect or explain identical or similar faculties for which it makes more sense to resort to the human model than to invent complicated alternatives only to retain something exclusively human. This anthropomorphism leads us to think on the level of species groups. It is used, for example, for monkeys and dogs who share a biological or cultural evolution with humans, or for other mammals such as horses, whose brains work similarly to humans’. This is not a retrograde or a centralizing anthropomorphism that erects the human as an anthropocentric absolute, superior reference, but a controlled, decentralized, and local anthropomorphism, one in which the human is one point of reference among many others, able to serve as a model in the questioning of the other species around it and a means of understanding when communities arise.

This thinking in terms of collectivities means revising our concepts—raising them to the levels of abstraction to shake them loose from their human versions, which become not references but just possible variations—and expanding our definitions. Intelligence must be rethought as flexibility and adaptation, and morality as a set of rules and social expectations that aim to limit the differences between individuals. Envy becomes a way of keeping contact between species, and culture becomes knowledge and habits attained in connection with others, learning from them, etc.⁴⁸ These concepts vary, specified and tailored to each species. The vocabulary of this book follows this path paved by ethology.

It is particularly necessary to reconfigure notions of the individual, the person, and the subject in order to escape the limitations imposed on them between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries—a period in which Western culture sought to separate humans from nature, reducing nature to an object to be exploited. If the term individual had formerly signified an indivisible unity, a unique and particular case, or a distinct being, it now meant only a member of the human species. Person, which initially referred to a theatrical mask and then to a role, became a type of human behavior and character. Subject, which used to mean a thing in possession of a singular nature, narrowed to mean the thinking being—or the human alone, as opposed to other kinds of being. We must leave behind such logics and their goal of exalting humanity, instead raising these terms back to the level of abstraction and rendering them more universal. Indeed, some of them are already used today with different definitions. For now, let us start with the idea that an individual has singular traits; a person has particular behaviors; and a subject has preferences and choices.⁴⁹ These definitions do indeed apply to a selection of animals—a selection that contemporary science is constantly expanding.

To write biographies also requires attention to the availability of documents from the past. Here I again refer to what I have previously written on the question of sources in animal history. Famous animals make up the most easily available cases, since they produce the greatest number of accounts. More ordinary animals become legible if someone—usually an owner—wrote about them. But even there, full trajectories are difficult to reconstitute, for lack of good documentation. What is necessary is human interest in real facts and gestures, human attention to them, and then representation in a way that does not completely obscure them beneath subjective interpretation. Of course this is easier said than done, as it is for all sources, since they require some historical critique and the aid of the richest contemporary ethological knowledge or hypotheses, as I have sketched above. To this end, we will avoid suggesting that obvious human subjectivity impedes access to reality, and that only academic discourse is available for analysis, as has been too often the trend in human sciences over the past thirty years. Our obvious limits must not lead to the lazy declaration that the search for exterior realities is impossible—it should not lead us to wallow in human navel-gazing, obsessed with ourselves and our self. Our surrounding environment is not reducible to our perceptions; it exists even if our gaze is partial and relative, being always in perspective.⁵⁰

But let us try to settle on several of the individual’s characteristics: its singular experience, which constitutes it and which justifies the attention of those around it;⁵¹ its relations with others (often humans, owing to the fact of documentation, but also animals) and in particular its ways of welcoming, adapting, and encouraging its partners to do the